The articulation of the creative city as a relatively cohesive framework is inscribed in the span of time which goes from the 1970 s to the first decade of the present century. As we will see, the United Kingdom played a key role in this process, it being necessary to also consider the weight that the European region exercised when adapting and validating a policy proposal that has obtained a global dimension.
Although our description is mainly linear, it is important to stress that the construction of the creative city approach is better understood as an organic process, carried out on different fronts, based on the imperfect combination of disparate ideas, characterised by multiple ramifications and overlaps. The exposition below aims to account for this.
The basis of the creative city vision: cities and culture in a post-industrial world
The first formulation of the creative city was influenced by a series of assumptions which, in an agitated and not particularly placid manner, took shape during the process of economic and political restructuring fed by the acceleration of globalisation in the last decades of the 20th century.
From the economic perspective, after the decline of the Fordist regime, the announcement of the arrival of a post-industrial world (Bell 1976) caused a strong change of patterns in the manner of observing reality and imagining the future. Although there were voices that warned of the risks of a too literal and deterministic reading of those descriptions (Cohen and Zysman 1987), the narratives from that period outlined an idea of development built upon “the end of industry”. From that moment onwards, the western states sought to change their productive models towards a globally competitive service economy.
As for the political aspect, the post-fordism roll-out coincided with the growing questioning of the Welfare State and the subsequent expansion of neoliberalism (Kus 2006). The phase between the 1970 s and the 1980 s showed complex and divergent movements that were a reflection of the crisis of the preceding model and the search for a new direction. The British context was a clear example and a precursor of many of the problems and transformations that were occurring. The United Kingdom especially suffered from the industrial offshoring process caused by globalisation and the impacts of that were strongly noted in its metropolitan regions, where the production resources were concentrated. This caused the idea of “urban decline”, understood as a pressing matter, to acquire a central position in the public debate (Cheshire and Hay 1989). The semi-abandoned physical landscape left behind by the flight of production resources served as a tangible reflection of the collapse of the industrial world and of the multiple social problems deriving from the increase in unemployment. It is within this context that the ideas that economic growth is a prior requirement for social welfare and that our cities are spaces where the battle for reconstruction will take place began to take root (Cochrane 2004).
The way to tackle this new outlook was neither immediate nor univocal. The confrontation between the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher and the brief experience of municipal socialism (Boddy and Fudge 1984) shows how the discussion regarding the possible alternatives took place within the same national sphere. The contrast between these two stances also reveals agreements on two influential ideas that took hold at this time: the new relevance of the local scale and the new value of culture.
Both Thatcherism and municipal socialism defended the city as a space of strategic importance. The new right contemplated the urban areas as places where to make the rhetoric of the national economic regeneration visible, also filtering the idea of the convenience of privatisation and investment in large infrastructures for managing the transition (Barnekov et al. 1989). Paradoxically, this narrative was reconciled with a governance model leaning towards centralisation. On the other hand, for the new left that had managed to take over local governments of significance, the city was envisioned as a place of resistance against the central state project and as a trench from which to test grassroots policies of an innovative nature, susceptible to providing alternatives to the neoliberal advance and the old Keynesian labour movement simultaneously (Bianchini 1989). With hindsight, municipal socialism’s vision of the local scale unveils a clear idealised and defensive character. Combined with the movement from the right and fed by different discourses that underlined the importance of cities in the global scenario (Castells 1989; Sassen 1991), it contributed to further cementing the misleading and persistent myth of cities as autonomous entities and as places brimming with opportunities.
In the cultural field, municipal socialism identified a strategic space to boost the transformation that it argued for. The rise of advanced modes of cultural production and the associated labour market expansion gave birth to the idea of “cultural industries”, an economic sector of rising importance that was seen as a niche of opportunity for the reconstruction of the British production model without relinquishing its industrial tradition (Cochrane 1986). Beyond the macroeconomic perspective, the recognition of the economic dimension of culture had an added political aim, as it was understood as a front of action for improving the working conditions of the cultural agents, favouring labour inclusion by paying attention to the auxiliary jobs and shattering the elitism of which the paradigm of cultural democratisation was accused (Garnham 2005). In contrast, during the dismantling of the Welfare State carried out by neoliberalism, the usefulness and legitimacy of public investment in culture were cast into doubt. Because of this, cultural policy was obliged to justify its contribution on the basis of new demands, such as economic, social and urban development (Belfiore 2004; Subirats et al. 2015). In the right-wing political framework, the idea of cultural industries (production-based) was replaced by that of “economics of amenities” (consumption-based) (McNulty et al. 1985). Under the latter perspective, cultural assets were used to capture international attention, by attracting tourists and investment, and boosting property development. Once again, the diverging postures ended up giving rise to an unexpected convergence: culture became a space from which to act and not only in which to act.
The practical preamble: Glasgow 90 (and Barcelona 92), the creative city acquires body
The creative city approach is not only constructed within the realm of theory. The exercises of policy design and its implementation act as additional vertices in a continuous process of cross-triangulation (Bianchini 2018). This is a constant and characteristic trait which is reflected in the abundance of conceptual reviews, discursive analyses and case studies in academic literature. In fact, the applied experience, guided by the comprehensions which we saw flourish in the previous section, had a crucial role as a preamble for the formulation of an initial policy proposal for the creative city.
The transition from the 1980 s to the 1990 s saw how a large number of European cities went through profound transformations characterised for including arguments associated with culture. The publication Cultural policy and urban regeneration: The West European experience (Bianchini and Parkinson 1993) becomes a bibliographical reference of great interest for the way in which, through the analysis of eight cities belonging to six different countries (United Kingdom, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany and France) gives an account of the panorama that was unfolding, as well as the opportunities and conflicts that could be made out on its horizons (Bianchini 1993a).
Although the experiences compiled in the book were heterogeneous and reflected a path dependency that went beyond the local scale, their general willingness was aligned with the mindset introduced in the previous section: urban regeneration, economic reconstruction and improvement of the local-national image on the global stage (Bianchini 1993b). Therefore, the approximations prioritising economic growth by treating culture as an amenity pre-dominated, but it is important to note that these not only included a high range of degrees and declinations, they also coexisted with other forms of action. In particular, frequent cultural strategies and projects aimed at community development and/or caring for run-down urban areas (Belfiore 2002). These type of approaches reflected the demands that were being placed on cultural policies to demonstrate their public value and were also related to a certain persistence of the sociocultural animation and community arts projects within the advance of the cultural management paradigm (Kelly 1984).
Although clear frictions are observed between the approximation from the economic aspect with the global perspective and the approximation from the social aspect with local focus, these also show a certain complementarity (Pratt 2010). The eight cities presented in the book integrated both perspectives, the differences being in their orientation, connection and balance.
The possibility of combining objectives and diverse forms of action to achieve crosscutting change was illustrated with the experience that opened the practical section: the urban transformation of Glasgow based on its designation as European City of Culture 1990 (Booth and Boyle 1993), a case which at the moment of the publication of the book was already recognised as a model for success. Glasgow was the perfect embodiment of a British city economically and socially broken by the deindustrialisation. Its regeneration was directed by the City Council, but, as is sometimes forgotten, it could not have been carried out without the decided support of the central government, which as we said needed clear images to disseminate - both internally and externally- the message of national reconstruction. Nor could it have been done without the support of the European Commission, which reformulated the ECoC programme that served as a vehicle for the process (García 2005; Immler and Sakkers 2014).
The regeneration of Glasgow deployed actions which in that period were already considered close to conventional: cultural flagships, regeneration of the riverfront, tourist marketing, moderate decentralisation of urban interventions, the search for community support, etc. However, the element which served to lend distinction to the experience and draft the success story was the commitment to the cultural industries -mainly art, design and audiovisual- as a resource for economic and urban reinvention. On that basis, and directly connecting with the experience of municipal socialism, the path was opened towards a new economy that presumed to restore the skills of the local working class labour force (Booth and Boyle 1993). Glasgow presented itself as a city that was rebuilding itself through culture, creatively converting its weaknesses into strengths. It is important to note that Glasgow’s transformation strategy was designed by Comedia, a consulting firm headed by Charles Landry, who admitted that the first time he had ever used the concept of “the creative city” was in the title of the document they prepared (Landry 2005). As we have mentioned, applied experience served as a test for intuitions, linking theoretical thought with a strong practical vocation.
To close this section, it is worth briefly mentioning Barcelona 92 as a somewhat similar experience but, at the same time, contrastive to that of Glasgow 90. Here we have another great urban transformation, within the same period and which employed most of the actions listed in the first lines of the above paragraph. However, between both examples there are differences that go beyond the nuances. The baseline objective of Barcelona 92 was not so much the urban relaunch through an overhaul of the economic model, but rather to reflect the re-establishment of democracy in Spain and the integration of an idea of modernity in accordance with the European canon (Molas 1991). That is to say, in the case of Barcelona 92, culture was employed from an erudite and civilising perspective rather than economic. The interventions in the public space and on the urban landscape became the cornerstones of its strategy (Borja 1995), understood as the means through which to develop civic pride and construct a sense of a collective project.
Although there are occasional mentions of Barcelona 92 in the book by Bianchini and Parkinson, the repertoire of case studies chooses Bilbao as a Spanish example, this being a transformation which stands apart from that of Barcelona for the greater centrality of the idea of urban-economic reconstruction in the post-industrial world. This detail is expressive of how the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint introduces biases in the construction of a comprehension of the role of culture in urban policies, emphasising certain aspects while discriminating others.
The synthesis: an initial policy proposal for the creative city
As we have seen so far, different lines of analysis and the testing of a series of new trends progressively set out a complex understanding of the links between development, culture and city. In relation to this, a field of research that gained relevance was the one that sought to characterise the logics of production and consumption of the new capitalism. On the basis of the identification of an economic dynamic characterised by flexibility and for displaying complex geographic patterns (Sabel 1989), the call for attention towards the growing importance of aspects of a symbolic type in the global flows of exchange (Lash and Urry 1993) and the focus on the competitive advantage that changing from a labour-intensive model to a knowledge-intensive one meant (Porter 1989), “cultural economy” became an area of study that also acquired sophistication and acknowledgement (Pratt 1997; Scott 2000).
Having a solid analytical support, at a time when public policies aimed to work through evidence-based technical criteria in order to reaffirm their legitimacy (Young et al. 2002), acted as a driving force behind the programmes that promoted the development of the cultural and creative sectors for an economic turnaround. Furthermore, the influence of the studies of cultural economy was even broader due to the way in which they prepared the way forward for discourses that pointed towards the importance of culture, creativity and innovation within the entirety of the urban governance (Scott 2014). Although this new focus on urban creativity was conceptualised in different parts of Europe (particularly in Germany by the cultural policy consultancy STADTart, who established eventual collaborations with Comedia), the UK context continues to play a central role in its development and circulation.
At this point, the contact between Peter Hall, Franco Bianchini and Charles Landry acquires particular importance. The exchange of ideas between them set the tone for the first presentation of the creative city as an articulated policy proposal. Hall had dedicated years to working around the idea that, throughout history, the cities that have had the greatest moments of splendour had done so thanks to having configured themselves “creatively”. The energies to do so were born of the concentration of people, ideas and skills to which they are home, elements that establish a “creative milieu” (Hall 1998). As Hall indicates, creativity was not only a key for success, but rather a natural tendency of the city that was necessary to understand and stimulate.
For his part, Franco Bianchini introduced the notion of cultural planning, a concept that had arisen in the US and Australia but which he addressed from a European point of view, granting centrality to the idea of “cultural resources” (Bianchini 1999, 2016). The key here was in the way in which these resources were defined. Bianchini’s proposal goes beyond the conventional idea of material assets (works of art, built heritage, museums, cultural centres, etc.) to include elements of a more complex nature such as memories, citizens’ identities, shared values, lifestyles, democratic sturdiness, the propensity to civic engagement or the storytelling that revolves around a city. Bianchini also indicated that these resources affected matters that went beyond the understanding of culture as a sector, owning potentialities for a crosscutting action. Understanding how to activate and mobilise them was the basis of an endogenous development model that went beyond the scope of urban regeneration. From the perspective of cultural planning, culture was no longer a mere instrument to restore cities in decline, but rather a complex dimension that concerns the entire urban dynamic and public life.
The combination of these ideas, supported by the practical experience of the authors, served to present a preliminary proposal of The creative city (Landry and Bianchini 1995) that warned of an “urban crisis”, recognised a “time of transition” and called for a more holistic thinking and greater risk acceptance when responding to the cities’ challenges. In order to discover unforeseen opportunities, the creative approach needed to challenge the overestimation of the role of instrumental rationality in policymaking. It was also indicated that urban governance and city development should focus on the smart use of local resources rather than globalised formulas. As the authors state (Landry 2012; Bianchini 2018), this vision was a reaction against the generic, technocratic, top-down and cataclysmic urban transformation model which was extending throughout the West.
This creative city in its germinal stage was presented in a book of little more than fifty pages. Half of them formulated a conceptual framework which acknowledged Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs as theoretical references. The other half of the work consisted of the listing of multiple examples, many of which were trivial and little known, that sought to transmit the idea that urban creativity, in the terms on which it was considered, was not a question of epic deeds, but rather something that happened repetitively, unperceived but successfully.
A few years later, Charles Landry was responsible for taking that rough draft of the creative city and converting it into a more detailed and acceptably cohesive policy proposal. His book The creative city: A toolkit for urban innovators (Landry 2000) once again called attention to the crucial importance of “rediscovering urban creativity” and, from there, built an articulated framework combining the perspective of cultural planning with that of urban governance. Landry’s exposition was punctuated with a large number of strong ideas, showing a special ability to formulate attractive statements acquired in the field of consultancy. This does not mean to say it is an exercise full of hot air. His central thesis, the idea that gives unity and meaning to the explanation, is that urban creativity is not defined in terms of production or consumption (Cunningham 2012), but rather in terms of process. In the words of Andy C. Pratt, Landry’s proposal “is about an inclusive and participatory city where arts and culture are a means and a practice of place making and living” (Pratt 2008). Additionally, it is appropriate to note that the choice of the term “toolkit” in the subtitle of the book has frequently been used by the detractors of the creative city to reduce it to an aspirational and formulaic proposal that leads to naive solutions. It is a criticism that does not correspond to the content of the publication, which places the weight of its attention on defining conceptual and methodological premises rather than giving specific instructions to follow. One of Landry’s declared objectives is to influence policymaking and urban governance. His discourse is formulated and presented from this point of view and this is how the emphasis in the applied side of the creative city and the use of the examples that illustrate the explanation must be understood.
Our assessment of Landry´s work is far from uncritical, which on the other hand reflects many of the preconceptions and contradictions of its epoch in the form of disproportionate optimism; focusing on the opportunities rather than on the problems; a vague hierarchy between heterogeneous objectives; the assumption of a corporate language that insists on economic reasoning; discrediting the bureaucratic logic in favour of ambiguous flexibility; a harmonic and virtuous idea of citizenry; entrepreneurial rhetoric surrounding the creative sectors or a misrepresentation of the city as a stand-alone entity. It is easy to recognise the origin of many of these inclinations in the historical itinerary that we have described. Taking into account the specific moment in which Landry’s book was published, it is essential to also consider the climate of enthusiasm (lately tempered) generated in the United Kingdom by the victory of Tony Blair in 1997, with a government project that announced a new importance of culture and, specifically, creativity (Banks and O’Connor 2017). In fact, Franco Bianchini identifies a slight shift of tone between the creative city discourse he and Landry presented in the 1990 s and the one that was proposed in the year 2000. In his opinion, that shift could be defined by a move from a radical and participatory willingness towards a more self-referential and technocratic elite style (Bianchini 2018).
Although Landry’s policy proposal had a big success, a couple of years later Richard Florida burst onto the scene with the “creative class” theory (Florida 2002) and rapidly got all the attention in the debates that linked creativity and city (Peck 2005). Even if both proposals (the one formulated by Landry and the one by Florida) tend to be cited together as if they were analogous approaches, the differences between them are more than significant. Florida’s proposal draws from diverse sources and uses them in a very particular manner. Jane Jacobs acts as a shared reference with Landry due to her vision of the good city as a socially vibrant space that functions as a generator of well-being (Jacobs 1961). Particularly in Florida’s discourse, but also in Landry’s, clear influences can be found of the descriptions that drew attention to the remarkable changes in contemporary urban lifestyles and the rising importance of leisure and cultural consumption (Zukin 1998; Brooks 2000). Even so, the theory of the creative class fits better in the field of studies of the new economy, its dynamics and its geographies. In the manner in which it is conceptualised, the creative class is an asset that offers a competitive advantage in the face of the reduction of production costs. The claims presented by Richard Florida that go further than this, as the representativeness of the preferences assigned to this specific group of people or their supposed propensity towards civic engagement, usually become the centre of attention when they are actually the weakest and most secondary elements of the discourse (Glaeser 2005). Despite substantial discrepancies, Richard Florida’s perspective is closer to that of Alan J. Scott when working around the geographic logic of cultural production ecosystems (Scott 2000), or that of Ann Markusen when she places artists in the centre of the analysis and proposes assessing their contribution to the regional economies by defining an “artistic dividend” (Markusen et al. 2004; Markusen and Schrock 2006). Our intention is not to establish a valuation hierarchy between one type of approximation and the other, but rather to introduce a certain order between ideas that have tended to become mixed much too lightly.
Lastly, it is worth discussing another extended idea, the one that argues that the theory of the creative class had an overwhelming impact on a global scale. It is undeniable that Florida’s discourse became a circulating policy model that made its way around various territories (Peck 2009), but this does not mean that its influence had a homogeneous reach. This affirmation is particularly reflected in the European context, where the dynamics described by Florida from a US perspective do not correspond very well in functional terms (Martin-Brelot et al. 2010) and also cause frictions with the region’s common values.
It is on this last point that we will close our review of the emergence and consolidation of the creative city discourse and its transformation into an -open but specific- approach. We will show that, in the international arena and particularly in Europe, the policy proposal distilled by Charles Landry has had a considerable influence, although its acceptance has been subject to a process of correction and adjustment in order to create a comprehension of the creative city in accordance with more consensual frameworks.
Adaptation and acceptance: the creative city under the prism of sustainability
We have explained that one of the factors that surrounded the emergence of the creative city discourse was a shift in the understanding of the value of culture, mostly motivated by an increasing attention to its economic dimension. As globalisation advanced, culture became an object of intense debates, but the above was not the only way towards which the arguments leaned. The need to delimit the treatment of cultural products and services in the global market intensified the defence of the intrinsic value of culture, which in the scope of international organisations was reaffirmed by concepts such as “diversity” (UNESCO 2001) and “cultural rights” (The Fribourgh Group 2007). The emphasis on the inherent importance of culture also gained recognition within the framework of sustainable development with the assimilation of the idea of the “fourth pillar”(Hawkes 2001). The reformulation of the concept of development formulated by Amartya Sen (Sen 1999), understood as a process that expands the capabilities to live a good life, connected with this entire movement endorsed internationally (PNUD 2004). Recent contributions such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ONU 2015) reflect the integration of culture within the prisms of sustainability and human rights.
The idea of culture for sustainability was constructed at the same time as the creative city vision and, in the same manner, needed a process of gradual structuration. It would be a mistake to assume that this process only involved large international organisations. To the contrary, the agents that took part in it -creating narratives and applying pressure, contributing to the progress proactively or approaching it in an opportunistic manner- are numerous, varied in nature and closely connected to the territory; these include civic associations, cultural agents, regional and local governments, coordinating platforms, transnational networks, and so on (Pascual 2021).
It would also be wrong to consider the culture for sustainability perspective as a complete alternative to the culture for urban development and economic growth focus, as a paradigm arising within a totally different context of forces and trends. To such an extent did the culture for sustainability perspective participate in the reality described in the previous sections that, the Universal Forum of Cultures celebrated in Barcelona in 2004, a top-down urban transformation project based on the mega-events formula, served to stage its consolidation (Majoor 2011).
The culture for sustainability perspective does not turn its back on the studies of the economy of culture, as it draws multiple statements from them. This is particularly perceptible within the context of the European Union, which has logically assimilated discourses that arose, to a large extent, within its geographic scope. For example, the New European Agenda for Culture (European Commission 2018) assigns a key importance to creativity to reinforce the economic dimension of culture and calls for it to be connected with education and innovation to foster the creation of jobs and growth. Even so, the objectives of an economic nature are placed second, behind the social goals, which are framed within a discourse clearly influenced by Sen’s idea of development, highlighting welfare and quality of life as emerging fields for cultural action and introducing concepts such as “cultural capacity”. The latter acquires particular interest, as it calls for "making available a wide range of quality cultural activities, promoting opportunities for all to take part and to create, and strengthening links between culture and education, social affairs, urban policy, research and innovation” (European Commission, 2018 , p. 3). It is possible to affirm that the idea of culture as an element that can take part in other public policy areas in favour of comprehensive development is akin to the vision of creativity that Landry and Bianchini proposed in the mid-1990 s.
Additionally, the European Union has shown a growing interest in promoting cities, seeing them as potential nodes for the economic and cultural cohesion of the region (Eurocities 2017). The urban policy programmes promoted by the European Commission from this angle also reflects the specific influence of the creative city policy proposal (Vinci 2008). The Cultural and Creative Cities MonitorFootnote 1 is one of the more obvious examples, to which the experience of the Urban Innovative ActionsFootnote 2 can be added. The latter presents a strategic framework structured into different topics, with one dedicated to “culture and cultural heritage” that includes objectives in relation to social cohesion, improving regional competitiveness, innovation for governance and contributing to “culture-centred participatory urban processes”. Once more, the holistic and crosscutting overview which Landry and Bianchini’s proposal claimed for urban governance is reflected through the idea of creativity.
In any event, it is important to highlight once again that the integration of the creative city perspective within the framework of culture for sustainability does not result in a refined paradigm or a general model for action. The study of cases in different geographic realities continues to account for the wide range of intervention modalities and the importance of the contextual factors regarding applied experience (Culture for Cities and Regions 2015). As Franco Bianchini indicated very early on (Bianchini 1993b), the implications of path dependence include the national attitudes towards culture, the local urban planning traditions, the inertias of public policies, the distribution of power within the systems of government, the relationships of force between market dynamics and social movements, and the permeability to external influences. Furthermore, the importance of context -which includes time and place- is not to be understood mechanically, but rather in terms of complexity, it being necessary to assume that the policies that explore the intersections between culture and city act in fields of unstable chemistry (Comunian 2011).
In summary, the creative city policy proposal has managed to connect with the sustainable development perspective and, from there, it has transitioned towards international urban and cultural agendas. By doing so, the creative city has positioned itself in a policymaking framework which nowadays has a high degree of consensus on a global scale and especially within Europe. The creative city discourse has introduced diverse aims and almost literal statements within the culture for sustainability perspective. In the other direction, by coming under the prism of sustainability, the creative city came into contact with concerns and ideas which, even though they are familiar to it, provide a new mould for its conceptual and operational apparatus. The sustainability perspective reinforces the arguments of the creative city which called for an understanding of the cultural dimension of the urban environments as a complex ecosystem, which exceeds both the sectorial understanding of culture as well as its instrumental usage. In any event, the creative city framework is not completely emulsified into the discourse on sustainability, which is also configured as an assemblage of ideas rather than as a closed equation. In this regard, the calls for creativity in current urban policies continue to reflect the origins and the route followed by the creative city through its emergence and consolidation, but now they are fitted into a larger and more complex framework, the principal function of which is to provide guidance. This is why, at this point, it is especially appropriate to understand the creative city as an “approach”; as an epistemological and methodological focus that, as mentioned, was originally conceived to manage periods of transition.