Sustainable City and Creativity

Book excerpt: The notion of 'creative cities' - where cultural activities and creative and cultural industries play a crucial role in supporting urban creativity and contributing to the new creative economy - has become central to most regional and urban development strategies in recent years. A creative city is supposed to develop imaginative and innovative solutions to a range of social, economic and environmental problems: economic stagnancy, urban shrinkage, social segregation, global competition or more. Cities and regions around the world are trying to develop, facilitate or promote concentrations of creative, innovative and/or knowledge-intensive industries in order to become more competitive. These places are seeking new strategies to combine economic development with quality of place that will increase economic productivity and encourage growth. Against this increasing interest in creative cities, this volume offers a coherent set of articles on sustainable and creative cities, and addresses modern theories and concepts relating to research on sustainability and creativity. It analyses principles and practices of the creative city for the formulation of policies and recommendations towards the sustainable city. It brings together leading academics with different approaches from different disciplines to provide a comprehensive and holistic overview of creativity and sustainability of the city, linking research and practice. In doing so, it puts forward ideas about stimulating the production of an innovative knowledge for a creative and sustainable city, and transforming a specific knowledge into a general common knowledge, which suggests best future policy actions, decision-making processes and choices for the change towards a human sustainable development of the city.