Every city wants to become creative, perhaps even the most creative ever. But what does it mean to be a creative city? What images take shape as a consequence? What sort of city do we envisage? Which one are we actually building?In a journey that starts with Blade Runner and passes through English punk, Milanese creative workers and Star Wars, the book explores the features and outcomes of the creative city, penetrating its dark side but also identifying its assets. In the future, cities must be guided by a vision of a creative city able to be inclusive yet competitive, to open new public spaces and to be socially innovative. This book presents some of the tools that allow us to look at the city as a place whose air makes people free.

Check out the author's video to find out more about the book: https://vimeo.com/124247409 This book provides a comprehensive critique of the current Creative City paradigm, with a capital ‘C’, and argues for a creative city with a small ‘c’ via a theoretical exploration of urban subversion. The book argues that the Creative City (with a capital 'C') is a systemic requirement of neoliberal capitalist urban development and part of the wider policy framework of ‘creativity’ that includes the creative industries and the creative class, and also has inequalities and injustices in-built. The book argues that the Creative City does stimulate creativity, but through a reaction to it, not as part of it. Creative City policies speak of having mechanisms to stimulate individual, collective or civic creativity, yet through a theoretical exploration of urban subversion, the book argues that to be 'truly' creative is to be radically different from those creative practices that the Creative City caters for. Moreover, the book analyses the role that urban subversion and subcultures have in the contemporary city in challenging the dominant political economic hegemony of urban creativity. Creative activities of people from cities all over the world are discussed and critically analysed to highlight how urban creativity has become co-opted for political and economic goals, but through a radical reconceptualisation of what creativity is that includes urban subversion, we can begin to realise a creative city (with a small 'c').

Cities will have to apply creative solutions to their myrrad problems the coming years. They need to develop creative and innovative industries and services, such as design and culture. Examples of 'creative' cities.

The Creative City: Vision and Execution, edited by James E. Doyle and Biljana Mickov, challenges the popular understanding of the Creative City, by bridging the gap between the Creative City as concept and the Creative City as practice and, in so doing, provides a contemporary template for policy makers, city planners, and citizens alike. The book will offer researchers and pragmatists a series of real-life examples of successful cultural and creative practice throughout Europe, reflecting on the analysis and thinking that forms our contemporary understanding of the creative city. It will examine and explain the changes to the concept of the ’creative city’, explore its connectivity to the cultural sector as well as other sectors and practices across Europe and will serve to illustrate the perspectives of Cultural Managers, Educators, Professionals and Researchers from the creative sector in Dublin and Europe. This book will present the reader, and the cultural sector at large, with a new reality based on the quality of contemporary creative practice. Doyle and Mickov address cultural trends such as sustainability and social networking and how they value-impact our attitudes towards culture and the creative city By recognizing that we live in a time of rapid change, which affects all systems, financial models, resources, the economy and technology, we also recognize that the creative process is at the heart of our responses to these changes.

Richard Florida outlines how certain cities succeed in attracting members of the 'creative class' - the key economic growth asset - and argues that, in order to prosper, cities must harness this creative potential.

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This book offers an empirically-grounded account of the emergence and political activities of a new collective actor in Berlin’s art field. Investigating the organizational and representative practices of Koalition der Freien Szene (Coalition of the Independent Scene) – a trans-disciplinary action platform assembling a wide variety of cultural producers in Berlin – the author unpacks the political organization of one of the most compelling contemporary art scenes, or ‘creative’ cities, worldwide, analysing both its concrete policy ‘success’ and the means by which it seeks to challenge and rearticulate the meaning of Berlin as a ‘creative’ city from the producers’ point of view. The book thus opens new opportunities for long-term transformations of the cultural political field. Theoretically sophisticated and based on empirical material including interviews with spokespeople and cultural administrators, Agonistic Articulations in the ‘Creative’ City presents a unique conceptualization of new modes of political collectivization, representation and legitimacy that imagine new avenues of political engagement at a time when political institutions, parties and regimes of representation are in crisis. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and urban studies with interests in social movements and cultural activism.