PLANNING THE ‘CREATIVE’ CITY: Reconciling Global Strategies with Local Subcultures
Chief Investigators: Professor Kim Dovey, Dr Stephen Wood, Dr Kate Shaw (APD)
Funded by: ARC Discovery Project grant 2009–2011
The ‘creative city’ concept has emerged as one of high political, economic and symbolic currency and has been widely incorporated into ‘Creative City’ strategies. Yet a genuinely creative city fosters new ideas and practices and new uses of space—it requires that we plan for the unplanned; and urban creativity can be displaced by the very policies designed to promote it. This project investigates the ways that creative subcultures (such as the visual and performing arts) and creative industries (such as new media, design and fashion) tend to cluster in particular districts with particular urban morphologies. It focuses on complex relationships between ‘creativity’ and place; exploring the ways in which such clustering changes over time; the synergies or linkages between different creative practices. It critiques the ways in which creative subcultures are displaced by gentrification and the role of planning policy in producing or preventing such displacement.
