Creative city policy: Bridging the gap with theory

The creative city concept is popular among researchers and policy-makers. On the one hand, academic literature elaborates, on a conceptual level, the importance of creativity and innovation for urban competitiveness; on the other, numerous cities develop and implement creative city policies in practice. The connection between these two is rather weak and implicit. Accordingly, creative city policy tends to be ad hoc, rather than moving towards professionalization of creative activities. Our purpose here is to bridge the abovementioned gap between theory and practice, by addressing the question how conceptual insights into the creative city can be converted into an elaborated operational approach for local policy practice. We propose a three-step approach: 1) to position a city’s present creative places and communities in the context of social and economic structures, urban narratives and prevailing governance structures and style, by means of a systematic analytical framework; 2) to assess spatial, social and symbolic place qualities of the creative production and consumption; 3) to identify options for effective policy intervention. Next, we examine how these steps may be applied in practice, by means of an example of the Dutch city of Delft. A discussion on the applicability and implementation of this approach concludes the paper.OTB onderzoekOTB Research Institut