Le concept de la ville créative : la création réelle ou imaginaire d’une forme d’action politique dominante

In this short paper dedicated to the memory of the work of Bernard Jouve, we address ourselves to the notion of the creative city. We had opportunity to work extensively with Jouve on questions of metropolitan governance and the constitution of new modes of governance (or urban regimes). On the basis of this collaboration, we occupy ourselves here with the importance of the notion of the creative city in the particular context of Toronto where, in spite of the absence of strong metropolitan institutions, a certain regional governance has begun to emerge nonetheless. Yet, the dominant concept of the creative city has proceeded in defiance of the metropolitan scale and has been built entirely on urban centrality at the expense of the urban peripheries. With the help of two powerful public figures in Toronto, Richard Florida and David Pecaut, we propose a critique of that concept of the creative city