A Creatively Inclusive London?: Nomadic urban creative clusters as drivers of socio-economic integration and spatial quality in peripheral urban areas

As the creative industries started gaining their recognition as beneficial forces for socio-economic transformation in the 1990s, there have been plenty of discussions regarding such phenomenon in urban planning policy and academia. While certain sectors of creative industries are enjoying the economic growth brought by globalisation, some others, especially the Nomadic Creative Community (NCC) as this thesis identifies as young, mobile, highly educated, artistically employed, and low income groups, are suffering from cities’ high land values caused by gentrifications. This thesis aims to explore the potentiality and obstacles of facilitating the NCC as the bottom-up forces for locally based urban regenerations in the case of global city London. On top of that, the thesis adapts the Creative City concept and evaluates the effect of globalisation in the context of creative industries and how they respond to the conditions. Through multi-scale spatial and governance analysis, example reviews as well as empirical findings collected via on-site interviews and observation, the project reveals the importance and values of community-oriented creative and cultural amenities supported by involved stakeholders. In the end, the thesis proposes several design and planning recommendations with aims of improving liveability for all and steering the current London’s metropolitan structures towards better spatial, socio-economic inclusivity.Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | Complex Citie