Locating Creative Industries In Creative Cities For Local Economic Development: The Case Of Penang State\ud

In the 21 sl century, cities around the world are aspiring and transforming to become Creative Cities. A Creative City is a city that leverages on creativity, innovation and new ideas to spur economic development. Broadly, Creative Cities are locations that attract talented, innovative and ambitious people or better known as the 'Creative Class' to cluster in order to maximise their full economic potentials. Subsequently, the clustering force of the Creative Class will drive economic growth and development for a city and a country. Against this backdrop, this study applied Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques to locate, map out and understand the pattern of spatial concentration and geographical distributions of existing creative industries and creative employees in Penang State. Subsequently, a survey was also undertaken to explore and understand the factors that shaped their existing and future choice of location for work, home and leisure