1 51st European Congress of the Regional Science Association International New Challenges for European Regions and Urban Areas in a Globalised World From Talent to Creative Cities: Toward a Conceptual Framework Very first draft- Please do not quote

This article explores the concept of “creative city ” by focusing on creative people and creative industries. Creative industries belong to the formal world of market-oriented firms and institutions while creative people interact through social networks to share and diffuse creative ideas. While creative people explore and generate ideas, creative industries exploit creative productions. The role of the city is to link up the myriad of creative ideas coming from its creative districts with creative industries located in creative clusters. Creative industries rest on constellations of communities that constitute a medium level bringing up talented-people ideas viable and marketable. We develop here the anatomy of the creative city following Cohendet et al. (2009). After discussing about conceptual issues of the “creative city”, this article deals with the question of its measurement. We found that quantitative data do not provide enough information to catch the whole local process of creative production. Qualitative methods appear to be more relevant to understand relations, city’s layers and actors ’ game at stake in exploring and exploiting local creative production