Abstract
The creative city, along with creative industries and the creative class, are frequently seen as examples of global policy transfer, where ‘policy technologies’ circulate through a global policy sphere. This chapter starts with a critical account of the literature, focusing especially on the idea of the ‘modern’ underpinning the ‘development’ which is sought from creative cities and the creative economies they are aimed at promoting. The chapter argues this goes beyond global policy elites and their ‘epistemic communities’ and forms part of a much wider ‘imaginary’ of the modern. This imaginary has been able to interpellate a range of, usually younger, creative actors from outside established policy communities, and these have given the idea a dynamic presence well beyond its actual policy traction within government. The chapter tries to reconstruct the creative city as a global imaginary, and ends by suggesting it is in rapid dissolution—or transformation.
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Notes
- 1.
Though in the very last lines Prince calls for research into policy forms ‘not interested in reproducing the status quo, providing a rejoinder to representations of the tyranny of expertise and pointing to the possibility of its redemption in alternative governmental visions’ (2010: 883). We can only guess what these might be.
- 2.
This was exemplified in the new global visibility of contemporary art, whose galleries rapidly shouldered out concert halls and opera houses from their emblematic position in the global cultural city. The example of Bilbao and the Guggenheim played a part, its success in attracting tourists and global media attention representing the old industrial city’s re-invention of itself. But it is easy to miss the ways in which contemporary art had become articulated to forms of popular culture and lifestyle, becoming an important marker of a contemporary global subject. The ability to interpellate such subject positions became increasingly important for global cultural cities, the latest example being the spate of contemporary art museums in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, not to mention Shanghai and Singapore. The art gallery, increasingly associated with urban gentrification, was also a portal into a cosmopolitan modernity (for practicing artists and visitors alike), as well as providing its local flagship presence.
- 3.
This was part of a wider global defeat of the ‘Third World’. Cf. Quinn Slobodian (2018) Globalists. The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
- 4.
Similar things happened with ‘gay villages’ throughout the Global North, or indeed with the China Towns of previous eras, parlayed into tourism sites.
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O’Connor, J. (2020). Creative Cities, Creative Classes and the Global Modern. In: Gu, X., Lim, M.K., O’Connor, J. (eds) Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Twenty-First Century Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46291-8_2
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