Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1 6
AND SPACE
Julie Wilson
As individuals, we often strive to be creative as a form of self-actualisation, in the hope that
it will allow us to realise our potential as human beings and express ourselves satisfactorily.
Such creative aspirations have more recently become the concern of
places
as well as people.
There is certainly nothing new about creativity as an aspiration (and the search for personal
creativity has certainly become more important than ever). However, it is only in the past
decade or so that the concept has come to permeate urban and regional policy on a large-scale
basis, thanks to its ideal and timely fi t within what Peck terms the current 'fast policy climate'
(2005). In more recent work, Peck has argued that:
For all their fl amboyant display of liberal cultural innovation, creativity strategies
barely disrupt neoliberal urban-policy orthodoxies, based on place promotion,
market-led development, gentrifi cation, and normalized sociospatial inequality. But
these strategies also extend and recodify entrenched tendencies in neoliberal urban
politics, seductively repackaging them in the soft-focus terms of cultural policy.
They elevate creativity to the status of a new urban imperative - defi ning new sites,
validating new strategies, placing new subjects, and establishing new stakes in the
realm of competitive interurban relations.
(Peck, 2010: 192)
Not all accounts of the creativity idea share this particular analytical view (i.e. framing it
as a largely neoliberal and uneven urban strategy). The heavy weight placed behind the
'creative turn' in policy-making and regulatory domains is a clear example of the popularity
of such measures, as observable in the number of local, regional and national authorities
that have snapped up the concept wholeheartedly (and increasingly with regard to tourism
policy).
In this chapter, I will fi rst examine the emergence of creativity as a policy instrument from
a spatial and place-based perspective and as an academic 'turn' in geography and tourism
studies. Following this, I examine the linkages between space, place and creativity as a
conceptual framework in researching tourism development, and fi nally I offer a number of
salient areas for research on this topic in the future. As space limitations do not permit too
much explanatory detail on the emerging relationship between tourism and creativity, I
