Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 10
Creative Cities
Niamh Moore-Cherry
The creative city, if there is such a thing, is surely an arena for
contentious politics over the character of the city and for whom
it works.
Markusen
2006
, p. 1937
101
Introduction
Cities are fundamentally shaped by their social and economic life; they obtain their
specific character from the people that congregate and activities that take place
within, as well as their interactions with places outside, their specific spatial or func-
tional boundaries (Massey
1994
). Economic change goes hand-in-hand with urban
transformation. The de-industrialisation of cities in Europe and North America and
the growing importance of Asian cities in the late 1970s and early 1980s is one good
example of this trend, as large proportions of global manufacturing moved from
some historic industrial cities, such as Sheffield (UK) and Detroit (USA), to those
such as Guangzou (China), Dacca (Bangladesh) and Bangkok (Thailand). Equally,
the emergence of the so-called 'New Economy' in recent decades has resulted in
significant spatial, social and economic urban change. This new economic order is
indexed by the growing importance of the service sector, especially by international
financial services in the biggest cities, and has been facilitated by significant ad-
vances in information and communication technologies (ICT), although stalled by
the dot-com crash of the early 2000s and the financial crash from 2007. Because of
these new technologies, the new economy is more footloose and capital has become
highly mobile. This seems to make the nature of contemporary economic activ-
ity less place-dependent on traditional locational factors, such as land, labour and
capital, which means that cities are facing significant competition to attract their
share of global investment. To address this issue over the last two decades, policy-
makers have used a range of tools to improve urban competitiveness, such as fiscal
