Creative Cities - Theme Cities: Solutions for Urban Problems - page 360

tools for achieving creative city status: first, the development of world-class physi-
cal spaces in the city—such as landmark buildings and public spaces—and second,
the attraction of external human talent to the city.
As the discussion above has shown, much of the debate on creativity in cities be-
gan with a focus on the cultural economy in the 1980s, building on other more dis-
parate bodies of work that had emerged from the 1960s onwards. While not directly
identifying with the idea of creative cities, Jane Jacobs ( 1961 ), the well-known
community activist and planning critic, can be credited with influencing much of
the recent work in this field. For her, the urban renewal policies of the 1950s that
razed city neighbourhoods for road building and other urban projects were entirely
counter-productive. She advocated the need for dense mixed-use neighbourhoods
with a diversity of people and activities to ensure urban vibrancy and success. This
kind of diversity of people and activities and constant change as a pre-requisite for
urban dynamism is a recurring theme in the creative cities literature. For example,
Andersson ( 1985 ) argued that the conditions that promote urban synergy or interac-
tion come from the instability that is crucial to the promotion of creativity. This idea
can also be seen in the work of Peter Hall ( 2000 ), who suggested that innovative
capacity in cities only happens in a society in extreme flux, where there is a large
number of new and young arrivals mixing and merging into a new kind of society.
More recent discussions of the creative city have taken these ideas as their starting
point and developed them in entirely new directions to some acclaim and much
criticism.

10﻽3 Creative Class Theory

The existence of a Creative Class, as proposed by Richard Florida, has become a key
element of the Creative City idea since 2002. Adding value to the attractiveness of
the city by a particular social group now underlies much the planning and develop-
ment goals and urban tourism strategies which aim to attract high-spending visitors
to maximise their impact across the wider economy. The city atmosphere or 'city
buzz' is crucial to perceptions of vitality and economic growth and these ideas have
become the starting point for the most recent work on creative cities. Rather than
using these characteristics to simply market a city to visitors, they are now seen as
central to attracting highly educated and capable migrants. Rather than being simply
dependent on the classic location factors of physical infrastructure, schools, and low
tax rates for urban competitiveness, successful cities are those that use a range of
less tangible attributes to attract highly talented people who are seen as the driving
forces of economic development in this creative age (Florida 2005 ). Grounding this
in the kind of language beloved of policy-makers, it has been emphasized that
the key dimension of economic competitiveness no longer lies in large endowments of raw
materials or natural resources or even labour cost advantages. Rather, it turns on the ability
to attract, cultivate and mobilize creative assets. (Florida and Tingali 2004 , p. 12)

But the argument goes further. If cities are to have creative ambitions, then it is
stressed that they need to invest heavily in building a high-quality urban environment