Creative Cities - Theme Cities: Solutions for Urban Problems - page 365

Peck ( 2005 , p. 760) has also demonstrated how the creative city in the U.K. is
just a “market-friendly urban placebo … (that) … can quite easily be bolted on to
business-as-usual urban-development policies”. This view seems to be duplicated
in other countries. Lund Hansen et al. ( 2001 ) in their review of the discussion on
creativity in Copenhagen (Denmark) argue similarly that no-one has questioned
how the creative city is different from the property-led regeneration that it claims
to replace. More generally, Rausch and Negrey ( 2006 ) argued that strategies aimed
at Creative Class attraction are just another tool for those controlling the economic
development agenda in order to distinguish the city from other, potentially com-
petitive centres. In Ireland, for example, the newest Dublin Economic Development
Strategy ( 2009 ) embraces the creativity agenda as an added-value component of a
pre-existing development approach. This is explicitly articulated in the aim of this
Plan:
to further develop the Dublin City Region, the engine of Ireland's economy, as a significant
hub in the European knowledge economy through a network of thriving spatial and sectoral
clusters providing a magnet for creative talent and investment. (Dublin City Council 2009 ,
p. 7)
The delivery of the Plan was designed to be aided by the Creative Dublin Alli-
ance, which is a network led by the Dublin City Manager, with members drawn
from the most senior level in Local Government, Commerce, Industry, Education,
State Agencies and the Not-for-Profit Sector. The role of the Alliance is to identify
challenges and issues of citywide significance that could most effectively be dealt
with through the synergies created in the Alliance. The influence of Creative Class
theory, concepts and approaches as shaped by Florida ( 2002a , 2005 ) on facilitating
a business-as-usual planning and economic development agenda in Dublin is clear:
Good urban quality is of central importance in attracting investment and talent. This
includes the quality of the built and natural environment, the vibrancy of street life, density
and intensity, caf￩ culture, arts and music, outdoor activities, public spaces, a choice of
quality places to live, a child friendly environment, tolerance and social harmony. (Dublin
City Council 2009 , p. 18)
Unfortunately, this type of development agenda is being adopted with little regard
to the evidence emerging from empirical research. For example, Lawton et al.
( 2009 ) have demonstrated in the same context that the people described as being in
the creative class are not as highly mobile as Florida would suggest. Their work, un-
dertaken in Dublin (Ireland) as part of a broader European project on transnational
migrant workers and other members of the creative class, suggested that personal
trajectories and family-kinship ties—things that Florida criticizes—along with the
more classic hard factors of location, land availability and infrastructure, are still the
most important factors in locational decision-making. This crucial evidence iden-
tifies a problem about the degree of mobility of the creative class; there is a sig-
nificant disjuncture between rhetoric that assumes ease of mobility and the spatial
immobility reality in creative-class decision-making.
Despite these problems there have also been some surprising Creative City ben-
efits in the emergence of this focus. For example one significant outcome of this
type of urban development strategy has been the emergence of a clear rationale for