Individual Paper
6. Using the Arts, Media and Culture: Contestations and Collaborations
This paper critically examines the origin of the creative city concept (Landry 2000, Florida 2002). While empirical studies on creative cities in North America and Europe have given insight into how and why the concept has traveled across geographies, the concept has also been criticized as lacking intersectional depth (McLean 2014) and serving to reinforce neoliberal agendas of commodification (Peck 2007). At the same time, the creative city paradigm is gaining traction in cities of the global South (Chuangchai 2021, O’Connor and Shaw 2014). In this multifaceted fairwater, we set out to understand what happens to the basic assumptions of the creative city (and within it, the creative class) and its interrelated meaning and priority in urban policy discourse if we apply a non-Western epistemology of arts, culture and creativity. To explore this theoretical trajectory, we draw on the conceptual frameworks of urban policy mobilities (Baker and Temenos 2015; McCann and Ward 2012) and specifically interconnect this conceptual trope to creative cities (Borén and Young 2021), in order to compare the locally specific materializations of the creative city concept. Through empirical vignettes from Berlin, Germany, and Ahmedabad, India, we aim to map ‘creativity from below’. Using ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews and secondary literature, we reconstruct how ‘creativity from below’ shapes both explicit and implicit policy formation in the urban cultural realm (Landau-Donnelly et al. 2023). From this standpoint, we mobilize a productive dialogue between cities from the global South and North to conceptualize a de-centered understanding of the creative city.
Pooja Thomas
MICA The School of Ideas, India
Friederike Landau- Donnelly
Radboud University, Netherlands