BRIEF ARCHAEOLOGY OF AN IDEA

Psychologists have long been interested in the question of individual creativity and its general aetiology, but it was Jane Jacobs (Jacobs, 1984) who first alluded to the creative city, as such, in a discussion of innovative small-scale craft industries, inspired by the inquiries of Sabel (1982) into industrial development in the Third Italy. ¹ Sabel himself went on to write at length (partly in partnership with Piore) about the peculiar model of agglomeration-specific innovation that seemed to be developing in the Third Italy in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Piore and Sabel, 1984). A number of parallel research thrusts by authors such as Aydalot (1986), Oakey (1985) and Stöhr (1986) also raised questions about the broadly innovative character of industrial agglomerations. At about the same time, Andersson (1985) came up with the related proposition that structural instabilities in particular localities might give rise to ‘creative regions’. Quite independently of these efforts, the idea of integrating arts and culture into urban planning was put forward by Yencken (1988) who also suggested that this manner of proceeding pointed toward a new kind of creative city. It was only after about 1990, however, that the notion of the creative city really began to gather momentum. This was the year in which Glasgow was proclaimed as the European Capital of Culture, leading directly to a detailed report by Comedia (1991) ² in which the creative city was portrayed prescriptively as a vortex of innovation in all spheres of life and most especially in the arts, design and new media. The Comedia report was succeeded in 1993 by Vancouver's decisive policy push to develop its artistic and cultural assets (Duxbury, 2004). Shortly thereafter, a number of other cities (e.g. Toronto and Cologne) declared that they, too, would henceforth move in much the same direction.

Over the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, then, various initial research and policy thrusts started to raise questions about the genetics of creativity and innovation in spatial agglomerations, even though there was a tendency, still discernible in the literature today, to restrict the term ‘creativity’ to activities in culture and the arts while the somewhat more sober notion of ‘innovation’ was more consistently invoked in analyses of the manufacturing economy and especially technology-intensive industry. Virtually all this effort resonated explicitly or implicitly with an emergent theoretical framework focused on postfordism and its expression in flexible production (cf. Amin, 1994; Esser and Hirsch, 1989; Sabel and Zeitlin, 1985; Sayer, 1989). The intellectual terrain was thus already well prepared when, in the mid-1990s, two extended statements, one by Landry and Bianchini (1995), the other by Landry et al. (1996), helped further to bring the notion of creative cities to the fore. Landry (2000) subsequently published a landmark manifesto that issued an all-azimuths call for the investment of creative energies in virtually every aspect of urban existence and especially for major efforts to be made in promoting the cultural life of the city. A further gloss on these propositions was added by Hall (1996, 1998) who argued that density, human interaction and synergy were essential foundations of the creativity of individual places. Alongside these lines of enquiry, a number of geographers and sociologists were starting to develop ideas about the cultural economy of cities (e.g. Lash and Urry, 1994; Molotch 1996; Pratt, 1997; Scott, 1996), and these ideas came rapidly to be intertwined with work on the creative city.

Despite this evident ferment, research on the urban and regional foundations of creativity was still confined to a relatively small number of scholars up to the end of the 1990s. The year 2002 marks a major turning point. This was the year in which Richard Florida published his influential book on the rise of the ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002), an event that almost immediately sparked off an extended debate about creativity as a force in urban development. Florida restated his ideas two years later in a book that advanced the additional claim that cities could attract large numbers of creative class workers if they offered high-order amenities (among which social diversity and tolerance were said to play a major part), thereby stimulating local economic growth (Florida, 2004). Florida's identification of the creative class as a significant new social stratum in contemporary capitalism was unquestionably an important insight (though anticipated in different ways by analysts such as Bell (1973), Gouldner (1979) and Reich (1992), but his further asseverations to the effect that urban growth flowed spontaneously from the presence of this class were met – appropriately, as will be shown – with considerable scepticism (e.g. Markusen, 2006; Peck, 2005).

In spite of this scepticism, Florida's work marked the beginning of a widening stream of academic work on the topic of the creative city that has continued to expand down to the present day (Fig. 1). Moreover, Florida's writings found instant echoes in the practical initiatives that were building up around the creative city idea so that his message (consolidated by his frenetic consulting efforts and extensive press coverage) found a sympathetic audience among policy-makers all around the world. This enthusiastic reception is reflected in the proliferation of cities over the last decade or so that claim to have been touched in one way or another by the viaticum of creativity. By one account, there are now over 60 self-professed creative cities worldwide (Karvounis, 2010), and even such palpably improbable places – on the face of it, at least – as Sudbury, Canada (Paquette, 2009), Milwaukee, USA (Zimmerman, 2008), Huddersfield, UK (Chatterton, 2000), and Darwin, Australia (Luckman et al., 2009) have now jumped into the fray. As Kong and O'Connor (2010) indicate, the idea has caught on with special tenacity in Asian policy circles, and is notably strong in China where the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongquin and Wuhan (not to forget Hong Kong and Macau) are all now asserting their creative accomplishments and potentials. In addition, recent research on the creative city has steadily widened the terms of reference of this idea. Some of the major themes running through the current literature focus on aspects of creative urbanism revolving around the institutions of the new economy (the cultural economy above all, but other forms of enterprise as well, including high-technology industry), human capital formation, cultural policy, and innovative idioms of urban design and architecture (e.g. Bontje et al., 2011; Cohendet et al., 2010; Communian, 2011; Costa et al., 2008; Cunningham, 2012; Evans, 2009; Greffe, 2011; Grodach, 2012; Kagan and Hahn, 2011; Kong and O’Connor, 2010; Krätke, 2011; McCann, 2007; Ponzini and Rossi, 2010; Pratt, 2008; Vivant, 2009). This research has also pointed to some of the more naïve and/or cynical appropriations of the creative city idea in the world of policy. A further emerging theme refers not only to major urban centres but also to the creative countryside and small towns in rural areas (Bell and Jayne, 2010; Lewis and Donald, 2010; Scott, 2010b; Waitt and Gibson, 2009).

Beyond the Creative City: Cognitive–Cultural Capitalism and the New Urbanism

All authors

Allen John Scott

https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.891010

Published online:

03 April 2014

Fig. 1. Annual number of citations of the term ‘creative cities’ as recorded by Google Scholar, 1990–2012

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There is much that can be defended in this overall body of work, including the deep reservations in the recent literature about any approach that starts with the so-called creative class as a sort of privileged independent variable. There is also much, however, that needs to be questioned with regard to its theoretical bases and orientation as well as its broader political implications. The discussion that follows is an attempt to rethink various aspects of all of this work by putting it in the context of 21st-century capitalism and related overarching shifts in the economic and social characteristics of cities. The attempted reconstruction here seeks to move away from ‘creativity’ as a foundational concept for approaching urban issues, not only because creativity itself needs to be problematized and its essential social origins revealed, but also because the term so clearly fails to capture so much that is at stake in the urbanization process today, even in those cities that have been identified as being on the cutting edge of creative performance. It will be argued that even when urban outcomes are most intimately connected to creativity, as such, one still needs to go well beyond the confines of this concept in order to achieve an adequate understanding of its motions – and limits – in the city.

DECIPHERING CREATIVITY

Creativity is an extraordinarily difficult word whose meaning is bedevilled by its oft-presumed connection with exalted states of mind, and notably with the ‘mysterious’ workings of artistic and scientific genius. Right at the outset, therefore, one needs to be wary of any metaphysical connotations of the term, especially its not-infrequent association with the transcendent. Instead, one can usefully begin by situating creativity between two concrete polarities, one psychological or internal to the individual, the other sociological or external. On the one side, then, creativity resides in the mental capacities and personal endowments of individual subjects. Some individuals have the native talent and acquired know-how enabling them to accomplish certain kinds of creative acts; some have little or none. Much useful analysis has been published by psychologists on these aspects of the problem (for a summary, see Sternberg and Lubart 1999). On the other side, creativity is also embedded in concrete social contexts that shape its character and objectives in many different ways (cf. Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Hemlin et al., 2008; Seitz, 2003). It is this second facet of the problem that is most pertinent to the present discussion, though assuredly one must not fall into an untenable dualism that separates these two moments of creativity into watertight compartments.

In this context, one also needs to distinguish between three interconnected but rather distinctive processes, namely, learning, creativity and innovation. Learning, the essential complement of the ‘prepared mind’, is a preliminary to creativity (cf. Pasteur, 1854); creativity itself is the act of producing meaningful new ideas, where the qualifiers ‘meaningful’ and ‘new’ both need to be stressed (Bastide, 1977); and innovation entails the translation of those ideas into concrete, effective outcomes. Thus, creative thinking is always in important respects moulded by the knowledge and skills of individuals. These assets are acquired to a significant degree through education, practice and informal socialization, that is, from external sources that are themselves permeated with definite historical and geographical character. Equally, knowledge and skills are bound by all manner of checks and limits (e.g. by theoretical closure, by prescriptive ideologies, by historical tradition, by habit, and so on) though the degree of rigidity of these constraints will vary greatly depending on specific circumstances (Amin and Roberts, 2008; Bautès and Valette, 2004; Brown and Duguid, 1991). In brief, individuals typically internalize elements of their daily environment and these are then reflected back – via further mental processing – in more or less socially conditioned creative efforts. At the same time, individuals caught up in dense transactional networks of various kinds are obviously in a more favoured position to acquire useful information and to explore its wider potentialities than those who are more socially isolated. In fact, much of the labour process in the new economy is organized specifically in ways that seek to capture and optimize these transactional aspects of creativity. As Grabher (2001) has written, this manner of organizing work is especially evident in the case of project-oriented teams in which selected individuals are brought together for a period of time in order to pool their know-how and to cross-fertilize each other's thinking in a context of close collaboration directed to problem-solving exercises. This remark exemplifies another important dynamic of creative activity, namely, that certain kinds of disruptive communications or situations can enhance creative efforts. In this respect, Noteboom (1999) suggests that interpersonal cognitive distance (further refined in terms of novelty and communicability) is an important intermediate variable in the way such disruption works. In particular, too little novelty in any given transaction is apt to be unproductive because it merely reinforces what is already known; and so is too much, because it may not be decodable at the point of reception. Intermediate doses are calculated to push creativity forward most effectively.

The point of all this is that creativity is in deeply meaningful ways a social phenomenon. What this signifies in the present account is that whatever it is that might be identified as the essential nexus of the creativity of cities, its motions can only be deciphered in the last instance, by reference to the communal, context-dependent and purpose-driving conditions that are found in the urban milieu. As will be shown, there is also always a dimension of political choice that shapes these conditions and their effects. In any case, creativity is most certainly not a purely self-acting primum mobile of urban development. An alternative way of referring to these matters is to say that something like an energized creative field extends across the city in the guise of overlapping physical and social infrastructures and that the dense, polarized, multifaceted mesh of transactions generated within this field is a major factor in moulding locally distinctive patterns of ingenuity and imagination (Scott, 1999, 2006, 2010a). It should be added that creative fields can be identified at many other levels of scale, including the national and the global, but for present purposes attention is focused solely on the urban. ³ What is the specific concrete character of the creative field of the city? How does it reflect the logic of urbanization at the beginning of the 21st century? What are its potentialities and limits? And once these questions have been dealt with, what remains of a creative city problematic? These issues can now be dealt with by an extended discussion of urban processes in the emerging, transformative world of cognitive–cultural capitalism. The discussion will underline the legitimacy and urgency of concerns about creativity in contemporary cities, but will, at the same time, seek to dissolve these concerns into what is taken to be a considerably more robust theoretical framework.

CITIES IN COGNITIVE–CULTURAL CAPITALISM

Over the history of capitalism, a distinction was frequently made between cities of industry and commerce, on the one hand, and cities of art and culture, on the other, and, indeed, these two forms of urban development were widely seen as being quite incompatible with one another. Today, this distinction is disappearing in favour of a more syncretic view of cities that is in some degree captured under the rubric of the ‘postfordist city’, one of whose declinations is the ‘creative city’, i.e. a city where production, work, leisure, the arts and the physical milieu exist in varying degrees of mutual harmony.

This trend is in significant ways related to a number of important transformations that have come about in the shift from fordism to postfordism that occurred over the 1980s and 1990s and that have a strong bearing on learning, creativity and innovation. Four main points follow immediately from this remark. First, the main capitalist economies have come to focus increasingly on unstandardized products in sectors like technology-intensive production, business, financial and personal services, and a wide array of cultural industries ranging from the media to fashion-intensive crafts. Second, the same sectors display definite tendencies to extensive horizontal and vertical disintegration with selected groups of firms then being recomposed into networks of specialized but complementary producers with strong proclivities to agglomeration, especially in large cities. Third, increasing shares of the output of these sectors are marked by firm- and place-specific product specifications. Fourth, the conspicuous growth of the new economy is echoed in the expansion of a labour force (roughly equivalent to Florida's creative class, or what Reich, 1992, has called ‘symbolic analysts’) that is called upon increasingly to deploy high-level cognitive and cultural skills such as deductive reasoning capacities, technical insight, leadership, communication abilities, cultural awareness and visual imagination – in other words, more or less creative capacities – in the workplace. As these transformations have come about, economy and culture have fused together in important ways, in the sense that economic outputs are subject to ever-increasing injections of aesthetic and semiotic meaning, while the culture that is consumed is produced more and more by profit-seeking firms in the commodity form.

In line with these remarks, and as advocated elsewhere, the term ‘postfordism’ should doubtless be abandoned and replaced by the more affirmative designation ‘cognitive–cultural capitalism’ (Scott 2011, 2012). The former label has the disadvantage of expressing itself only by what it is not, whereas the latter has the advantage of positively reflecting the foundations of much contemporary economic activity – above all in the more advanced centres of capitalism – in the cerebral and affective capacities of the labour force. It can be argued that we are now entering a period marked by a distinctive third wave of urbanization based on cognitive–cultural capitalism, in contradistinction to a first wave associated with the 19th-century factory and workshop system and a second wave associated with 20th-century fordism (Scott, 2011). This remark is not intended to suggest that all cities have entered this phase as equal participants, but it is certainly the case that more and more large cities in North America and Western Europe are taking part in this trend, as well as cities in the Asia-Pacific Region and elsewhere. A very partial illustrative list of such cities would include New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok. At the same time, many smaller cities and even rural areas are increasingly subject to transformation within this cognitive–cultural order (Scott, 2012).

The contention here is that these new socio-economic arrangements in third-wave cities generate distinctive creative fields while simultaneously providing terms of reference that point well beyond a narrow focus on creativity as such. A core element of the creative fields within these cities consists of the clusters of technology-intensive, service and cultural producers that nowadays constitute so much of their economic base. These clusters are sites of productive labour in which know-how is accumulated, skills are honed, and firm- and place-specific forms of product configuration (the source of Chamberlinian monopolistic competition) are worked out. The same clusters are shot through with dense transactional networks that in part hold them together as geographical entities, and that function as important channels of information and mutually cross-fertilizing creative signals (Asheim and Coenen, 2005; Bathelt et al., 2004; Desrochers and Leppälä, 2011). The labour markets that form around these clusters are also important sources of creative energies as workers rotate through different jobs and interact with one another in project-oriented teams. At the same time, the wider urban system plays a role in helping to sustain (or impede) individual creative drives via the forms of social reproduction that it sustains. In this regard, the cultural and social spaces of the city as well as local institutions, like schools and universities, are of major consequence (Scott, 2010a). In favoured cases, the physical fabric and cultural institutions of the city help to underpin these functions by providing a milieu that is supportive of the overall social and economic vocation of the city, as well as exuding images that function as branding devices and as advertisements for its capabilities, attractions, and ambitions (Okano and Samson, 2010; Vanolo, 2008).

The most visible expression of the latter phenomenon can be found in the central business districts of major global cities where peculiar new forms of aestheticization, as represented above all by markedly idiosyncratic buildings signed by star architects, amplify the individuality and visibility of the urban milieu. The historical and cultural patrimony of cities serves much the same purpose, and often forms the basis of lucrative heritage and place marketing efforts (Graham et al., 2000; Philo and Kearns, 1993). Even many former manufacturing centres are attempting to upgrade parts of their ageing built stock in efforts to construct some sort of ‘creative’ future for themselves, above all one that emphatically involves a break with the old economy and that reaches out to more knowledge- and culture-intensive forms of production. Initiatives like these are evident in the widespread recycling of derelict industrial and warehouse properties in cities that prospered in earlier phases of urban economic development, and their utilization for art centres and galleries, music venues, boutique retail outlets, and facilities such as small design, media and fashion firms (cf. Andres and Grésillon, 2011; Brown et al., 2000; Communian, 2011; Gnad, 2000; Wynne, 1992). In brief, and to repeat an earlier refrain, forms of creative expression in the contemporary city are not simply sovereign emanations from the minds of the citizenry but are also mobilized and moulded by the complex interweaving between relations of production, social life and the urban milieu at large.

These trends have been associated with a notable if selective resurgence of urban growth over the last few decades, and this in turn has sparked off a debate – deeply interwoven with the creative city idea – about the causalities underlying this growth. One fashionable view about this matter can be summarized in Florida's claim that cities with abundant amenities are apt to grow because the creative class will preferentially migrate to such cities, and their presence will then be reflected in bursts of local economic dynamism (see also Florida, 2008; and Mellander et al., 2013, for extensions). One variation on this theme can be found in Clark (2004) who views successful modern cities as ‘entertainment machines’ that attract and maintain highly qualified workers by virtue of their amusement value. Another is offered by Glaeser (2011) for whom cities have evolved from being centres of production in the 20th century to consumer cities in the 21st, and he avers that the latter cities grow when they have abundant amenities (sunshine, low crime rates, ‘playground’ effects, etc.) that draw in workers endowed with high levels of human capital. In opposition to these amenity-based and sumptuary views on urban dynamism, Storper and Scott (2009) have argued that cities develop primarily on the basis of their job-generating capacities. This argument does not dismiss the auxiliary role of human capital in the recursive, path-dependent process of urban growth. However, it does claim that even today it is jobs not amenities that attract highly qualified workers to particular cities and that keep them durably in place. The complexities of this debate are much too great to be summarized in the present context, except perhaps to say that one of the fatal flaws of the amenities-based view is that it is quite incapable of explaining how it is that the production systems of cities, and their corresponding stocks of human capital, are so frequently specialized. If the view as articulated by Storper and Scott is correct, it means that even so-called creative cities (or, in what is taken to be a more theoretically informed vocabulary, cities with vibrant cognitive–cultural economies) remain directly dependent for their growth and prosperity on the health of their internal productive arrangements (and, of course, export markets). This statement holds as much for cities dominated by sectors like tourism, the heritage industry, theatre and casino gambling, whose outputs are largely immobile, as it does for cities dominated by technology-intensive sectors, business and financial services, and cultural industries, producing outputs that can normally be readily transported to distant markets.

CHIAROSCURO: INTRA-URBAN SOCIAL AND SPATIAL TRANSFORMATIONS

Human capital and social restratification. Much, though by no means all, of the research accomplished on the creative city to date celebrates the ostensibly benign dimensions of this concept while neglecting or deemphasizing its more malignant elements. But cities in advanced capitalism, even those that are well-endowed with advanced cognitive and cultural employment opportunities, are in practice awash in crisis conditions – exacerbated by fiscal austerity in these last few years – not in a purely contingent way, but as an organic outgrowth of their role as cynosures of the new economy. Among the problems and predicaments created in this manner, those that revolve around the widening economic and social gap between the upper and lower halves of the labour force are undoubtedly the most explosive in political terms.

In classical fordist society the dominant division of labour in production was represented by the white- and blue-collar fractions of the workforce. This division of labour was projected out into intra-urban space where it reappeared in the form of a pervasive but never fully accomplished division of neighborhoods. With the advent of the new economy, an alternative bipartite division of labour is now overriding the old white/blue-collar social split (Levy and Murnane, 2004) leading to a significant restratification of urban society and thence to significant readjustments in the geography of urban neighborhoods. The new division of labour is represented on the one side by the creative class or symbolic analysts, and on the other by a low-wage service underclass. In more polemical terms, the latter group might be said to constitute a new servile class. Standing (2011) and others refer to a ‘precariat’ that is more or less equivalent to this class. The steadily widening gap in the fortunes of these two strata is in large part a function of their differential command of skills and formal qualifications, but is greatly exacerbated by the increasing atomization and competitiveness that have invaded labour markets as neoliberal fundamentalism and globalization have continued to run their course. The deepening divide in advanced capitalist cities is all the more evident given the steady retreat of manufacturing employment (by both attrition and movement offshore) from major urban centres and the concomitant shrinkage of the traditional blue-collar labour force.

The human capital assets of the top half of the urban labour force comprise advanced technical knowledge, analytical prowess and relevant forms of socio-cultural know-how. These assets are typically valorized within a system of formal credentialing. By contrast, the abilities of the service underclass are very much more informal and undervalued. These workers are deployed in jobs whose subaltern status is underlined by the high proportion of politically marginal social groups (such as immigrants from poor countries) who carry them out. These jobs are focused above all on sustaining the facilities and infrastructure of the urban system, and on providing diverse kinds of domestic and personal help. This remark implies at once that service underclass work is geared in large degree to providing for the direct and indirect demands of the upper echelon of workers in the cognitive–cultural economy. It would be a grave mistake, however, to suppose that the labour of the service underclass is devoid of cognitive and cultural skills. Consider, for example, the kinds of flexibility and discretionary decision-making required for janitors, motor-vehicle operators, and crossing guards to accomplish their work, or the communicative and resourceful capacities that must be mobilized by child care workers, home health aides, and beauty salon personnel. Moreover, because the members of the service underclass must always be available in proximity to the point of service, the tasks that they perform, unlike much manufacturing activity, cannot be repackaged and sent offshore (Gatta et al., 2009). Indeed, the incidence of these workers has been rising in both absolute and relative terms in American cities of late. Thus, among the fastest growing jobs in large US cities in the first decade of the 21st century are found such low-wage service occupations as couriers and messengers, dining room attendants, dishwashers, food preparation workers, grounds maintenance workers, highway maintenance workers, hotel clerks, miscellaneous motor vehicle operators, painters, parking lot attendants, and service station attendants (Scott, 2009, 2010c).

Land use changes. As the social shifts noted above have occurred, significant rearrangements of intra-urban space have also come about. Among the more dramatic of these changes is the revitalization of selected areas in the city, most especially in and around the urban core. This form of revitalization comprises two related but distinctive phases, each frequently equated with creative city dynamics. One involves the upgrading of deteriorated residential areas, notably but not exclusively, in inner-city areas; the other is focused on the redevelopment of commercial and business properties within the central business district. Both phases are commonly referred to in the literature by reference to ‘gentrification’, though the term is unsatisfactory in many ways. What follows will continue to refer to residential upgrading as gentrification, but the more evocative phrase ‘aestheticized land use intensification’ will be used to refer to commercial and business land-use redevelopment in central business districts.

Gentrification, as such, was first identified by Glass (1964) who observed that a number of poorer neighborhoods in Central London were undergoing social transformation as upper middle-class families started to take over much of the local housing stock. The historical origins of gentrification thus precede the rise of the cognitive–cultural economy, though it might well be maintained that Central London was a harbinger of things to come with its already declining manufacturing industries and its shifting occupational structure reflecting the rapid growth of its financial, media, fashion and entertainment sectors. In many instances, the incipient stages of gentrification are signalled by incursions of artists and bohemians into run-down working-class neighborhoods (Lloyd, 2002; Zukin 1982). A pioneer fringe of middle class gentrifiers then frequently starts to move in and renovate local properties, followed by successive waves of further gentrification and rapidly increasing property values. These events are accompanied by steady displacement of the original low-income residents as rental rates rise and as what remains of their local employment base in manufacturing is demolished. The pace of change is frequently boosted by unscrupulous landlords eager to reap the benefits of higher property values and by overzealous city councils anxious to enhance the image of the city (Lees et al., 2008; Slater, 2006; Wacquant, 2008). As this happens, inner-city residential areas become increasingly dominated by ‘creative’ workers with demographic profiles like young professional families, cohabiting couples, people in same-sex unions, apartment sharers, metrosexual singles, and so on (Haase et al., 2010; Hamnett and Whitelegg, 2007; Harris, 2008).

The allied process of aestheticized land-use intensification can be described as the quest for increased productivity per unit of urban land in central business districts (as well as more outlying business clusters), particularly with regard to cognitively and culturally inflected sectors. Today, this quest is typically associated with forms of embellishment coinciding with strikingly new idioms of architecture and urban design that are very different from the ageing modernist style that formerly dominated downtown areas in different parts of the world. These idioms in many ways reflect something of the character of the cognitive–cultural activities that now dominate in downtown areas as well the ideology and tastes of the new transnational capitalist class whose members move with ease between the various global foci of new economy (Sklair, 2005). They are also a reflection of an aggressive global urbanism that thrives on dramatized city branding strategies not only in the interests of self-assertion but also as a means of attracting inflows of capital investment and highly qualified labour.

A widely accepted theoretical explanation of these processes of land-use redevelopment and change was proposed by Smith (1982, 1986) in terms of what he called a ‘rent gap’. Smith argues that inner-city properties often seem to command potential rents far above the actual rent earned and that this gap provides the incentive for land-use upgrading and socio-economic succession. A phenomenon analogous to the rent gap can certainly be observed at different times in different cities. However, it is suggested that it should more properly be seen not as a cause but as an effect of gentrification (in all of its senses), or perhaps, better yet, an endogenous element of the gentrification process relative to the wider economic and social changes currently going on in cities. Above all, these changes need to be considered in the light of two basic and mutually reinforcing trends. On the one hand, these peculiar forms of redevelopment owe much to the collapse of manufacturing employment in inner-city areas and the erosion of adjacent working-class neighborhoods. On the other hand, they also reflect the enormous recent expansion of the new economy in central business districts, leading in turn to revalorization of surrounding residential areas and their steady colonization by cognitive–cultural workers. Central business district redevelopment has also typically been accompanied by major investments in cultural and entertainment facilities such as museums, art galleries, music venues and sports arenas, and this has added to the attractions of nearby neighborhoods for well-paid, well-qualified, cognitive and cultural workers.

As these developments have moved ahead, patterns of socio-spatial segmentation in cities have been significantly reshaped by comparison with the situation under fordism. In some respects, socio-spatial segmentation has actually become more strongly indurated than it was in the fordist era as the incomes of different occupational strata diverge and as members of the upper tier of the labour force increasingly secure their own residential seclusion by means of gated communities and stringent zoning regulations, not only in central cities but also in the suburbs (Blakely and Snyder, 1997; Le Goix, 2005 ). The incongruity of cities of the third wave, despite frequent claims about their creative vitality, is the glaring contrast between the shimmer of their more affluent landmark areas and the squalor of their darker underside. Increasing numbers of cities in both the Global North and Global South today are marked by a yawning void between their internal islands of prosperity linked to the global economy, and widely ranging tracts where social and political marginalization is the order of the day. In these circumstances, the right to the city that Lefebvre (1968) saw, correctly, as one of the basic conditions for a renewal of democratic values, social solidarity and the capacity for réjouissance seems as distant as ever. Some of the most creative cities in today's world are deeply caught up in this stubborn predicament.

THE URBAN POLICY DIMENSION

In its unreconstructed form, creative city theory offers a seductively glowing vision of urban potentialities. The call to creativity as a centrepiece of urban development goals is certainly compelling by comparison with politically fraught and often ineffectual measures focused on more traditional approaches entailing attempts to improve the local business climate and efforts to lure inward investors by means of fiscal incentives. Small wonder, in view of this vision, that large numbers of self-declared creative cities are asserting themselves on every continent at the present moment in history.

To be sure, cities have always been centres of creativity, even if in different ways at different times (Andersson, 2011; Hall, 1998; Hessler and Zimmerman, 2008). Today, forms of urban creativity reside substantially in the specific socio-economic relationships built into the new cognitive and cultural order. As already noted, however, the descriptive and normative resonances of ‘creative city’ discourse systematically occlude much of what is most fundamental in the contemporary urban process and are hence prone both to overlook many crucial questions and to generate dysfunctional policy advocacies. It is undeniably the case that a great deal of what goes on in contemporary cities is symptomatic of diverse creative impulses, especially in the guise of the continual destruction and reconstruction of ideas, images, styles, routines, organizational arrangements, and all the rest. These impulses are embedded in a new socio-economic regime of volatility, flexibility, intensified competition and a type of consumerism that is increasingly focused on the aesthetic, semiotic and libidinal content of the products that circulate through global markets. These circumstances, by and large, remain beyond the purview of creative city discourse, which in its uncritical optimism, expresses a sort of credulity about the urban future compounded by policy recommendations that in practice, as Pratt (2011) has argued, lead frequently to regressive policy outcomes. For one thing, as noted above, creative city policies help to turbo-charge gentrification processes thus exacerbating the exclusion of low-income families from central city areas and underwriting the takeover of those areas by the new bourgeoisie (Bayliss, 2007; McCann, 2007; Smith, 2002). The irony here is that although creative city theory puts much emphasis on diversity and tolerance, the policy advocacies that have been constructed in its name actually make few gestures in the direction of social inclusion and even less in the direction of income redistribution. For another thing, creative city discourse all too often licenses deeply flawed programmes that proceed on the faith that investments in amenities will function as a magnet for creative class migrants and that this will then presumably foster rising urban prosperity for all. It has already been suggested that this faith is misplaced, and several authors have shown that in many instances the expected returns to major investment in urban amenities far exceed the actual returns, notably when policy-makers have adopted exaggerated hopes based on mediatized but dubious models like Bilbao's attempted renaissance by means of its Guggenheim Museum (cf. Evans, 2005; Jayne, 2004; Paquette, 2009; Sasaki, 2010). Moreover, investments in amenities calculated to appeal primarily to the creative class are ipso facto liable to involve regressive subsidies to privileged groups at the expense of other social fractions. Such investments are particularly likely to provide disproportional benefits to property owners (O'Connor and Gu, 2013).

It is no surprise, therefore, to observe that popular political movements in large cities everywhere, have rather consistently turned their backs on these kinds of policy advocacies in favour of goals that address the specific needs of low-wage workers, the unemployed and the destitute (Borén and Young, 2012; Holm, 2010). Alternative movements like these are well exemplified by the Bus Riders Union and the Janitors for Justice campaign in Los Angeles (cf. Milkman, 2006; Soja, 2010), or by the community-based workers' centres that offer help in cities across the United States to low-income and especially immigrant workers in their quest for improved wages and working conditions (Fine, 2005). Even groups of artists (who, on the basis of narrow self-interest, would seem to have much to gain from creative city policies) have started to campaign for socially inclusive approaches in cities as far apart as Hamburg and Toronto, and to call for reconsideration of some of the more overtly regressive and philistine public initiatives intended to bring creative city ideas into concrete realization (Catungal et al., 2009; Holm, 2010).

More generally, the tasks of harnessing and regulating urban realities in the interests of a progressive future require initiatives that recognize the positive, forward-looking energies of cities, but that go radically beyond the advocacies of creative city enthusiasts. Three imperatives, responding to core economic and social breakdowns in the large city today, are of particular importance and urgency. The first is to build institutional frameworks that can effectively manage the common-pool resources that abound within the cognitive–cultural economy at the scale of the individual city and that are otherwise susceptible to gross inefficiencies. The second is to rectify the huge discrepancies of incomes and life chances that currently distort the social landscape of large cities all over the world. The third is to secure the wider democratization of urban space and to promote the rehabilitation of communal life. These desiderata are essential for achieving the full developmental possibilities of third wave cities, and for countering some of the more frankly rapacious and narcissistic qualities of existence in the world of the new cognitive–cultural economy.

TAKING STOCK

Despite the critical comments made here on creative city theory and policy-making, it should be re-emphasized that much of the substantive content of this approach echoes some very real currents in contemporary society, albeit in a wayward and distorted manner. These currents stem from a number of important dimensions of the creative field in contemporary cities. Hence, cities, large and small, in many different parts of the world are most assuredly being transformed in economic terms as the new cognitive–cultural economy deepens and widens its hold; even rural areas are participating in this shift. A distinctive stratum of highly paid workers with well-honed cerebral and affective human capital is also coming to the fore in large cities as these changes occur, though this ostensibly cheerful outcome is counterbalanced by the emergence of a low-wage service underclass and all that this implies in terms of the socio-spatial segmentation of urban life. The resurgence and rising wealth of cities worldwide over the last few decades are further reflected in significant upgrading of selected parts of the urban environment together with expanding stocks of high-grade amenities like museums, concert halls, libraries, recreational facilities and public art. And in the context of the intensifying race for competitive advantage and the quest for inward flows of investment and human capital, there is continually intensifying pressure on cities to assert their global presence and ambitions by means of vibrant visual images and branding campaigns emphasizing local attractions such as lifestyle, cultural facilities and historical heritage.

Then again, as this paper has tried to show, these trends and the creative impulses that they promote are subjacent to a much wider set of social and economic forces rooted in the dynamics of cognitive–cultural capitalism. The primary theoretical challenge therefore is to reveal how these dynamics undergird the spatial and temporal logic of urbanization today. An exclusive focus on the creativity-engendering capacities of the city, as such, misses much of what is most crucial in this challenge, namely, the social and economic forces that bring specific modes of urban life into being in the first instance. By the same token, what Peck (2005) calls the ‘creative cities script’ assuredly contains an unwarranted dose of wishful thinking not to mention its encouragement of top-down, leadership-style political recuperation and regressive policy-making (see also Campbell, 2013). So even if its time has come, the concept of creativity in economic and urban geography needs to be approached with all due caution.

Two further observations can be appended to this injunction. First, to the degree that creativity emerges out of the complex physical and social infrastructures of the city it is an epiphenomenon; and second, to the degree that it is invoked – as is so often the case – simply as a synonym for upgrading the building stock and cultural facilities of the city, it is a misnomer. Still, many striking new prospects for urban development are now coming to the fore by reason of the powerful and intensifying interplay between cognition, culture and economy in the capitalism of the 21st century. A basic condition for the full flowering of these prospects is the reining in of the neoliberal frameworks that regulate so much of contemporary city governance, and a dramatic enlargement of the sphere of urban democratic order.