Research project Creativity from below

The aim of this research is to critically analyse how globally mobile ‘creative city’ policy is reconstructed in locally contingent contexts and the implications of this for developing a progressive politics and planning milieu. How ‘creativity’ is actually understood among policy-makers, and the perspectives of those individuals and occupational groups to whom creative city policy is actually applied, are significant research gaps in the literature. Furthermore, we know little about how particular creative groups might engage with policy in a progressive fashion rather than simply being casts as opponents. Thus this research seeks to reveal the complexity of ways in which mobile creative city policy is shaped by local network ecologies of actors (eg. urban policy makers, creative entrepreneurs, city marketers, property developers) through which the global and the local are mutually constitutive, and how creative producers react to the local development of creative city policy. The research will use a comparative case study methodology compare across scales, which is innovative in this field. The empirical research with groups of creative producers and urban strategists, who represent parts of these network-ecologies, will provide further understanding of how urban policy ‘travels’ and is received, challenged, resisted or mutated ie. is locally-produced. The project involves qualitative fieldwork in Stockholm, Manchester and Gdańsk.