Creative City Policy and the Gap with Theory

The creative city concept is popular among researchers and policy-makers. On the one hand, academic literature elaborates, on a conceptual level, the importance of creativity and innovation for urban competitiveness; on the other, numerous cities develop and implement creative city policies in practice. The connection between these two is rather weak and, accordingly, creative city policy tends to be ad hoc. Our purpose in this paper is to narrow the above-mentioned gap between theory and practice, by addressing the question of how conceptual insights into the creative city can be converted into an elaborated operational approach for local policy practice. We propose a three-step approach: (1) to position a city's current creative places and communities within the context of social and economic structures, urban narratives and prevailing governance structures and style by means of a systematic analytical framework; (2) to assess the spatial, social and symbolic place qualities of the creative production and consumption; (3) to identify options for effective policy intervention. We further examine how these steps may be applied in practice, and use the city of Delft in the Netherlands as an example. A discussion of the applicability and implementation of this approach concludes the paper.