Creative Urban Milieus

'Creative Urban Milieus' is an interdisciplinary examination of the historical relationship between culture and the economy in such cities as Berlin, New York, Helsinki, London, Venice, and many others.

In 2008 for the first time the majority of the planet's inhabitants lived in cities and towns. Becoming globally urban has been one of mankind's greatest collective achievements over time. Written by leading scholar, this is the first detailed survey of the world's cities and towns from ancient times to the present day.

The notion of 'creative cities' - where cultural activities and creative and cultural industries play a crucial role in supporting urban creativity and contributing to the new creative economy - has become central to most regional and urban development strategies in recent years. A creative city is supposed to develop imaginative and innovative solutions to a range of social, economic and environmental problems: economic stagnancy, urban shrinkage, social segregation, global competition or more. Cities and regions around the world are trying to develop, facilitate or promote concentrations of creative, innovative and/or knowledge-intensive industries in order to become more competitive. These places are seeking new strategies to combine economic development with quality of place that will increase economic productivity and encourage growth. Against this increasing interest in creative cities, this volume offers a coherent set of articles on sustainable and creative cities, and addresses modern theories and concepts relating to research on sustainability and creativity. It analyses principles and practices of the creative city for the formulation of policies and recommendations towards the sustainable city. It brings together leading academics with different approaches from different disciplines to provide a comprehensive and holistic overview of creativity and sustainability of the city, linking research and practice. In doing so, it puts forward ideas about stimulating the production of an innovative knowledge for a creative and sustainable city, and transforming a specific knowledge into a general common knowledge, which suggests best future policy actions, decision-making processes and choices for the change towards a human sustainable development of the city.

With the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida in 2002, the 'creative city' became the new hot topic among urban policymakers, planners and economists. Florida has developed one of three path-breaking theories about the relationship between creative individuals and urban environments. The economist Åke E. Andersson and the psychologist Dean Simonton are the other members of this 'creative troika'. In the Handbook of Creative Cities, Florida, Andersson and Simonton appear in the same volume for the first time. The expert contributors in this timely Handbook extend their insights with a varied set of theoretical and empirical tools. The diversity of the contributions reflect the multidisciplinary nature of creative city theorizing, which encompasses urban economics, economic geography, social psychology, urban sociology, and urban planning. The stated policy implications are equally diverse, ranging from libertarian to social democratic visions of our shared creative and urban future. Being truly international in its scope, this major Handbook will be particularly useful for policy makers that are involved in urban development, academics in urban economics, economic geography, urban sociology, social psychology, and urban planning, as well as graduate and advanced undergraduate students across the social sciences and in business.

This book investigates the evolving paradigm of creative industries and creative entrepreneurship, and their related economy over time. It explores different stages of the paradigm diffusion in ‘first generation countries’ such as the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, and ‘second generation countries’ in Asia, South America and North Africa in order to identify new trends and their distinctive aspects. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the book develops a comprehensive overview of the composite phenomenon of the creative economy and its relationship with entrepreneurship.

This book is a pioneering work to position the creative city concept within Malaysian urban development discourse. The chapters are written and systematically sequenced to be all-encompassing and comprehensible to audiences both from the academic and non-academic realms. The nascency of creative city development in Malaysia has motivated the timely exploration of the viability of this strategy for selected Malaysian cities (i.e. Kuala Lumpur, George Town, Ipoh, Johor Bahru). The book also discusses the global discourse on creative city and its critiques. This is followed by an overview of Malaysia’s macrolevel socio-economic and political structures as well as national policies to frame the Malaysian creative city narrative. The case study chapters are novel, as each Malaysian city unravels its unique experiences and dissects the way the city responds to the creative city agenda amidst local nuances and idiosyncrasies.

This book introduces a radically spatialised approach to knowledge creation and innovation. Reflecting on an array of European urban and regional developments, it offers an updated notion of milieu as the conceptual and material space of knowledge and innovation in line with the interpretative turn in social sciences and humanities. In view of the unwillingness of mainstream economics to accommodate such a trend, the authors pursue a broadly understood hermeneutic approach that expands on the triad of knowledge-space-innovation. The book’s main findings are that space is an essential intermediary in the connection between knowledge and innovation, and that a renewed notion of milieu provides the knowledge-space-innovation triad with both an analytical basis and operational power. It also offers fresh insights into the significance and potential of the knowledge economy. A number of empirical European case studies on various scales (organisations, cities and territories) support the findings and suggest new policy directions.