1 Analysing creative cities

David Emanuel Andersson and Charlotta Mellander

With the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002), the ‘creative
city’ became the new hot topic among urban policymakers, planners and economists,
especially in North America and Western Europe. But Richard Florida was not the first
scholar to study the relationship between creativity and economic development. Already
in 1985, the regional economist Åke E. Andersson published a book (in Swedish) that
claimed that creativity represents the future of the metropolis, and that creative ‘knowl-
edge handlers’ will become increasingly important in the emerging post-industrial
economy (Andersson, 1985a). In 1989, Andersson co-authored another book that
explained how the establishment of critical infrastructural links may cause phase transi-
tions that result in far-reaching economic restructuring (Andersson and Strömquist,
1989). But since these books were published in Swedish, and the corresponding contri-
butions in English were both much shorter and much less accessible to non-economists
(Andersson, 1985b, 1985c; Andersson et al., 1990), the sphere of influence of Andersson’s
theory of the ‘creative knowledge society’ was limited to academic regional economists.
The exception is Scandinavia, especially Sweden and Denmark, where Andersson’s ideas
have reached a wider audience.
This is not to say that Andersson’s and Florida’s theories are identical. They
are not. While Andersson has always emphasized the importance of inter-regional
network connectivity and the role of investments in transport infrastructures, for
Florida these factors became a concern much later in conjunction with his work on
mega-regions and post-crash structures (Florida, 2010). Conversely, Florida’s interest
in the various attributes that members of the creative class are more likely to share
with one another than with others (see, for example, Florida, 2002, 2008; Florida et
al., 2008) has no direct counterpart in Andersson’s oeuvre. The focus on creativity
in a new type of society where cities play a leading role is however something that
Andersson and Florida shares. This implies that both Andersson’s ‘knowledge han-
dlers’ and Florida’s ‘talent’ include artists, designers and entertainers as part of the
human capital stock. Traditional economists tend to leave out such occupations when
they use formal educational attainment as equivalent to human capital accumula-
tion. The differences that remain between these two scholars could be summed up by
contrasting their theoretical emphases: infrastructure (Andersson) versus diversity and
tolerance (Florida).
Another original thinker in creativity research is the psychologist Dean Simonton.
Since the 1970s he has analysed both the inherent personality traits of unusually creative
individuals and what type of social interactions encourage creativity (see, for example,
Simonton, 1984a, 1984b). More recently, Simonton has considered the relationship
between creative milieus and political institutions (Simonton, 2004). Simonton’s con-
tributions represent a micro-level perspective on creativity that in many ways comple-
ment Andersson’s and Florida’s more aggregated analyses, and which Andersson has

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 4 Handbook of creative cities

attempted to integrate in his more recent contributions (see, for example, Andersson and
Andersson, 2006 and Chapter 2 in this volume).
It is our conviction that Åke E. Andersson, Richard Florida and Dean Simonton are
the three leading theorists that have investigated the social aspects of creativity. It is
therefore fortunate that this handbook is the first book that includes separate chapters
by each of the ‘Big Three’.

FOUNDATIONS

Since the most comprehensive treatises on creative people, cities or societies are associ-
ated with the regional economist Åke E. Andersson, the urban planner Richard Florida
and the psychologist Dean Simonton, it is appropriate that these three creative think-
ers provide the foundations for the more partial and applied contributions that follow
in later parts of the book. In addition to Andersson, Florida and Simonton, Charlie
Karlsson is also included as a contributor to the foundational part of the book, since
he is one of a very small number of scholars who can provide an exhaustive account of
the nascent literature on creative cities and its relation to adjacent fields such as cluster
theory and the economics of innovation.
Åke E. Andersson (Chapter 2) sets the stage by connecting the micro, meso and macro
aspects of creative cities. Drawing on some of the psychological findings of Simonton
and others, he points to the human need for external stimulation as the underlying cause
of knowledge-related agglomeration economies.
Andersson also shows that while creativity has become more widespread with the
advent of post-industrial society, there is nonetheless a great deal of continuity between
the most creative cities of the past and the globalized creative cities of the present. He
uses examples ranging from ancient Athens to fin de siècle Vienna in order to show that
there are a few time-invariant preconditions that must be present if human creativity is to
flourish. For example, creative cities are and have always been associated with substan-
tial and diverse inflows of migrants and traded goods as well as with the free exchange of
artistic and scientific ideas.
Looking back at the phenomenal impact of Florida (2002), Richard Florida and co-
authors (Chapter 3) take stock of past achievements and look ahead to what Florida’s
creative class theory can accomplish in the future. Does Florida’s theory amount to a
new paradigm in the social sciences? Florida, Charlotta Mellander and Patrick Adler
think it does, as the chapter title makes clear. The new paradigm represents the conflu-
ence of a variety of pre-existing theoretical components, ranging from Marxian notions
of class over Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’ to the relentlessly evolving urban
neighbourhoods of Jane Jacobs. The authors argue that the creative class paradigm –
which includes associated ideas such as the three Ts of talent, technology and tolerance
– has been better at explaining and predicting urban development trajectories than any
single competing theory.
Creative cities and the creative class rely on creative individuals, implying that the
starting point of any multi-layered analysis must include an understanding of what
makes some individuals more creative than others. Dean Simonton (Chapter 4) explains
how psychological research can shed light on creative processes in urban environments.

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 Analysing creative cities 5

In particular, empirical psychological research shows that human creativity is related to

a number of personality traits, including not only openness to experience and intelligence
but also psychopathology.
Simonton speculates that creative cities act both as attractors and stimulators: they
attract creative migrants and stimulate those already there. One of the stimulants of crea-
tivity is a diverse population, which is not only associated with big cities, but also with
institutional features such as political fragmentation and decentralization.1
Charlie Karlsson’s contribution (Chapter 5) provides the main literature review in
this handbook, connecting the contributions of Andersson, Florida and Simonton to
the wider literature on clusters, innovation and urban development. As the editor of
numerous books (including handbooks) on clusters and innovation and as President of
the European Regional Science Association at the time of writing, Karlsson is arguably
uniquely qualified to offer the mainstream view in regional science (regional economics
and economic geography) on the state of the art in creative city theorizing. Like many
of the other contributors to this volume, he emphasizes the importance of economic
diversity, such as when different clusters in a creative city spawn ‘offspring’ clusters that
combine ideas from different sources.

PEOPLE

Florida’s notion of a creative class builds on the assumption that a certain group of
individuals are united by a number of attributes such as remuneration for creating new
knowledge, tolerant values and perhaps even shared psychological traits. While there is
a positive correlation between the share of a region’s workers that belong to the crea-
tive class and the region’s average educational attainment, this correlation is far from
perfect. The creative class is therefore distinct from the highly educated segment of the
population.
Peter Jason Rentfrow (Chapter 6) analyses the spatial distribution of responses to
the well-known Five Factor Model of personality traits. Certain cities and regions
may disproportionately cultivate certain personality traits, while at the same time
attracting an inflow of people who have similar psychological predispositions as their
established residents. Rentfrow’s chapter represents an empirical study that makes
explicit the spatial sorting processes that Simonton discusses at a conceptual level (see
Chapter 4).
The main finding is that cities combine psychological traits, economic specialization
and political values in a way that is both non-random and where psychological and
non-psychological city attributes complement one another. For example, San Francisco,
Los Angeles, Austin and New York are the cities whose residents attain the four highest
average scores on the ‘openness to experience’ factor in the Big Five personality test.
They are also among the most creative of American cities (Florida’s top four creative
cities are San Francisco, San Diego, Austin and Boston). A statistical analysis shows
that the openness of a city’s residents is most strongly correlated with its ‘gay index’,
followed by its proportion of international migrants and the Milken Institute Tech-Pole
Index.
While Rentfrow shows that openness to experience is related to many more factors

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 6 Handbook of creative cities

than educational attainment levels, Todd Gabe (Chapter 7) shows that wage differences
are not reducible to some education-based measure of human capital accumulation. He
does this by showing that there is a ‘creativity wage premium’ that is not explained by
differences in educational attainment, using detailed wage data from American metro-
politan regions. In addition, the econometric analysis shows that the creativity wage
premium is greater in more economically diverse regions, which implies that there are
increasing returns to scale as a region diversifies economically. In contrast, the creativity
wage premium is smaller in the most creative industries, implying diminishing returns to
creativity within the same industry.
Design work characterizes some of the most creative occupations, such as fashion
designer, graphic designer and architect. Tara Vinodrai (Chapter 8) shows that Canadian
employment in design occupations grew much more rapidly than overall employ-
ment between 1991 and 2006. Toronto was, however, the only city in which designers
accounted for more than 1 per cent of the total workforce at the end of the analysed
period, indicating that Toronto is Canada’s design capital in both absolute and relative
terms. But many other cities are catching up by posting faster growth of design employ-
ment than Toronto, for example, Calgary and Vancouver.
Karen King (Chapter 9) writes about another aspect of Canada’s post-industrial
economy. Her focus is on inter-regional migration and the question of whether
Florida’s creative, service and working classes exhibit different migration propensities
as regards the characteristics of their respective destination regions. Perhaps surpris-
ingly, King finds that this is not clearly evident. While creative class people are more
prone to migrate to regions that are high in tolerance and technology than to other
regions, this demonstrated preference is not limited to creative class migrants; service
and working-class people also exhibit greater-than-average migration propensities
to such regions. Another unexpected result is that while creative class workers are
attracted to tolerant and technological destinations, they are repelled (ceteris paribus)
by regions that are rich in talent. While this result may appear counterintuitive, one
should perhaps interpret it as the effect of diminishing returns as talent becomes pro-
gressively less scarce.
A subset of the creative class that is supposed to demonstrate unusually pronounced
creative class attributes are the ‘bohemians’, which is the occupational grouping that
Florida (2002) uses for his so-called ‘boho index’. Roberta Comunian and Alessandra
Faggian (Chapter 10) note that many of these bohemians have attended arts-related
courses in higher education.
In the United Kingdom, arts-related education is over-represented in certain locali-
ties, which implies that bohemian students are likely to cluster there. The question then
arises whether they stay in the same location after graduating from college. Comunian
and Faggian show that although there are positive correlations between the number of
bohemian students, graduates and workers in a location, there are nevertheless some
British locations that are favoured to a greater extent than is accounted for by the spatial
distribution of bohemian students. No such place is more favoured than London, which
dominates bohemian employment to an even greater extent than it dominates bohemian
education. In particular, the western part of inner London seems to have taken on a role
as the ‘artistic Mecca’ of the British economy.

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 Analysing creative cities 7

NETWORKS
The network perspective is closely connected to Åke E. Andersson’s focus on how criti-
cal infrastructural links enable cities to create more new knowledge than would other-
wise be possible (cf. Andersson, 1985a; Andersson and Strömquist, 1989). According
to this ‘infrastructure-centred’ view, creative cities not only need sufficient population
diversity, tolerant values and investments in scientific research, they also need sufficient
infrastructural connectivity to other creative cities around the world.
In what is perhaps the key empirical contribution of this book, Christian Wichmann
Matthiessen, Annette Winkel Schwarz and Søren Find describe and analyse the spatial
distribution and connectivity of scientific research, using linkages between academic
institutions and functional urban regions to assess the relative weight of the world’s
metropolitan regions. Their findings support Florida’s (2008) assertion that the world is
‘spiky’ rather than flat, and that the scientific world is even spikier than other economic
spatial configurations. The existence of agglomeration economies guarantee spikiness,
but spatial patterns in science, engineering and medicine imply even stronger agglomera-
tion economies in the production of science than elsewhere, as well as an even spikier
map of the world.
Matthiessen, Schwarz and Find show that there is a great deal of path dependence in
the spatial structure of science, with northwestern Europe and North America hosting
most of the leading creative city regions. But there is also a dissemination tendency that
is demonstrated by the fact that the scientific output of Asian and southern European
cities is growing more rapidly than the output of the dominant cities along the main
European and North American corridors.
Scientific connectivity is measured as journal paper co-authorships involving different
cities while scientific volume is measured as the total number of journal papers origi-
nating in a city. Combining the connectivity and volume measures results in a spatial
structure with several levels and regional ‘bands’. The image that emerges from this
spatial analysis is one in which London is the world’s most important science city. This
is a striking conclusion for two reasons. First, London is also the city where land prices
reach a global maximum, which points to the connection between science and other
types of production. Second, the centrality of London in the world of science exempli-
fies the importance of lock-in effects and path dependence: London was the city where
the scientific method was invented in the seventeenth century in conjunction with the
establishment of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (see
Chapter 2).
Daniel Silver, Terry Nichols Clark and Christopher Graziul (Chapter 12) expand our
view by looking at the role of creativity in urban development, but in a very different way
from the conventional economic focus on either industries or occupations. Their focus
is instead on how the mixture of scenes (consumption clusters) of various types interact
with different local performance measures such as population growth or income growth.
The authors identify and survey different types of such creative scenes, including a city’s
‘glamorous’, ‘bohemian’ and ‘traditional’ scenes.
Silver, Clark and Graziul find that there is no simple recipe between one type of
scene and one type of urban development. Many different types of scenes may gener-
ate growth, and what type of scene generates the greatest growth-enhancing properties

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 8 Handbook of creative cities

depends on a number of local and regional attributes. For example, bohemian scenes
‘are strongest in areas that are breaking with tradition and taking off in artistic and
economic activity’.
In Chapter 13, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and Kevin Stolarick show that artistic spe-
cialization tends to be specific rather than general within the spatial context of American
metropolitan areas. Only in New York and Los Angeles does it make sense to speak of a
general specialization in a variety of artistic skills and artistic industries.
Currid-Halkett and Stolarick also show that many visual artists, musicians and writers
do not work in artistic industries. Conversely, many of the workers in the artistic indus-
tries are non-artists. Different places specialize in different arts, and some places may
combine over-represented artistic skills with under-represented artistic industries and
vice versa.
David Batten (Chapter 14) identifies the Dutch Randstad region as an original
network city which also serves as an example of the economic potential associated with
a new trend: the development of networks of overlapping cities with complementary
economic functions. Newer examples of this type of emergent network region include
Scandinavia’s Øresund and Japan’s Kansai regions.
The economic justification of a network region is its ability to combine diverse special-
izations and diverse residential environments within an integrated market for jobs and
housing. It therefore becomes possible to serve a greater variety of skills and residential
preferences than is possible in a traditional monocentric region. Batten contends that
networks of mutually accessible city centres, residential neighbourhoods and green areas
may become increasingly common (and competitive) as part of the evolution of the new
post-industrial society.
It is not only locally that people network; in today’s globalized world networks may
span the globe, as is evidenced by interactions between information technology profes-
sionals as far apart as Silicon Valley and Finland. But while it is true that telephone and
computer networks facilitate long-distance interaction, Carol Kiriakos argues (Chapter
15) that such technologically assisted interaction is insufficient for certain types of inter-
personal exchange.
Not only does transmission of tacit knowledge often require face-to-face interaction;
being in a locality may also build trust and provide an environment in which serendipi-
tous discoveries happen. In interviews with Finnish residents of Silicon Valley, she shows
how advantageous an on-the-scene presence is for those who desire to take full advan-
tage of the local knowledge that is hosted by a specific region. As one Silicon Valley Finn
puts it: ‘from a distance, you can access what you know you are looking for, but when
living in the locality, you can access what you did not know you needed’.

PLANNING

Friedrich Hayek (1945) shows how central planning leads to knowledge losses, because
planners cannot access or process knowledge of the ‘particular circumstances of time and
place’ (Hayek, 1945, p. 521). Economic progress depends on the existence of a multitude
of decentralized economic experiments that are both guided by and influence market
prices.

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 Analysing creative cities 9

David Emanuel Andersson (Chapter 16) argues that a more complex economy implies
more diverse preferences, which in turn implies that the Hayekian knowledge problems
that afflict all planning are even more serious in a post-industrial than in an industrial
society. While the set of shared objectives is small in an industrial society, we can expect
it to be smaller still in a society where people are not only more diverse in their geo-
graphic origins, but also more diverse in the skills that they make use of as producers
and consumers.
D.E. Andersson therefore suggests that the success of government initiatives in crea-
tive cities depends on their being modest and severely constrained. While it may some-
times be worthwhile to tax residents in order to fund major infrastructure projects, any
attempt to fine-tune land-use patterns or to plan elaborate social policies can only dimin-
ish the set of local creative experiments that jointly decide the creative accomplishments
of a city.
In a similar vein, Stefano Moroni (Chapter 17) argues that creative cities do not
need ‘creative land-use plans’; stable, rigid and uncreative land-use regulations are
necessary for allowing the full potential of creative market interactions to materialize.
Moroni’s point of view is that these land-use regulations should be universal and based
on a simple, non-discriminatory and easily understood system of rules that is the same
everywhere (cf. Hayek, 1979). More active and locally differentiated public planning
is only desirable when it concerns public property. There should therefore be a stricter
differentiation between private property (with minimal planning constraints) and public
property than is usually the case. This would facilitate the emergence of creative new uses
of land.
While using a similar theoretical approach as D.E. Andersson and Moroni in that
it employs the Hayekian notion of a ‘spontaneous order’, the conclusions of Gus diZ-
erega and David Hardwick (Chapter 18) are much less similar. Rather than treating the
market as an unusually efficacious spontaneous order (the views of D.E. Andersson and
Moroni), they claim that a balance has to be achieved between three complementary
and sometimes contradictory such orders: the market, democracy and civil society.
According to this view, markets privilege a narrow rationality centred on the accumula-
tion of money, while democracies privilege the accumulation of votes. There is therefore
a need for balancing the systemic forces so that no single spontaneous order reigns
supreme.
Gus diZerega and Hardwick use Vancouver as an example of what they consider to be
an unusually successful example of balancing markets, politics and civil society. It is this
balance that has enabled the city to prosper as one of North America’s most successful
creative cities. Markets have been creative, but so have democratic decision-making and
non-governmental grassroots organizations.

MARKETS

Both Åke E. Andersson and Richard Florida explain creative cities as spatial mani-
festations of market processes. In Åke E. Andersson’s theory, new networks and new
institutions have caused a phase transition from an industrial society based on manufac-
turing and large-scale infrastructures to a new type of society in which the creation of

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 10 Handbook of creative cities

knowledge is central. And the creation of knowledge tends to benefit from being located
in cities with good and ‘fine-grained’ connectivity to the rest of the world. Florida’s crea-
tive class theory is similarly economic: increasing market demand for creative endeav-
ours has resulted in many more people earning a living from the creation of new ideas
and new designs than in the past.
Randall Holcombe (Chapter 19) argues that since the creative class is defined as con-
sisting of people who receive market remuneration for their services, notions of entre-
preneurship become central to our understanding of the creative class. He uses Israel
Kirzner’s (1973) theory of entrepreneurship to show that creative work really is entrepre-
neurial work: it amounts to directly or indirectly profit-seeking creative changes from the
habitual way of doing things within an evolutionary market process.
The implication, according to Holcombe, is not only that policies that favour entre-
preneurship are exactly those that favour the creative class. It is also that sufficiently
favourable policies may expand the creative class to encompass almost all workers.
Holcombe contends that a society with well-protected property rights, low barriers to
market entry for newcomers and low taxes would be especially important for cultivating
an environment in which people are likely to engage in work that is both creative and
remunerative.
Arielle John and Virgil Henry Storr (Chapter 20) claim that markets are not only
important as a process which encourages and rewards socially beneficial creativity and
entrepreneurship. Markets also encourage values that are conducive to creative cities.
Among other such values, they claim that markets encourage the very tolerance that
Florida asserts is associated with the creativity of urban environments. They note that
Voltaire was an early exponent of this view, writing that in ‘the Exchange in London . . .
the Jew, the Mohametan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were the
same religion’ (Voltaire [1733] 2003, p. 26).
The modern economic explanation for the connection between markets and tolerance
is that markets raise the cost of discrimination and therefore discourage it (Friedman,
1962). John and Storr use the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia as one specific
example of how real-world markets encourage interactions that serve to defuse ethnic
and other cultural tensions.
Inventors are a category of people who are natural members of the creative class
and who should benefit from locating in creative cities. Pierre Desrochers and Samuli
Leppälä (Chapter 21) describe their interviews with numerous inventors in Québec and
Ontario, which were conducted with the aim of finding what connections and local con-
ditions are especially conducive to coming up with new ideas.
Echoing Jacobs (1969), Desrochers and Leppälä conclude that inventors benefit not
only from an urban environment, but from a diverse urban environment. The inter-
viewed inventors gave detailed descriptions of how they benefited from being able to
encounter dissimilar ideas within a limited spatial context.
In Chapter 22, Peter Gordon and Sanford Ikeda look at another of Jacobs’s prescrip-
tions, which is that density is essential for creativity and innovation. With this as their
starting point, they investigate whether members of the creative class are disproportion-
ately attracted by dense areas.
When looking at the migration pattern of people with advanced degrees in the
United States, they find that there is no clear preference either way: both high-density

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Manhattan and low-density Silicon Valley are among the main destinations for such
migrants. On the other hand, dense areas get more in-migrants, other things being equal.
But districts with high population densities areas attract people in general rather than
members of the creative class in particular. Generally speaking, high-income and high-
density neighbourhoods in small conurbations are most favoured, especially if located
on the west coast or in New England.
Gordon and Ikeda speculate that while density may continue to be important due
to superior interaction opportunities, the relevant density may take other forms than
Jacobs’s favoured inner-city neighbourhoods with short blocks and mixed uses. They
argue that in a society where most people travel by car, what is important is not so much
being in a traditional downtown, but rather in any kind of space that provides informal
meeting places with good accessibility vis-à-vis residents.
Stockholm is one of the most creative cities in the world. It is not only one of the top
30 global research centres (see Chapter 11) with one of the highest number of published
papers per person, it also has an unusually tolerant population according to the results
of the 2005 wave of the World Values Survey. It is therefore appropriate that Börje
Johansson and Johan Klaesson (Chapter 23) dig deeper in order to survey and analyse
the economic structures and interactions that characterize the metropolitan area.
They show that knowledge-intensive services are over-represented in the Stockholm
region as compared with Sweden as a whole. It is possible to identify five important clus-
ters with high location quotients in the Stockholm region, of which four are unusually
knowledge-intensive in terms of their cognitive requirements.
An especially important finding is that Stockholm is Sweden’s key import region. This
corroborates Jacobs’s (1984) contention that successful metropolitan regions are import
centres. Inflows of new ideas and products facilitate the creation of a diverse local eco-
nomic environment, which in its turn encourages local creativity and innovativeness. But
Johansson’s and Klaesson’s analysis shows that the benefits of imports are not limited
to the cultivation of creativity within the region itself. While their analysis shows that
imports flow disproportionately to Stockholm and that imported novelties are a source
of innovation in its dominant clusters, it is perhaps even more significant that the inno-
vative changes to the economic structure that take place in the Stockholm region fore-
shadow similar structural changes in the rest of the Swedish urban hierarchy. Imports
make Stockholm more creative, and this creativity demonstrates feasible directions of
change for firms in smaller Swedish regions.
Philip Morrison (Chapter 24) analyses the spatial structure of Wellington, a small cre-
ative region and an antipodean capital city. Unlike Johansson and Klaesson, Morrison
concentrates on a feature that may be interpreted as a less desirable consequence of
knowledge-driven economic restructuring. He argues that the inflow of high-income
creative class people to the city centre of Wellington has resulted in increasing levels
of socio-economic residential segregation. This spatial segregation has had the effect
of forcing many less-educated workers to accept long commutes in order to provide
essential services for the high-end creative workers that populate the downtown area and
adjacent neighbourhoods.
While acknowledging that Wellington’s economic restructuring has benefited the
region in terms of aggregate wealth, Morrison argues that there may be certain segments
of the population that are becoming increasingly marginalized. This is especially evident

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 12 Handbook of creative cities

in the housing market, as market forces may price many long-established residents out
of previously attainable locations.

VISIONS

The contributors to this volume agree that the creative city is here to stay. The new
post-industrial society has arisen due to greater network connectivity and increasing
economic complexity, and the strong agglomeration economies that are associated with
most knowledge-intensive services guarantee that some cities must become creative
centres.
But what a desirable scenario of future urban development should look like is not self-
evident. In the final part of the book, Fred Foldvary and Charles Landry offer competing
visions that could hardly be more different. While different, they offer relevant contrasts,
since the (mostly unstated) policy implications of the book’s contributors seem to range
from Foldvary’s decentralized minimal-state conception to Landry’s highly interven-
tionist creative city. While most contributions could perhaps be construed as implicitly
prescribing a vague middle ground, it is appropriate that the explicitly normative contri-
butions represent contrasts that can serve as useful foils to each other.
Foldvary (Chapter 25) offers an unabashedly libertarian vision. He argues that
market processes are virtually always best at encouraging desirable forms of creativity
in an urban setting. Drawing partly on the ideas of Henry George, he envisions a future
creative society that consists of a multitude of voluntary communities, where collective
goods are funded through contribution assessments that are derived from land rents.
The voluntary communities that Foldvary proposes have a great deal in common with
contemporary condominium associations, although on a larger spatial scale. The com-
munity of Arden, Delaware, is one of several examples of contractual governance that
Foldvary thinks stimulates creativity to a greater extent than is possible with conven-
tional urban institutions.
In contrast, Landry (Chapter 26) offers up a variegated menu of possible policy inter-
ventions that he thinks will encourage cities to become more creative. These policies
range from targeted housing policies over encouragement of various aspects of creativity
in the education system to architectural landmarks that symbolize the specific character
of a creative city. While accepting that markets have an indispensable role in urban
development and rejecting the idea that all cities should adopt identical policies, his
chapter reads very much like a manifesto for an updated (or ‘post-modernized’) social
democracy.
We believe that it is a desirable attribute of this book that it accommodates a wide
variety of policy views; it complements the diversity of analytical approaches that the
contributors represent. The goal of this book is not to provide a unified and mutu-
ally consistent theory, nor is it to pursue shared ideological commitments. What we
wish to provide is a diverse framework that may stimulate future creative attempts
to understand creative cities. Creativity benefits from the presence of diverse ideas,
whether they manifest themselves as diverse individuals in a city or as diverse chapters
in a book.

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 Analysing creative cities 13

NOTE
1. This aspect is elaborated by Åke E. Andersson in Chapter 2 (the role of political fragmentation and disu-
nity) and by David Emanuel Andersson in Chapter 16 (the creative potential of political decentralization).

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