Keywords

1 Creative Cities: A Broad Field of Research

When people use the notion of the creative city , they use a term that is potentially contradictory even in itself: A city is ascribed a competence that is normally reserved for humans. But the term is usually not used for a nonhuman entity such as a city. This metaphorical ascription is the first problematic, and sometimes even contradictory, aspect researchers are confronted with when dealing with creative cities. The second possible contradiction lies in the various forms that cities can take on when planning institutions operate with the concept of creativity : although they use the same term (“creativity”), they assemble very different strategies and projects under its conceptual umbrella. These “multiple realities,” their inherent contradictions, and the ways to handle them will be in the focus of this paper.

Numerous studies on the impact of the theory of the creative class on urban planning and cities have been published since the late 1990s, focussing on the impact of the discourses of the creative class and the creative city on the fields of urban planning and city branding (for example, Hospers 2008; Bontje and Musterd 2009) or on the local conditions under which the concepts are applied (Hospers 2003; Boyle 2006; Lange 2007; Atkinson and Easthope 2009; Merkel 2009; Rannila and Loivaranta 2015). These studies and my own empirical research show that there exist structural similarities in both strategies and addressees of creative city planning. However, there are local differences accounting for what I want to call the multiple realities of creative cities.

The main question guiding the argument in this paper is how urban planners handle the contradictions inherent in contemporary urban planning , namely, when using the concept of creativity to design cities for future usages. With this, the paper examines a topic that is widely discussed in the broad field of urban studies and, each with its own focus, in the fields of cultural geography, cultural sociology, and urban planning.

In recent years, planning the so-called creative city has become one of the major objectives of urban planning, especially in industrialized societies (see, selectively, Florida 2005; Lange 2007; Landry 2008; Merkel 2009). One thing makes the creative city concept appealing to both urban planners and city officials (for suggestions on how to become a creative city, see Landry 2006, 2008): The promise that a city can be subject to design and planning strategies and may turn into an attractive place for a particular social group—the creative class —which is promising in economic (technologists) and in image terms (artists). Although the planning projects vary in scope and context, they can be grouped according to their focussing on 1) planning strategies applied, 2) social groups addressed, and 3) identified shortcomings of planning strategies following the creativity paradigm. The latter includes various works criticizing especially the more consultant-oriented creative city approach and its key figure, Richard Florida.

While the concept of the creative city was warmly welcomed by many urban planners and city officials, it was massively criticized as a quasi-elitist (planning ) approach by researchers and urban activists. Many of the critiques were directed at the prominent protagonist of the creative class theory, Richard Florida (for example, Kunzmann 2005; Peck 2005; Scott 2006). These critiques questioned especially the assumption that an urban environment can be planned so as to be stimulating for certain social groups, in this case, the creative class (exemplarily Pratt 2010).Footnote 1 In addition, the lack of empirical basis of Florida’s work, his generalization of the data stemming from the U.S. (Hoyman and Faricy 2009), and its implicit elitist character, fostering social exclusion in cities (for example, McCann 2007; for Florida’s reaction to this critique, see Florida 2008, pp. 185–205), were criticized. Despite this critique, Florida’s theory seems to be an interesting case for urban researchers for two reasons: 1) It highlights the interrelation of a city and its users in emphasizing that cities are not just places to live in, but places to live a specific form of life and 2) as the theory was gratefully taken up and applied by city planners worldwide, it had an apparent effect on practical city planning and thus on cities themselves.

What remains rather unanswered in Florida’s and other works is the question what specific characteristics cities develop that use the creativity paradigm as guiding element of their development strategies and how these strategies are adapted to and combined with other societal paradigms. Ultimately, this entails the question whether one can talk of the creative city as a specific type of city —analogous to, e.g., the “global city” (Sassen 1991)—or whether creativity is just one possible characteristic of cities in industrialized societies.

Before describing the different approaches in detail, I want to emphasize that “creative city ” can mean very different things. The differing understandings and usages of this term mark two poles of an ideal typical spectrum of meanings. One pole is marked by understanding creativity as producing technologically innovative outcomes; the other by creating artistic-cultural products. Put differently: the spectrum ranges from technology to arts. These different understandings hugely impact the planning strategies assembled under the paradigm of creativity and the projects realized in the cities (Müller 2013). I will refer to this differentiation in detail when describing the multiple realities of creative cities.

In the following, I will describe the creative city idea and the changing role of urban planners in today’s societies. Subsequently, I will propose the notion of the multiple realities of creative cities in order to describe the varying urban forms to be found under the umbrella of the creative city . One central element accounting for these multiple realities is that the inherent contradictions in the usage of the creative city paradigm are handled in different ways. I conclude the paper with a prospect for (empirical) research of creative cities.

2 Planning the Creative City

In the course of the rise of the concept of the creative city as urban planning objective, many different cities started to use the concept as a guideline for their development projects. Consequently, different planning strategies can be found that are gathered under the conceptual umbrella of the creative city . I argue that this variety of strategies ultimately accounts for what I call the multiple realities of creative cities. Before elaborating on this notion and on the inherent contradictions within the field of creative cities, I will address a more general question: How do strategies aiming at planning the creative city relate to general societal developments? What contradictions between overall strategies and singular projects become visible and in what sense do planning strategies that focus on a certain group of people contradict policies aiming at integrating all members of a society ?

The context in which the creative city idea has evolved is the observation that creativity has advanced to be one of the major societal paradigms in postmodern societies (Joas 1996; Florida 2004), bringing ever more people to strive for realizing their creativity and to live in environments supposedly inspiring the inhabitants to be even more creative. Parallel to the advancement of creativity as a societal paradigm (Reckwitz 2012), a shift in professions occurs, that is an increased monetarization (or, economization?) of cultural professions, ultimately leading to the professional sectors of cultural and creative industries (Hartley 2004; Howkins 2004). In addition, neoliberalism took hold of the everyday lives of cities’ inhabitants (Foucault 2006; Mattissek 2008), ultimately encouraging people to take responsibility for every single branch of their individual lives and optimizing their lives—be it their health, their work/profession, or their family life.

In what sense do these changes affect the ways how contemporary cities are planned? This is what I will turn to in the following.

2.1 The Changing Role of Urban Planners

These two developments, observable to varying degrees in industrialized societies, fundamentally affected contemporary life in cities and led to a shift in planning strategies . These modified planning strategies are part of a generally changing understanding of the role of urban planning in today’s cities. The role of professional urban planning has crucially changed during the last decades. Planners left behind the idea of planning cities from scratch, totally redesigning cities to conform to planning principles , and directly impacting societal developments via the design of cities. This way of urban planning was, for example, conceptualized by Le Corbusier in the twentieth century. Here, planning tried to directly impact a society ’s development by telling people how and for what purpose to use the city (Siebel 2009, p. 40).

Today, however, there is a shift from deciding about people’s usages of a city toward enabling certain usages and offering these to people. Rather than assigning fixed functions to specific areas, the approach stresses the possibility of various simultaneous usages; the role of the planner is to offer ways to use a city. This does not mean that planning is arbitrary. Rather, planners intend to design a city to offer the inhabitants certain ways of using the city by simultaneously accepting alternative ways of using it. Nonetheless, these offers refer to superordinate planning goals. For example, the widely used planning objective to create mixed-use quarters implies that planners design quarters so that they are equipped with dwellings, areas for retail shops and restaurants, as well as spaces for leisure activities. Arranging the buildings and spaces in such a way allows using them for living, shopping, and leisure time. Simultaneously, usages such as farming, parking, or industrial production are prohibited with zoning plans and others, such as skateboarding, playing on the street, etc., are discouraged through the very design of the quarter. Thus, in the twenty-first century, planners are facilitators rather than ultimate deciders.

These two contradictory understandings of urban planners’ roles and their chances to impact societies’ developments are now troubled by the shift toward planning the creative city . Urban planners are now challenged by people who try to fulfill two demands: first, the demand of being creative and, second, the demand of being responsible for themselves. This clashes with an understanding of the urban planner as omniscient: If the neoliberal principle of governing the self is successful (e.g., Foucault 2006; Bröckling 2007), then people will oppose to being governed by urban planners. But is the understanding of the planner as facilitator in line with the neoliberal and the creative demands; are planners possibly even reinforcing the societal demands? Are the planners of the creative city and the creative society of the twenty-first century the Siamese twins of contemporary urbanized societies?

I argue that thinking in these dichotomies is not sufficient for explaining contemporary social-spatial phenomena such as the creative city . It is not the dichotomy “planner as omniscient plus people adhering to the designated usage of the urban design ” versus “planner as facilitator plus people carefully choosing from the possibilities offered to optimize their lives.” Rather, urban planners find themselves in a hybrid or even contradictory position: On the one hand, they understand their role as securing the well-being of the many and to pay tribute to current societal developments such as the rise of cultural and creative industries as important economic sectors. They acknowledge that a growing number of people work in professions that require technological and artistic creativity . On the other hand, planners are supposed to keep in mind “the others,” that is, those people who do not work in creative professions or are otherwise labeled creative. This is an often discursively silenced but, in quantitative terms, predominant societal group. In this sense, planners are also supposed to facilitate usages of the city that respond neither to the creative demand nor to the neoliberal demand of self-optimization.

Following this line of argument, I will use the remainders of this chapter to shed light on the different planning strategies that are applied to design creative cities and on the two main addressees of creative city planning: technologists and artists. From a perspective taking these two aspects into account, both planning strategies and projects directed at the assumed needs of these two groups account for the multiple realities of creative cities in general and for the inherent contradictions of urban planning in creative cities in particular.

2.2 The Strategies of Creative City Planning

Three different types of strategies can be identified when analyzing urban planning projects under the conceptual umbrella of creativity . In all cases, creativity is used as an overarching framework and guideline. To name only those that are most commonly found: waterfront and brownfield developments, regeneration of housing districts, promotion of start-up companies, architectural redesign of cities, and sponsorship and promotion of cultural events (for an overview, see Atkinson and Easthope 2009). The diversity of approaches refers to and is made possible by the fact that both “creativity” and “creative city ” have no fixed meaning and thus allow for a variety of interpretations. As I’ve shown elsewhere (Müller 2013), they are ideas that travel between local contexts, experiencing shifts in meaning during this travel.Footnote 2 This allows for the variety of, often contradictory, usages under the general concept of creativity.

In my own empirical research,Footnote 3 I find the openness of the concept expressed in a city official’s statement: “we define it for ourselves and live up to that reputation.” (DCC2, paragr. 694–696) Nonetheless, the strategies applied make it possible to identify types of planning strategies and projects. For the sake of analytical differentiation, I group the strategies according to their main objective. These are housing , economic development , and leisure . Contradictions that might occur lie in different demands of the addressees of the projects: inhabitants who are approached with housing projects will have different infrastructural demands and another sensitivity, e.g., to noise, than tourists who are in the focus of leisure projects; enterprises to bring taxes revenues and jobs to a city might make demands on land that could otherwise be used for public usage, etc.

In the following, I describe the different sets of strategies in more detail to illustrate how urban planning toward a creative city looks like.

  1. 1.

    The strategies that address the housing problem are closely connected to waterfront and brownfield development projects. Here, wasteland, especially in inner-city areas, is made accessible via housing projects. Several of the cities in which the creativity paradigm is used for urban development, e.g., Dublin, Bilbao, and San Francisco, use their former port areas as sites for these housing projects, while, in doing so, also regenerating the urban waterfront. This is not least a reaction to reurbanization tendencies and the assumed wish of the creative class to live (close to) downtown (e.g., Florida 2008, pp. 243–245). These housing projects are part of the creative city strategy if they explicitly address those people that belong to the creative class—also known as “young urban professionals” (Piesman and Hartley 1984) or “bourgeois bohemians” (Brooks 2001)—as these social groups show significant overlaps in their characteristics with the members of the creative class. In addition, these housing projects are an attempt to materialize creativity in the buildings’ architecture , thus symbolizing a certain understanding of creativity to the outer world and possibly communicating this understanding to the city’s inhabitants.

  2. 2.

    The strategies that focus on a city ’s economic development relate to the emergence of the cultural and creative industries as prospering economic sectors and address the core of what Florida (2004) identifies as the creative class . Here, these strategies aim at providing infrastructure to facilitate the work of smaller start-up companies as well as big IT enterprises. Infrastructural improvements include securing high-speed Internet access, providing employers with office space or financial incentives such as tax reductions or subsidized office space. Often, these planning strategies include the erection of technology parks, for example, The Digital Hub in Dublin, Ireland, or Lindholmen Science Park in Gothenburg, Sweden.

    These examples also shed light on another important aspect: planning strategies aiming at fostering a city ’s economic development often directly affect the city’s material-spatial structure. In Dublin, old industrial buildings are converted to new usages by assigning them the role as a home for the technology park. In Gothenburg, the technology park is part of a greater development project of the former dockyards, aiming at transforming the area from an industrial into a postindustrial working space. By bringing private companies and academic institutions together and housing them in newly erected buildings, these projects contribute to new forms of cooperation (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1995) and a new urban design .

  3. 3.

    Finally, there are strategies that focus on the advancement of the leisure sector. These can be singular events as well as recurring events that are especially directed at the city ’s and the region’s inhabitants, but also events with a connection to the national or supranational level. The latter is the case when cities apply for the title as European Capital of Culture (European Commission 2017), a title that refers to the artistic-cultural dimension of the creative city phenomenon. Numerous cities that use the creative city paradigm in their planning strategies have also been European Capitals of Culture (Amsterdam in 1987, Dublin in 1991, Copenhagen in 1996, Marseille in 2013, to mention only a few). The European Union also advocates these projects under the label of a “Creative Europe” (European Commission 2017).

Other strategies intended to enhance a city ’s attractiveness for leisure activities include establishing so-called cultural quarters, supporting local artists or redesigning the waterfront areas to host (cultural) events. In Dublin, there was a Craft Beer Festival in the Docklands in 2012, Gothenburg’s docklands were the site of the Americas Cup in 2015, and the waterfront in Victoria, BC, is where the annual Festival of Trees takes place. These events can be big or small; they reach the local, regional, or international public, and are attractions to visitors from different catchment areas. What they have in common is that a physical transformation of the city goes together with an enhancement of local cultural events, thus connecting urban redevelopments with an eventization of the cities (Häußermann 1993). This eventization is also described as culturalization (Reckwitz 2009) and might be understood as structural element of the creative cities’ planning .

The strategies described focus on housing , economic development , and leisure . They differ not only regarding the projects subsumed under them but also address different groups of people who might have contradictory demands on, e.g., planning projects. Two groups of people are especially in focus of urban planning strategies aiming at designing a creative city : technologists and artists. I call these two groups the addressees of creative city planning. In the following, I will describe how they are approached by local urban planners.

3 Addressees of Creative City Planning

The addressees of creative city planning are manifold: investors, policy-makers, politicians, tourists and, last but not least, inhabitants. In the following, I am going to focus on the latter group, the inhabitants. They are of special importance because of two reasons: First, a city ’s population is a defining criterion not only in quantitative terms (think of administrative definitions of the city as entities of a certain density) but also in qualitative terms.Footnote 4 Second, the creative city concept is ultimately about people and about ways to attract a working and living population to cities (Florida 2007, 2008). For cities that are planned according to the creativity paradigm, two (possible) inhabitants are in focus: technologists/knowledge workers and artists. The two understandings of creativity identified above—technological and artistic creativity—as well as certain types of planning strategies find their respective addressees in these two groups.

Technologists or knowledge workers are those who pursue jobs in the creative industries sector. Digital media occupations and information technologies are the professions in which technologists particularly work. With this, they belong to the so-called super creative core of Florida’s (2004, p. 69) creative class . One of their professional characteristics is that they earn their living by inventing new solutions and developing new applications for (technological) problems. A substantial number of these people head or work in start-up companies, thus integrating the demands to optimize one’s professional life (neoliberal demand) and to be creative (creative demand) into their lifestyles.

Planning strategies that have these people as their addressees often assemble around the creation of technology or science parks. For urban planners, such technologies parks are a means to achieve at least three objectives: 1) regeneration of urban quarters, 2) job creation, and 3) image building. In analytical terms, these three objectives focus on a city ’s material-spatial (ad 1), economic (ad 2), and narrative (ad 3) dimension. Planning projects aim at realizing a technology park in the urban core and thereby attempt to create an image of the city as technologically innovative and smart. The city is presented as a place that is fit for the twenty-first century and a place for the knowledge economy (DDH1, paragr. 211). Jobs created with the help of a technology park are supposed to fuel this image and to make it last. In addition, using “job creation” as argument for urban development under the umbrella of creativity is also a means to convince even the last critic of the strategy. Finally, using technology parks as a way to regenerate urban quarters, often in areas close to the city center, promises to be a financially sound way to refurbish an urban area.

By renovating existing buildings and building new sites for the creative class , the built environment is said to depict the creative city planning strategies . Here, planners fall back on the assumed needs and preferences of technologists and artists (here termed “creatives”) as one representative of Dublin’s technology park, The Digital Hub, describes:

you know, we’re certainly taking advantage of the infrastructure that’s here already, […] there is a degree of planning in there, in that what we’re trying to establish is a portfolio of space of different sizes, shapes, and different elements, because of the range of activities that we’re trying to support, there are some activities that suit older buildings, and particularly where we’re trying to attract creative activities, those creatives tend to prefer heritage type buildings, whereas the technologists tend to like the modern steel and glass buildings, so it’s a combination of both that we’re trying to establish, the other thing I would say is that there is, certainly, some innovation in terms of the way those buildings are being used, and the way they’re designed to be used (DDH2, paragr. 671–679, own emphasis).

The strategies to address artists and thereby the artistic-cultural dimension of creativity are structurally similar to those described above. In general, planners attempt to design areas according to the assumed needs of artists. These assumed needs imply studio space, galleries in close proximity, and an inspirational urban environment. As the latter is hard to design for planners, they focus on infrastructural elements of the city . For example, they provide subsidized studio space and marketing infrastructure to support artists in their professional lives.

To grasp the observation that urban planners design a city according to the assumed needs of two groups as diverse as technologists and artists and focus on diverse fields as housing , economic development and leisure , I propose the notion of the multiple realities of creative cities . In the following chapter, I will explain what these realities look like and how they are fundamentally shaped by inherent contradictions.

4 Creative Cities’ Multiple Realities

The above description points to the fact that the empirically observable creative cities are very diverse: there exist “multiple realities of creative cities”. This notion highlights the fact that urban planners in each case understand “creative city ” in their own way and thus design the city accordingly. To the planners, the particular creative city they attempt to design is real—and these numerous creative cities are the multiple realities of the umbrella term creative city. The multiple realities of creative cities are linked 1) to the locally specific social and material contexts of cities and 2) to the openness of the concept as such. The local context has to be analyzed and assessed separately for each individual case. Still, on a more theoretical level, the twofold understanding of creativity can be used as a grid to understand creative cities’ multiple realities. As I have shown above, existing empirical studies show that the term creativity is open to a variety of meanings, which can be ordered along a continuous spectrum from producing technologically innovative outcomes to creating artistic-cultural products. On the local level, the different understandings of creativity become effective in planning strategies : they determine the addressees of the planning strategies, the sites to be (re-)developed, and, ultimately, the planning projects realized.

The resulting variety of planning strategies and realized projects under the conceptual umbrella of creativity is not only diverse; the different projects do not just coexist quietly side by side. Rather, empirical studies point to the fact that the planning strategies and projects subsumed under the supposedly integrative concept of creativity are to a great extent contradictory: they contradict other understandings of creativity, and they contradict other projects’ objectives and principles within the greater planning framework of the individual city . As a result, creative cities are socio-spatial environments that include contradictions at their very core. For the sake of clarity, I will now describe these contradictions and their effects in their ideal typical form. In reality, the classifications either—or are never as distinct as presented here.

What kinds of contradiction am I talking about when arguing that creative cities are contradictory phenomena? Contradictions as used here are understood in a relational sense: Empirical phenomena are composed of sets of interrelated elements. The relations between these elements can be harmonizing or contradictory. They account for intensified or retardant developments and, ultimately, for the overall complexity of societal phenomena such as creative cities. Thus, I am not using the logical term “contradiction” (A and not-A) here but want to stress that contradictions are inherent in the empirical phenomena researched by social scientists.

In the case of creative cities , there are contradictions on a vertical and a horizontal level. Contradictions on these two levels have different effects, and there are different strategies to handle them. Their effects and planners’ ways to manage them are in focus of the following section.

4.1 Contradictions Within Urban Planning

In this section, I analyze the empirical reality of contradictions in the field of planning the creative cities . In general, there are contradictions 1) on the vertical level and 2) on the horizontal level that are crucial to urban planning in general and urban planning under the creativity paradigm in particular. Contradictions on these two levels threaten to de-legitimatize the overall work of local urban planners and, ultimately, the success of their work. Thus, they have to be handled in one way or another.

On the vertical level, contradictions between globally hegemonic planning paradigm s and objectives and their application on the local scale are in focus. On this level, it is a contradictory oscillation between the global and the local: On the global scale, the creative city discourse is referred to as an ultimate solution for cities in neoliberal times, giving the cities a toolkit to become creative. This is said to attract economically solvent workers and inhabitants who, in turn, also change the city ’s image to the better, thus making the city attractive for tourists. On the local scale, the creative city discourse is challenged by the locally specific contexts and the city’s demand of caring for its actual (and not only future) inhabitants.

On the horizontal level, contradictions concerning different groups of addressees are in focus. It is the contradictions on the horizontal level I will elaborate on in the following. On this level, the strategies to design a city as a creative city include addressing different groups (e.g., technologists and artists) with at times contrasting interests and spatially dividing contrasting planning objectives. In focusing on a variety of groups with different demands on the city, the strategies themselves can contradict each other. For example, this is the case when the success of a strategy to create a city as workplace for creative people is either measured with the economic success of funded start-up companies (technologists) or with the cultural reputation of having funded a now renowned painter (artists). Here, economic capital (value added) and symbolic capital (reputation) oppose each other. In addition, planning paradigm s and objectives can also contradict each other on this horizontal level: economic sustainability, aimed at by creating an economically sound technology park (Dublin), is assigned the same value within the general planning concept as social sustainability, strived for by using the technology park to improve the inhabitants’ education.

Contradictions on the horizontal level can have different effects on the city and its inhabitants. Either, the situation can be worsened: The inherent contradictions are not resolved and intensify existing conflicts. For example, the social and spatial segregation of a city’s population is enhanced by the redesign of the docklands (Dublin). Or, the contradictory situation can be resolved: The contrasting elements of planning objectives (such as supporting the highly skilled creative class and caring for the low-skilled working class) are worked on in a temporal order; by this, a certain sequence is established and the contradictions between the two planning objectives never escalate in a conflict because they are never confronted with each other in the planners’ everyday work. An alternative is the spatial sequentialization: By using different objectives and/or addressees in different urban areas, planners avoid to confront different interpretations of creativity . For example, Gothenburg’s formers docklands, Norra Älvstranden, are redesigned as area for the technologists; here, the technologically innovative understanding of creativity shall find its built expression. Artists are explicitly not in the focus of the planning strategies applied here, in contrast to planning projects developed for the quarter Haga in downtown Gothenburg.

Finally, a fourth way to deal with contradictions is to create an informal hierarchy among the single planning projects within the overall planning framework to solve this contradiction . For example, the technology park is presented as ultimately economic in nature and yet having a socially sustainable effect as subordinate, intended consequence: “there is a premise that the Digital Hub will be economically sustainable” (DDH2, paragr. 703), but “we also work with the local community” (DDH1, paragr. 158). The broader a planning paradigm , the more different strategies can be subsumed and hierarchically ordered under its umbrella. These strategies can be contradictory; as long as the hierarchies are clear and the audiences are not mixed (Goffman 1959, pp. 136–137), the inherent contradictions do not jeopardize the planners’ work.Footnote 5

4.2 Contradictions on the Ground: The Case of Redesigning Old Sites and Buildings

In the following, I will use the case of reusing old sites and heritage buildings to illustrate the forms that contradictions assume on the local level and how they are handled by the local urban planners. It is the case of contradictions that occur when the globally hegemonic planning paradigm , creativity , is applied in a specific city and is confronted with the locally particular urban conditions.

Although today’s planning works differently than that of earlier times and large renewal projects including the demolition of vast areas of cities are rare, the idea of planning still is that a planning paradigm shall be expressed by a city ’s material structure. This also applies to planning under the creativity paradigm: the city’s physical and spatial structure is, among other things, understood as the representation of a planning objective. The fundamental difference to earlier planning projects is that radical conversion is replaced by an integration of the old, existing structures into the city’s new design . Here, the potentially contradictory tension holds between new and old, between construction from scratch and renovation.

The situation for planners in industrialized societies is often contradictory and tough: there are sites and buildings protected by national or supranational heritage laws; there are sites protected by nature conservation laws from being covered with buildings; the zoning plan assigns certain sites specific usages such as flood protection areas; and there is a bundle of political and economic interests planners have to consider. Within these local contexts, planners have to find adequate ways of (re-)designing the city and still adhere to the current global planning paradigm . Conceptualizing and building a technology park with new “steel and glass buildings” to attract “the technologists” (DDH2, paragr. 671–679) at a heritage site is not only contradictory in itself (new vs. old) but can also contradict the legal framework in which the planners have to act.

A possible solution for these contradictions is to use the city ’s existing built environment to build the city’s future on it—both in material and in social terms. This “synthesis” (Popper 1980, pp. 263–264) is a way to handle a contradiction and comprises, in this case, two different strategies: A strategy for the social dimension of the conflict is to integrate new buildings into existing structures and have new buildings alongside old buildings. This is a way to reduce uncertainty and hostility among the inhabitants. A strategy for resolving the material dimension of the contradiction is to reuse heritage sites and to adapt the buildings’ infrastructure to meet the needs of, e.g., technologists and artists. The integration of, for environmental reasons, protected areas is reframed and “sold” as an asset of the city which enhances its value for leisure activities.

In the case of creativity , the solution comes with a problem: the preference for industrial buildings identified on the site of the creative class makes it possible to adhere to a legal framework (heritage sites) and to use creativity as planning paradigm . Thus, the contradiction between old and new, between renovation and redesign is resolved with a synthesis.

This appreciation of industrial aesthetics (Zukin 1989) can be found in many postindustrial cities, and planners currently tend to make use of this development. It has at least one major advantage for them: what has long been a burden for urban planning , industrial buildings protected against demolition because of their status as historic monuments, is now an asset. These industrial buildings are transformed into offices for start-ups in the creative industries sector, into studios for artists, and into living spaces for the middle class.

But this preference for industrial aesthetics is in itself contradictory as Zukin (1989, p. 59) argues. When describing the reinterpretation of the past by artists and the middle class in the case of the so-called loft living, Zukin identifies contradictions that are inscribed in the urban fabric: a certain material design of buildings, a result of industrialized mass construction, is reinterpreted as built expression of individuality and appreciated in its particular aesthetic. This changing perception is more than just a change in aesthetic preferences. Rather, Zukin identifies it as an expression of a qualitative change not directly correlating to the number of people living in lofts:

loft living is more significant than the relatively small number of SoHos or loft dwellers implies. It marks a different perception of space and time and a new relation between art and industry. […] Although loft living seems to reject suburbia and all it represents, living lofts have some of the same spatial values as a typical suburban home, particularly a preference for lots of air, light, and open space. Certainly lofts are located on busy city streets rather than grassy plots, but inside, a loft has an air of detachment from the city. This suggests that loft living is appealing, in part, because it is paradoxical. The incongruity of living in a factory does not cease to surprise us. From the outside, of course, a loft building looks like a factory, but inside, we find a home. Although homes are considered private space, the openness of a loft makes it a public space. (Zukin 1989, p. 60, own emphasis)

What Zukin observed in the late 1980s is not directly connected to urban planning under the paradigm of creativity . However, her description of New York shows strong structural similarities with contemporary urban phenomena in Western postindustrial cities. The difference lies in the degree of control: What has been part of general urban developments in the 1980s is now part of explicit urban planning strategies .

The examples above illustrate how the concept of the creative city with its inherent contradictions accounts for multiple realities when applied in local urban planning strategies and development projects. The examples show how urban planners find ways to handle these contradictions by establishing hierarchies, addressing different audiences, and by finding a synthesis that allows for combining the remainders of the city ’s past with designs for the future city. In the last section of this paper, I will sketch the methodological implications of understanding creative cities as an inherently contradictory phenomenon.

5 Beyond Contradictions: On Methodological Consequences

The final section of this chapter deals with the methodological implications of looking at creative cities research through the lenses of Contradiction Studies. This section also intends to provide a prospect for future research. The pressing question that arises from my analysis is: what consequences does the answer to the first question have for empirical analyses of creative cities?

In order to shed light on the multiple realities of creative cities and the inherent variety of contradictions, I argue for thorough and comparative empirical research on creative cities’ multiple realities. Social scientists researching creative cities are confronted with two contradictory reactions on their work: strong approval, especially from urban planners and colleagues from the economics departments, or equally strong rejection, especially from colleagues from those fields with a “critical” approach (critical geography, critical urban studies, etc.). To avoid the criticism of being either purely affirmative of planning strategies under the umbrella of creativity or absolutely hostile toward these strategies, accusing them of elitism and social exclusion, the empirical research has to provide the researcher with extensive data “to figure out what the hell is going on” (Clifford Geertz in Olson 1991, p. 264). Thick descriptions of the particularities of each single “creative city ” as well as a comparative approach help to shed light on the multiple realities and further the understanding of the creative city phenomenon. Such empirical research will then also help to avoid the dichotomy of either-or (either bad or good, either elitist or inclusive, either neoliberal or socially sustainable) and advance this field of research.

Three fields of research seem especially promising to me to fully understand the phenomenon “creative city ” and, ultimately, to come to an answer for the theoretical question whether the “creative city ” in itself is an analytical category or rather an objective of urban planning in industrialized societies applied to different types of cities. Future research could address 1) the meaning that is assigned to the term “creativity ” in different contexts and how it changes through its travel as planning idea, 2) the ascriptions used by different social groups when using the notion of the creative city, and 3) the differences and similarities between the built environment in creative cities in both the Global North and the Global South. As these phenomena are highly interdependent, an integrative research design could be used to research them not only as singular phenomenon but also as set of interrelated elements.

For each of these fields, different methods should be used to collect data. In the first case, an analysis of the metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1998; Kruse et al. 2011) and narratives (Elliott and Squire 2017) used by urban planners and the cities’ users alike could be of high value. Such analyses should be both qualitative and quantitative. Although only a qualitative analysis can shed light on the whole spectrum of metaphors and narratives used, the number of cases in which these narratives and metaphors are used in specific contexts provides good information on the diffusion of the concept and the variety of its interpretations. Such an analysis of the linguistic modes of using creativity contributes to understanding the contradictions inherent to the concept and the individuals’ ways of handling the contradictory elements.

In the second field, the whole set of qualitative research methods ranging from discourse analysis to interviews and ethnography could be applied. A mixed-methods design proves helpful for assessing the varying, contradictory, or consentaneous forms of understanding the creative city concept and the ways the ascriptions are performed. Finally, a comparative analysis of the built environments of creative cities could help to understand the local particularities and the global similarities of the design and material-spatial structure of creative cities. Methods such as qualitative content analysis of planning documents, visual ethnography (Pink 2007, 2008) in and rephotographing (Harper 1988) of the built environment as well as qualitative interviews with urban planners and architects, but also with the cities’ inhabitants promise fruitful data on the multiple realities of creative cities and their inherent contradictions.

Finally, such research should be both in-depth and comparative. Not only cross-local studies should be carried out but also cross-national studies and studies comparing cities in the Global North and South. By this, the results would further the knowledge on the phenomenon “creative city ,” its local characteristics and global influences.