Gaps between rhetoric and reality in the discourse about creative cities

Citadels of entertainment: non-places? Urban sprawl and hypertrophy

The tyranny of car dependency and the rhetoric of environmental sustainability: towards the obese city

Other threats to urban creativity Information overload: more time spent on handling information, less on selecting and understanding it.

Other threats to urban creativity ‘Night-time economies’: the dream of a convivial café culture, and the reality of the ‘alcoholic agora’ (and its costs)

Other threats to urban creativity The ‘audit society’: evaluate anything that moves Auditing and power Auditing as a ritual, and a substitute for action The emergence of more balanced approaches to auditing

threats to public social life and the public sphere The risk averse society: more and more restrictions on children’s play the pervasiveness of health and safety and insurance frameworks and mentalities negative impacts on grassroots cultural activities

Some issues in urban cultural policy today: the rhetoric of high quality architecture, and the reality of blandness “I have learnt from my mistakes, and I can now repeat them almost exactly” (Peter Cook)

A crisis in local (public and private) cultural funding and leadership (with honourable exceptions) The problems generated by focusing funding on consumption activities, flagship buildings and city centres: the illusion of the iconic The issue of social exclusion: the importance of access policies, ‘soft boundaries’ and public space networks Some issues in urban cultural policy today

Urban cultural policies in the context of the ‘triple crunch’ (New Economics Foundation) Experimenting with temporary uses of vacant buildings and sites A new focus on production and skills? Creative cities for the world (Charles Landry): beyond destructive forms of urban competitiveness The importance of intercultural creativity and innovation New priorities: reducing the negative impacts of unemployment encouraging resilience and experimentation fostering less materialistic lifestyles Some issues in urban cultural policy today

Thinking culturally (and artistically) about urban policy: the ‘cultural planning’ approach ‘Cultural planning’ as ‘the strategic and integral planning and use of cultural resources in urban and community development’ (Colin Mercer) Creative urban strategies will have to be: collaborative, interdisciplinary intercultural innovation-oriented critical cultured based on a detailed cartography of local cultural resources involving new types of professional specializations Rethinking Policy & Planning approaches to creative spaces in urban & rural centres

Professor Franco Bianchini Faculty of Arts and Society Leeds Metropolitan University