Planning the ‘Creative’ City: Global Strategies and Local Creative Subcultures | Kate Shaw

Summary: Cosmopolitan Melbourne: Kate Shaw <strong>Planning the ‘Creative’ City: Global Strategies and Local Creative Subcultures</strong> <em>Kate Shaw (University of Melbourne)</em> The ‘creative city’ concept has high political and symbolic importance for global cities seeking to attract jobs and investment. But the concept contains a well established dilemma: local creative subcultures, which feed city cultures, can be vulnerable to the gentrification that often results. Increasing land rents in Australian central cities are placing pressure on local creative initiatives, displacing small cultural producers and dispersing local networks. Genuinely creative cities foster new ideas and practices and new uses of space, requiring that we plan for the unplanned. Some city governments are beginning to understand this, and are developing planning policies that can create the conditions for the continuity of their valued (and valuable) creative subcultural activities. This paper examines the complex relationships between ‘creativity’ and place, and evaluates recent initiatives intended to nourish local cultural diversity. In identifying cases of best practice in Australia, and with reference to similar practices overseas, the research reveals an evolution in the range of regulatory and negotiating tools available to governments, and in public discourses around the maintenance of sustainable city competitiveness.