Evans - Creative cities
Evans, G. (2017). Creative cities – An international perspective. In John A. Hannigan & Richards Greg (eds) The SAGE Handbook of New Urban Studies, (311-329). Sage. ISBN 9781412912655; eISBN 9781473982604
The effects of creative city policy in extended period of economic recession as pressures on spending within local and city states continue and tax bases contract, are also less clear. Certainly decline in creative industry employment has occurred in some creative cities, initially following the dot.com crash of the early 2000s, but recovery has been seen in key creative capitals and also in Eastern European cities (Power and Nielsen, 2010). Inter-city competition is also fierce, with Google for example relocating their European headquarters from Amsterdam to London. However, clustering continues to favor the larger cities, particularly in the new digital economy and in major digital media/ICT developments, as well as major experiential cultural zones. This sug-gests that most cities going down the creative city path will have to develop alternatives to, and collaborations with these global nodes and with other regional cities, rather than seek to emulate creative capitals and their competitive advantages. As Scott warned: ‘As the experience of many actual local economic development efforts over the 1980s demonstrates, it is in general not advisable to attempt to become a Silicon Valley when Silicon Valley exists elsewhere’ (2000: 27).
Graeme Evans “Creative cities – An international perspective”