ABSTRACT
In Paris as in Bologna, the concept of creativity assumed a particular significance given the cities' networks of prestigious scientific and cultural institutions and the intense activity of small businesses, which were open to technical innovation. Paris and Bologna owed their great change to the close relationship between economic activity and scientific and cultural progress, which has always existed in the French capital as it has in the 'city of towers' Bologna. It should be noted that throughout the processes of transition that characterised the nineteenth century, Paris often stood as a model for Bologna whose elites copied the innovations of the French capital. In Bologna, for the most part of the nineteenth century, the speed of modernisation was in a certain sense held back or slowed down by a mainly rural society, agriculture being the source of city's wealth. In the case of Paris, which experienced a brutal industrialisation, it was also necessary to address the problem of pollution.
