ABSTRACT
This chapter explains knowledge of urban creativity to suggest the diverse and contextually contingent ways in which creativity can contribute to regenerating urban spaces. It presents a generative reading of the varied and multiple relationships between creativity and urban regeneration, underpinned by assemblage thinking (AT), a framing increasingly deployed to capture the multiple dimensions and forms of agency at work in the urban. The chapter examines the multiple possibilities of urban creativity more forcefully into the analytical frame. Culture-led urban regeneration, the deliberate harnessing of culture and creativity for urban revitalisation, has become a widespread tool for urban policymakers, reflecting recognition of the cultural economy as a potential driver of urban economies. Urban spaces are understood as always emergent, contingent and multiplex: continually being reworked through the (re)alignment of socio-material relations. AT opens up space for new questions to be posed of creativity and how it may be regenerating the urban.
