ABSTRACT
The “creative city” is a global urban policy trend that has been adopted by many cities across the globe. Emerging within the context of cities in the Global North in response to the changing urban socio-economic landscape, that is, post-industrial city, creative city discourse has also landed into the policy realm of cities in the Global South. This chapter focuses on the unfolding of the creative city process in Bandung City, being often regarded as an exemplar creative city in Indonesia. We aim to show how a global urban idea such as the creative city has been adopted into Bandung’s urban agenda and the extent to which the country’s decentralisation system has provided room for a variety of actors to play an integral part in this adoption process. This chapter exhibits that Bandung’s local actors, particularly what we call “creative communities”, spearheaded by Bandung Creative City Forum (BCCF), have played a key part in contextually grounding creative economy/city ideas brought from elsewhere amid the global motion of the policy world. The case of Bandung is expected to provide an alternative discussion of the geography of knowledge production outside the traditional Global North cities.
