ABSTRACT
In recent years the creative city concept has become highly popular among local policy-
makers and researchers. Particularly in the wake of Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative
Class (2002) and Landry’s The Creative City (2000), every self-respecting city seems to
have turned its attention to developing a creative city policy. Even though the creative city
concept generally refers to larger cities that can provide a certain critical mass and diver-
sity of people and activities, small and medium-sized cities and regions also advertise
themselves as “creative” and set out creative city policies (e.g. INTELI, 2011), seemingly
without sufficient awareness of the limitations of creative city policies. Furthermore, the
creative city thesis-particularly the work of Florida-quickly became the subject of
