ABSTRACT
Furthermore, a gap exists between the academic literature which discusses the develop-
ment of the creative city or the creative economy on a conceptual level, and actual policy
development in individual cities. Many cities base their creative city policies explicitly on
a limited number of sources that make more or less empirically based academic insights
accessible to a broader audience. These include, notably, the above-mentioned works of
Landry and Florida. Furthermore, cities are apt to imitate-with questionable chances
for success-well-known creative city success stories such as Barcelona or Lille
(cf. Brenner, 2003; Harris, 2006). Both practices carry the risk that local policy-makers
“fall into a reductive trap of universality at the cost of understanding the particular”
(Evans, 2009, p. 1006). Finally, some policy-makers pay lip service to the creative city
concept, considering it a label to “renew” and popularize existing policies (Chatterton,
2000, p. 392). As Russo and van der Borg (2010, p. 686) state, the relation between
culture and urban economic development remains largely “a black box in which most
cities move like amateurs”. Accordingly, creative city policy tends to be ad hoc, or, as
Jayne comments (in: Evans, 2009, p. 1011) with regard to the implementation of a creative
industry agenda at the regional level in the UK, “[. . .] at best patchy . . . a lack of best-prac-
tice models and empirical research to guide policy-makers”.
