ABSTRACT
As individuals, we often strive to be creative as a form of self-actualisation, in the hope that it will allow us to realise our potential as human beings and express ourselves satisfactorily. Such creative aspirations have more recently become the concern of places as well as people. There is certainly nothing new about creativity as an aspiration (and the search for personal creativity has certainly become more important than ever). However, it is only in the past decade or so that the concept has come to permeate urban and regional policy on a large-scale basis, thanks to its ideal and timely fi t within what Peck terms the current ‘fast policy climate’ (2005). In more recent work, Peck has argued that:
For all their fl amboyant display of liberal cultural innovation, creativity strategies barely disrupt neoliberal urban-policy orthodoxies, based on place promotion, market-led development, gentrifi cation, and normalized sociospatial inequality. But these strategies also extend and recodify entrenched tendencies in neoliberal urban politics, seductively repackaging them in the soft-focus terms of cultural policy. They elevate creativity to the status of a new urban imperative – defi ning new sites, validating new strategies, placing new subjects, and establishing new stakes in the realm of competitive interurban relations.
