About the project

The ‘Beyond the Creative City’ network involves international academics from across disciplines including economics, urban planning, geography, sociology, cultural policy and creative practice who are developing a shared research and knowledge exchange agenda.

Bringing together interdisciplinary research with policy and practitioner experiences, we are identifying challenges for places and creative communities that have been previously ‘left behind’ by national policy and investment. In the area of urban regeneration and creative place-making in left behind ‘satellite towns’ and places that are outside of core cities.

We are asking what happens ‘beyond the creative city’ in endemic and post-Covid urban spaces including rural areas, small cities, satellite towns, peri-urban settlements, peripheral suburbs, and diffuse networks brought together through digital technologies. In policy and practice, creative placemaking often assumes wholly positive relationships between creative economies and local development.

This follows the highly influential paradigm of the ‘Creative City’ as a strategic factor in urban planning, reproduced and transferred world-wide, but criticised for lack of place-sensitivity and for masking (and sometimes exacerbating) inequalities. The Covid-19 pandemic has generated further challenges to the Creative City model, by disrupting business models of creative industries and creating new cultural geographies, hollowing out city centres, and increasing precarity, inequity, hybrid-working and a return to the hyper-local.