The significance of creativity in urban governance and regeneration practice through the lens of an institutional capacity framework

Abstract

Contemporary urbanised places have specific challenges arising from social and economic change. Thus, the techniques of ‘modern’ town planning, focused on regulating urban land use and property-led development, have been usurped by ‘softer’ factors. One of these new directions centres on ideas of the ‘creative city’. This thesis uses Healey’s institutional capacity framework to analyse two ‘creative city’ cases, one in the UK and one in Japan. Using a comparative approach, it investigates the significance of the creativity concept to mobilise governance resources; the development of ‘civic creativity’ through collaborative governance; and the roles of social enterprise in establishing creative local governance and community-based practice. The importance of the creativity concept stemmed from its vagueness, its ‘interpretive flexibility’. This flexibility created a space where relational resources, knowledge resources and mobilising capacity were developed to underpin the development of a creative milieu consisting of creative local governance and practical regeneration activity. Civic creativity was present in both case studies, but they differed in the forces that drove the development of creative city ideas. In the UK, such ideas were more explicit, driven by their circulation in well-established policy networks and through vertical networks linking central and local government. Such ‘external forces’ were not only a trigger to transforming local governance and community activities through urban regeneration to be creative, but also diverted attention from building local institutional capacity. In the Japanese case, without such explicit external forces, internal forces based on local collaborative traditions were utilised to address urban regeneration through horizontal networks. Social enterprises were significant throughout both cases, through the formation of special vehicles for building partnerships, and at a practical programme level where citizens and social enterprises applied their creativity to improving the quality of life through social and artistic programmes to tackle local problems.