Brand-building: the creative city

This book is the result of the work undertaken by the Cultural Cities group. In order to provide a general background to these essays we offer a brief presentation of the contents and results of the research conducted by the group.

Though attitudes to the city always seem to have been ambivalent –they have been viewed as centres of both civilisation and corruption – one side of this has emphasised their particular and active role in promotionof culture and creativity (e.g. P. Hall 2001). This idea is hardly limited to the observation that these activities have been disproportionately more important in large cities than in smaller settlements, or that the major developments of an era were concentrated in specific places rather than across all urban areas in a nation or continent. On the contrary, such creative developments have been stimulated, produced by and have matured in the circumstances of particular cities, both reflecting and shaping the distinct characters of these places – in economic, social, political and physical terms, as well as culturally.