Will the real Creative City please stand up?

S omething has been troubling me. It is that, apparently, the cities we live in have become creative. What I mean by this is that the various attempts to tackle social and economic decline in urban areas over the last few decades have recently found new expression through discourses of creativity and the 'creative city'. These discourses have made their way into the centre of urban policy debates commentaries have also emerged on how the creative city concept has been put into practice by urban authorities (e.g. see Tony Harcup in issue 4(2) of City in relation to Leeds). As a result of this new vocabulary, certain cities such as Barcelona, Cologne, Bologna and even Huddersfield have gained the tag 'creative city'. But what does this rather nebulous term mean? It refers to a new 'method of strategic urban planning and examines how people can think, plan and act creatively' (Landry, 2000, p. xii). A city is being creative, then, when people adopt new and different ways of looking at the problems which they face. In what follows, I want to explore some of the ideas associated with the creative city concept which were explored at an epony-mously named conference in Huddersfield in May 2000. I then want to take a closer look at some issues which arise from a more critical analysis of the creative city concept. In particular, I want to explore in more detail the links between ethics, values and creativity, and the types of creativity which are tolerated within the creative city. The most recent Creative Cities conference occurred in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, near where I was born amongst the mill towns of the east Pennines which these days I didn't much associate with either cityness or creativity. While people's perceptions of Huddersfield may extend to cloth mills and its role at the centre of textile production during the industrial revolution, Lowry's matchstick people, or perhaps the new McAlpine football stadium, for fewer people, I imagine, it would extend to that of a creative urban milieu. Nevertheless, several significant shifts have occurred in this town and it has experienced a partial cultural, and in some ways economic, turnaround. Indeed, it often comes as a surprise to learn that Huddersfield includes 1660 listed buildings, an amount second only to Bristol and West-minster in the whole of England. While much of the recent upturn may be a result …