Creative City Limits: Urban Cultural Economy in a New Era of Austerity

This research project is from UCL Urban Laboratory

Lead researchers: Dr Andrew Harris and Louis Moreno

Between January and July 2011, Dr Andrew Harris and Louis Moreno ran the Creative City Limits international and cross-disciplinary research network. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this network offered a forum for reassessing the place of creativity in urban economic growth. It used the limitations and shortcomings of the creative city model exposed by the recent financial crisis, and the uneven urban prospects of recovery, to review and rethink the historical and theoretical relationship between culture, economy and urban development.

Six workshops were held in London, Leeds and Plymouth, bringing together academics, artists, planners, architects, policy-makers and other key stakeholders. These workshops sought to provide a geographically and historically sensitive critique of current creative city models, and to reshape the policy and conceptual frameworks required to stimulate new creative urban futures.

Further information:

• Read the Creative City Limits pamphlet (pdf)
• Visit the project website
• Listen to the Creative City Limits East London bus tour