Parasites of Innovation – The Dual Models of Neoliberal Urban Creativity

This critical interrogation of the neoliberal agenda pivots around its usurpation of creativity as crystalized in the creative city and related urban politics in the global North. Cities being the engines of the economy (Jane Jacobs and Peter Hall), Florida and Landry advocate the creative city as the real motor force of the neoliberal economy – a kind of creativity that has little to do with spontaneous imaginative bottom-up urban regeneration but rather the fostering of a factitious or cultivated creativity through the top-down implementation of specific policy interventions. It is theorized that this artificially created creativity is incarnated in a direct and indirect model respectively that function differently to foster economic growth. While the direct model is glaringly invasive and overtly top-down, the indirect model is more insidious because more subtle and unobtrusive by utilizing negative planning measures to let the informal creative margins and interstices flourish “organically” – the latter serving as breeding ground upon which the former parasitizes. Together the direct and indirect models permeate the entire register of power operative in the creative city from macropolitical urban interventions to the microphysics of the individual creaworker. This contribution critically unpacks the dual models of neoliberal urban creativity and concludes by briefly touching upon the crucial question of resistance.