The Creative City: a Toolkit for Urban Innovators

Charles Landry

The transition from industrial to post-industrial societies, together with the globalisation of the world economy, are creating new challenges for cities in the twenty-first century. As wealth is increasingly created by ideas as opposed to the manufacturing of material goods, Charles Landry highlights the need for a creative approach to urban development, one that is based on the exploitation of local cultural resources and the centrality of imagination.

The book provides a number of British and worldwide case studies and looks at how to challenge contemporary urban problems, through creative thinking and planning. Moving away from a notion of urban regeneration based purely on physical renewal, Landry stresses the centrality of creative processes and the need for a more holistic approach to regeneration.

The toolkit is a conceptual framework, designed to provide the reader with the cornerstones of a new mindset, offering new ways to think, approach and tackle urban problems through a range of creative methods. The book will be of interest to urban planners, policy-makers and anybody who shares an interest in creativity and the future of cities.

2000, Comedia/Earthscan, London, 330pp, ISBN 1 85383 613 3

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