Creative-led strategies for peripheral settlements and the uneasy transition towards sustainability

ABSTRACT

The creative cities discourse has long-overlooked the impact of the new creative economy regime on rural areas, often legitimazing arguable urban-biased policies. This paper illustrates how two small towns, in Asia and in Europe, have attempted to build creative settlements, setting up agendas for sustainability transition. This has implied a strategy to reposition the local economy around notions of culture and creativity, deconstructing mainstream pro-growth discourses. It has been also accompanied by the experimentation of forms of engagement of local communities. The aim is to explain the challenges encountered during this process, and to distil, from this experience, the potential factors that might hinder a real process of transition towards sustainability in the long run. It will conclude that employing effective creative-led strategies, to overcome ‘smallness’ and ‘marginality’ in a sustainable way, should be based on the strengthening of local planning capacities, and the development of effective network governance arrangements.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative-led strategies
• rural areas
• governance
• place-making
• participation
• sustainability

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the research report ‘Creative small settlements. Culture-based solutions for local sustainable development’ (2017), which has not received funding but it was based on the volunteer contribution of a number of academic scholars, policy makers, practitioners and activists involved in ‘making creative settlements’ in many countries. I wish here to thank the main contributors: Karina Borjia, Paola Ferrari, Françoise Ged, Pilar Maria Guerrieri, Alain Marinos, Maria da Graça Moreira, Etra Connie Occhialini, Min Zhang, Li Zhen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an overview of the network, currently formed by 246 members: https://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/ (Accessed 15 April 2020).

2 Five researchers from various disciplinary fields (architects, urban planners, local economic experts) led, in both cases, groups of 4–5 students from various international and local Universities.

3 The participation day took place in the last day of the workshop in the case of China, while two events were organized in Gagliato (one at the beginning and one at the end of the week).