Creative City, City Marketing, Creative Industries and Cultural Policy: Challenges for Antwerp

The 'creativity hysteria' (Madden 2004) that started around 2000 in Europe has not come to an end yet, with 2009 being the European year of 'Creativity and innovation'. The creative city was one of the main themes during that year. Indeed, today the idea of the Creative City is the policy du jour, on everybody 's menu. Also the Flemish government has set up a policy program, aiming to stimulate Flanders' creative industries and to profile Flanders as a top creative region. Next to this program of the Flemish government, some of the cities in Flanders start to work towards a creative city -policy. Antwerp, being the largest Flemish city, is taking on the lead. Our paper critically questions the importance of the creative city policy within Antwerp cultural and arts policy: how is the city of Antwerp dealing with *the creative city* issue as part of or next to its general cultural and arts policy; how are the creative city, city marketing and the city*s cultural and arts policy interrelated? Is there a mutual benefit or do both policy concepts risk to interfere? Firstly, we analyse policy discourse, based on a content analysis of official policy documents on cultural and arts policy, city marketing and the creative city. Secondly, we make a meta-analysis of a data-set of unpublished source material put to our disposal by the city of Antwerp in comparison with the cities of Stuttgart, Manchester and Rotterdam. keywords: Creative city, city marketing, cultural and arts policy, creative industries, Antwerp, discourse. This research is based on documents and data-analysis of unpublished source material put at our disposal by the city of Antwerp concerning its creative industries. This research wants to evaluate the culture policy of the city of Antwerp on creative industries and the discourse about the 'creative city' in their city marketing. These insights will lead to conclusions and recommendations for the policymakers.

ISBN:978-1-4462-0122-0

Keywords:cultural industries, creative cities