The creative economy in the arena of urban sustainability
Creative Cluster; Creative City; Urbanism Planning; Sustainable Development, Contemporary City.
Contemporary thinkers have discussed the dimensions that best reflect debates in the arenas of urban sustainability and creativity. The term 'sustainable' boosted the production of data and information, whose original objective was a new paradigm of production and consumption, different from the one that accompanied urban densification, questioned in terms of sustainabil-ity. Technological advances accompanied this review of concepts, giving rise to new economies in which symbolic value prevails over material value, among which the creative economy (CE). This thesis adds to previous efforts by authors in ordering the debate in these multidisciplinary arenas, hopefully with a systemic look for a better understanding of sustainability in the set of narratives to cultural and creative cities. In the bibliographical review, eight major dimensions of urban sustainability are disordered: those of the New Urban Agenda – 1) environmental, 2) social, 3) economic, 4) cultural, 5) political-judicial-institutional and 6) territorial-spatial - and 7) technology and 8) ethics are recognized in the contemporary urban debate. With the aid of drawing, the method consisted of identifying these dimensions in the literature, a multidimen-sional key to urban sustainability that guided the qualification and systemic analysis of narra-tives in theories of cultural and creative cities. The systemic key allows another understanding of the discourse behind each theory. The ethical dimension, inseparable from the notion of sus-tainability, is nascent in the literature of cities, it appears in the discourses of creative urban brandings under the aegis of open-mindedness and tolerance and collaborative economies, instead of the right to the city. The environmental dimension is creative rather than ecological, where terms such as 'creative environments' encompass narratives of a certain recycling of urban spaces for new uses and vintage finishes. The economic dimension is dominant among the narratives and has the greatest influence on policies in the underlying theories, although multidimensional narratives are recognized in the discourses from the United Nations (UN) agencies. The new intangible economies are usually urban, alternatives to the modernist indus-trial mode, possibly due to the contemporary popularization of audiovisual technologies and internet access.