Are cultural cities always creative? An empirical analysis of culture-led development in 190 European cities

There is a socioeconomic threshold beyond which creative cities are at risk to become inaccessible to young, promising, but often low-income, cultural and creative professionals, thus undermining a major source of cultural dynamism. Building on this argument, scholars have increasingly weighed out the benefits of culture-led development. Yet, the literature dealing with this topic is mostly based on single case studies, failing to provide broad comparable evidence, particularly for European cities. To improve our understanding of how culture-led development may unfold in an urban context, we empirically analyse the creative and cultural performance of 190 cities in Europe, using the European Commission's Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor-a unique dataset that gathers 29 culture-related indicators for a very diverse sample of urban areas. We find that there is no strong correlation between empirical indicators of a city's cultural vibrancy and its creative economy performance. This may be due to deliberate policy choices, among which specialisation choices, or rather to unintended (and unsustainable) consequences of culture-led investment strategies that a deeper understanding of the interaction between the culture and creativity dimensions may help correct, if backed by sound empirical evidence.