Inequalities in Creative Cities ─ Issues, Approaches, Comparisons

This edited volume is a lively and timely appraisal of “ordinary cities” as they struggle to implement creative redevelopment and economic growth strategies to enhance their global competitiveness. The book is concerned with new and often unanticipated inequalities that have emerged from this new city movement. As chronicled, such cities – Cleveland (USA), Heidelberg (Germany), Oxford (UK), Groningen (Netherlands), Montpellier (France), but also cities from the Global South such as Cachoeira (Brazil) and Delhi (India) – now experience new and unexpected realities of poverty, segregation, neglect of the poor, racial and ethnic strife. To date planners, academics, and policy analysts have paid little attention to the connections between this drive in these cities to be more creative and the inequalities that have followed. This book, keenly making these connections, highlights the limited visions that have been applied in this planning drive to make these cities more creative and ultimately more globally competitive.

Ulrike Gerhard is Professor of Human Geography of North America at the Institute of Geography and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) at Heidelberg University, Germany.

Michael Hoelscher is Professor at the University of Speyer, Germany, and obtained his PhD in sociology from Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany.

David Wilson is Professor of Geography, Urban Planning, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.