Creative cities: experimental urban labs

In post-industrial societies, culture is frequently deployed to innovate traditional sectors and their outputs through the injection of creativity and knowledge into the urban system. The term creative city identifies both the source of creativity and the many processes which use it as a driver of sustainable development and renewal. The dynamic between heritage resources and policies, both contributing to the development of creative cities, is place specific and has been largely neglected in the literature. In Italy it has usually produced traditional development models based on cultural tourism and there is a great deal of scepticism about levering the creative economy to innovate these models. The Alpine city of Trento is an experimental lab which is bucking the general trend, demonstrating traditional and new culture-led development paths and smart specializations – forms of hybridization between local heritage and the creative economy. The long, internally driven process of Trento’s culture-led regeneration allowed a balanced integration of the preservation and enhancement of urban identity with the fostering of innovations coherent with the city’s identity. However Trento cannot yet be considered a fully fledged creative city since it has still not articulated a shared, informed and organic development plan focused on culture-led processes.