Choose The Path Of Creative Cities

Creative city has become a new signpost for urban revival, urban construction and sustainable development, and creativity has become the foremost feature of city. While the amount of production value and number of creative producers are on the rise, the creative level is also improving. What is creative city? Can Shanghai and Beijing be called creative cities? According to western scholars'viewpoint, only when a city enjoys the benefits from creation on large scale, can the city be labeled as creative city. Urban planners, decision makers and entrepreneurs are now regarding creative city as a powerful instrument to stimulate urban economy. Some research also believes that creative city is beneficial for improving quality of life in the community.Construction of creative city has a history of more than ten years in abroad, and now it has attracted increasing attention in China. Almost every city has planned to build creative industry park and develop cultural and creative industry. The number of parks has been, intentionally or unconsciously, regarded as an index of construction of creative city. Moreover, municipal governments all set such construction at a supreme place, investing greatly in hardware facilities, which will result in undercapitalization of soft investment. While in fact, the validity of such investment relies on the corresponding increase of soft investment.Another fact should be noted here. At the beginning of this century, the appeal of knowledge economy and knowledge city was as alluring as that of creative economy and creative city today. It is reasonable to think that creativity is the most important component of knowledge accumulation, and that the transition from knowledge to creativity is the result of people's deepened understanding. However, there must exist a huge gap in thinking or even behavior during this period when the authorities'planning focus shifts intensely from knowledge to creation. The new investment may not be cohesive with the previous investment."Creativity"becomes another concept after"knowledge", with their interrelation being neglected, which will lead to a new round of reconstruction. Creative city has its own theoretical origin and is the result of natural option, but the cognitive gap between knowledge and creativity should be made up as soon as possible.Creative city in developed countries is the natural requirement of production and consumption in post-industrial society. China's economic construction has followed"learn from practice"and"doctrine of taking and copying"in the last thirty years, and"practicality"has become the main standard for behavior habits. Creative industry and creative city can avoid the malignant results of extensive utilization of resources, and has become another goal for domestic urban construction. Neglect of process and results has long resulted in many irreversible problems in economic development, so construction of creative city must conform to the law of process.Path Option for Creative City is selected as the title of doctorate research paper, in order to explore how to choose the path for creative city, how to cast away the reliance of urban development on path option and how to integrate urbanization into the construction of creative city.Speaking from economic theories, the concept of creative city is closely related to two fields. One is economic growth theory and innovation theory, and the other is urban development and space economy. However, there haven't appeared satisfactory research results by far. In the author's opinion, creative city is a dynamic concept and development of creative city should be analyzed from evolutive perspective in order to be more explanatory. So, in theoretical analysis part of this paper, the author introduced the function of innovation in economic growth, the model of urban formation, and evolvement theory and system transaction theory, which is also the theoretical focus of this paper.Elements, or components, of creative city are the key point to analyze how to construct creative city. The author firstly adopted benefit to scale and product differentiation to argue the economic feasibility of creative city. The mainstream economics heavily relies on logical propositions of diminishing marginal utility and diminishing marginal benefit to analyze specific problems. It was not until Clark put forward the proposition that"knowledge is the only thing that doesn't follow the law of diminishing marginal benefit"that knowledge, as a factor of production, began to break its dependence on resource and capital, and urban development began to take on a new look. City enjoys inherent advantages in accumulating industries and talents, and in this phase of creative city, the accumulation will not only maintain urban"uniqueness", but also pay attention to cultivation of creative situations, which will be instructive for public decision making.Urban creativity came into being since the birth of city, but its function began to expand only after the promotion of new economy and information technology revolution that. A brief review of urban development will clearly display the internal momentum of transformation of urban developmental phases. The development of creative city has its own phases, restrictive conditions and path reliance. The author mainly discussed three supportive conditions for creative city: creative groups, creative situations and technical support. After analysis of basic conditions of domestic cities, the author proposed two paths for creative city development: one is goal-oriented, and the other is instrument-oriented. Goal-oriented path contains conditions for spontaneous accumulation and government guidance, while instrument-oriented path takes advantage of the concept of creative city to reconstruct the city and solve complex problems the city faces. These two paths will choose different policies accordingly. Based on analysis of specific conditions of each path, this paper pointed out the policymaking focus and obligatory index.Shanghai was analyzed as the forthgoer of creative city in China, or to put in another way, it has already acquired certain conditions for creative city construction. The indigenous features and development course of Shanghai has determined its path for creative city construction. By virtue of historic tradition and policy favors of the creative industrial park, its production value has been growing year by year. Though it still lags far behind that of London, it ranks one of the best in China.Generally speaking, creative city emerges and develops on the basis of advanced industrialization. Development of creative industry has overt endogenesis. However, as a theory and mode of urban development to fully stimulate human creativity, can creative city be applied in the development of some special cities, to help drag them out of trouble and realize leapfrogging development? The seventh chapter takes Wenzhou city as example to explore, analyzing the key factors for Wenzhou success and the current trouble, in order to apply the path of"creative city"to promote the new leapfrog of"Wenzhou Mode". Through analysis of dynamic relation between creative city and urban economic output, between improvement of urban spiritual life and urban competitiveness, the author concluded that either path of creative city construction could not be independent of the dominant function played by the government.During concrete research, the author found that creative city was not only a goal of urban construction, but also a tool that can be integrated into urban reconstruction. This understanding offers another path for creative city construction, i.e., to accumulate human resources, material resources and capital resources by the concept of creative city to cope with problems emerging in development process.With a comprehensive consideration of system transition theory, the development trace of international creative cities which can be described as"endogenetic strength dominates, exogenous strength supplements"and the experience of international practices, the author pointed out that the construction of China's creative city should follow national conditions and in the short term, it should adopt an"exogenous strength promoting"path, and in the long term, it should respect the characteristic of city development, and fulfill the self-organization of cities. When exogenous strength promoting enters a certain stage, an endogenetic path is needed to promote the construction of creative city.Furthermore, under different external circumstances, key elements of creative city also differ. China's basic economic conditions for creative city construction appear relatively inadequate, so it becomes the major option of public policies to supply high-quality infrastructure and service channel. Besides, the dominant function of policies in promoting creative city construction should be emphasized.Due to the limitation of time and knowledge, there still remain some deficiencies in this research on path option for creative city. Creative city involves numerous fields and poses high requirements for researchers'theoretical accomplishment. There must exist some insufficiency and incorrectness in the review part. Besides, this paper lacks practice as well as more abstract research, which is the focus of the author's further study.