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FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS (Apologies for Cross-Postings)Canadian Association of Geographers Annual Meeting (May 29 to June 2 2007)University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon SK

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The Canadian Creative City: Importing Richard Florida’s UrbanismA Graduate Student Paper Session

The ‘making-up’ of policy is … a profoundly geographical process, in and through which different places are constructed as facing similar problems in need of similar solutions (Ward, 2006: 70).[1]

It is likely … that the ‘weak’ and unsustainable serial reproduction of certain landscape elements from city to city under urban entrepreneurialism will be paralleled by the emergence of decontextualised ‘copy-cat’ policies that fail to achieve their long-term economic development goals. (McCann, 2004: 1922).[2]

Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’ thesis is simultaneously popular and controversial. Needless to say, it has led to vigorous research interest and policy change in many North American and European cities. However, the diffusion of this particular idea from its particular American urban context to other cities around world needs to be studied, if only to expose the politics and constraints involved in such policy transfers. Studies of policy mobilities ^{1, 2}, exemplified by the quotes above, have pointed out that so-called ‘policies in motion’ are place-specific, and so they need to be adapted when transferred, lest they face the prospect of failing completely by ignoring the local context altogether. Florida’s ‘creative class’ thesis, when translated into so-called creative city policies, is no exception.

This call for papers is an opportunity to talk about the particular Canadian iterations of Florida’s ‘creative class thesis’ and its policy adaptations. I am particularly interested in the political channels and context-specific constraints in and through which Florida’s ideas have been turned into Canadian policies. The following (admittedly partial) list of topics is salient for this CFP:

• Canada’s multicultural policy and its relationship to creative city policies
• Emplacing national historical-geographical imaginations in creative city discourses
• The politics of creative city policy transfer: where do Canadian cities learn from?
• The impact of creative city policies on other social and economic policies
• The role of professional and academic networks and relationships in policy learning
• Race, sexuality, class, gender and other makers of difference in Canadian creative cities
• Creative urban landscaping: architecture, planning, design and heritage in Canadian cities
• The politics and/or governance of creative professions in Canadian cities
• Creative city policy outside Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, particularly in small cities

Please forward expressions of interest, including an abstract of up to 250 words, to John Paul Catungal ([log in to unmask]). The deadline for this first call is November 27, 2006.