%0 Journal Article
%T Worlding Cape Town by design: Encounters with creative cityness
%A Laura Nkula-Wenz
%J Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space
%@ 1472-3409
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0308518X18796503
%X Considering the ongoing global proliferation of the urban ¡®creativity fix¡¯ and its inclination to further push local governments towards entrepreneurial governance logics and market-led development imperatives, there is a sustained need to understand how the creative city paradigm is being grounded, renegotiated and put into practice in so-called ¡®Southern¡¯ cities. To analyse Cape Town¡¯s creative city trajectory and its eventual emergence as the ¡®first African World Design Capital¡¯ in 2014, this article brings together three strands of contemporary urban scholarship. First, it utilizes the notion of ¡®worlding¡¯ to foreground the complex and multi-scalar processes that shaped Cape Town¡¯s ¡®politics of becoming¡¯ a creative city. Second, it draws on the related and growing body of work that engages with globally mobile urban policies, their modes of circulation, adoption and transformation in different socio-political and spatial contexts. Finally, in using this relational framework to analyse Cape Town¡¯s creative-to-design city journey, it contributes to a ¡®second wave¡¯ of scholarship on creative city-making that focuses on understanding its heterogeneous manifestations and varied local effects ¨C that is, the diverse and situated expressions of creative cityness in the broader context of a globalizing cultural political economy. Overall the article suggests that future research has much to gain from understanding the creative city paradigm as a powerful ¡®worlding device¡¯ that produces place-based responses, which are as much ambitious and aspirational as they are fragile and necessarily incomplete
%K Urban theory
%K creative city
%K policy mobilities
%K post-colonial theory
%K design
%K Cape Town
%K South Africa
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X18796503