Are cultural cities always creative? An empirical analysis of culture-led development in 190 European cities

There is a socio-economic threshold beyond which creative cities are at risk to become inaccessible to young, promising, but often low-income, cultural and creative professionals, thus undermining a major source of cul-tural dynamism. Building on this argument, scholars have increasingly weighed out the benefits of culture-led development. Yet, the literature dealing with this topic is mostly based on single case studies, failing to pro-vide broad comparable evidence, particularly for European cities. To improve our understanding of how culture -led development may unfold in an urban context, we empirically analyse the creative and cultural performance of 190 cities in Europe, using the European Commission's Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor - a unique dataset that gathers 29 culture-related indicators for a very diverse sample of urban areas. We find that there is no strong correlation between empirical indicators of a city's cultural vibrancy and its creative economy performance. This may be due to deliberate policy choices, among which specialisation choices, or rather to unintended (and unsustainable) consequences of culture-led investment strategies that a deeper understanding of the interaction between the culture and creativity dimensions may help correct, if backed by sound empirical evidence.