Social Justice and the Creative City: Class, Gender and Racial Inequalities

Richard Florida’s creative class theory has recently been adopted by many municipal governments as a key urban economic development policy. This trend, as others have noted, has significant implications for social justice in the creative city, particularly by continuing and even deepening class inequality. This paper shares in the spirit of these class‐based critiques, but goes beyond them to argue that gender and racial equality is also at stake in the creative city. We point in particular to three particular geographies of the creative city – (1) the conceptual spaces of the creative class idea, (2) the workplaces of the cultural and creative industries and (3) the amenity and public landscapes of the creative city – as sites where class, gender and racial inequalities are maintained and exacerbated as a result of creativity‐led urban economic development policies.