ABSTRACT Cultural districts are prominent yet contested policy instruments for fostering creative industries. While the literature often contrasts “policy‐driven” and “organically grown” models, there is a paucity of longitudinal, evidence‐based research assessing whether top‐down interventions can cultivate sustainable, self‐sustaining clusters. This study addresses this gap by asking: Can policy‐driven cultural districts evolve toward organically grown models, and under what conditions? To address the issues identified above, we develop and apply a novel cost‐effectiveness evaluation framework. Through a paired case study of two production‐oriented cultural districts in Guangzhou, China—one policy‐driven, one organically grown—we leverage 2 decades of spatial and economic data. Our findings reveal that, despite higher initial costs, policy‐driven districts can achieve accelerated growth in scale‐sized enterprises and develop complex industrial chains over time, demonstrating one viable pathway toward sustainable agglomeration under specific institutional conditions. This research contributes a refined evaluative lens to cultural policy studies and offers empirically grounded insights for designing more effective and resilient cultural‐economic strategies.
Zhu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.