Invisible Agents and hidden Protagonists: Rethinking Creative Cities Policy

This article acts as an introduction to the special issue on creative cities policy. We begin the article with a discussion of recent critical accounts of cultural/creative industries and creative cities policy, arguing that the failure of policies to fully understand the often hidden complexities of cultural production has fostered simplistic and often self-defeating policy design and intervention. We then move on to present a series of papers that are concerned in various ways with both developing an understanding of the complex dimensions of cultural production and with tackling the often weak and implicit links between research, policy and urban planning.