Creative industries urban model: structure and functioning

Abstract

The last decade saw the wide promotion of creative industries at city scale development agendas. However, these practices have attached too much emphasis onto investment in specific regeneration projects or flagship developments rather than addressing the nature of the infrastructure, networks and agents engaged. This paper presents an agent-based model (named CID-USST) developed to explore this overlooked aspect. It uses Nanjing, a Chinese metropolis in the Yangtze River Delta, as a case to illustrate how the dynamics of the city scale location behaviours of the creative firms and the creative workers is simulated. The model has the capability to generate different scenarios to examine the spatial distributions, the spatial clustering patterns of the creative firms and the creative workers, as well as the spatial distribution of the housing rent and the office rent resulting from the firms'/workers' spatial movements.