jats:p The last decade saw the wide promotion of creative industries at city-scale development agendas. However, these practices have attached too much emphasis to 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 (termed CID-USST) that was 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 city-scale location behaviours of creative firms and creative workers is simulated. The model has the capability to generate different scenarios to examine the spatial distributions and spatial clustering patterns of the creative firms and creative workers, as well as the spatial distribution of the housing rent and the office rent resulting from the firms' and the workers' spatial movements. </jats:p>