Creative and knowledge cities: development paths and policies from a European perspective.

In this paper we compare the economic development of thirteen European metropolitan regions. The objective is to learn more about the conditions that are important to these developments, especially in the spheres of creative and knowledge-intensive industries. Here we will focus on the expected positions of cities and regions in these economic spheres, based on the long-term development paths they went through (within the context of more general economic and societal changes) and on the current and more recent developments in the spheres of so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ conditions for development. The expected positions will be confronted with current economic performance - measured in terms of the number of jobs - in creative industries and knowledge-intensive industries. This results in new hypotheses which need to be tested in any subsequent research. We also consider the findings against active policy interventions that cities are developing. Most research that focused on the development of today's cities is biased with a ‘Western’ focus and we break away from that perspective by covering cities in both Western and Eastern Europe.