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"Left to its own devices, the highly innovative creative economy is generating concentrated and uneven development on a world scale. To continue down our current path will likely mean greater regional concentrations of wealth, mounting economic inequality, growing class divides, and potentially worsening political tension and unrest within countries and on a global scale. Never mind implications for social justice. It's huge waste of human creativity and talent, pure and simple" (R. Florida 2007, The flight of the creative class, pp xv-xvi).  

Though Richard Florida is not the soul promoter of "the creative city", he is certainly among the most efficient theory-providers on what a little culture and creativity can do to the prosperity of cities. The magic formulas tend to be blindly internalised by city planners and politicians who aim to enhance economic growth, or maybe not? Do cultural strategies naturalise active policies of uneven development, in which social and spatial justice are absent - in political discourses as well as actions?

This paper sets out to critically investigate "the creative city thesis" and the way it is actually articulated, negotiated and resisted in Oslo and Marseille. The paper draws on the findings of my thesis research on the cultural and spatial strategies used in these cities, studied through extensive case studies of the central waterfront projects Fjordbyen and Euroméditerranée.     

The main question discussed is how diversity, celebrated as it is in "the creative city thesis", is maintained or suppressed in the actual development of urban landscapes.  

Three main lines of arguments are discussed: First, policies of scale have reconfigured the metropolitan region and fostered new aims and forms of centrality based on notions of competitiveness. Second, the renewed focus on the urban centre combined with "creative city formulas" tends to discipline the new landscapes and the practices to take place there. I argue that strategies of the creative city are used in order to legitimize neoliberal policies, and that despite discursive emphasis on access, plurality and distinctiveness, social, material and cultural diversity is rather suppressed in the redevelopment policies in Oslo and Marseille. Thirdly, I move on to discuss whether third parties through other forms of opposition and resistance can negotiate the redevelopment policies, and consequently contribute to more diversity. The answer is that even though various forms of opposition are invited and taking place, they do not really alter the homogenising forces of "modelled" redevelopment policies. in brief, I will finally discuss how notions of social and spatial justice can contribute to a more transparent conceptualisation of urban diversity and of what Iris Marion Young calls "a normative ideal of city life".