Introduction to SI: Against the creative city: Activism in the creative city: When cultural workers fight against creative city policy

- What kind of “creative city” is imagined by urban policy? How is the creative city implemented locally? How is a creative city contested by cultural workers?
- How do cultural workers organise their interests and how do they use their creativity for social mobilisation?
- How are different notions of “creativity” imagined and mobilised by activists within the considered urban social movement? How do such meanings of creativity differ from those mobilised and used by cultural urban policies at different scales (from small-scale projects, to the city level)?
- Are culture and social innovation also products of the mobilisation? To what extent does the creative action organised by cultural operators transform or expand into culture or socially innovative strategy?

This special issue explores artists' and cultural workers' activism in the context of urban social movements opposing creative city policy, focusing in particular on the meanings and images of creativity that emerge from this confrontation. Today this theme is important because it reveals a glaring contradiction in many culturally based urban policies currently being implemented, which have the explicit objective of fostering creativity but leave cultural workers out of their development. Cultural workers have begun to contest those policies nowadays as several authors have already been able to document (Borèn and Young, 2013; Novy & Colomb, 2013), which this special issue will also contribute to. This contestation is the best proof of the paradoxical divorce between cultural workers and policy makers in charge of creative city policy. For some, like David Harvey, The confrontation results from the intensive instrumental use of culture and the arts in contemporary capitalist cities as a resource for socioeconomic development, an exploitation scheme that had also been denounced by Sharon Zukin (1989, 1995) a long time ago.