Prosuming creative urban areas. Evidence from East London

• Visitors want to learn and exercise creativity; many are employed in creative professions.
• Creative areas display objectified, embodied and institutionalised cultural capital.
• Visitors’ varieties of practice generate five new typologies.
• Coolness and atmosphere are central to appeal.
• Tourism development policy must be unobtrusive.

This research explores the role creative clusters play in the development of tourism. It involves an in-depth study of characteristics, motivations and experiences of visitors to creative urban areas using qualitative analysis of 142 interviews in creative, non-central locations in East London. The data show that the concentration of creative industries affords opportunities for consumption and for the accumulation of cultural capital, leveraging the presence of creative producers and other creative visitors, who are themselves perceived as an attraction. These factors, combined with a particular urban morphology and the presence of everyday activities, contribute to the areas’ perceived authenticity, bohemian atmosphere and cool image. The paper develops typologies of visitors to creative areas and concludes with a discussion of Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital applied to a contemporary urban context.