Creative Toronto: Harnessing the Economic Development Power of Arts & Culture

Abstract

Over the 2000s, Toronto initiated and instituted a process of cultivating itself as a creative city.Entrepreneurial city visionaries found that in order to enter the global market, their planning had to be strategic.This paper explores how Toronto's policy entrepreneurs used planning, partnerships, and an expanded definition of economic development to create a "Cultural Camelot."In addition to competing on the financial and revenue-generating fronts, a coalition of cross-sector leaders took on the challenge of fostering a livable city with a deep social ethos imbued within a variety of dimensions of urban life.This new focus gave Toronto the chance establish itself as a center for innovation, which strengthened urban cultural capital and helped promote the strategic agenda of becoming a competitor in the creative economy sector.Investment in research and creative city strategic planning, coupled with the allocation of financial and human capital resources across a variety of industries, served to encourage creativity, promote culture and competitiveness, and drive economic development. Creative Toronto: Harnessing the power of arts & cultureThe decade of the 2000s in Toronto was one in which there was a 'Creative Cities Coalescence,' wherein cultural policy, economic development, and state and private support came together in a window of opportunity and played highly visible roles (See Figure 1).The ability of Toronto's policy entrepreneurs to attach solutions to key problems, within both the cultural community and the municipal framework, resulted in a very visible outcome in that decade.Stakeholders, including urban planners, policymakers, elected officials and the cultural community, put forward an agenda based on a variety of planning documents with the goal of branding Toronto as a creative destination and cultural powerhouse.Through the lens of policy theory, this paper looks at the factors that coalesced to bring this goal to fruition, including the identification of an opportunity, political will, timing, and the creation of powerful alliances.Figure 1.Toronto's Creative Cities Coalescence (Goldberg, 2012) I examine the role of stakeholder partnerships in the municipal effort to develop Toronto

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