Overview

All around the world, museums and other elements of culture sprawl as drivers for new regional and urban economic development processes. Strategic development of cities can no longer take place without a relevant role for culture and knowledge.

Cities, city-regions, or new spaces arise, ever more, as relevant units of analysis for human communities. These new spaces or territories carry a critical role in enhancing the new policies of competitiveness and well-being. They have stopped being mere passive holders of physical resources to become true active agents. Additionally, knowledge and culture have evolved from the static productivity factors (together with capital and manpower) and comparative advantages of the past, to a dynamic component of the competitive advantage of a nation, region, or city.

Unique and differentiated cities face the challenge to retain and attract strategic resources (capital, companies and mainly, talent) to guarantee their connectivity along the world and to favor the development and ownership of live networks. This is a new answer to the old simplistic debate of Global vs Local. A new, complex, and diverse mode of interrelation, challenge, and opportunity opens up in the horizon.

These new cities are the main nodes of leadership for ideas, culture, technology, economy, and society. They have become the critical spaces of coexistence, solidarity, and creativity.

But the received view of urbanism is rendered obsolete when trying to develop this new role for territories. The traditional disciplinary approach to creative nodes as driving forces...