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Beyond the hype: Nuit Blanche in the "Creative City".

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The "Creative City" has become a common byword in today's increasingly globalized world. Metropolitan centres the world over are mobilizing their cultural resources in a bid to brand themselves as global "cultural" cities, with hopes that this strategy will have a positive impact on the local economy and strengthen peoples sense of place and civic identity. During the headlong rush to position culture as a resource in urban regeneration, there has been an unprecedented focus on cities as sites of intense cultural activity in the belief that the attendant creative quotient will translate into economic benefits. Yet the focus on culture, as mobilized through urban cultural policy, also has important implications for the public realm and urban citizenship. This fervent attention to culture offers avenues of possibility for the civic-minded since the articulation of culture is never a finished project nor is it a closed system. Instead, it is a constantly contested realm, which makes it an ideal staging ground for speaking about the people, spaces, and institutions that constitute a city.

While each city is unique, strategies for culture-led urban regeneration have some notably similar characteristics, typically ones involving heavy investment in cultural infrastructure along with the creation of a myriad of festivals as place-making tactics. According to Guy Julier, the revaluation of the built environment through investment in the physical infrastructure of the urban milieu can be understood as a "hard-branding" strategy for city place-marketing, while the widespread "festivalization" of cities suggests a "soft-branding" tactic that is characterized by "a looser system" with a "broader palette of options" used to present "the more nuanced aspects of [a city's] aesthetic dimension." (1) Toronto's current cultural renaissance reflects both hard-branding and soft-branding as the city's flagship cultural institutions are being made over and urban spaces are transformed throughout the year by various festivals and their attendant publics.

One of the most well-attended urban festivals is Toronto's Nuit Blanche, the annual 12-hour, dusk-to-dawn celebration of contemporary art that boasts an estimated attendance ranging from 425,000 in its inaugural year of 2006; to 800,000 in 2007; and approaching 1,000,000 in 2008. Nuit Blanche is an interesting phenomenon because it is a perfect example of how an urban festival can be used to placebrand the Creative City, while also enriching and strengthening the city's public realm. As a unique event staged in public space, the festival creates a site where the dominant narratives of Toronto's Creative City can be enacted and performed, but also where such ideologies can be unframed by socially minded artists and curators. Nuit Blanche makes available space for the re-framing of public discourse around issues not currently in the public consciousness. Rather than operating as merely a placebranding strategy, it also functions as a highly visible mode of public address that can be catalytic in engaging urban citizens to conceive of their city as a shared task and to participate actively in the evolution of the Creative City.

According to Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini, the Creative City idea was formulated as an urban response to the structural changes wrought by neoliberal economic globalization. It was broad in scope and aimed to foreground "the importance of creative responses to urban problems, be they in traffic management, business development, greening the city, integrating ethnic communities, regenerating run-down housing estates or enlivening city centres." (2) To them, the concept represented a new epistemology of the city and was meant to stimulate new modes of thought and knowledge on coping with the difficulties of contemporary urban living. In 2003, Toronto implemented a Culture Plan for the Creative City: City of Toronto to strategically mobilize its cultural resources and aid in its own Creative City renaissance.

"This plan, however, has not been without controversy. Much of the criticism is centred around its foregrounding of the importance of Richard Florida's "creative class" as a fundamental reason for mobilizing Toronto's cultural resources as an economic expedient. (3) Put bluntly, the plan assessed the city's existing cultural resources and argued for greater investment in cultural and heritage amenities in order to attract members of the creative class as a key component of future prosperity. Explicitly referencing Florida's Rise of the Creative Class (2002), the executive summary states:

The Culture Plan recognizes that great cities of the world are all Creative Cities whose citizens work with ideas, are intensely mobile and insist on a high quality of life wherever they choose to live. Such cities, and their citizens, have an overwhelming impact on the economies of their countries and compete with one another directly for trade, for investment and,...

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