Global Urban Frontiers through Policy Transfer? Unpacking Seoul’s Creative City Programmes

Abstract

This paper critically examines the Seoul city government’s attempts at the policy transfer of creative cities programmes, both as a policy borrower and as a policy lender, by using the emergent ‘policy mobilities’ approach. Seoul’s way of actualising the idea of creative cities places more emphasis on local-serving administration, tourism and physical cultural infrastructure. The original creative city programmes have been transformed, ideologically and materially, by Seoul into a process of downsizing government organisations and workforce and limiting the use of public space. Seoul’s attempt to be a policy lender is not a product of other foreign cities’ policy transfer from Seoul, but the result of the city government’s promotional practices. Its final outcome, thus bears relatively little relationship or similarity to the original policies, encountering unexpected administrative and operational problems, such as increasing debt and resistance from civil groups.