Positioning the Creative City Agenda Within Urban Policy Discourse: The Malaysian Scenario

Abstract

As the hype of the creative city model transcends Western borders to Eastern settings, Malaysian cities are fast embracing it as sine qua non urban development strategy. The global creative city model, however, is fraught with conceptual and operational ambiguities when dissecting the notions of “cultural industries” and “creative industries”. The “knowledge economy-based concept of creative industries” is widely critiqued as being void of cultural content. Malaysia is also caught in this conundrum due to national aspirations to be a knowledge and creative economy. The aim of this article is to examine how the Malaysian creative city agenda is positioned within urban policy discourse as the nation’s structural base shifts from industrial to services and the creative economy. Based on qualitative research techniques (i.e. interviews, focus group discussions, fieldwork observations), primary data was collected in selected Malaysian cities from 2019 to 2021. The study indicated that the creative city strategy is still nascent in Malaysia and not systematically integrated and intersected across urban policy domains. This article recommends the need to integrate the elements of culture and creativity more distinctively across all urban policy domains in the quest to develop culturally sensitive and sustainable Malaysian creative cities.