Creative communities’ is a phrase that appears in a wide range of government policy and strategy documents, commissioned reports and academic texts. In a post-Richard Florida landscape, urban planners, social scientists, economists, cultural development workers and bureaucrats litter their work with affirmations of community creativity, underscoring its vital role in a twenty-first century creative economy. As we move from a knowledge-based economy to a creative economy, attention has been directed to creative communities in the hope that they will generate economic value through innovation. Therefore, this impresses a higher value upon those creative communities that become, or at least demonstrate the potential to become, creative industries. Moreover, much of the discourse around how creative communities are engendered and sustained indulges the rhetoric of globalisation and the ‘act local, think global’ spin.

The loose application of the term, ‘creative communities’, and its variable discursive contexts, have distracted us from asking the most elementary of questions regarding the people and the practices that generate and sustain ‘creative communities’ that lead to social inclusion. That is, who are the individuals, collectives and facilitators of community creativity? What are their stories and where are they located? And, how might we rethink ‘creativity as a pathway to social inclusion’ outside the current debates around ‘creative class’, ‘creative cities’, and ‘creative industries’?

Following the highly successful Creative Communities conference in April 2009, Creative Communities 2 will address the above questions, bringing together academics, practitioners and policy makers from a variety of different settings, national and international.