The Creative City in the Urban Sustainability Agenda.
Creative economy; Design; Architecture; Sustainable urbanism; Urban development; Contemporary cities.
Sustainable city and creative economy are post-modern concepts, key in the contemporary urban debate. The creative economy (CE) is one of the economic terms that are articulated at the turn of the 20th century to the 21st, in the wake of technology and the symbolic production of culture and urban densification. Multinational debates about cities lead contemporary thinkers from different areas to discuss dimensions that best represent consensus, both in the arena of sustainability and urban creativity. Furthermore, a transdisciplinary agenda of sustainability and creativity for contemporary cities requires advances in systemic visions and methodologies for the best political positioning of urban planners in the face of climate emergencies. It does so through the elaboration of a methodological framework and its application in the evaluation of sets of narratives in Sachs's (1986; 2002) eight dimensions of sustainability: those that persist in the New Urban Agenda (2016): 1) environmental, 2) social, 3) economic, 4) cultural, 5) political-legal-institutional; and 6) territorial-spatial; and 7) technological; and 8) ethics. We present the method and dimensions of this agenda in chapter 2, and in the following chapters we apply it to qualify sets of authors' narratives, reaching a different understanding of each one. The visually appealing methodological proposal is an effort to understand the complex thinking that accompanies sustainable and urban debates, for analyzing sustainability in contemporary urban branding, particularly in creative cities. It is concluded that the debate on urban sustainability in contemporary cities, marked by dynamics of individual production, changing urban cultures and collective efforts, should encourage advances in future creative projects on multiple scales, focusing on climate adaptations, social resilience and in strengthening transdisciplinary urban ethics. These are agendas for joint mobilization and essential innovations for the whole society, government and teaching, research and extension agendas to ensure adequate coping with urban challenges in an ethical, sustainable and integrated way.