Small cities: Developing collaborative advantage through creativity

With growing urban competition, smaller cities in particular face challenges in ‘putting themselves on the map’. Richards and Duif (2019) suggest that smaller places can succeed if they collaborate rather than compete, enabling them to ‘borrow size’ to stimulate development. By collaborating, small cities also have opportunities to ‘create size’ through joint actions. This chapter focusses on the role of events in generating creative development powered by the ‘Middleground’ of the creative city, and highlights the effects of networking across regional and international borders. A review of traditional creative industries, creative class and creative city approaches leads to an integrative creative development model based on the work of Sacco et al. (2014) and the placemaking perspective of Richards (2020). This model analyses the different layers of the creative city proposed by Cohendet et al. (2010), integrating different forms of creative capital and accounting for the dynamic links between actors and institutions. These ideas are applied to cases from the Netherlands and Luxemburg, with a particular focus on cross-border collaboration stimulated through the European Capital of Culture programme.