Preface to the Blue Book of Creative Cities

Zhang Jingcheng

City came into being while social productivity has developed into a certain stage and upgrades with the progress of the productivity. Along with the marching of industrial civilization，cultural development，the growth of the service industry，the transformation of economic growth and the adjustment of industrial structure，cities worldwide have by now entered an unprecedented stage as of the era of creative cities.

Creative cities have caught the attention from various fields these years. While the global competition for limited resources gets heated，sustainable development has become the only solution for cities，which brings creative economy of high added value and high efficiency into this historic stage. Creative industries is the parallel phrase to creative economy，which regards cities as the bases and the core of the development，and cities is also the place where creative industries started and clustered. On the other hand，creative industries helped to keep the city vigorous，attract more talents and strengthen the public image of the city.

From the experiences of world cities such as London，New York，Tokyo，Paris，and Milan，creative economy has been their common characteristic. First，histories of these cities have provided them with certain amount of economic，cultural and technological resources，which is the engine to start and maintain creative economy；second，all these cities have had sound creative industries which can function as a driving force for the innovation and economic growth of the city；finally，these cities have fostered harmonious and tolerant creative ecology through time，which conserves consumers of creative industries，while attracting more creative industries practitioners.

It can be seen that some Chinese cities have been showing their tendency on the way to become creative cities，such as large cities of Beijing and Shanghai，medium-size cities of Qingdao，Xi’an and even small cities of Yiwu and Lijiang，whose development paths have been closely followed up in our Chinese Creative Industries Report started in 2006. By now，some cities have had rich experiences，comprehensive data and materials worthy to be studied，thus the time to carry out a special research has arrived.

Therefore，based on Chinese Creative Industries Report，we decided to conduct a deeper，more detailed and more characteristic research on some active creative cities of China，leading to the birth of Blue Book of Creative Cities，which is also an important part of Creative Series published by China Creative Industries Research Center. We hope this blue book can function as a faithful recorder，promoter and explorer for every creative city of China.