From Paris to Barcelona, Manchester to Frankfurt and Bradford to Lille, implanting a cultural policy now lies at the heart of achieving a successful urban renaissance. The most discernible socio-economic change in the late twentieth and early twentieth centuries was the replacement of manufacturing and production by a cultural and consumption-based approach. Indeed, local, regional and national policy-makers now view cultural urban policy as the panacea for urban ills, a tool to stimulate economic development and eradicate social exclusion whilst at the same time providing the basis for an attractive and marketable urban lifestyle. The contraction of the manufacturing sector led to a focus on finding and marketing urban distinctiveness and on what the city can become on the European stage. The city is now the product that is sold and consumed. This distinctiveness can be defined in numerous and varied ways such as performing arts, sport, heritage, gastronomy, architecture or art. This Reader makes a contribution to the diverse ways in which culture and creativity have both been defined and used to regenerate the city, through an exploration primarily of music, sport and leisure as tools to create a distinctive city with the aim of securing an urban renaissance.

Cultural and creative regeneration has attracted interest from urban history, geography, political science and sociology to name just a few. The book further blurs the disciplinary boundaries as MA students from architecture, media studies, urban planning and engineering analyse the role of culture and creativity in securing urban regeneration in a number of Western European cities. This cross-disciplinary nature is the book's main strength, as it allows the reader an insight into the different ways in which culture, creativity and regeneration can be both conceptualized and worked in practice in cities from Sheffield to New York to Essen to Chemnitz.

The book's logical structure works well by exploring conceptual issues, then grounding them in case-study examples and finally by proposing student suggestions to re-energize Sheffield city centre, thus providing a balance of theory and practice that is grounded in both real and imagined case studies. The first section outlines the theoretical musings which surround these buzz-words and explores them under the guise of democracy, liberalism, post-modernism and globalization as well as current pressing urban issues such as multiculturalism and security, crime and control. The attempt at such an ambitious theoretical sweep of concepts enlightens us and provides us with an insight into the different issues, but we are also left frustrated as each concept could be explored in far more depth than the eight to ten pages that are afforded each in this book. However, in exposing some of the more immediate urban issues, such as trans/multi/intraculturality, heightened by current intra-European migration flows, the book moves away from the traditional analysis of culture and creativity as purely a tool for economic development.

The reader is taken on an historical and geographical tour of world cities and shown the various top-down and bottom-up methods that have been used to re-make place and re-create place identities. For example, Disneyland in America and creative quarters in Eastern Germany are contrasted with Chicago's jazz scene and Manchester's ‘Madchester’ phase. One of the book's major strengths is this broad scope, geographically, in terms of various means employed (music, sport and leisure), and also with the themes that cut through the book. Manipulation of both urban space and minds is in evidence throughout the chapters, the most obvious cases being the promotion of major sporting events and the construction of museums with the aim of projecting a certain urban image. Disneyland, where people pay to be deceived, is a more overt example of this mental manipulation employed in cultural regeneration. The book also travels through the impact of the built environment, iconography, institutional control and people in influencing the cultural agenda. What is particularly striking about the content of the book is that, while it acknowledges the use of cultural and creative industries as a tool for economic development, it also explores the ways in which culture and creativity can stimulate social regeneration. The last section of the book concludes the past and present and future dimensions of the chapters by showcasing a series of hypothetical projects in which the students have proposed a number of ideas to energize Sheffield city centre. Through this wide-ranging mix of places, themes and concepts, the reader is left with an idea of some of the processes of cultural-led urban regeneration across Europe and America in both a historical and contemporary framework.

This book will be useful for undergraduates, some postgraduates and interested readers of cultural issues as it provides a handy reference point for the main texts that have been produced and numerous case-study examples from across the Western world, and it offers an insight into some of the main ways in which culture and creativity has been, is being and will be used to stimulate urban regeneration. However, the book's referencing practice is questionable: most references are to are online sources, and wikipedia is heavily relied on. And although the main authors in the field (Charles Landry, Richard Florida and Sharon Zukin) are mentioned, they are repeatedly, perhaps excessively, cited. The book could have benefited from having a single synthesis chapter which would update the reader on the main literature, which would in turn have allowed the authors to devote more time to empirical studies.