Creative industries are increasingly associated with employment, tourism and the attraction and retention of talent in economic development discourse. However, there is a need to foreground the interests involved in promoting the creative city and the political implications of such policies. This paper analyses new industry formation in Liberty Village—a cultural industry precinct in inner-city Toronto, Canada. The focus is on the place-making strategies at work in constructing Liberty Village. In particular, the paper explores a series of displacements associated with creative districts, focusing on three scales in particular—the level of the city, the neighbourhood and the precinct itself. An examination of these displacements foregrounds the contested nature of the creative city script.

Richard Florida’s creative class theory has recently been adopted by many municipal governments as a key urban economic development policy. This trend, as others have noted, has significant implications for social justice in the creative city, particularly by continuing and even deepening class inequality. This paper shares in the spirit of these class‐based critiques, but goes beyond them to argue that gender and racial equality is also at stake in the creative city. We point in particular to three particular geographies of the creative city – (1) the conceptual spaces of the creative class idea, (2) the workplaces of the cultural and creative industries and (3) the amenity and public landscapes of the creative city – as sites where class, gender and racial inequalities are maintained and exacerbated as a result of creativity‐led urban economic development policies.

In this paper we analyze the making of Liberty Village as a creative hub in inner-city Toronto. We focus on the role of property developers and the Liberty Village Business Improvement Association in fostering the area's internal economic geography. Drawing on the literature on governmentality, we dissect how the production of a place identity requires both the production of new subjectivities and the exclusion of alternative actors and understandings of organization within the district.

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