The Pandemic and the Creative Performance of Cities: An Empirical Study in Portugal

Abstract

In a pandemic and post-pandemic environment, the consequences for the creative economy have been brutal and nefarious. Thus, this study aims to measure cities’ creativity performance, through a composite index, reported in the year 2021. In this sense, the results show that culture, the creative economy and enabling environment, as subdimensions of creativity, show that cities suffered a significant setback in their creative performance. However, this is currently being reversed so that creativity continues to contribute to the performance and growth of cities, whereby the formation of networks/partnerships as allies of the creative class and industries that characterise this dimension becomes even more important. This means that the creative class was one of the most affected by the pandemic, given that its activities are sustained mainly by the public, which corroborated recent studies. The study’s main contribution lies in the use of the Composite Index, in which it was concluded that creativity generates employment and wealth for a country’s economy. Finally, some limitations and avenues for future research were outlined.

Place-based sustainability—act or wait-and-see?

“…Meanwhile creative industries produce "symbolic goods" (Markusen et al, 2008;Strielkowski, 2018) with symbolic value (Krisiukeniene and Pilinkiene, 2023) and are strongly connected with the particular place to create local amenities (Krueger and Buckingham, 2012;Della Lucia and Trunfio, 2018;Rodrigues et al, 2023) and using their own resources (Yum, 2020). Thus, policymakers are looking for new ways to sustain the activity and growth of CCIs, believed to be a growing and potential-holding sector (Redaelli, 2019;Arcos-Pumarola et al, 2023).…”