This international and interdisciplinary research network funded by the AHRC offers a forum for reassessing the place of creativity in urban economic growth. It uses the limitations and shortcomings of the creative city model exposed by the recent financial crisis, and the uneven urban prospects of recovery, to review and rethink the historical and theoretical relationship between culture, economy and urban development. Between January and July 2011, workshops were held in London, Leeds and Plymouth bringing together academics, artists, planners, architects, policy-makers and other key stakeholders. These will be used to provide a geographically and historically aware critique of current creative city models, and to try to reshape the policy and conceptual frameworks required to stimulate new creative urban futures.