Creative Ecosystems and Urban Sustainability: Evidence from Global Cities
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Abstract
Cultural and creative activity is often presented as a source of urban vitality, yet comparative evidence typically combines cultural amenities, entrepreneurship, social openness, and sustainability without clarifying how these components work together. This study develops and tests a city-level creative-ecosystem framework across a primary sample of 82 global cities. We standardized cultural amenities, creative entrepreneurship, and enabling conditions and integrated them into a Creative-Ecosystem Capacity Index, while evaluating sustainable urban performance through people, planet, profit, and overall city outcomes. We used Spearman correlations, heteroskedasticity-robust regression, quartile comparisons, principal-component sensitivity analysis, and cluster analysis, followed by independent validation against climate-governance and urban-prosperity indicators. The integrated index was positively associated with overall sustainable-city performance (B = 6.14, p = .036) and showed its strongest adjusted relationship with the profit dimension (B = 11.48, p = .009). Enabling conditions, represented by education, digital access, and tolerance, were more consistently associated with overall and people-centered outcomes than cultural amenities alone. Cities in the highest creative-ecosystem quartile recorded a mean overall score of 72.10 compared with 30.00 in the lowest quartile. External validation produced positive correlations with sustainability governance (rho = .487) and city prosperity (rho = .829). The findings indicate that cultural provision becomes more consequential when embedded in entrepreneurial, educational, digital, and inclusive urban systems. Because the design is cross-sectional and relies on harmonized public indicators, the results establish comparative associations rather than causal effects. The study contributes a measurable, policy-oriented framework for evaluating culture-led urban development without reducing creative capacity to venue counts or cultural visibility alone.
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