Abstract:

With its prominent contribution to regional economy, creative industry (CI) is a popular topic both in academic field and practice. CI cultivating and development is crucial for industrial upgrading and spatial restructuring in metropolitans and medium cities. An overall survey of the relative literatures reveals that nine research themes are closely or partly related to this research, which are: influence on economic growth, insights on creative class, reasoning of creative city, elaboration of creative milieu, examination of location preference, exploration on network of CI, argumentation of cultureled urban regeneration, concerns to urban social space, urban policy implications. Recently, CI features the urban agglomeration and urban hierarchy. Integrating the two theories of Christaller's centrality and Floridas creative economy, the article uses original database to explore the determinant factors influencing CI development in urban agglomeration and creative economy, and their impact on urban agglomeration restructuring across 16 cities in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD). A measure index system of 14 factors are proposed from five perspectives of economic, culture, social, creation and intelligence, for the relation of creative industry and urban agglomeration and creative city hierarchy. On the database of year 2005 and 2009, five factors are distinguished in factor analysis with SPSS150 and ArcGIS92, including city amenity, scale and quality of creative class, economic base and economic investment intensity, city recreation facility, with the first three are leading factors. This different feature from Florida's theory implies that diversity of cultural environment and tolerance does not show its impact in those Chinese regions with most developed creative industry. Research also shows the rapid increase of CI in 16 cities, and less disparity at intercity level. The ranksize of city hierarchy with CI as measure index shows similar feature as that using economy or population as index, with Shanghai as the primary city, the second level cities of Nanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou. However it shows some different feature, as Ningbo and Yangzhou showing lower CI level than Taizhou, Zhengjiang and Shaoxing, implying that a new urban system is developing guided by creative industry in the YRD. CI development does not show its restructuring ability in urban system in the YDA, implying the advantage of creativity of creative class has not been transferred to industry advantage. The research implies the competition between cities taking similar development path and policy with space carrier of creative industry center. The disordered competition will restrict the progress to be a creative city, and the competitiveness improvement of the YDA urban agglomeration in global competition