This article aims to advance the literature on policy mobility by decentring the primacy of mobility itself and focusing on understanding what cities do in order to ‘arrive at’ localized versions of urban policy in relation to globally circulating ideas around creativity. The paper explores the performance of a particular local ‘creative economy’ in terms of institutional and strategic adjustments, key drivers and individuals and events, and the role of long-term local, national and international influences on ‘creative cityness’. It does this through an analysis of cultural and creativity policy and local stakeholders in the cultural policy scene in Gdańsk, Poland, focusing on the local performative aspects of mobile policies and arguing the need to understand the formation of a ‘common local project’ as a form of intra-urban connectedness alongside inter-urban connectedness. The paper extends the range of contexts in which the ‘creative city’ has been analysed to include post-socialist, post-European Union accession Central and Eastern Europe, thus making an original contribution by studying these issues in the context of the complex multi-scalar relations between the city, national government and the supranational European Union and the ideological conflict between national authoritarian neoliberalism and urban and supranational scale (neo-)liberalism.

This paper develops perspectives which seek to spatialize authoritarian neoliberalism through arguing for greater engagement with the politics of urban cultural policy formation in the neglected context of post-socialist East and Central Europe. Through analyzing the politics of urban cultural policy-making in Gdańsk, Poland, the paper spatializes authoritarian neoliberalism by exploring how relations between the urban and the national, and between the urban and the supranational, shape urban cultural policy, drawing upon literatures on political economy, policy mobilities, cultural policy research, and the concepts of authoritarian neoliberalism and the relational-territorial nexus. Gdańsk is a liberally run city, strongly aligned with the European Union (EU), opposed to the authoritarian neoliberal national level politics in Poland. The paper analyses urban-national tensions and relationships between Gdańsk and the EU to unpack the contested spatial nature of authoritarian neoliberalism.

Analysis of the role emotions play in a range of social processes has increased significantly, but is neglected in the context of cultural policymaking. Recent literatures in feminist and emotional geographies draw attention to how emotions are emergent in, and play a role in shaping, a broad range of social contexts and processes, while other literatures stress the need to 'personalise' the expert and consider the emotional aspects of planning. Inspired by these literatures we deploy the notion of 'affective urbanism' to study how emotions are interwoven with cultural policy spaces in the city and explore the 'emotional regimes' that incorporate emotions with the multi-scalar politics that is shaping urban cultural policy-making. This is undertaken through an analysis of emotions in the working lives and political contexts of cultural policy-makers in Stockholm (Sweden), Gdańsk (Poland) and Manchester (UK). Overall the paper seeks to develop a research agenda that places emotions centrally in studies of cultural policy formation and implementation.

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