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1. Introduction
In the past two decades, the interconnection between local development and cultural industries has rapidly gained interest in policy rounds as the urban cultural policy that could promote cultural and economic vitality (Hesmondhalgh and Pratt, 2005; Lee, 2015). In 1997, the British government’s distinct effort to establish a Creative Industries Task Force and to re-brand culture came to be the origination of the policy-related debates on the concept of creative industries (DCMS, 2001). Subsequently, the term cultural industries in the arts policy documents was shifted to the creative industries in the governmental policy documents (Garnham, 2005). In this shift, both culture and creativity were realised as a driving force of economic urban redevelopment and social solidarity (Patricio Mulero and Rius-Ulldemolins, 2017).
Currently, most of the international debates have concentrated on the Western world, affected by the European urban experiences (Minty and Nkula-Wenz, 2019). There are similar studies on European cities such as the integration of arts festivals or regeneration of public spaces in cities of Manchester, Copenhagen and Vienna (Olsen, 2013). Here, a missing focus has been on the impacts of local culture and local creative potentials of cities and the influence of national cultural strategies (Kim and Comunian, 2020), especially on urban cultural policy adoption. This is a more common case in the middle-east, such as Iran, where in spite of several registered creative cities, there is neither a national “cultural” policy nor a document particularly dedicated to the creative economy, even with the general development goal to develop a culture in the economy field and to raise local awareness and contribution to the indigenous socio-cultural assets in cities (MRUD, 2014). In a developing country such as Iran, the national documents have mostly based their cultural strategies on international documents such as the United Nation (UN)’s schemas. Thus, this paper adopts the UN definition where cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have transnationally been described as the rounds of production and distribution of goods and services where the main input has been creativity and intellectual capital (UNCTAD, 2010). Accordingly, in Iran, CCIs encompass not only the new smart technology but also the indigenous arts such as local performance, traditional architecture and crafts that can attract cross-national creative tourism (Pourzakarya, 2022).
There is a...