The cultural economies of world cities are, with few exceptions, experiencing a significant race-to-the bottom crisis of affordability, driven by a largely unchecked spiral of financialisation, gentrification, precarity and displacement. Under such pressure, many urban municipalities now recognise that traditional policy interventions seeking to shore up financial value and competitive advantage in these sectors are increasingly ineffective at mitigating the structural threats facing the intricate ecologies of urban creativity that they prize so highly. Viewed in these terms, without policy interventions that nurture and sustain spaces of creative activity in more equitable and inclusive ways, the fundamental ‘creative city’ credentials of many world cities are at stake. In this paper, we consider ongoing cultural policies intended to underwrite the provision of artists’ studios and creative workspaces as a crucial form of cultural infrastructure. Specifically, we consider the adoption of ‘creative land trust’ (CLT) models that have taken inspiration from the US grassroots ‘land trust’ movement of the 1970s and 1980s seeking radical reformulation of common property and land ownership. Just as dominant discourses and policy agendas of the creative city have developed across global urban policy networks, we show here how creative land trust models are similarly being developed through international circuits of cultural policy exchange, mediated by global actors such as the World Cities Culture Forum and UNESCO. By drawing upon interviews with policy stakeholders and creative workers using studio spaces, we trace one such circuit in the formation of creative land trusts across three world cities – San Francisco, London, and Sydney – as each seeks to adapt the model to local conditions of affordability, ownership and property rights. In doing so, we reflect critically on both the potential for new modes of urban commoning that such models appear to offer, and the role played by international policy transfers that are mobilising their development. 

Dr Rhian Scott is Postdoctoral Research Associate at King’s College London. She has recently completed an ESRC-funded research project exploring the challenges facing affordable workspace provision for artists in London, which informed the recent publication of the Artists’ Workspace Consultation Report (2022). Her current research develops this interest through an international comparison of creative land trust models being deployed in London, San Francisco, and Sydney. 

Dr Luke Dickens is Senior Lecturer in Urban Futures at King’s College London. As an urban cultural geographer, his research examines the cultural politics of urban transformation and its contested futures with a particular focus on youth, creativity and participation. He is widely published in leading international journals including Antipode, cultural geographies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 

Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London and recognised as a leading commentator on urban trends. His work assesses the impacts of urban change on different social groups, with a focus on urban culture and consumption. His recent funded research projects include studies of the role of art in urban cohesion, cinema as a focus for urban life, and impacts of gentrification. His books developing these ideas include: The Battle for the High Street: Retail Gentrification, Class and Disgust (2017), City: Key Ideas in Geography (2017), and Borderland: Identity and Belonging at the edge of England (2022).