Innovation is widely recognised as a driver of urban and regional development, but attention has focused almost exclusively on technical and social forms. Aesthetic innovation, despite mounting evidence of its economic and urban contribution, remains largely absent from research and policy on urban and regional development. This paper addresses that gap by drawing on the history of art and on new empirical evidence from the contemporary art world.

First, it examines six major artistic epochs, from the Renaissance to Postmodernism, across leading creative cities and introduces the concept of creative ecosystems as an interpretive framework. The analysis suggests that aesthetic innovation is an emergent property of complex urban systems, generating consequences that extend into technical, institutional and economic domains. It is argued that aesthetic, technical and social innovation form mutually reinforcing loops through which cities develop.

Second, it explores whether this historical configuration still holds for contemporary cities, using the World Art Cities Index (WACI), a new composite measure of aesthetic innovative capacity across 50 cities worldwide. It is found that cities with strong aesthetic capacity outperform matched comparators on wider urban development across 45 of 50 cities examined.

It is concluded that art and the aesthetic innovation it generates goes hand-in-hand with the economic development of cities and regions. The policy task, therefore, is to build the creative ecosystems through which peripheral and post-industrial places can capture the value of the aesthetic innovation they now generate, rather than treating them as nurseries for the core.