Creative Networks and the Making of Africa’s First UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy

Creative cities and their networks are topics of growing scholarship. The objective is to examine the emergence of an African creative city and of its membership of a creative network, one of the seven subnetworks of the UNESCO Network of Creative Cities which focuses on gastronomy. The paper represents a contribution to scholarship on gastronomic tourism in the global South and is one of the few studies to address this theme in Africa. Attention is upon Overstrand which is situated in South Africa’s Western Cape province. A discussion is presented of the theoretical concept of creative networks, the development of the UNESCO Network of Creative Cities, debates specifically concerning UNESCO Creative Cities of Gastronomy, and of the evolution of gastronomy as one of the tourism products of the Overstrand, Africa’s first UNESCO creative city of gastronomy.