Recent city planning and urban sociology widely discuss the emergence of what city planners, academics, and journalists call the creative city (cf. Florida 2005; Landry 2000). In the context of this much debated concept, empirical research is needed to analyse its implications for the city, understood as (built) place of the social, and for the overall structure of society. So far, studies have focussed mostly either on the impact of cultural developments on cities (cf. e.g. Jayne 2004; Liep 2001; Montgomery 2004; Scott 2000)or on political ecommendations of how to transform cities towards creative cities (cf. e.g. Bianchini and Landry 1994; Carta 2007; Florida 2005; Landry 2006). What's missing are studies analysing the concrete planning approaches that are used in cities which integrate the creative city concept as programmatic element in their city development plans. Additionally, this new form of planning and transforming cities is hardly put in context with greater structural changes of society. My paper presents findings of my empirical research which I conducted in the course of the last two years in the cities of Dublin (Ireland) and Gothenburg (Sweden). The focus was on the political dimension of creative city planning. In so doing, I studied how planning authorities programmatically integrated the concept of creativity in local city development strategies and how that affected the built environment and the city's relation to and impact on overall societal changes. With qualitative interviews with city representatives and planning authorities, participant observation, and photographic documentation, planning strategies, their realization, and their effects on the built environment were studied. Photographic archive material and planning documents served as additional material. Evaluating the broad range of material, several interesting findings were made. One of the findings is that the Triple Helix concept is used as an underlying concept for present city planning and urban transformation. In the city of Gothenburg, the concept is explicitly used in order to transform an old industrial part of the city, the former dockyards, towards a new and sustainable inner-city quarter. That implies focussing on certain parts of the knowledge-intensive economy â which can be subsumed as belonging to the creative class and the creative industries respectively, as Florida or Howkins define them (cf. Florida 2004, p. 328; Howkins 2004, p.88ff). The strategies of the local planning authorities aim at integrating the Lindholmen Science Park in the city of Gothenburg and at enhancing the quarter's infrastructure and reputation. In Dublin, the Triple Helix concept is an implicit part of the planning strategies in selected inner-city quarters. A prominent example is The Digital Hub, a cluster for digital media enterprises which is thought to enhance the city quarter in economic and social terms. Thus, the paper analyzes the characteristics of these particular planning approaches and contextualises them both with traditionally used concepts such as the integrated urban regeneration approach and with the overall programmatic strategy of the creative city. Additionally, it describes how the concept is used as a means to meet the underlying objective to assure the cities' character as a place of the knowledge society (cf. Bell 1973; Drucker 1993). Both the city of Gothenburg with its Science Park and the city of Dublin with its Digital Hub can thus be described as paradigmatic cities of the knowledge society. In this sense, the paper presents a macro- and a micro-perspective on present social developments in Western Europe. On a macro level, the role of cities in and for the knowledge society is brought into focus. On a micro level, local strategies and concrete planning approaches are presented to give a clear picture of two case studies. ; Madrid