Exploring the theme of a creative city in the Venetian context reveals a complex picture. The case of Forte Marghera clearly combines the contradictions of Venice as a creative city. Artists, creative workers, policy makers, opinion makers and operators share a physical space made up of natural and historical heritage and former military buildings. Top-down governance rules combine with bottom-up initiatives through a language still unknown to both parties. The productive ambition of the creative class who inhabits the district goes against the entertainment vocation of the bars and restaurants, which are increasingly developing in the site. In this study, Forte Marghera is explored as the Venetian case where controversial positions meet in the same place. It is also this case that best demonstrates how different understandings of the creative city model can give rise to different processes of creativity-led regeneration. The article proposes three approaches for the development of the creative city model in Forte Marghera, which could be found elsewhere in Italy and beyond Italy. First of all, from a general overview of the situation, Forte Marghera appears to be a self-organizing system where causes and effects cannot be mapped in a linear manner. In the theory of social self-organization, humans play a key role as creative beings (Fuchs, 2003). In fact, structures do not act, they only exist within and through social actions, and the term social self-organization refers to the dialectical relationship between structures and actions, which results in reproduction overall system (Fuchs, 2003: 147). ). This approach is essential to governance conceived as a collective action of private, public and business agents reg...... middle of document ......d the relative roles of government policy and strategy , non-governmental groups, private forces of capital and citizens to shape the artistic, cultural, social and economic character of Forte Marghera. Government actors, through weak and disorganized policies, attempted to define the future development of the Fort, without success. At the same time, despite the efforts of a non-governmental organization, namely the Marco Polo System, to shape the development of the fort, the results remain uncertain. The free play of market players, such as restaurants and bars, and the individual choices of residents and local communities embody the current form of Forte Marghera as a creative and cultural park. Ultimately, the growth of Forte Marghera was largely caused by the availability of material and immaterial spaces: political, physical, social and cultural..