Creativity, as well as culture as its part, is progressively becoming a source of competitive advantage, and is becoming an important objective for development policies paying particular attention to the territorial dimension of innovative processes (Lazzareti et al., 2008). At the local level, the first step is to map the creative and cultural potential and evaluate it suitability for the future development. The creative potential of a territory combines the elements of hard and soft infrastructure and adds to them the intangible components such as creativity, symbolic value, image, and atmosphere (e.g. universities, innovation center, people, partnerships, openness, cultural institutions, etc.). Based on the mapped creative and cultural potential the city managers can suggest the strategy of creative and cultural development respecting the unique features of the city or village. The strategical approach makes up the roadmap that ensures success in planning and implementation and support the inclusion of collaboration and partnership with relevant stakeholders. The ambition of the paper is to present examples of cities from Slovak Republic and France, where the culture and creative industries are a key driver of the local development and can be an inspiration for other European cities how to use the cultural and creative potential in more addressed way and point out what to avoid. The paper is an output of international project SK-FR-2017-0001 Creative potential in the cities and its exploitation in the sustainable development.