:  This article represents a broad and occasionally polemical meditation on the nature and significance of creative cities. I seek to situate the concept of creative cities within the context of the so‐called new economy and to trace out the connections of these phenomena to recent shifts in technologies, structures of production, labor markets, and the dynamics of locational agglomeration. I try to show, in particular, how the structures of the new economy unleash historically specific forms of economic and cultural innovation in modern cities. The argument is concerned passim with policy issues and, above all, with the general possibilities and limitations faced by policymakers in any attempt to build creative cities. The effects of globalization are discussed, with special reference to the prospective emergence of a worldwide network of creative cities bound together in relations of competition and cooperation. In the conclusion, I pinpoint some of the darker dimensions—both actual and potential—of creative cities.

An increasingly important fraction of contemporary economic activity is devoted to the production of cultural outputs, i.e. goods and services with high levels of aesthetic or semiotic content. This kind of economic activity is especially, and increasingly, associated with a number of large cities scattered over the globe. A conceptual account of this phenomenon is provided on the basis of an exploration of the character of place‐specific forms of culture generation and the agglomerative tendencies of many kinds of cultural products industries. The empirical cases of Los Angeles and Paris are briefly discussed. The dynamics of production, distribution and location of major cultural products industries are also examined. The paper ends with a brief allusion to the modalities of spatial differentiation of culture in contemporary capitalism and to a prospective cultural politics.

Do jobs follow people or do people follow jobs? A number of currently prominent approaches to urbanization respond to this question by privileging the role of individual locational choice in response to amenity values as the motor of contemporary urban growth. Amenities, it is often said, have an especially potent effect on the migration patterns of individuals endowed with high levels of human capital. However, these approaches raise many unanswered questions. Theories that describe urban growth as a response to movements of people in search of consumer or lifestyle preferences can be questioned on the grounds of their assumptions about human behavior, as well as their silence in regard to the geographical dynamics of production and work. We argue that a more effective line of explanation must relate urban growth directly to the economic geography of production and must explicitly deal with the complex recursive interactions between the location of firms and the movements of labor. In this context, we also offer a reinterpretation of the currently fashionable notions of 'creativity' and the role of skilled labor in cities.

There has been a growing debate in recent decades A disputed conceptThe quotation above echoes a widespread view, namely, that cities are so big, so complicated and so lacking in easily identifiable boundaries that any attempt to define their essential characteristics is doomed to failure. The same problem haunts urban studies generally, with a plethora of diverging claims about the nature of cities competing for attention. Despite this confusion, most of us have little hesitation in dealing with everyday propositions to the effect, say, that cities are now growing rapidly at locations all over the globe or that urbanization is moving ahead more forcefully than at any other time in human history. Indeed, urbanization is so prominent a feature of our world that scholarly agendas attuned to this issue continue to proliferate, even as disagreements multiply as to how exactly cities should be conceptualized and studied.

S COTT A. J. and S TORPER M. (2003) Regions, globalization, development , Reg. Studies 37 , 579-593. Regional economies are synergy-laden systems of physical and relational assets, and intensifying globalization is making this situation more and not less the case. As such, regions are an essential dimension of the development process, not just in the more advanced countries but also in less- developed parts of the world. Development theorists have hitherto largely tended to overlook this critical issue in favour of an emphasis on macroeconomic considerations. At the same time, conventional theories of the relationship between urbanization and economic development have favoured the view that the former is simply an effect of the latter. To be fully general, the theory of development must incorporate the role of cities and regions as active and causal elements in the economic growth process. This argument has consequences for development policy, especially in regard to the promotion of positive agglomeration economies and the initiation of growth in poorer regions. A related policy problem concerns ways of dealing with the increase in interregional inequalities associated with contemporary globalization. Issues of economic geography are thus of major significance to development theory and practice. S COTT A. J. et S TORPER M. (2003) Les regions, la mondialisation, le developpement, Reg. Studies 37 , 579-593. Les e conomies regionales sont des systemes d'atouts physiques et relationnels bourres de synergies, et l'intensification de la mondialisation renforce cet etat des choses. En tant que telles, les regions constituent un element cle du processus de developpement, non seulement dans les pays plus avances, mais aussi dans les zones moins developpees du monde. Jusqu'ici, les theoriciens du developpement ont eu tendance a ignorer en grande partie cette question primordiale, favorisant plutot des considerations macroeconomiques. En meme temps, des theories traditionnelles du rapport entre l'urbanisation et le developpement economique ont affirme que celle-la s'explique par celui-ci. En principe, la theorie du developpement doit embrasser le role des grandes villes et des regions comme elements essentiels et causaux dans le processus de croissance economique. Cette affirmation a de l' importance pour la politique de developpement, surtout pour ce qui est de la promotion des economies d'agglomeration positives et de l'amorcage de la croissance dans les regions defavorisees. Un probleme de politique connexe concerne les facons d'aborder la question du creusement des inegalites interregionales liees a la mondialisation contemporaine. Par la suite, les questions de geographie economique sont d'une importance majeure pour ce qui concerne la theorie du developpement, en principe et en pratique. S COTT A. J. und S TORPER M. (2003) Regionen, Globalisation, Entwicklung, Reg. Studies 37 , 579-593. Regionalwirtschaften sind Synergie-geladene Systeme mit physischen und relationalen Vermogenswerten, welche die immer intensiver wer...

We dedicate this paper to our late friend and colleague Edward Soja in the full knowledge that he would have been unable to resist expressing alternative perspectives on almost everything we say. 2 AbstractUrban studies today is marked by many active debates. In an earlier paper, we addressed some of these debates by proposing a foundational concept of urbanization and urban form as a way of identifying a common language for urban research. In the present paper we provide a brief recapitulation of that framework. We then use this preliminary material as background to a critique of three currently influential versions of urban analysis, namely, postcolonial urban theory, assemblage theoretic approaches, and planetary urbanism. We evaluate each of these versions in turn and find them seriously wanting as statements about urban realities. We criticize (a) postcolonial urban theory for its particularism and its insistence on the provincialization of knowledge, (b) assemblage theoretic approaches for their indeterminacy and eclecticism, and (c) planetary urbanism for its radical devaluation of the forces of agglomeration and nodality in urban-economic geography.3 Urban Challenges and Urban Theory in the 21st CenturyThe current period of human history can plausibly be identified not only as a global but also as an urban era. This is a period in which population, productive activity, and wealth are highly and increasingly concentrated in cities. 1 Most cities offer a better standard of living for more people than ever before in human history; even the urban poor are better off, on average, than the rural poor around the world. Cities are primary centers of scientific, cultural and social innovation (Hall, 1998; Glaeser, 2012). Cities have also proliferated all over the globe and have become increasingly interdependent so that where once we could speak quite meaningfully of "national urban systems" (most extensively developed in the Global North) the current situation is one marked by an increasingly integrated world-wide network of cities together with an extraordinary surge of urban growth in the Global South (McKinsey, 2011). But this era is also in some ways a dark age as marked by gutted-out old industrial cities, concentrated poverty, slums, ethnic conflict, ecological challenges, unequal access to housing, gentrification, homelessness, social isolation, violence and crime, and many other problems. There has been a corresponding proliferation of academic and policy-related research on cities and a vigorous revival of debates about the content and theoretical orientation of urban studies.In this paper we discuss three currently influential perspectives on these debates, namely, postcolonial urban analysis, assemblage theoretic accounts of the city, and the theory of "planetary urbanism." In their different ways, each of these three bodies of work attempts to provide bold understandings of the empirical trends referred to above.At the same time, each of them seeks to present an account of the city that poses strong ...

Creative destruction is a central element of the competitive dynamic of capitalism. This phenomenon assumes concrete form in relation to specific geographical and historical conditions. One such set of conditions is investigated here under the rubric of the creative field, i.e. the locationally-differentiated web of production activities and associated social relationships that shapes patterns of entrepreneurship and innovation in the new economy. The creative field operates at many different levels of scale, but I argue that the urban and regional scale is of special interest and significance. Accordingly, I go on to describe how the creative field functions as a site of (a) entrepreneurial behavior and new firm formation, (b) technical and organizational change, and (c) the symbolic elaboration and re-elaboration of cultural products. All of these activities are deeply structured by relations of spatial-cum-organizational proximity and separation in the system of production. The creative field, however, is far from being a fully self-organizing entity, and it is susceptible to various kinds of breakdowns and distortions. Several policy issues raised by these problems are examined. The paper ends by addressing the question as to whether industrial agglomeration is an effect of producers’ search for creative synergies, or whether such synergies are themselves simply a contingent outcome of agglomeration. Copyright Springer 2006

In this article, we explore the issue of industrial agglomeration and its relationship to economic development and growth in the less‐developed countries of East Asia. We present theoretical arguments and secondary empirical evidence as to why we should have strong expectations about finding a positive relationship between agglomeration and economic performance. We also review evidence from the literature on the roles of formal and informal institutions in East Asian regional economic systems. We then focus specifically on the case of China. We argue that regional development in China has much in common with regional development in other East Asian economies, although there are also important contrasts because of China's history of socialism and its recent trend toward economic liberalization. Through a variety of statistical investigations, we substantiate (in part) the expected positive relationship between agglomeration and economic performance in China. We show that many kinds of manufacturing sectors are characterized by a strong positive relationship between spatial agglomeration and productivity. This phenomenon is especially marked in sectors and regions where liberalization has proceeded rapidly. We consider the relevance of our comments about industrial clustering and economic performance for policy formulation in China and the less‐developed countries of East Asia.