This article reviews work on 'cultural economy', particularly from within geography, and from other disciplines, where there are links to overtly geographical debates. We seek to clarify different interpretations of the term and to steer a course through this multivalency to suggest productive new research agendas. We review and critique work on cultural economy that represents a relatively straightforward economic geography, based on empirical observation while theoretically informed and driven by debates about Fordism and post-Fordism, agglomeration and cluster theory. Some of these ideas about cultural economy have proven attractive to policymakers and we map a normative script of cultural economy, with its prescriptive recommendations for economic development, which we then critique. Turning from this normative cultural economy, we move to a more theoretical discussion which reinterprets the cultural economy in light of debates on the culturization of 'the economic' in research praxis. We conclude that better acknowledgement is needed of the contradictory uses of 'cultural economy', but point nevertheless to the value of this multivalency as long as we reflect on the multiple contradictions and interpretations. With many current absences in work on cultural economy, we suggest various agendas waiting to be addressed.

Whether advocating creativity as a means to place competition or critiquing the social dislocations that stem from creativity-led urban regeneration, research about the creative economy has tended to assume that large cities are the cores of creativity. That many workers in `creative' industries choose to live and work in small urban centres is often overlooked. In this context, this article aims to recover within debates the importance of size, geographical position and class legacies in theories of creativity, economic development and urban regeneration. Using empirical materials from a case study of one Australian city—Wollongong, in New South Wales—it is argued that what might at first appear a rather parochial example illustrates the importance of rethinking the creative economy in place. Crucially, it is shown that, regardless of the numerical population size of a city, creativity is embedded in various complex, competing and intersecting place narratives fashioned by discourses of size, proximity and inherited class legacies. Only when the creative economy is conceptualised qualitatively in place is it possible to reveal how urban regeneration can operate in uncertain and sometimes surprising ways, simultaneously to estrange and involve civic leaders and residents.

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Recent dialogues in geography and the social sciences have reminded researchers of the extent to which academic and policy knowledges are socially and spatially embedded – that is, they circulate through formal and informal systems of publishing, exchange, commodification and cultural influence. Academic and policy knowledges are, in short, very much a part of the creative economy. In light of this, our paper surveys knowledges of the creative economy itself, as reflected in a geography of industry reports and government policy statements in selected Asian countries. Using a post‐positivist framework adapted from diffusion theory, we critically interpret the circulation, mutation and adaptation of knowledges of the creative economy, claims to its significance, areas of emphases and notable silences.

This paper continues recent discussions on the (geo)politics of the production of academic knowledges, in relation to the recent rise of narratives of 'the creative economy'. Creativity and the 'creative industries' are increasingly common components of urban economic development discourse, especially following the release of a set of key books -most notably Charles Landry's The Creative City (2000), and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) -that have become popular among economic development planners and cultural policy makers. This paper focuses on the traffic of these books, and their authors, beyond the Anglo-American core. It also briefly discusses policy discourses interpreted from these texts. It is principally, though, a critique of the ways in which academic knowledges circulate, stemming from theorization of academics as creative producers, and of knowledge production as part of the creative economy. The article seeks to critique the means by which particular northern economic knowledges become normative, framed as universal and 'global', and are distributed and absorbed via intellectual 'scenes' and an academic 'celebrity' circuit.

Music has been neglected in geography, yet the rise of ‘world music’ exemplifies the multiple ways in which places are constructed, commodified and contested. Music from distant and ‘exotic’ places has long entered the western canon, yet the pace of diffusion to the west accelerated with the rise of reggae and the marketing of Paul Simon's Graceland (1986), which pointed to the modification and transformation of distant, ‘other’ musics for western tastes and markets. Fusion and hybridity in musical styles emphasized both the impossibility of tracing authenticity in musical styles and the simultaneous exoticism and accessibility of distant musics. ‘Strategic inauthenticity’, romanticization and the fetishization of marginality were central to the search for and marketing of purity and novelty: simplistic celebrations of geographical diversity and remoteness. The formal arrival of world music in 1987 was as a marketing category with commerce and culture entangled and inseparable, in a form of appropriation for western, cosmopolitan audiences. Yet, for musicians, world music was an expressive project, which created identities that fused the local and global, traditional and modern. For some, international success required artistic compromise, essentialized identities and the resources of transnational companies. Others simply resisted categorization. The expansion of world music exemplifies the deterritorialization of cultures and emphasizes how the rise of a particular cultural commodity (world music) is primarily a commercial phenomenon, but could not have occurred without the construction and contestation of discourses of place and otherness.