Creative cities and the reflexivity of the urban creative economy

Abstract

The paper addresses the abundant literature on the creative city that has been generated following publication in 2002 of Richard Florida's work on the creative class. In particular, it is maintained that the discussion should be based more on a robust social economic analysis of urban economies. The paper starts with a brief review of the polarized debate on the creative city in which either the optimist obsession with a new growth sector is stressed or there is a focus of attention on its negative impact on urban society. Building on the idea of cultural production as a reflexive economic activity and on three empirical vignettes about how culture, the economy and the city interact, it argues that cultural production is an adaptable activity which is, however, permanently forced into a state of adaptation. Urban space and society have an ambivalent role here. On the one hand, the city offers adaptability: on the other hand, however, because this is the case, it fosters the need for permanent adaptation.

Bridging the gap in creative economy and ICT research: a regional analysis in Europe

“…The implication is that urban policy makers should consider both creative and ICT capital when locating creative functions within cities and regions. Policy makers should not only focus on 'culture', which has commonly been associated with the creative class (Navarro et al, 2014;Thiel, 2017), but they should also encourage technological investment and applications such as ICT and the digital transformation more generally and ensuring creative workers gain access to it.…”

“…Florida's creative class concept (Florida, 2002a;2002b;2010a;2010b) focused on the contribution of creative skills rather than general human capital and this was coined as the Three T's (Technology, Talent, Tolerance). However, Florida's assertions has created a polarised debate in the literature (Thiel, 2017) and some have advocated that the logic and empirical claims of the creative class within Florida's thesis is to a certain degree disconnected with economic and social realities (Peck, 2005;Scott, 2014). The literature has specified deficiencies concerning the theoretical framework that Florida utilised, such as: illustrating no difference compared to the traditional human capital measure (the share of graduates) (Glaeser, 2005;Donegan et al, 2008;Nathan, 2015); only indicating a sense of static correlation but not causality between the presence of the creative class and economic growth (Boschma and Fritsch, 2009); failing to capture the role of the creative class when explaining economic growth in smaller urban and rural areas; and failing to acknowledge bi-directional (Neal, 2012) relationships i.e.…”

Creative Clusters and Creative Multipliers: Evidence from UK Cities

“…The first is that urbanised creative industries are simply the spatial manifestation of an evolving national economy, a post-industrial process Lash and Urry (1984) refer to as 'culturalisation' and which Scott (2014) dubs 'cognitive-cultural capitalism'. In this view, creativity, broadly defined, is increasingly embedded into mainstream economic and social processes (Thiel 2016). While this embedding might take different forms across different countries (Hutton 2008, Lorenzen and Andersen 2009, Boix, Capone et al 2014, Kemeny, Nathan et al 2020) it implies that creative industries do not necessarily have an impact on their wider urban economies.…”

Accumulation of cultural capital at the intersection of socio-demographic features and productive specializations

“…However, as stressed again by Thiel (2017), cultural capital is made of vulnerable assets that "permanently face uncertainty and the necessity of change," depending on actors who interact with the "relational, institutional, cultural and material conditions in which they are embedded" (ibidem, 31-32). This suggests the need to 1 3…”