Toward a Cultural Economic Geography of Creative Industries and Urban Development: Introduction to the Special Issue on Creative Industries and Urban Development

Abstract

The connections between the development of creative industries and the growth of cities was noted by several sources in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but explanations relating to the nature of the link have thus far proven to be insufficient. The two dominant “scripts” were those of “creative clusters” and “creative/cities/creative class” theories, but both have significant limitations arising from how they privilege amenities-led, supply-driven accounts of urban development and how they fail to adequately situate cities in wider global circuits of culture and economic production. The author proposes that the emergent field of cultural economic geography provides some insights that redress these lacunae, particularly in the possibilities for an original synthesis of cultural and economic geography, cultural studies, and new strands of economic theory.