This book offers a fundamental contribution to the literature on the creative industries and the knowledge-based economy by focusing on three aspects: urban spaces as key sites of capitalist restructuring, creative industries policies as state technologies aimed at economic exploitation, and the role of networks of aesthetic production in inflecting these tendencies. It simultaneously goes beyond these debates by integrating a concern with the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the creative industries. As such, the book is relevant to researchers interested in the transdisciplinary project of a cultural political economy of creativity and urban change.
This book offers a fundamental contribution to the literature on the creative industries and the knowledge-based economy by focusing on three aspects: urban spaces as key sites of capitalist restructuring, creative industries' policies as state technologies aimed at economic exploitation, and the role of networks of aesthetic production in inflecting these tendencies. It simultaneously goes beyond these debates by integrating a concern with the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the creative industries. As such, the book is relevant to researchers interested in the transdisciplinary project of a cultural political economy of creativity and urban change.
In my original paper for Dialogues in Urban Research, I mapped the publication output of a set of multi-disciplinary urban studies centres across the world. The aim was to provide first insights into the (uneven) geographies of urban knowledge production and circulation. In this reply to the five commentaries on my paper, I will develop three observations in some more detail: urban studies as a fragmented field of research, urban studies as a place-based articulation of multiple disciplines and urban studies centres as a contested organisational form within university hierarchies.
This paper poses the question of what the proliferation of urban research centres across the world means for urban studies as a field of research, what this tells us about the (uneven) geographies of urban knowledge production and circulation, and who are the key institutions and researchers involved. In other words: what, where and who is urban studies? Building on a minor tradition of bibliometric research in urban studies and related disciplines, the paper assesses the Scopus-registered 2011–2021 publication output of the more than 1000 researchers affiliated to 30 urban studies centres across the world. The analysis points to four main observations. First, urban studies output is published in an extraordinarily wide range of journals, representing work from research communities across the social sciences and humanities, engineering, natural sciences and medical sciences. Second, clear global hierarchies exist in knowledge production, but co-authorship relations are also shaped by geographical proximity and the multidisciplinary profile of each individual research centre. Third, English is the dominant language of academic publications, but other languages play important roles for individual centres at the level of co-authorship relations and journals. Fourth, the article provides evidence of a diverse and globally distributed landscape of mid-sized urban studies centres that contribute substantially to the top urban studies journals. Each observation is linked to a reflection on the potential role for research centres in creating a more equal playing field for urban studies.
This book offers a fundamental contribution to the literature on the creative industries and the knowledge-based economy by focusing on three aspects: urban spaces as key sites of capitalist restructuring, creative industries policies as state technologies aimed at economic exploitation, and the role of networks of aesthetic production in inflecting these tendencies. It simultaneously goes beyond these debates by integrating a concern with the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the creative industries. As such, the book is relevant to researchers interested in the transdisciplinary project of a cultural political economy of creativity and urban change.
Acknowledgements ix I. Introduction 1 I.1 Theme and Relevance 1 I.2 Research Questions and Focus 5 I.3 Thesis Statement 7 I.4 Case Selection 8 I.5 Chapter Organization 12 II. Methodology and Methods 22 II.1 Introduction 22 II.2 Cultural Studies and Critique 22 II.2.1 Culture as Ideology and the Hall/Jessop Debate 24 II.2.2 Urban Cultures and Critique 27 II.2.3 Culture, Political Economy and Urban Complexity 33 II.2.4 Cultural Analysis and Re- Specifying Critique 36 II.3 Critical Realism and Methodology 39 II.3.1 Retroductive Research 39 II.3.2 The Ontology of Critical Realism 42 II.3.3 Critical Realism and Social Research 44 II.3.4 Emergence 46 II.4 Between Disciplinary Deconstruction and Transdisciplinarity 49 II.5 Research Methods and Data Collection 52 II.5.1 Discourse Analysis 55 II.5.2 Qualitative Data 57 II.5.3 Spatial Data Analysis 58 II.5.3 Quantitative Data 59 II.6 Conclusion 61 III. Accumulation, Regulation, Networks 62 III.1 Introduction 62 III.2 Accumulation and Regulation 62 III.2.1 Accumulation Regime, Mode of Accumulation, Model of 64 Development III.2.2 The Crisis of Fordism, Post- Fordist Accumulation and the 68 Complexity of Regulation III.2.3 Meso-Level Investigations and the Intersection of Theories 75 III.2.4 Weaknesses of the Regulation Approach 79 III.3 Networks 81 III.3.1 Social Network Analysis 81 III.3.2 Inter-Urban Networks 84 III.3.3 Commodity Chains and Transnational Cultures 86 III.3.4 Actor-Network Theory 87 III.4 Towards a Cultural Political Economy of Emergence 89 III.5 Cities and Networks 96 III.5.1 London and Berlin 96 III.5.2 Music Networks 101 III.6 Conclusion 104 IV. Location 106 IV.1 Introduction 106 IV.2 Creative Cluster Policies in London and Berlin 106 IV.3 Music Clusters in London and Berlin 109 IV.3.1 London 109 IV.3.2 Berlin 113 IV.4 The Exclusions of Theory and Policy 117 IV.4.1 Vertical and Horizontal Linkages 117 IV.4.2 Knowledge and Learning 127 IV.4.3 Cluster Growth and Development 132 IV.5 Conclusion 137 V. Communication 139 V.1 Introduction 139 V.2 Urban ...
The volume highlights ongoing changes in the political economy of small cities in relation to the field of culture and leisure. Culture and leisure are focal points both to local entrepreneurship and to planning by city governments, which means that these developments are subject to market dynamics as well as to political discourse and action. Public-private partnerships as well as conflicts of interests characterise the field, and a major issue related to the strategic development of culture and leisure is the balance between market and welfare. This field is gaining importance in most cities today in planning, production and consumption, but to the extent that these changes have drawn academic attention it has focused on large, metropolitan areas and on creative clusters and flagship high culture projects. Smaller cities and their often substantively different cultural strategies have been largely ignored, thus leading to a huge gap in our knowledge on contemporary urban change. By bringing together a number of case studies as well as theoretical reflections on the cultural political economy of small cities, this volume contributes to an emerging small cities research agenda and to the development of policy-relevant expertise that is sensitive to place-specific cultural dynamics. In taking this approach, the volume hopes to contribute to emerging research on culture and leisure economies by developing a differentiated spatial dimension to it, without which sustainable urban strategies cannot be developed. This book integrates perspectives of economic development with questions of governance and equity in relation to the fields of culture and leisure planning and development. This book should be of interest to students and researchers of Urban Studies and Planning, Regional Studies and Economics, as well as Sociology and Geography.
AbstractThe notion of the 'urban laboratory' is increasingly striking a chord with actors involved in urban change. Is this term simply a metaphor for urban development or does it suggest urbanization by substantially different means? To answer this question, we review the work of science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have empirically investigated laboratories and practices of experimentation over the past three decades to understand the significance of these spaces of experimentation in urban contexts. Based on this overview of laboratory studies, we argue that urban laboratories and experimentation involve three key achievements — situatedness, change‐orientation and contingency — that are useful for evaluating and critiquing those practices that claim to be urban laboratories. We conclude by considering some future directions of research on urban laboratories.
