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Publication

Creative cities and the infrastructural fragmentation of socioeconomic space

Book Contribution - Chapter

Recent debates on creative cities and the cultural industries are in many
ways stuck in the past. They reproduce many of the same storylines developed
more than ten or even twenty years ago but often leave behind the
original normative concerns in favour of more narrowly defi ned methodological,
empirical or theoretical questions. This, of course, is not intended
to deny the practical ‘usefulness’ (unfortunately mostly understood as policy
relevance) of a continued engagement with the creative city topic, but intellectually,
these debates seem only to offer diminishing returns.
In this chapter, and by way of refl ecting on the fi ndings and arguments of
the contributors to this book, I will try to reconnect this creative city debate
to what I consider more fundamental societal challenges, arguing that the
emergence of creative city debates and their subsequent material realisation
contributes to the fragmentation of urban, regional and national socioeconomic
space. This raises serious questions concerning sociospatial cohesion
and solidarity because the net effect of this fragmentation is a prioritisation
of some actors over others.
Book: Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present
Pages: 261-270
ISBN:9781138054066
Publication year:2018
Keywords:creative cities, urban studies
Accessibility:Open