Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
would direct readers to Richards and Wilson's (2007a) edited volume
Tourism, Creativity and
Development
, which provides a more in-depth conceptual underpinning.
Creative geographies
Much has been published on the relationship between urban transformation, culture and
(latterly) creativity, increasingly by geographers (Champion, 2010; Chapain
et al.
, 2010; Flew,
2010; Florida, 2002, 2005; Hamilton and Granger, 2010; Pratt, 2008; Richards and Wilson,
2006, 2007a; S. Scott, 2006; Waitt and Gibson, 2009), which extends to the emergence of a
Creative Industries Journal
, published by Intellect. As Ribera-Fumaz (2009: 450) argues:
as culture has become a more explicit part of economic urban strategies (e.g.
European Capitals of Cultures; the 'Guggenheim effect' etc.), urban political econ-
omists also started to think seriously about the role of culture and discourses in the
production of urban strategies.
In mainstream geography, the focus has been on an emerging 'creative turn' entrenched
within the wider cultural turn (see Gale,
Chapter 4
in this volume), which has more recently
come to terms with the consumption aspects of the urban creative domain. Previous studies
had tended to focus on the political economy of urban creativity - creative labour forces, the
creative industries (Pratt, 2008), the spatial development of creative spaces and mega-projects.
However, the mobility of creative talent and knowledge (after Florida, 2002, 2005) has
become perhaps the principal topic in studies of creativity, space and place. This latter body
of research led to the development of several major indices and indicators of creativity, which
in turn has fuelled the momentum of creative strategies worldwide (see for example Florida
and Tinagli, 2004).
Many of the earlier studies of creativity as a policy instrument and an industrial sector
outside of the geography discipline were based on government-led mapping and defi nition
research (particularly in the UK; see for example DCMS, 1998). More recently, (mostly
economic) geographers have taken stock of research and theoretical developments in the fi eld
and have started to advance economics-based conceptual frameworks underpinning the crea-
tive domain in geography (see for example de Propris
et al.
's (2009) piece for NESTA on the
geography of creativity, which adopted traditional econometric approaches to measure the
value and volume of the creative industries).
Also from an economic geography perspective, S. Scott (2006) examined labour markets,
entrepreneurship, innovation and industrial development in 'revisiting' the creative fi eld,
while Jayne (2005) explored the regional development dimension of the creative economy. A
special issue of
Economic Geography
explored the creative class in European City Regions
(edited by Asheim, 2009), including pieces on centrality, urban hierarchy and creativity, as
wel l as reg iona l g rowth and creative industr ies development. Research in this domain has a lso
concentrated on behaviour patterns of (mostly urban) creative fi rms, spatial economic clusters
(with a particular focus on creative districts, cosmopolitan neighbourhoods, design districts,
and other post-thematisation place-framing devices (Hutton, 2006).
Other studies have included creative sector-defi ned cases, including fashion (Chilese and
Russo, 2008; Santagata, 2004), fi lm/movie production (Turok, 2003), music clusters (Florida
and Jackson, 2010), advertising (Pratt, 2006), digital and audiovisual clusters and major event
spaces (Richards and Palmer, 2010). Ethnic cultural and creative clusters or precincts, partic-
ularly based around gastronomy and retail, have also been the object of several studies (see for
