My paper “Creative suburbia: Rethinking urban cultural policy- the Australian case” will be published in the Intenrational Journal of Cultural Studies in 2012, but a pre-publication copy can be accessed here. The abstract for the paper is below:

This article considers the question of whether creative workers demonstrate a preference for inner cities or suburbs, drawing upon research findings from the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project undertaken by a team of Australian researchers over 2008–2010 in selected suburban areas of Brisbane and Melbourne. Locating this question in wider debates about the relationship of the suburbs to the city, as well as the development of new suburban forms such as master-planned communities, the article finds that the number of creative industries workers located in the suburbs is significant, and those creative workforce members living and working in suburban areas are generally happy with this experience, locating in the suburbs out of personal choice rather than economic necessity. It is noted that this runs counter to received wisdom on creative cities, which emphasize cultural amenity in inner city areas as a primary driver of location decisions for the ‘creative class’. The article draws out some implications of the findings for urban cultural policy, arguing that the focus on developing inner urban cultural amenity has been overplayed, and that more attention should be given to how to better enable distributed knowledge systems through high-speed broadband infrastructure.

The Introduction to the special issue, co-authored with Mark Gibson, Christy Collis and Emma Felton, can also be accessed here.