The special issue of The Information Society on “Creative Industries and Urban Development” (Volume 26 No. 2) is now available through Taylor & Francis. The special issue contains a paper by Stuart Cunningham and myself assessing the creative industries concept after over a decade among both policy institutions and cultural academics. In the paper we argue the following:
It has now been over a decade since the concept of creative industries was first put into the public domain by the Blair Labour government’s Creative Industries Mapping Documents in Britain. The concept has developed traction globally, but it has also been understood and developed in different ways in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and North America, and also in international bodies such as UNCTAD and UNESCO. A review of the policy literature reveals that although questions and issues remain around definitional coherence, there is some degree of consensus emerging about the size, scope, and significance of the sectors in question in both advanced and developing economies. At the same time, debate about the concept remains highly animated in media, communication, and cultural studies, with its critics dismissing the concept outright as a harbinger of neoliberal ideology in the cultural sphere. This article couches such critiques in light of recent debates surrounding the intellectual coherence of the concept of neoliberalism, arguing that this term itself possesses problems when taken outside of the Anglo-American context in which it originated.
The full paper can be found here:
Creative Industries after a Decade of Debate
My introduction to the special issue can also be linked to below (Note: these are pre-publication copies, so have notation on them that is not found on the final text):
Towards a Cultural Economic Geography of Creative Industries and Urban Development
The other papers in the collection are:
GIS, Ethnography, and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping, Chris Brennan-Horley; Susan Luckman; Chris Gibson; Julie Willoughby-Smith
Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice, Christy Collis; Emma Felton; Phil Graham
Developing a Creative Cluster in a Postindustrial City: CIDS and Manchester, Justin O’Connor; Xin Gu