Creative Splintering and the Rise of Municipal Creative Economies
Date
Authors
Advisors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
ISSN
DOI
Volume Title
Publisher
Type
Peer reviewed
Abstract
Drawing on Leicester as a second tier creative city in the UK, the chapter examines creative economies expressed through accounts of precarity, inequity, and polarisation. In the literature, these are presented as the inevitable vagaries of a capitalist model, but here are argued to be part of longer-term creative lifecycle, in which first-mover creative cities show signs of splintering from the mainstream model. The creative life-cycle provides a framework to explain local saturation, diminishing returns, and falling international competitiveness, which warrant wide-scale restructuring to prevent terminal decline. The development of smart cities, rising exports, and globally footloose cultural capital might be taken then as one attempt to rejuvenate through sector or spatial expansion, while the rise of grass-root creative movements, new business models, and a municipal approaches could be viewed as an example of resulting reorganisation.