The Hidden Value of Underground Networks and Intermediaries in the Creative City

In this chapter, the value produced from creative performance in collective spaces and processes is examined by drawing on creative relationships and networks. For some, the city can be read as a series of bounded spaces, socio-political and dialectical tensions, sites of linguistic or material development and representation, or even as places of historical significance. In this chapter, the creative city is read through its people and their interrelationships, and the main message offered is that this provides a rich and more nuanced view of creative economic performance as a live action.

Drawing on relational economics and the New Economic Geography, the chapter positions value in the creative economy firmly as economic value, but also as socially constructed value, created, mediated, and validated by a series of actors and agencies, some performing as intermediaries. In this, it is recognised that creative performance is shaped, and ultimately constructed from the unique spatialities of knowledge and power bound in relationships that take place between key actors and sites/social spaces in a city. In doing so, the chapter sheds light on the key processes through which creative activities are constructed and valorised, the key sites and actors that add value to creative processes, and the legitimising and enabling relationships both within and between places that have salience in improving our understanding of what value means in the creative economy.