This article reviews work on 'cultural economy', particularly from within geography, and from other disciplines, where there are links to overtly geographical debates. We seek to clarify different interpretations of the term and to steer a course through this multivalency to suggest productive new research agendas. We review and critique work on cultural economy that represents a relatively straightforward economic geography, based on empirical observation while theoretically informed and driven by debates about Fordism and post-Fordism, agglomeration and cluster theory. Some of these ideas about cultural economy have proven attractive to policymakers and we map a normative script of cultural economy, with its prescriptive recommendations for economic development, which we then critique. Turning from this normative cultural economy, we move to a more theoretical discussion which reinterprets the cultural economy in light of debates on the culturization of 'the economic' in research praxis. We conclude that better acknowledgement is needed of the contradictory uses of 'cultural economy', but point nevertheless to the value of this multivalency as long as we reflect on the multiple contradictions and interpretations. With many current absences in work on cultural economy, we suggest various agendas waiting to be addressed.
Whether advocating creativity as a means to place competition or critiquing the social dislocations that stem from creativity-led urban regeneration, research about the creative economy has tended to assume that large cities are the cores of creativity. That many workers in `creative' industries choose to live and work in small urban centres is often overlooked. In this context, this article aims to recover within debates the importance of size, geographical position and class legacies in theories of creativity, economic development and urban regeneration. Using empirical materials from a case study of one Australian city—Wollongong, in New South Wales—it is argued that what might at first appear a rather parochial example illustrates the importance of rethinking the creative economy in place. Crucially, it is shown that, regardless of the numerical population size of a city, creativity is embedded in various complex, competing and intersecting place narratives fashioned by discourses of size, proximity and inherited class legacies. Only when the creative economy is conceptualised qualitatively in place is it possible to reveal how urban regeneration can operate in uncertain and sometimes surprising ways, simultaneously to estrange and involve civic leaders and residents.
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