Discussions about the culture-economy articulation have occurred largely within the confines of economic geography. In addition, much attention has been diverted into caricaturized discussions over the demise of political economy or the invalidity of culturalist arguments. Moving the argument from the inquiry on the "nature" of the economy itself to the transformation of the role of culture and economy in understanding the production of the urban form from an urban political economy (UPE) this paper focuses on how the challenges posed by the cultural turn have enabled urban political economy to participate constructively in interdisciplinary efforts to reorient political economy in the direction of a critical cultural political economy.Keywords: Culture and economy, urban geography, urban political economy, economic geography, cultural political economy 4
I IntroductionOne of the most vivid outcomes of the post-modern/cultural turns 1 in Anglo-American 2 human geography has been the long-running debate over the role of political economy in the discipline (Jones, 2008; Amin and Thrift, 2007a Harvey, 2007;Smith, 2005;Goodwin, 2004). This debate has been intensely reflected in the long-running discussion over the articulation between culture and economy. The discussion that has emerged from within a new field of 'cultural economy' 3 has been characterised by a twofold barrier to progress regarding our understanding of the culture-economy articulation. First, the discussion has been characterized by crude caricatures of culturalists as die-hard absolute relativists, and of political economists as irreducible basesuperstructure materialists. Second, the discussion has been limited in much of the literature to the confines of economic geography, despite its inherently 'more than economic' subject matter. 4 In this context, there are an increasing number of interventions, incorporating new and interesting questions, theories and methods from the cultural turn, that attempt to find an appropriate balance between positions concerning the relations of culture and economy that go beyond the divide between culturalists and political economists (compare Gregson et al, 2001 with Castree, 2004 and Barnes, 2005). Yet, from a political economy perspective, there are still concerns that the cultural turn has accompanied an abandonment of old but perhaps still relevant questions, such as inequality, uneven development, and the normative character of political economy analysis (Jones, 2008; Coe, 2006;Hudson, 2006;Martin and Sunley, 2001).Rather than write another individual intervention advocating the superiority of either culturalism or political economy, or looking for a third way, the aim of this paper is to contribute to recovering "a sense of political economy through post-disciplinary 5 expeditions to capture 'new intellectual currents,' whilst emphasizing some 'fundamental continuities within the make up of contemporary capitalism'" a nd as regards our understanding of the articulation between culture and econom...
