rachelcf's creativity [4 articles]

Abstract

Drawing on an extended case study of Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, this article develops the concept of neo-bohemia. Neo-bohemia suggests that traditions of cultural innovation in older city neighborhoods persist, but that these bohemian traditions intersect with economic development in new ways in the post-Fordist city. Neo-bohemia supports both residential gentrification and the concentration of entertainment and new media enterprises, creating the context for the redevelopment of former industrial spaces in Chicago. Neo-bohemia complicates contemporary urban theories that stress deconcentration, and ...

Abstract

This paper continues recent discussions on the (geo)politics of the production of academic knowledges, in relation to the recent rise of narratives of ‘the creative economy’. Creativity and the ‘creative industries’ are increasingly common components of urban economic development discourse, especially following the release of a set of key books – most notably Charles Landry's The Creative City (2000), and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) – that have become popular among economic development planners and cultural policy ...

Abstract

This article develops a critique of the recently popularized concepts of the 'creative class' and 'creative cities'. The geographic reach and policy salience of these discourses is explained not in terms of their intrinsic merits, which can be challenged on a number of grounds, but as a function of the profoundly neoliberalized urban landscapes across which they have been traveling. For all their performative display of liberal cultural innovation, creativity strategies barely disrupt extant urban-policy orthodoxies, based on interlocal competition, place ...