Small Cities and the Geographical Bias of Creative Industries Research and Policy

Despite more than a decade of research on the creative industries and even longer on the role of culture in the economic development of cities, researchers still know surprisingly little about the actual complexity of cultural life in concrete cities around the world and the ways in which these lifeworlds shape processes of economic valorization. From a policy perspective, this is highly problematic, since not only do most policy makers lack substantive empirical data on the cities in which they have to implement their policies, the theories that influence these policies (with the work of Richard Florida as perhaps the most high profile example) are often best understood as theoretical generalizations of empirical knowledge derived from global cities and metropolises.