Creative Networks and the City

... with Bas van Heur

1. »Bücher, die die Welt nicht braucht.« Warum trifft das auf Ihr Buch nicht zu?

This book offers a critical perspective on the creative industries by focusing on the specific logics shaping aesthetic practices and by highlighting the difficulties of regulation. In doing so, it points to basic problems that emerge when using creative networks in urban development strategies. Readers can use the arguments in the book to criticize the policy rhetoric, but also to develop more effective development strategies that do justice to the specificity of aesthetic production.

2. Welche neuen Perspektiven eröffnet Ihr Buch?

It connects the critical political economy tradition in geography and urban studies with debates in cultural studies. This enables the development of a research programme of cultural political economy that can grasp the complex intertwinement of aesthetic production with broader capitalist political economies.

3. Welche Bedeutung kommt dem Thema in den aktuellen Forschungsdebatten zu?

A highly interdisciplinary field of research, the creative industries has become a central research topic in urban studies, geography, cultural studies, and policy studies. In approaching these debates through the lens of cultural political economy, this book offers a synthesis of the main lines of argument. It also goes beyond the established debates by highlighting the specific logics shaping creative networks and the limited extent to which these networks can be regulated through policy interventions.

4. Mit wem würden Sie Ihr Buch am liebsten diskutieren?

This book of course would have been impossible without the many discussions I already had in the research and writing phase. These discussions – with researchers, but also with policy-makers, activists, artists and other citizens – will continue.

5. Ihr Buch in einem Satz:

Creative industries and other economic imaginaries: or, why the reality doesn't live up to the hype and what we can do about it.