Culture club : creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order

This chapter reflects on what Allen Scott (2006) once aptly called the creative-cities ‘syndrome’, a phrase that captures the essence of what has become a pan-urban policymaking paradigm, culture or ‘order’, in which both the means and ends of local economic development have been ‘culturalized’. This process of policymaking contagion was initially animated by Richard Florida’s (2002a) bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class, although it is not entirely reducible to the after-effects of that much-discussed book, or to the extensive and long-running marketing campaign with which it was associated. Rather, the argument in this chapter is that Florida’s zeitgeist-catching intervention articulated, and then helped to realize and reproduce, a particular kind of ‘late entrepreneurial’ or ‘soft neoliberal’ moment across evolving regimes of urban governance, in a context in which the scope for effective manoeuvre (not to say innovation) in local economic policy has been significantly narrowed, in ideological, practical and financial terms.