ABSTRACT
This chapter considers more fundamental societal challenges, arguing that the emergence of creative city debates and their subsequent material realisation contributes to the fragmentation of urban, regional and national socio-economic space. It discusses debates on urban infrastructures. The chapter summarises the main points and reflects on possible strategies to research creative infrastructures in ways that contribute to socio-spatial cohesion and solidarity instead of fragmentation. The social bias of particular urban infrastructures not only has consequences for 'internal' infrastructural logics but also for the city as a landscape of crosscutting networked infrastructures. Studies on creative cities mostly focus on the relational side of infrastructures, but to grasp the ways in which these creative interactions are complicit in the wider infrastructural fragmentation of socio-economic space, this ecological dimension demands investigation. The chapter also presents some of the key concepts discussed in this book.
