ABSTRACT
At least since the 2002 publication of Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, and even more intensely following the global economic crisis in 2008, cities and their leaders have been looking to the creative and knowledge economies for solutions to a wide range of social and economic problems. At about the same time, a short paper by physicists Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert (1999) altered the course of an emerging new science by demonstrating that most networks contain a few actors with an unusually large number of connections: hubs. To be sure, the conventional language of urban economic development had already told us that hubs are important. Regional economic development strategies often explicitly focus on creating ‘Hubs of Innovation and Opportunity’ (see https://www.development.ohio.gov/urban/ohiohubs.html" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.development.ohio.gov/urban/ohiohubs.html), while more generally all civic leaders want their city to be a ‘hub of activity’. However, a decade after these insights transformed their respective fields, we still know little about how hubs are important for creative economies. What does it mean for a city to be a hub, and how is being a hub important for cities’ creative economies?
