ABSTRACT
The so-called ‘creative industries’ are increasingly being presented as an important tool of urban regeneration and economic development. Many cities worldwide are seeking to make themselves more creative, by developing strategies, building facilities or defining particular quarters. Such policies have been influenced by debates that claim the importance of place for economic development, and for the operation of creative industries in particular. There is an extensive literature that seeks to understand the relationships between place and the creative industries. This work mostly focuses on the locational choices of these industries and their workers, as well as the resultant spatial patterns of the industries’ work and leisure activities, and the distribution of the firms themselves. Creative industries seem to cluster in neighbourhoods on the fringe of the inner city, the “zone in transition” identified long ago by Burgess (1928, 106), “an interstitial area in the throes of change from residence to business and industry” which is home to a “mobile and mixed population of youth and old age, aspiring and defeated individuals, pleasure-seeking Bohemians and hardworking students . . . and radical freethinkers”. As Preston (1966, 236) later noted, this zone has a number of distinctive physical characteristics, being “typified by mixed land use, aging structures, general instability, and change, and by a wide range in type and quality of functions”. This type of urban physical environment would seem to potentially have an important role in creative activity.
