Editorial: Geography and the Cultural Economy

One of the more remarkable shifts in the nature and structure of economic activity over the last few decades has been the insistent rise of sectors focused on the production of cultural outputs ranging from purely experiential items like film and recorded music on the one hand to design-intensive artefacts like jewellery and clothing on the other hand. These sectors constitute the core of what is increasingly referred to as the cultural economy or creative economy (Caves, 2000; Throsby, 2001; Hesmondhalgh, 2002). Indeed, the cultural economy can be said to extend well beyond this central core, for one of the distinctive features of contemporary capitalism is the ever-intensifying efforts of producers to imbue all manner of otherwise utilitarian products—from cars to mobile telephones and from eyeglasses to kitchen utensils—with distinctive aesthetic and semiotic content (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). These trends have not escaped the attention of social scientists; and, of course, theorists have long been concerned with these matters from the point of view of the consumer (Bourdieu, 1979). In particular, a rising body of research over the last decade or so has begun to address many of the supply-side puzzles brought to the fore by the vigorous expansion of the cultural economy. Not surprisingly, geographers have been very much in the vanguard of these efforts, for the rise of the cultural economy poses and re-poses many serious theoretical and empirical questions that go to the heart of geography's preoccupation with location, space and place. Basic items on the geographer's agenda, such as industrial districts, urbanization, regional development and globalization, among many others, have all been subject to important re-considerations in the light of recent research on the cultural economy. In addition, policy-makers are being drawn more and more to the cultural economy as a potential source of local as well as national economic development energies. One of the current manifestations of this policy connection is the widening debate on creativity in city and regional economic formations, and—though this goes well beyond the cultural economy in the strict sense—the search for ways of stimulating local innovative capacities (Pratt and Hesmondhalgh, 2005).