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Richard Florida constructed a series of checklists for success: Bohemian Index, Gay Index, Creativity Index and Diversity Index. Yet what is ‘Bohemia’ that is measured, ranked and promoted? Tara Brabazon enters the city that dominates most of the indices of creativity: San Francisco. She explores a street in this city with attention to one specific business, City Lights Bookshop. This special business captures a history of bohemia and demonstrates how it can be marketed.

Cities are hubs of mobility, of people, products and money. The question is how this mobility can be sustainable. If cities are to survive, then they must be more than shopping malls and car parks. Tara Brabazon concludes this book by looking at the edges of cities, their waste and their potential to renew, often through technology. The question is: can modern cities survive without reliance on car cultures?

There are certain unusual architectural features that move through a diversity of buildings and structures. Danny Hagan researches the popularity of the atrium, placing attention on their role in both shopping and education. The atrium creates new relationships between culture and nature, shoppers/students and their environment. Therefore the history of the commodification of education can be tracked through the movement of the atrium onto university campuses.

Human creativity is both individual and collective. As symbols, signs, brands, and other intangibles grow in importance, the search for creativity and how to manage it has increased in importance. Organizations such as corporations and research institutions try to enhance and manage the collective creativity of their employees, but creativity remains to a large degree both unpredictable and unmanageable. The location of creativity is mainly urban, as people interact within cities to generate creative places and urban creative scenes. Just as creativity cannot be managed completely, it cannot be fully planned.

This chapter interprets the role and function of aesthetic creativity in the promotion of Taiwan’s art education through both theoretical and practical frameworks. On the theoretical level, past discussions on aesthetics and creativity are reviewed and their significance is proposed. From the practical standpoint, the current problem on Taiwan’s art education, that is, the absence of discussions on creativity is then to be discussed. By examining examples from Taiwan’s culture and creative industry, we can see the importance and development of aesthetic creativity in the community cultural settings. This paper concludes with the role of aesthetic creativity in bridging arts, culture and education in contemporary art education.

This chapter examine Detroit techno music production by utilizing the lenses of Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community and community-based proposals for rebuilding Detroit, which recognize that large-scale industrial production will not be coming back to the city. In light of the limited opportunities in the formal economy for city youth, the threat of illegal drugs and alcohol, and the defunding of arts programs in the public schools, Detroit’s techno community has been active in fostering the next generation of musicians while producing a critical alternative to mainstream urban music that glorifies violence and programs failure. To ensure the future for such young musicians by protecting the Detroit techno brand, Detroit’s techno community has also worked to emphasize Detroit both as the place where techno was born but also as a current creative force in the music. Detroit’s globally recognized techno musical production highlights a creative and mutually supportive community that has long been part of the city that has inspired its artists, even as Detroit and Michigan have largely overlooked them in favor of initiatives aimed at attracting footloose creative workers.

The introduction traces the history of growing intersections between economic and cultural geography, including milestones such as: non-structural Marxism; Granovetter’s thesis of cultural embeddedness; flexible production, clusters, and the role of trust, reputation, and tacit knowledge; geographies of the body; Richard Florida’s creative class; consumption; and the cultural turn. It points to some of the analytical and epistemological implications of the convergence between the cultural and the economic. Finally, it briefly summarizes each of the chapters in the volume.

European urban regions are becoming more similar to American ­low-density metropolitan areas in the organization of space and in people mobility. On the other hand, in North American cities, high-density neighborhoods and renewed European-like downtowns have become popular. Everywhere in the Western world, it is difficult for any politician to refuse further development. Therefore, although the most innovative planners in the most environment-­concerned cities focus on issues such as neighborhood life and go for mixed-use zones, they are not quite successful in limiting urban and traffic growth. Contemporary society is actually formed by several social groups with preferences, experiences, and ­values often radically diverse. Thus, we cannot offer one single option for urban mobility to respond to a variegated demand. Nonetheless, the mass-society/mass-transportation paradigms still dominate planning and transportation policies in most urban areas in the world. Because of the major public works funding system, it is difficult to avoid the approval of mobility infrastructure, no matter how detrimental, helpful or useless they are. The public finance problem of how to pay for mobility infrastructure is related to: (a) the production system and technologies; (b) basic political values; (c) administrative geography. According to a common planning approach different scenarios for future city and traffic developments are designed. Then, one of them is selected. Another solution is possible: instead of selecting only one of the scenarios, we should respond to citizens’ diverse needs. This approach responds to the opportunity to favor creativeness in administration.

From the 1980s, the stimulation, nourishing or even instrumental creation of culturalcreative clusters has become an important component of both cultural and economic public policy at both the urban and regional level. Cultural functions, from the ‘classical’ performing and visual arts to more contemporary multi-media, leisure and/or design activities, are grouped together in a variety of spatial forms: in new building complexes, renovated industrial and harbour buildings, in quarters and districts. Together, they form part of a broader cultural turn in both urban planning and regional development strategies. However, cultural-creative clustering strategies have often been based on notions not usually made explicit. In particular, there was a fragmented understanding of the role of culture and creativity in the new service economy, and in relation to that, of the economic transformation of cities and regions. This went together with an under-exploration of the transformations the cultural realm itself was going through, from a rather hierarchical and canonical reality, to something much more open and horizontal, but also more commercial. What did this imply for notions of artistic professionalism, the cultural resourcing of artistic creativity, the composition of critical audiences, artistic role models, and the reputation of creative careers? As a consequence, complex questions about the role of culture and the arts in the future economy and in future cities and regions have been left underexplored, thus resulting in the lumping together of different models of artistic, cultural, urban and industrial development. One possible result of this was that the cultural-creative clustering agenda either got stuck in former ‘artisanal’ models of creative communities or was hijacked by more economically oriented industry, ICT, innovation or real estate policy agendas (cf. Cunningham 2004; O’Connor 2007). In either case, an embryonic Chapter 4 Spaces of Culture and Economy: Mapping the Cultural-Creative Cluster Landscape

Since Florida published his provocative book, The rise of the creative class, in 2002 it has spurred an impressive amount of attention and occasionally, heated debate among academics and policy-makers. With this paper, we aim at pushing this debate further, but not by summarizing, reviewing or contributing to the various types of critiques of Florida (for a detailed critique, see Glaeser 2004; Malanga 2004; Peck 2005; Markusen 2006; Hansen et al. 2005; Asheim and Hansen 2008; Hansen 2007; see also Chapter 8, Oakley, this volume; Chapter 9, Mok, this volume). Instead we test and discuss the relevance of the core hypotheses in Florida’s work for 445 European regions and thus contribute critical yet constructive insights into the relevance of Florida’s work for Europe. The regions are distributed across Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany and the UK. There are good reasons to undertake this exercise in a European context especially as Florida is central to policy-making in Europe as well. The creative class (or classes) in Europe is carrier of different cultures, historical experiences, educational backgrounds and possibly, different value systems. The regions are embedded in different nations and super-national regimes of regulation, have different histories and cultures, and levels of urbanisation from the US. Thus, one can neither a priori assume that Florida’s work will automatically be relevant in a European context, nor take it for granted that its degree of relevance is the same across the diverse European space. The context for Florida’s work is the recognition that creativity and talents are important factors underpinning regional development (Florida 2002, 2005a, b). According to this stream of research, time–space compression has resulted in the emergence of a regionalised knowledge economy (Asheim et al. 2007) where competition for talent has increased as innovation becomes crucial for maintaining competitiveness. These insights have entered the regional policy agenda. Sub