Andy gives keynote at International Association of Cultural Economics

Andy Pratt was invited to give the keynote lecture to 200 or so attendees of the bi-annual International Association of Cultural Economics (ACEI) in Valladolid, Spain.(June 23rd) Andy’s paper was titled ‘The Creative city: an anatomy lesson’, the abstract is as below. Andy argued for the need to carry out multidisciplinary and heterodox analyses of the creative city; approaches that focus on processes not simply outputs. Accordingly, to be develop more situated analyses.

“This paper seeks to advance analytical approaches to the creative city. Initial analyses have been suggestive of an object of interest, but weak on its interpretation. I take as my starting point the need to get beyond normative and universalist  frameworks of : output measures, the models of activity, and the simplistic binaries of production and consumption, and the economic and the social, that they are based upon. It will be argued that such analyses promote a short term and instrumentalist approach to creative cities.It will be argued that we need to develop explanations of the following: 1. processes (as diverse processes may produce similar outputs, for different reasons), 2. scale (different processes work at various scales), 3. embeddedness (as the city is a vast entanglement of the social, economic and political, as well as producing, and being a product of the social environment, finally, 4. we need to explore the modality of interactions and the ways in which knowledge and practices ‘circulate’. Alternative perspectives produce more nuanced and meaningful analyses of (not) the creative city, but rather of creative cities. Moreover, they offer insights into the sustainability and the resilience of the urban cultural economy.”