16 - Creativity: An Evolving Critical Debate

Summary

Introduction

Creativity in economic geography has primarily been addressed from two perspectives: one that takes a sectoral approach by investigating spatial dynamics in cultural and creative industries, and a second that is interested in creativity as a practice – either on an individual or a collective level. The first perspective was developed against the background of indicating how regional development stems from creative processes. Creativity here is expressed by economic activities in cultural and creative organizations and occupations with working routines and organizational forms of work that differ from other industrial sectors. Creative work hence is project-based and working contracts are often temporal. Therefore, careers in creative sectors develop less within but across organizations and projects, which is why workers in creative sectors develop boundaryless and subjective careers (Khapova et al, 2007). The second perspective conceptualizes (creative) work as practices ‘necessary for the material and immaterial reproduction of society’ (Kruker et al, 2002: 248). This perspective seeks to carve out the multiple spatial dynamics of practices and routines of creating novel and useful outlets. Against this background, such discourses are rather embedded in knowledge economy and knowledge society discourses addressing spatial dynamics and spatial dimensions of generating novelty in form of new knowledge (see also Chapter 13 in this volume).

Both perspectives, however, suggest that creativity in the form of creative work in creative sectors or as creative practices seldom crystalizes within a single organization or location, but instead combines several on-and offline places and likewise creates new places and spaces. Recent discourses point towards particular places that are embedded in multilocal creative practices, such as homes (Reuschke et al, 2021), hacker spaces (Toupin, 2014), creative hubs (Virani and Gill, 2019) or Open Creative Labs (Schmidt, 2019). In fact, if creativity-driven work and practices unfold across organizations and projects, some scholars argue that such places may take over governing functions in creative work (Doussard et al, 2018) and thus become central elements in the context of creativity and space. Many of these spaces such as coworking, maker, hacker or collaborative workspaces postulate openness, underlining their accessibility to all kinds of users, and thus seem to naturally suggest differences to be integrated in the conceptualization of creative work (Reimer, 2016; Crewe and Wang, 2018; Morgan, 2020; McLean, 2021). However, very seldom this has been critically tackled by scholars.