Darja Reuschke gave a seminar to Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow about new insights into and methods to study economic creativity in cities. Based on two papers (together with Donald Houston from the University of Portsmouth and Jed Long from the Western University, Ontario) she argued that the creative class theory (by Richard Florida) has received much attention over the past two decades in urban economic research, however, what Florida termed economic or entrepreneurial creativity has remained under-researched. This is partly because entrepreneurs and their residential choices are not captured in existing secondary data and most research has focused on artistic and cultural creativity. Much research on the creative industries has approached economic creativity in the city through spatial clusters of firms – but business register data do not include creative freelancers (who work on their own account rather than running registered businesses) who are often performing the most creative task in supply chains.
Based on a small business study in the City of Edinburgh, which included both entrepreneurial and less entrepreneurial small business owners, and a study of creative freelancers and entrepreneurs whose practices of economic creativity in the city were studied using their geolocated tweets, she argued that a diversity of neighbourhoods and ‘third places’ are important for creativity in the city. Rather than a dualism of city centre vs suburbs, she proposed a new concept of an eco-system of neighbourhoods that are relevant for entrepreneurs’ locations and practices.
The paper on the intra-urban spatial patterns of small business owners in the City of Edinburgh is published in the Journal of Urban Affairs
Please find the link to the recording of the talk here:
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