Knowledge and the City

‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual infl uences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’, John Maynard Keynes once memorably wrote. ‘Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air’, he argued, ‘are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back’. He might have reached exactly that conclusion about the creative city – except that here the scribblers are on frenetic whistle-stop lecture tours. It now seems that every city in the developed world, and not a few in the developing world, wants to acquire the secret of instant creativity. Elder or at least middle-aged statesmen, who really should know better, goad them into this competition. It’s the only game in town – any town. But, as the articles in this collection have shown, it might be worthwhile first to take a deep breath for reflection. Much of the current enthusiasm about creative cities comes out of America, in particular from that notable academic entrepreneur Richard Florida, who has made himself a kind of one-man salesman for the new urban holy grail. There’s more than a hint, in this approach, of the instant self-recreation literature that has been flooding the business school publishing industry in recent years, with titles lik