Defining the cultural economy. Industry and occupational approaches. Paper presented at the North American Regional Science Council Meetings

Norcliffe, and Stephen Sheppard for comments on an earlier draft. Please email us for updates before citing. Because of growing interest in creative cities and cultural industries, scholars of economic development enjoy a new frontier for timely research with planning and policy implications. However, diverse literatures often use the terms creative and cultural without clearing defining them and without transparency in the use of data and statistics to measure and compare them. Cities rush to commission cultural plans and mandate cultural districts, states fund "cool cities " programs, and real estate interests dub certain areas of cities creative without the benefit of careful reasoning and empirical analysis. In this paper, we argue that there are a number of nested definitions of the regional cultural economy that researchers and policymakers can use with relative precision and for useful policy work. We explore the conceptual underpinnings of the terms "creative " and "cultural, " both fuzzy concepts. The term "creative " is popular but problematic, and in the rest of our paper, we use the more focused term, "cultural." We analyze two sets of metrics for assessing the regional cultural economy