Creative Knowledge Cities: Myths, Visions and Realities

摘要

Research on the role of creativity and knowledge in regional economic development is a multifaceted beast: depending on how one approaches this thematic and depending on one's disciplinary or subdisciplinary perspectives and normative assumptions, different elements will be considered relevant and worthy of academic investigation as well as policy support. These different positionalities are not always made explicit, which all too often leads to generic "talk" about the importance of knowledge and creativity without delving into the intricacies of analytical frameworks and the practical suggestions that follow from these perspectives. This 475-page edited volume on "creative knowledge cities" suffers from this problem: although the book claims to approach the topic from "various combinations of theoretical angles" (6) ranging from evolutionary approaches and debates on organizational learning to network as well as cluster theoretical approaches, no substantive attempt is made to relate these different theoretical angles to each other, to investigate the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and to indicate how we need to move beyond established analytical models to achieve better explanations and develop better policies.