Seeking Talent for Creative Cities: The Social Dynamics of Innovation

Abstract

Nearly two decades after Landry and Bianchini (1995) penned the Creative City manifesto for Demos in 1995, the Creative City paradigm has been unrelenting in its global mobility. The list of cities that continue to adopt ‘creativity’ as a means of political manoeuvrability to espouse economic development growth is as long as it is irrelevant. One of the principal protagonists in the propagation of this political pervasiveness has been Richard Florida’s (2002) work on the creative class. His arrival in Toronto in 2008 was trumpeted by the incumbent mayor of the city, the premier of Ontario and the Dean of the School as cementing Toronto’s place as a world-class city. Additionally, given Toronto’s articulated position as Canada’s economic powerhouse, it seems the whole of the country was to benefit from the continued growth of the city’s knowledge economy. The national political investment in the ideas of the knowledge economy, creativity and innovation as economic development strategies no doubt spawned (directly or indirectly) a number of projects that aimed to valorize such actions. One such project undoubtedly was a large study of the innovative capacity of Canada’s city-regions. The Innovation Systems Research Network (ISRN), consisting of a number of key academics from across the country ‘focused on how the interaction among major components of the regional innovation system shape the process of innovation and social learning that is critical for Canada’s success’ (page x). This book is a product of this research network and therefore consists of a number of different, yet related studies that empirically investigate the innovate, creative and entrepreneurial capacity of certain city-regions in Canada, and how these are affected by their local social and cultural specificities. The book, therefore, is a collection of some of Canada’s foremost economic geography scholars, strung together by an empirical thread that is nationally focused and thematically concise.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.