Regional Cultures, Economies, and Creativity

Drawing on Australian and comparative case studies, this volume reconceptualises non-metropolitan creative economies through the qualities of place. This book examines the agricultural and gastronomic cultures surrounding native foods, coastal sculpture festivals, universities and regional communities, wine in regional Australia and Canada, the creative systems of the Hunter Valley, musicians in outback settings, Fab Labs as alternatives to clusters, cinema and the cultivation of authentic landscapes, and tensions between the representational and non-representational in the cultural economies of the Blue Mountains. What emerges is a picture of rural and regional places as more than the other of metropolitan creative cities. Place itself is shown to embody affordances, unique institutional structures and the invisible threads that hold communities together. If, in the wake of the publication of Floridas Rise of the Creative Class, creative industries models tended to emphasize big cities and the spatial-cum-cultural imaginaries of the Global North, recent research and policy discourses especially, in the Australian context have paid greater attention to small cities, rural and remote creativity. This collection will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners in creative industries, urban and regional studies, sociology, geography and cultural planning.