Creative cities: The cultural industries and the creative class

The aim of this article is to critically examine the notion that the creative class may or may not play as a causal mechanism of urban regeneration. I begin with a review of Florida's argument focusing on the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings. The second section develops a critique of the relationship between the creative class and growth. This is followed by an attempt to clarify the relationship between the concepts of creativity, culture and the creative industries. Finally, I suggest that policy-makers may achieve more successful regeneration outcomes if they attend to the cultural industries as an object that links production and consumption, manufacturing and service. Such a notion is more useful in interpreting and understanding the significant role of cultural production in contemporary cities, and what relation it has to growth

Toward the Development of an Urban Growth Model that Recognizes the Importance of the Basic Nature of Services

This exploratory research examines selected service sectors of a defined local economy. Using export base theory, preliminary models linking these services sectors to exogenous influences are developed. These models are found to be statistically diverse. Further model-building efforts should recognize the heterogeneous nature of services through disaggregation of services sectors and a thorough consideration of potential exogenous variables. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

Measuring External Shocks to the City Economy: An Index of Export Prices and Terms of Trade

This paper details the construction of an index of export goods prices (the Export Price Index or "EPI") for a panel of 196 metropolitan areas from 1977 to 1992. The "EPI" is an indicator of external demand shocks to the city economy which does not suffer from the causal ambiguity of the endogenous indicators such as income, employment or output. The creation of an index of aggregate export prices, the "EPI", for the panel of areas provides both academicians and policy analysts with a new exogenous indicator that identifies demand price innovations and the terms of trade shocks to cities. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.