Creative Economy: Innovation or Inequality? Scott and Pratt

The creative economy is the set of industries that produce goods and services from creativity and intellectual property, design, film, music, advertising, video games, architecture, fashion, and since the decline of traditional industries it has been presented as the new engine of urban development and, at the same time, as a source of inequality. Three authors have set the debate: Richard Florida, who in The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) turned it into a recipe for cities; Allen J. Scott, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who in The Cultural Economy of Cities (2000) explained why those industries concentrate in urban agglomerations; and Andy Pratt, of City, University of London, who has studied their working conditions and criticised their use as a brand.

Allen J. Scott: cultural agglomerations and cognitive-cultural capitalism

Scott supplies the economic explanation. Cultural industries are organised in networks of small firms and freelance workers who collaborate by project, and that form of production demands proximity: Hollywood, the Paris fashion district, Nashville's music or Milan's design work as agglomerations where tacit knowledge, reputation and contacts circulate face to face. Scott shows that these agglomerations usually occupy former industrial districts or declining neighbourhoods, which become centres of cultural and economic production, and that the city itself, its image and atmosphere, becomes an input of what they produce, in what he calls cognitive-cultural capitalism.

Richard Florida: the creative class recipe and its self-critique

Florida supplies the recipe and its self-critique. His thesis that cities prosper by attracting the creative class with tolerance, diversity and quality of life was adopted by mayors worldwide, and produced creative districts, festivals and image campaigns. In The New Urban Crisis (2017) he acknowledged that the cities that followed it successfully became unaffordable, that the creative class concentrates in a few metropolises and a few neighbourhoods, and that alongside it grows a poorly paid service class that serves it. The creative economy, he admitted, had been a catalyst of innovation and of inequality at once.

Andy Pratt: precarious work and the confusion of consumption with production

Pratt supplies the critique from production. His studies of London's creative industries show that creative work is largely precarious, project-based, poorly paid and dependent on informal networks that exclude those without contacts or the means to work for free at the start, and that most of those who produce the city's culture belong to no privileged class. Pratt also criticises creative city policies for confusing consumption with production: they invest in museums, events and branding to attract visitors and talent while neglecting the workshops, studios and affordable workspaces where creation happens and which rising values expel.

Shoreditch, Wynwood, Raval: the urban result and which policies correct it

The urban result is well known. Creative districts, from Shoreditch in London to Wynwood in Miami or the Raval in Barcelona, revitalise neighbourhoods and then make them expensive, displacing residents and the creators themselves; the creative economy concentrates its benefits among landowners, platforms and large firms while distributing precarity among workers; and competition among cities for creative talent produces regional winners and losers. Scott and Pratt agree that the problem is not creativity but the policy that uses it as a substitute for stable employment and affordable housing.

The lesson of Florida, Scott and Pratt is that the creative economy is a real engine and an unequal distributor. Cities that want its innovation without its inequality have to treat it as production and not only as brand: protect affordable workspaces, guarantee labour rights to project workers, capture for the public part of the value uplift they generate and secure housing in the neighbourhoods they revitalise. Without those conditions, the creative city is a city that exhibits the culture it can no longer afford to produce.