The Cultural Economy of Cities

This article examines the role that big cities play in an ongoing change towards a ‘global cultural economy’. Starting from Allen Scott’s argument that a handful of urban flagships may benefit from this shift, it looks for an alternative approach to the territorial dimension of the ‘culture-economy nexus’ based on a more complex understanding of urban culture. A broad theoretical discussion of Scott’s ideas, as well as on the key concepts of culture, economy and the city, is placed alongside two case studies of the development of the audiovisual (AV) media sector in two European metropolitan regions, Hamburg and Lisbon. The article concludes that the territorial dimension of the ‘culture-economy nexus’ is more than the mere concentration of culturally informed economic activity in a few urban ‘master hubs’. Rather, it can be characterized as a non-linear refracted shift, to a large extent moving along historically and culturally determined trajectories of cities and regions.