Regional Cultures, Economies, and Creativity: Innovating Through Place in Australia and Beyond

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 Florida’s 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.

Ariella Van Luyn is a lecturer in writing at the University of New England, Armidale. Her research interests include practice-led research, historical fiction, community narratives and regional creativity.

Eduardo de la Fuente is an adjunct fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong. His research interests include culture, economy, creativity and place.