The sub-creative economy of the suburbs in question

Abstract

This article questions the sub-creative label all too frequently attached to suburbs. Simple distinctions between the economy of cities and suburbs are increasingly untenable in the enlarged and functionally complex urban regions that now exist in many, not just developed nations. By way of illustrative examples the article highlights evidence of the inventive or creative character of suburban economies both historically and today. These illustrations are suggestive of a variety of creative suburban economies that might each be a research agenda in itself. Future academic and policy interest will have to address the topic of suburban creativity if our economic well-being is to be better understood and supported.

Keywords

creativity external economies innovation suburbs

Harris and Larkham (1999: 8) provide a composite definition of a suburb as a settlement as being: (1) in a peripheral location relative to a dominant urban centre; (2) partly or wholly residential in character; (3) of low density of development; (4) with a distinctive culture or way of life; and (5) a separate community identity often embodied in a local government. However, the outward expansion of urban areas renders distinctions between city and suburb rather arbitrary and this itself should alert us to some of the dangers of over-generalizing about the complexion of cities and suburbs – including the innovativeness or creativity of their respective populations and businesses. Economists and geographers, for example, have come rather late to acknowledging the economic creativity of suburbs, having focused on elements (1), (2) and (3), in comparison to treatments from within the cultural studies tradition which have instead made explicit the possibilities implied in element (4) in the definition of suburbs outlined above, and government and policy analysts having concentrated on element (5).

In many advanced economy settings we should be careful about presuming anything in general about the character and economy of different settlements in what are increasingly extensive urban regions displaying complex patterns of specialization. Bogart (2006) refers to the specialized trading places of the urban ‘sprawl’ that is now characteristic of many North American metropolitan regions in which cities, suburbs, ‘edge cities’ (Garreau, 1991) and ‘post-suburban’ (Teaford, 1997) constitute an economic system. This has led some to question whether labels such as city and suburb are not ‘zombie’ categories – increasingly unable to adequately convey meaning in contemporary economy and society (Lang and Knox, 2009). In all of this, the tenuous administrative status of outer suburbs means that they are often invisible to discourses on economic dynamics since they are not recognized as destinations, as places, or as ‘containers’ of economic activity.

This problem of assigning qualities to settlements within large urban regions becomes acute when we acknowledge the industries and occupations we commonly regard as innovative or creative have changed over time, and when one considers that much innovation in industry does not derive from fundamental research but from the factory or office floors – now located in large numbers in suburban locations.¹ Since the late 1800s, corporate research and development furnished many of the key innovations, as was recognized in academic and policy discourse. Although these sources have hardly diminished, creative and cultural industries – the arts, media, design etc. – have come to be celebrated as the proximate origin of creativity and invention (Florida, 2005). Their significance in employment terms has become visible partly in light of ‘jobless growth’ in a raft of manufacturing and services companies and industries that have populated city economies. Their significance also plays into longer-standing recognition of the symbolic importance of the largest cities as the high-point of the division of labour in societies (Scott, 2001). These industries and occupations have come to be invested with policy and academic meaning to such an extent that they might be regarded as something of an ‘imagined economy’ with a corresponding imagined geography: one that can be contrasted with the economy imagined for the suburbs; one that may or may not bear relationship to realities (Collis et al., 2010). Instead, it seems reasonable to suggest that different sources of creativity with contrasting geographies coexist across settlements in extensive metropolitan systems.

In this article I question the sub-creative label frequently attached to the suburban economy. I begin by elaborating the idea that simple distinctions between the economy of cities and suburbs are increasingly untenable in the enlarged and functionally complex urban regions that now exist in many nations. The subsequent two sections provide illustrative stories of how, on the one hand, the historically inventive or creative character of suburban economies has perhaps been lost sight of and, on the other hand, how the creativity of suburban economies continues to be uncovered.

The place of suburbs in evolving urban systems

Writing in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the British economist Alfred Marshall observed the success of British industrial cities and attributed it to the presence of external economies – the benefits shared among a collectivity of businesses when they concentrated together geographically. Marshall’s external economies were three-fold, involving inter-firm and inter-industry input-output linkages, labour market pooling and the ‘industrial atmosphere’ of invention. Some aspects of this trinity are ‘traded’ benefits whose impact on business efficiency and productivity could be quantified, but some also involve ‘untraded interdependencies’ whose contribution to the creativity and inventiveness of business could not readily be measured. At that time, the compact cities of Britain were literally physical containers of these traded and untraded external economies, although advances in business organization and transportation and communications technology were already leading to the weakening of some of these external economy effects for some industries – notably the traded external economies connected to manufacturing industries (Phelps and Ozawa, 2003). Indeed, Bairoch (1988: 324–5) has suggested that the specifically urban contribution to innovation had already been in gradual decline from before this time.

By the 1960s Jane Jacobs (1969) had recognized some of these changes in city economies. The largest cities were no longer home to the efficiencies promoted by geographic clustering, though they did remain home to the untraded interdependencies – the ‘diversity’ that continued to prompt innovation and creativity. Such was the force of her argument that a distinction is often drawn by economists and economic geographers between Marshallian external economies of industry specialization (the efficiencies associated with traded external economies) and Jacobs’ external economies of creativity (the untraded benefits of urbanization economies) and, as a corollary, a distinction between the creative forces at work in the largest cities and the economic sterility of the suburbs, smaller cities and towns. The distinction is reproduced in accounts of the creative class (Florida, 2005) but has been less readily accepted in cultural studies and in cultural and historical geography (e.g. Dowling, 1998; Harris and Larkham, 1999; Powell, 1993). Seemingly, cities cannot be creative and efficient at the same time (Jacobs, 1969: 96–7), since the forces of creativity and efficiency are diametrically opposed, though others would suggest it is precisely the reciprocity – the interaction between industry-specific (Marshallian) and urbanization (Jacobs) externalities – that are in evidence in the most continuously successful large city economies (Parr; 2002; Phelps, 2004). There is also no space in Jacobs’ writings for the economic creativity of suburbs and smaller towns and cities. Here, as in her discussion of the way in which the Japanese hamlet of Shinohata was engulfed by the expanding Tokyo metropolis, the rural or suburban hinterland is something acted upon by the economic forces of the city (Jacobs, 1984).

Most recently scholars have begun to get to grips with the multiple and overlapping geographies of external economy effects. Allen Scott (1982) noted how companies had begun to free themselves from central city locations as personal mobility meant that Marshallian labour market pooling effects were attainable at the level of the metropolis by the early 1900s in the US. A historical vantage point also allows Walker and Lewis to neatly capture the deceptive nature of the urbanization process:

If once these districts were close enough to the centre to be confused for a single manufacturing centre, by the turn of the century, urbanisation had reached the metropolitan scale. Since at least 1850, the North American city has grown largely through the accretion of new institutional districts at the urban fringe, becoming multi-nodal in the process. (Walker and Lewis, 2001: 8–9)

Contemporary instances of agglomeration are of a different order and a different geographical scale, to those of Marshall’s or even Jacobs’ day. Silicon Valley and Route 128 in the US and ‘Motor Sport Valley’ in the UK, encompass free-standing cities and towns and suburban expanses within large heavily urbanized regions, leading to the argument that external economies in general now operate at this regional scale. I have suggested elsewhere that some of these statements, even if sensitive to different industries, sometimes tend not to differentiate sufficiently between different types of externality effect (Phelps, 2004, 2010; Phelps and Ozawa, 2003). In doing so, there is perhaps still a tendency in these accounts to underplay the potential significance of the untraded external economies associated with creativity and invention in suburban settings.

The creative suburb lost

In this section I draw attention to examples of the way in which the recent historic and contemporary contributions of suburbs to processes of economic invention and creativity have been forgotten or overlooked amidst academic and policy focus on the processes of world city formation and competition and on the creativity of cities.

London’s suburbs

As Harris (Harris and Larkham, 1999) has reminded us, the suburbs of most large cities were rarely as residentially mono-functional as has tended to be assumed, so the process of suburbanization is one that has been led as often as not by employment decentralization as it has by residential decentralization. Instead a class of industrial suburbs can usefully be identified and with them associated processes of suburban industrial innovation.

London’s outer suburbs provide one example of the forgotten economic complexion of some suburbs. They spawned what were at the time ‘new’ and innovative manufacturing industries – those of Fordist corporate capitalism which drove an era of unprecedented economic growth in the mixed economies of the West from the 1930s to the 1970s. A slew of new Fordist manufacturing industries in the UK were located in outer suburban areas of London, in contrast to the central and inner suburban Victorian industrial belt in the capital. The most important 20th-century metropolitan growth zone was to be found in north-west London, where many of Britain’s instrument, electrical and electronic and mechanical engineering industries originated, before later dispersing to the assisted areas and planned new towns in search of lower-cost locations and production efficiencies (Keeble, 1969). The Wembley–Willesden–Park Royal–Greenford triangle was the ‘greatest concentration of manufacturing industries in Southern England’ (Hall, 1962: 127). In parts of this triangle – such as Acton – small businesses were intermingled with residential uses, in others such as Southall–Hayes larger factories had colonized suburbia, while along the Great Western Road, from Chiswick to Staines, some of the industries were regarded in contemporary surveys as ‘industrially immature’ (Bates cited in Hall, 1962: 131). Elsewhere, in south London, such was the significance of the new manufacturing economy emerging at the same time as the rapid ‘dormitory’ housing development in the early 1900s in places like Croydon that the label ‘suburb’ has never been an accurate one (Cotton, 1991; Phelps et al., 2006).

This growth of new industry in London, and notably in its suburbs, was a diverse affair but was self-generating. The extent to which the location of these new industries followed a logic different from older industries is unclear, although the new industries could undoubtedly benefit from at least some limited external economy effects present in suburban concentrations and on new industrial estates. Indeed, some emergent branches of industry, which had previously left London for the provinces, later returned to form part of these suburban concentrations of industry (Hall, 1962: 146).

Alongside these clearly identifiable industrial suburbs, residential suburbs have acquired significant components of industry and yet others noted for their amenity have also been home to creative industries albeit on a smaller scale. It should be remembered that the political and ideological values crystallized in the suburban way of living are not at all antithetical to those of certain creative activities and industries. Not only did the promise of a retreat from the city go hand in hand with the search for a measure of personal independence from the impositions of the claims of municipal city life, but also the realization of this in residential form actually provided something of an early local demand or market for arts and crafts, with some cross-fertilization between them and ‘routine’ trades during the late Victorian era (Crowther, 2010). Not only did London’s higher-amenity inner and outer suburbs provide a fertile ground for craft production, suburbs such as Camberwell, Putney and Hammersmith were also important sites for new institutions concerned with education and training in the arts and crafts (Crowther, 2010).

The suburban office and research campus

David Harvey (1985: 157) has questioned the continued relevance of Jane Jacobs’ thesis regarding the creativity of cities in the late 20th century, arguing that innovation has itself become big business and that the preconditions of that business need not be agglomerated in cities as in the past. Following this line of argument, one ingredient in the creative potentiality of the suburbs comes in the shape of the office and research campuses that have grown by stealth in the outer suburbs of large city-regions in many national contexts. In the US, these low-density, high-amenity business and research parks began to emerge in the years before the Second World War, but their development gathered pace in the early post-war years as major corporations sought outer suburban locations for attractively landscaped new headquarters complexes, followed soon after by their research and development laboratories (Daniels, 1974), and sales and marketing activities. McKeever’s (1970: 9) suggestion that such developments also ‘started an avalanche of similar actions by a large number of small business firms in the professional, research, editorial, design and related fields’ indicates that such suburbs could hardly be described as economically sterile.

Harvey offers no comment on the implications, if any, of the presence of corporate research and development facilities upon their local environs. A key word here, then, is creative potentiality, since the connection between the presence of such corporate head office, research and development, and sales and marketing functions and suburban economic performance is far from straightforward. In theory at least, the occupational profile associated with these functions – in contrast to routine manufacturing facilities – could produce spillovers in the local economy from new business formation and process and product innovation by way of upstream and downstream linkages and demonstration effects. This is certainly a role ascribed to them by Muller (1982) in his early depiction of the emerging ‘outer city’, where he suggests that the suburbanization of entire industrial complexes has led to these new facilities becoming the dominant incubator of new companies. In the UK these corporate facilities take their place alongside public sector research institutions in what has been celebrated as a wide arc of high-technology industry in the generally affluent small town and suburban environment of the greater south-east of England (Hall et al., 1987).

It is also hard to read the implications of suburban research campuses upon wider suburban culture and society. On the one hand, they had their critics, since ‘Their monolithic, repetitive architecture conjures images of the man in the grey flannel suit, stripped of individuality and creativity’ (Rankin, 2010: 771). Trained physicists, burgeoning in number in the US, were among the first to adopt suburban residential locations and lifestyles, appropriating ‘the language of suburbanisation and mass consumption to express deep-seated wishes as well as fears’ (Kaiser, 2004: 854), while the research and office campus was a model of employment provision that was a suitable accommodation to the sensibilities of affluent residential suburbs (O’Mara, 2005). Yet it should be remembered that ‘even monopoly capitalism relied on relatively autonomous subjects to produce novelty, and the creativity and intellectual freedom of these subjects was the explicit goal of management’ (Rankin, 2010: 806). Local governments competed aggressively for this segment of the labour force precisely because of its qualitative contribution to their economies (O’Mara, 2005).

The creative suburb found

If some aspects of the creativity of suburbs have been forgotten, there are signs that the contemporary creativity and inventiveness of the suburban economy are being rediscovered.

The cosmopolitan suburbs of creative city-regions

The distinctly post-suburban communities currently emerging as a result of the fundamentally decentred nature of urbanization are also notable for their cosmopolitan ethnic complexion in comparison to traditional suburbs (Kling et al., 1995: 5). Of itself this should alert us to the possibilities for such post-suburbs to reproduce the sorts of diversity that Jane Jacobs reserved for the city. To be sure, examples of such a ‘strong’ version of a story of affluent cosmopolitan suburbs and their contribution to the creativity of city-regions are probably few. In the US, they are also the product of Cold War science noted above, which, due to shortages of scientists, drew increasingly upon a migrant workforce locating in the suburbs (O’Mara, 2005).

One good example would be the outer suburbs of Fairfax County in the greater Washington DC area. Richard Florida (2005) has good reason to use this same example to qualify his own arguments regarding the creativity of cities, since this area has some of the highest educational attainment levels in the US, and also one of the most diverse populations. It presents an interesting mix: part dormitory accommodation for DC; part low-density high-tech corporate suburban economy; connected to a rural though well-populated hinterland that forms part of a dual home-working realm. The ‘edge city’ of Tysons Corner forms part of the 11th largest employment concentration in the US that is suburban Fairfax County. However, it cannot be dismissed as simply sterile suburban office and retail employment, since the low-density office campuses and research institutions located in ‘internet alley’ – a linear stretch of suburbia out to Washington Dulles Airport through Tysons Corner, Reston and Herndon – have been at the forefront of several successive technological revolutions since the 1960s (Ceruzzi, 2008). Moreover, this corporate economy has knock-on effects in terms of the propensity and scale of spin-off from a slew of high-tech corporate enterprises funded notably by the state and defence contracts. Cold War science produced suburban ‘cities of knowledge’, which nevertheless contributed significantly to the metropolitan as well as the national economy (O’Mara, 2005: 1).

Moreover, creativity is not only the preserve of selected affluent and cosmopolitan suburbs such as those discussed above. Creativity can flourish, albeit perhaps temporarily and in ways less significant in aggregate terms, in suburban enclaves maligned for their concentrations of economically and socially excluded migrant populations. François Maspero (1994: 16) implies something of this when alluding to the authenticity of life in the banlieus of Paris:

Where did they all go? To the outskirts. To the suburbs. Paris had become a business hypermarket and a cultural Disneyland. And if Paris had emptied, if it was no more than a ghost town, didn’t that mean the true centre was now ‘all round’?

Robinson (2006: 88) has since elaborated on some of the implications of this sentiment for matters of economic creativity, arguing that ‘the hardships of life in favelas and townships shaped by economic exploitation and social exclusion have, at times, provided intensely creative environments for music, dance and fashion’. Moreover, the marginalized suburban communities of Mediterranean and Latin American cities alike have provided some of the most powerful contemporary mobilizations of civil society in the name of urbanity. These mobilizations have centred on a politics of collective consumption (Castells, 1983) and rights to the city (Holston, 2001).

Bourgeois utopia in a new era

In many national settings the suburbs represent a mass popular lifestyle choice, and in some settings suburbs represent some of the highest-amenity residential areas to be found in city-regions, combining safety, a degree of density with open space, good schools, etc. This is the familiar attraction of suburbia as a bourgeois utopia which can, by virtue of the occupational profile of residents, have important spillovers in the local economy. Some indication of this comes in the case of London’s suburbs. After two decades which saw something of a renaissance of the central London economy, closely connected to financial sector deregulation, London suburbs have become the focus of increased attention since the early 2000s. London’s suburbs were built onto and around a patchwork of pre-existing villages, institutions, large houses and estates, resulting in a village character and identity rather distinct from, for example, US and Australian suburbs and which continues to be the focal point of their appeal (GLA, 2002: 13).

As a result, London suburbs have never had the negative reputation of their counterparts in Paris, nor have they suffered in the way that some inner suburbs have in the US as selective outmigration and employment dispersal favours outer suburbs. Instead, the suburb retains much of its appeal such that urban renaissance and suburban growth are not necessarily incompatible (GLA, 2002: 27). As a result of this, according to one recent report, suburbs in London and across the south-east of England are no longer dormitories but, in many cases, drivers of city-regional economies in their own right, with generally highly skilled populations and many characteristics of the knowledge-driven economy (Local Futures n.d.: 30). Mayor Boris Johnson’s Outer London Commission has also noted the importance of quality of life and amenity – including the mundane semi-public realm of gardens, parks, playing fields, etc. – in place-shaping and place-shielding to the economy of the suburbs, and has raised the possibility of cultural quarters within suburbs and infrastructure to underpin home-working smaller businesses (Outer London Commission, 2010: 162).

As the nature and logic of employment and the organization of production has changed towards smaller business sizes, the high-amenity suburbs of major cities are a locus for new patterns of work that centre, to a greater or lesser extent, on the home or on the move, but only occasionally in a fixed singular place of work such as an office or factory. There is a sense here in which amenity drives growth and, since these high-amenity suburbs politically are closed to growth in terms of new housing and employment land uses, there is at least some pressure for local economic growth to manifest in high-value and/or new products and services. In these suburbs we see the bourgeois utopia of nuclear family life involving suburb–city commuting beginning to be reconstituted as a habitus based on geographically extended and more complex personal and professional networks (Mace, 2010). As Gornostaeva notes: ‘running a business from a comfortable inner or outer London suburban home privileged by close proximity to high-quality services such as schools, health surgeries, shops and parks, has become a more prominent feature of contemporary urban business culture’ (2008: 68).

As the growth of creative industries like film, television and video production evolves, the industry itself becomes more complex and the degree of specialization within the industry more intense, leading to more complex patterns of location. As Gornostaeva (2008) has recently charted with respect to London, this involves both positive and negative decentralization to the suburbs. This includes decentralization to the outer suburbs of London in a manner which is counter-intuitive from the perspective of much received theory of agglomeration noted above – involving micro-businesses relocating to less urbanized and accessible outer London. In this picture the home has become important as a nexus of trans-local, sometimes international, personal and business networks.

The extended suburban economy of ‘accessible rural’ areas

In the discussion immediately above, I have already hinted at what might be thought of as vast areas that function effectively as very low-density suburbs. These include the rural areas accessible to major cities and their suburbs – the outer suburbs and exurbs composed of small towns and villages. Such vast part-residential, part-employment hinterlands can be found surrounding the largest cities in many national settings. These locations have had employment growth records which have been generally better than those of central cities or metropolitan areas taken as a whole in nations experiencing ‘counter-urbanization’ such as the UK and US (Keeble and Tyler, 1995; Renski, 2009). There is also evidence to suggest that rates of new firm formation and innovation are now greater in accessible rural settlements in the UK (Keeble and Tyler, 1995). Similarly, in a study of new firm entry patterns across the US, Renski finds that it is the suburbs of metropolitan areas that are the dominant producers of new firms in manufacturing and advanced services including the high-technology portions of these sectors (Renski, 2009: 65).

While it is tempting to search for the success of these locations in terms of aspects of the places themselves, the rise of the accessible rural economy in this way is more likely to represent some complex combination of the selective migration of entrepreneurs coupled with the manner in which such settlements ‘borrow size’ from, or remain in the orbit of and benefit from the external economies of large urban centres (Phelps et al., 2001). The extended suburban hinterland of outer suburbia and exurbia represents something of an extension of the habitus found in the discussion above regarding London’s suburbs. This is a complex realm in and of itself. Doubtless some portion of it is composed of those who have jobs within metropolitan areas but cannot afford to live there. Some portion presumably includes wealthier segments of society who move between metropolitan and exurban residences. As in the city, the contrasts between wealth and poverty can be great but the impact of this latter class of people on the increasing fortunes of exurban economies from a low economic base level seems unmistakable.

Duranton (1999) has suggested that guilds formed the key organizing institution in pre-industrial urban agglomerations, while the land market governed the concentration and spatial organization of economic activity in the industrial era and personal and professional networks shape contemporary instances of agglomeration – albeit that these are now almost so diffuse as to make using the term ‘agglomeration’ questionable. Arguably, what we see in the extension of suburbia into these accessible rural areas is something of the way in which distantiated personal and business networks are an important shaper of extended urban regions comprised of complex patterns of functional specialization among settlements.

The national economy born suburban

Australia is sometimes described as the first suburban nation (see Flew, this volume; Gibson, this volume), signalling the quantitative significance of suburbs in population and employment terms. Nevertheless, the suburbs of even this first suburban nation have been ‘poorly understood and their dynamism … often not appreciated’ (Gleeson, 2002: 229). Indeed, Collis et al. (2010: 110) argue that failing to properly consider the economic potential of the suburbs would entail ‘disregarding an entire component of the creative industries in Australia, and misunderstanding the nature of those industries’. It is hardly surprising, then, that some of the best evidence emerging of the creativity of suburbs comes from the Australian setting.

In an aggregate analysis of patterns of employment change in creative industries in the Sydney metropolitan area Gibson and Brennan-Horley (2006) portray an irregular geography to creativity within the city-region – one in which some outer suburban or ex-urban areas perform well both as locations for, and in terms of rates of growth of, creative industry employment. They go on to point to the multiplicity of reasons for the growth of creative industries in suburbs, including faster population growth and growth in the size of the economy in outer suburbs, cost-squeeze pressures on creative industry workers within metro regions experiencing residential price inflation, and the location and relocation of creative industry employment within suburbs themselves.

Collis et al.’s work on the Redcliffe suburb of Brisbane finds the creative industries active there in a manner which is suggestive of ‘gaps between policy imaginings of inner city creative places and the lived experience of outer-suburban materialities for creative workers’ (2010: 104). Similar sentiments have been voiced by Martinez-Fernandez and Potts, whose study of the suburban ‘innovation ecosystem’ of the MacArthur region of Sydney’s outer suburbs indicates that suburban economies do make their own, quite variable, contributions to the innovative record of the metropolitan regional economy (2006: 563).

The work emerging on the creative economy of Australian suburbs underlines Duranton’s (1999) suggestion that the contemporary organizing institution in processes of agglomeration is personal and professional networks. So, Collis et al.’s (2010) work indicates that patterns of professional networks of the outer suburban creative industries are multi-scalar, encompassing not just the local but the national and international. Brennan-Horley’s (2010) analysis of the multi-sited nature of creative occupations in Darwin suggests a complex topology, including significant suburb to CBD and inter-suburb interactions. Just as significantly, there is also some evidence from the outer suburban areas of Sydney to suggest that such personal and professional networks, and the sourcing of knowledge-intensive service inputs, can be quite localized to the outer suburban setting (Martinez-Fernandez and Potts, 2006: 565).

Conclusion

The exclusive focus on the search for, and promotion of, a distinctly urban creative class or creative industries seems unhelpful, and potentially distorts academic and policy attention regarding what, in reality, ought to be a broader research agenda on the variegated forms of innovativeness in contemporary society. Creativity and innovativeness are properties that have come to be defined largely by elites through theoretical claims which reflect imaginings of their own social worth. The current privileging of the city within academic and policy discourse may simply be the latest incarnation of ‘suburb bashing’; although, as a powerful amalgam of two elite-defined categories – suburb and creative industries – it may be doubly misleading.

Here I have attempted to sketch some of the evolving complexities in the quality of suburban economies through a series of examples. I do not want simply to reverse city–suburb dualities but to place the suburban economy in all its variety (innovative or indeed not so creative) within a larger context of complex, and continually evolving, extended metropolitan economies. It is clear, for example, that many suburbs in the US have been and continue to experience significant and diverse trajectories of economic decline. Where more positive performance of suburban economies is apparent, policy interventions would nevertheless have to be tailored to what are diverse local processes of innovation (Martinez-Fernandez and Potts, 2006: 553).

If many nations now contain metropolitan regional economies composed of specialized trading places, then equally we can imagine a variety of creative suburban economies – here the high-amenity suburban micro-enterprise economy centred on the home, there the suburban corporate research and development campus economy. Elsewhere we see the market town and village economy brought within the orbit of the metropolis, and even the irrepressible creative economy of the marginalized suburbs of social housing and favelas. Each of these examples might be a research agenda on the past and future creativity of the suburbs in itself. However, in each case the surface of inquiry has only just been scratched. It seems inevitable that academic and policy interest will have to address the topic of suburban creativity if our economic well-being is to be better understood and supported.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Peter Hall, Andrew Harris, Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, referees and the editors for their very helpful suggestions for this paper.

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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