Edited by David Emanuel Andersson, Åke E. Andersson and Charlotta Mellander
Chapter 13: The Arts: Not Just Artists (and Vice Versa)
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and Kevin M. Stolarick Since the early 1990s, the arts have been seriously considered in scholarship and practice for their role in the economic development of the regions and cities in which they concentrate. There is no question that the arts, and more broadly cultural production, have been an important field of study in the social sciences since the turn of the nineteenth century (Veblen  1994; Simmel, 1904; Robinson, 1961; Blumer, 1969). However, in more recent years, the arts have been looked at for their practical application in the development of place (Molotch, 1996, 2002; Scott, 2000, 2005; Currid, 2006, 2007b; Markusen and Schrock, 2006b; Markusen et al., 2008). In the face of the globalization and homogenization of the urban experience, a regional arts economic base is significant in establishing a region or city identity or what Markusen and Schrock (2006a) call ‘distinction’. The insertion of the arts into economic development has resulted in large-scale tourism developments (Judd and Fainstein, 1999; Strom, 2002), efforts to use the arts as redevelopment (Zukin, 1989; Plaza, 2006; Grodach and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2007) and as a part of larger amenity schemes (Glaeser et al., 2001; Florida, 2002a; Clark, 2004). Other types of arts-oriented economic development have tended to invest in large-scale tourism and cultural ‘hard branding’ (Evans, 2003), using museums and corporate investments as a means to create a cultural milieu to lure visitors and new desirable residents (Sassen and Roost, 1999; Strom, 2002; Plaza, 2006). Additionally, developers have sought to create...
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