The Geography of Creativity

drawing on and citing sources from many places and times. Some of the authors are well known to readers of this journal; others were new to me. The review chapters cover the necessary topics, as well as some unnecessary ones. Surprises included several views from Austrian economics and strong calls for deregulation – or non-regulation – as the preferred governance model for creative cities. Overall, the first half of the volume is much stronger than the second. Some of the chapters contained analyses that seem too technical and detailed for a handbook – and too specific to its study area. I expect a handbook to bring the reader up to the state-of-the-art on a particular topic. Europe and (especially) North America are over-represented. New Zealand is as near to Asia as any chapter gets. Stockholm, Vancouver and Wellington are the only cities that receive case-study attention. I counted twelve of the twenty-six chapters as empirical – a proportion that seems a bit high for a handbook. For me, the best of the empirical chapters were by Gabe, who neatly shows how creative occupations benefit from a wage premium, and by Silver et al., who outline scenes as bundles of amenities that contribute to creative cities. I believe that some places are more creative than others and the volume documents this across several dimensions. The volume as a whole, however, is uneven: its worst chapters offer polemics that seem inappropriate for the volume, but its best chapters provide rewarding insights and summaries on creative cities as spaces for creativity.