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The cultural economy forms a leading trajectory of urban development, and has emerged as a key facet of globalizing cities. Cultural industries include new media, digital arts, music and film, and the design industries and professions, as well as allied consumption and spectacle in the city. The cultural economy now represents the third-largest sector in many metropolitan cities of the West including London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne, and is increasingly influential in the development of East Asian cities (Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore), as well as the mega-cities of the Global South (e.g. Mumbai, Capetown, and São Paulo). Cities and the Cultural Economy provides a critical integration of the burgeoning research and policy literatures in one of the most prominent sub-fields of contemporary urban studies. Policies for cultural economy are increasingly evident within planning, development and place-marketing programs, requiring large resource commitments, but producing – on the evidence – highly uneven results. Accordingly the volume includes a critical review of how the new cultural economy is reshaping urban labour, housing and property markets, contributing to gentrification and to ‘precarious employment'formation, as well as to broadly favorable outcomes, such as community regeneration and urban vitality. The volume acknowledges the important growth dynamics and sustainability of key creative industries. Written primarily as a text for upper-level undergraduate and Masters students in urban, economic and social geography; sociology; cultural studies; and planning, this provocative and compelling text will also be of interest to those studying urban land economics, architecture, landscape architecture and the built environment.

The East and Southeast Asia region constitutes the world's most compelling theatre of accelerated globalization and industrial restructuring. Following a spectacular realization of the ‘industrialization paradigm'and a period of services-led growth, the early twenty-first century economic landscape among leading Asian states now comprises a burgeoning ‘New Economy'spectrum of the most advanced industrial trajectories, including finance, the knowledge economy and the ‘new cultural economy'. In an agenda-setting volume, New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities draws on stimulating research conducted by a new generation of urban scholars to generate critical analysis and theoretical insights on the New Economy phenomenon within Asia.New industry formation and the transformation of older economic practices constitute instruments of development, as well as signifiers of larger processes of change, expressed in the reproduction of space in the city. Asia's major cities become the key staging areas for the New Economy, driven by the growing wealth of an urban middle and professional class, higher education institutions, city-based inter-regional movements and urban mega-projects. New Economic Spaces in Asian Cites animates this New Economy discourse by means of vibrant storylines of instructive cities and sites, including cases studies situated in cities such as Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Singapore. Theoretical and normative issues associated with the emergence of the new cultural economy are the subject of the book's context-setting chapters, and each case study presents an evocative narrative of development interdependencies and exemplary outcomes on the ground. New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities offers a vivid contribution to our understanding of the ongoing transformation of Asia's urban system, including the critical intersections of global and local-regional dynamics in processes of new industry formation and the relayering of space in the Asian metropolis. The synthesis of empirical profiles, normative insights, and theoretical reference points enhances the book's interest for scholars and students in fields of Asian studies, urban and cultural studies, and urban and economic geography, as well as for policy specialists and urban/community planners.