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International audience; “Cultural/Creative Quarters/Clusters/Districts” (CCC) have become very popular local development strategies across the World in the last 30 years. This popularity has been reflected within the academic literature in Urban Planning, Geography, Economics and Cultural Studies. However, each discipline and/or authors define these concepts in their own way or borrow from one another without necessarily clearly delimiting or explaining their approaches. As such, the CCC academic field of research is quite fuzzy. In order to address this issue, this paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of the peer-reviewed academic literature included in the Scopus database using the concepts of creative or cultural clusters, districts or quarters (the most popular combination of terms found in the literature). In doing so, the paper addresses the following questions: What are cultural/creative district, cluster and quarter? When did these concepts appear? Are these concepts overlapping? Who has been writing about these? In which disciplines and in which countries? What has been the evolution in terms of conceptual understanding? What are the themes and dimensions associated with these concepts? How have they been studied and researched (methodologies)? What issues and research gap are present within this literature? How can we move the research forward?

In the past fifteen years there has been an increasing focus on the importance of creativity in fostering economic development with the emergence of concepts such as creative industries, creative e...

The shift towards neo-liberal policy-making as orthodoxy has been well documented within the field of regional development and beyond (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2012; Boland, 2014; Haughton, Allme...

This paper examines how the loss of 6300 jobs from the closure of MG Rover (MGR) in the city of Birmingham (UK) in April 2005 affected the employment trajectories of ex-workers, in the context of wider structural change and efforts at urban renewal. The paper presents an analysis of a longitudinal survey of 300 ex-MGR workers, and examines to what extent the state of local labour markets and workers’ geographical mobility—as well as the effectiveness of the immediate policy response and longer-term local economic strategies—may have helped to balance the impacts of personal attributes associated with workers’ employability and their reabsorption into the labour markets. It is found that the relative buoyancy of the local economy, the success of longer-run efforts at diversification and a strong policy response and retraining initiative helped many disadvantaged workers to find new jobs in the medium term. However, the paper also highlights the unequal employment outcomes and trajectories that many lesser-skilled workers faced. It explores the policy issues arising from such closures and their aftermath, such as the need to co-ordinate responses, to retain institutional capacity, to offer high-quality training and education resources to workers and, where possible, to slow down such closure processes to enable skills to be retained and reused within the local economy.

Much of the recent literature concerned with the impacts of factory closure refers to closures occurring in the 1980s and 1990s and affecting heavy industry – coal, steel and shipbuilding. It also tends to focus on employment and labour market impacts assessed through the subsequent experience of workers made redundant following closures. It also tends to assume that these impacts are localized. Because of this much of the discussion of policy implications relates to the workers made redundant and to a very local economy. This paper refers to the closure of the MG Rover factory in Longbridge, Birmingham, UK. This closure was regarded as presenting a crisis for government and the local community. The paper responds to arguments in the research literature and explores the spatial and economic impact of the MG Rover closure in more detail. It complements other research which has focused on the experience of those made redundant in 2005 by referring to the loss of employment over a longer time period and iden...