Cultural creativity and symbolic economy in early modern Naples: music and theatre as Cultural Industries

This volume critically challenges the current creative city debate from a historical perspective. In the past two decades, urban studies has been engulfed by a creative city narrative in which concepts such as the creative economy, the creative class or creative industries proclaim the status of the city as the primary site of human creativity and innovation. So far, however, nobody has challenged the core premise underlyng this narrative, asking why we automatically have to look at cities as being the agentes of change and innovation. What prcesses have been at work historically before the predominance of cities in nurturing creativity and innovation was esatblished? To tackle this question, the editor of this volume have collected case studies ranging from Renaissance Firenze and sixteenth.century Antwerp to early modern Naples, Amsterdam, Bologna, and Paris; to industrialising Sheffield and across ninetheenth-and twentieth-century centres, including Scandinaviana port cities, Venics, London and the French techno-industrial city of Grenoble.