URBAN GEOGRAPHIES IN CREATIVITY-LED ECONOMIES. EVIDENCE FROM THE ITALIAN CASE

Though creativity is increasingly becoming an issue for consideration in economic literature beside the more usual topic of innovation, doubts arise about the ability of mainstream economics to cope with it as an analytically well-defined notion. Looking at it from a merely epiphenomenal point of view or reducing it to ideation are currently the ways economics deals with it, according to the dichotomy Schumpeter established a century ago between the ideational and the implementional phases within the process of innovation. The starting point of this paper is that this situation is basically an expression of the underlying compliance of economics with the neo-positivist paradigm and, conversely, its tardiness if not inability to take part in the ‘interpretive/hermeneutic turn’ which has involved all the other social sciences in recent decades. The paper suggests that this ambiguous condition of ‘creativity’ offers an extraordinary opportunity for delving into the potentialities of a hermeneutic approach to economics. Through providing that term with a proper analytical status in relation to the ideation/innovation pairing, such an approach makes it possible to get fruitful perspectives on the entire knowledge-innovation chain, with foreseeable implications on the normative side. Having set up a suitable theoretical frame, the paper carries out an empirical exercise to test the heuristic potential of the proposed approach, with reference to the Italian creative sector, and especially its sensitiveness to Marshallian and Jacobsian agglomeration economies.