This chapter draws attention to the ‘shadow spaces’ of the creativity paradigm: Small and mid-size cities at the fringes of the Global South that are constructed as irrelevant places in the branding circus of the universal creativity phantasm, and can therefore not compete with cities in the Global North. However, most of the global population growth will take place in these urban spaces of the Global South. Speaking with Fernand Braudel’s famous statement that the ‘fate of the world is decided in cities’, attention has to be shifted to small cities. By presenting the case of Cachoeira, Northeast Brazil, we show that the establishment of an academic knowledge institution is shaping profoundly the urban milieu to a creative bourgeois life-world and that the socio-spatial arrangements of medium cities are the main ‘boost’ for implementing the creativity paradigm and will therefore ‘cement’ inequality.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F978-1-349-95115-4_9
Baumgartner, Wendel Henrique; Rothfuß, Eberhard. Creative Inequality in the Mid-sized University City : Socio-spatial Reflections on the Brazilian Rural-Urban Interface : The Case of Cachoeira In: Gerhard, Ulrike ; Hoelscher, Michael ; Wilson, David (Hrsg.): Inequalities in Creative Cities – New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. – pp. 217-237