Are cities the font of innovation? A critical review of the literature on cities and innovation Richard Shearmur INRS Urbanisation Culture Société, Université du Québec, 385 Sherbrooke East, Montréal, Québec, Canada H2X 1E3 article info Article history: Available online 24 July 2012 Keywords: Innovation Cities Rural areas Temporary face-to-face Geographic systems abstract It has almost become a research premise, as opposed to a research question, that cities are the font of economic innovation. This review explores the connection between innovation and cities. In order to understand why this question arises, I first situate the exploration within the wider framework of the innovation discourse, and then within the more specific corpus of work that establishes a connection between innovation and territory. Although this territorial approach provides arguments and evidence in support of the prevailing idea that innovation is an urban phenomenon, there is also a disparate body of work that does not support this view. Two key questions emerge from this review. First, is it possible to distinguish the identification, marketing and promotion of innovation (that indeed occurs in cities, which are the loci of market power) from innovation itself (that does not necessarily occur in cities)? Second, given that innovation is understood to emanate from interactions and knowledge flows leavened by know-how and finance, does it make sense for innovation to be attached to any particular geographic or social milieu? Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction Even if one restricts oneself to the narrow field of economic innovation—i.e. the emergence of new industries, new products and new processes—it is almost impossible to review all that has been written over the last few years regarding its connection with cities. Numerous books have been published that explore innova- tion 1 and city growth (e.g. Acs, 2002; van Oort, 2004), innovative cit- ies through history (e.g. Hall, 1999), creativity—understood as a determinant of innovation—and cities (e.g. Andersson, Andersson, & Mellander, 2011; Cooke & Lazaretti, 2008; Florida, 2002; Landry, 2008; Montgomery, 2008), cities’ creative capital (e.g. Krätke, 2011), or, quite simply, their triumph as humankind’s greatest invention (e.g. Glaeser, 2011). Forests have been cut down and data centres engorged with papers on metropolitan innovation processes, whether at the scale of the neighbourhood (e.g. Currid, 2007; Florida, 2009; Hutton, 2009 2 ), the industrial cluster (e.g. Feldman & Francis, 2003; Potter & Miranda, 2009; Rantisi, 2011; Wolfe, 2009), the metropolitan area (e.g. Duranton, 2011; Duranton & Puga, 2001; Simmie, 2001) or of global city systems writ large (e.g. Castells, 1996; Komninos, 2011; Snyder & Wenger, 2004). Many of these papers and books are insightful analyses of par- ticular instances and processes of innovation that occur in cities. Some actively promote the idea that cities are the loci of innova- tion and creativity (such as Florida (2009) and Montgomery (2008)), others present case studies of innovation that occurs in cities (such as Currid (2007) and Potter and Miranda (2009)), and yet others still attempt to explain how and why innovative activity occurs in cities (such as Acs (2002), Duranton and Puga (2001) and Feldman and Audretsch (1999)). However, the overall impression that can easily be gained after immersion in this vast literature is one of confusion. Notwithstand- ing the way in which policy makers have internalised the idea that cities and economic innovation are linked, and despite the vast sum of research that seems to corroborate this idea, an uncomfort- able feeling remains. A number of questions seem to be elided, the most basic one being—why bother with innovation? This term, la- den with positive normative associations, hides not only a multi- tude of processes that can all lay claim to being innovative, but also gives little indication of why innovation is necessary, whether it is always a good thing, and, if it is a good thing, who benefits from it? Another question that is not usually confronted concerns the apparent absence of any constructive role that non-urban set- tings can play in the innovation game. The consignment of non-ur- ban spaces (and also of non-creative classes) to the scrap-heap of economic dynamism is of some concern, and can only be under- stood, I argue, if innovation is approached as a discourse—i.e. as a 0264-2751/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2012.06.008 E-mail address: richard.shearmur@ucs.inrs.ca 1 Unless otherwise specified innovation will refer to economic innovation, to be distinguished from social, policy and – to some extent at least – cultural innovation. Since the latter is often marketed (Scott, 2008), this type of innovation is ambiguous. However, to the extent that it is marketed, it will be considered to fall under the economic innovation rubric. 2 This book purports to be about different cities, but the empirical material presented focuses on different types of neighbourhood within a city. Cities 29 (2012) S9–S18 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Cities journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cities