Abstract

Compared with cultural industries, cultural workers are understudied in economic geography and regional science, reflecting in general a misplaced emphasis on industries at the expense of occupations. Artists (including musicians, actors, dancers, writers, designers) are unique in their high rates of high self-employment, propensity to relocate inter-regionally, and ability to work across commercial, non-profit and community sectors. Markusen offers a number of hypotheses about how self-employed artists choose to locate among regions and neighborhoods and how this varies across career cycles. She also contends that the occupational structure of a cultural industry in one place will not necessarily resemble that in another. Using US Census data (a one in five sample of the entire US population), Markusen provides evidence for these propositions and explores how arts and cultural workers are distributed among cultural and other industries and across major US metros. The talk also explores artists’ roles in creative placemaking—the deliberate shaping of regions, neighborhoods and small towns through cultural initiatives—and how these can be evaluated. The analysis demonstrates the use of occupations to conceptualize the regional workforce and to study urban and regional economies comparatively.