Thriving at the Edge: Rewriting the Urban Creativity Canon from the Margins

Abstract

This chapter takes aim at the current urban-age consensus and demonstrates how the orthodox perception of creativity as an urban prerogative has stifled our ability to imagine how creativity unfolds in peripheral contexts. Rather than reducing peripheries to the amorphous residual terrain beyond the city limits whose destiny is sealed by the profound lack of urban virtues, we present socio-material, socio-cultural and political-economic assets of peripherality. By drawing on a wide range of peripheral contexts – from artists in Finnish Lapland to spacefarers in New Zealand – the chapter elucidates how smallness and dispersion, diversities and hostility, and the absence of power and isolation are leveraged for creativity and innovation.