In the making: Open Creative Labs as an emerging topic in economic geography?

Abstract

In the past 15 years, we have witnessed an upsurge of collaborative spaces providing an arena for individual and collective creativity, (co)creating craft-based products, urban manufacturing, and experimentation with business or creative ideas using innovative technologies such as 3D printing or CNC milling machines. The discourses on spaces such as coworking, hacker- or makerspaces, accelerators, Fab Labs, and open workshops promise new communities, more innovation, and a transformation of work. This has called for interdisciplinary scholarly attention, primarily from organization and management studies, sociology, and entrepreneurship studies. However, little attention has so far been paid to this development from the perspective of geography. This paper employs Open Creative Labs as an umbrella term for the diversity of spaces and aims at, first, providing an overview of recent interdisciplinary perspectives on the functions of labs in coordinating creativity and entrepreneurship, as well as the motivations of users to utilize these spaces for their projects, and, second, offers an approach to a multiscalar spatial conceptualizations of labs. The paper concludes by exploring policy implications that may benefit from an economic-geography perspective.