Why Artists Cluster in Big Cities? Infrastructural Factors of Location, Professional Strategies and Community Dynamics

Abstract

The cause of the big cities concentration of artists has been gaining centrality
in academic research as it has been underlined its importance for the creative
industries. The research of this phenomenon is usually based on economic
clustering theories, which only take into account infrastructural factors of the
location. Although this approach has been increasingly criticized and social
interactions have been considered more important, the contributions of
sociology of artistic professions or urban sociology have been mostly
ignored. Taking into account the results of these sociological perspectives a
the research proposes a more multidimensional and a more critical point of
view towards the agglomeration artistic phenomenon, considering it as a
functional phenomenon of postfordist economy.