At the weekend, fossicking along the bookshelf in our front room, I picked up [amazon_link id=”1854373447″ target=”_blank” ]Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis[/amazon_link], the catalogue of a 2001 Tate exhibition.

[amazon_image id=”1854373447″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (Art Catalogue)[/amazon_image]

It was a terrific exhibition, covering art from 9 global cities during their most creative periods – Vienna in the early 1900s, Lagos in the 50s and 60s etc. The catalogue has a few additional essays including one by Sharon Zukin, ‘How to Create a Culture Capital: reflections on urban markets and places’, which is a concise statement of an point made since by many other people including [amazon_link id=”0465042481″ target=”_blank” ]Richard Florida[/amazon_link] about the importance of creative ‘industries’ for the urban economy. Zukin refers to it as the ‘Artistic Mode of Production’; echoing my thoughts in The Weightless World, she writes here: “Design adds more ‘value’ to products than their material components do,” linking in also globalisation, the great emphasis on innovation, and the relaxation of traditional ways of working. The essay also cites the very interesting 1994 book, [amazon_link id=”B00NPOATHC” target=”_blank” ]Economies of Signs and Space[/amazon_link] by Scott Lash and John Urry. It doesn’t cite – but could have done – 1999’s [amazon_link id=”0393323692″ target=”_blank” ]Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism[/amazon_link] by Walter LaFeber. I might need to look at those two again.

[amazon_image id=”B00NPOATHC” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Economies of Signs & Space (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society) by Lash, Scott, Urry, John (2000) Paperback[/amazon_image] [amazon_image id=”0393320375″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism[/amazon_image]