The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once declared that the best place in which to resolve philosophical problems is a railway station, leaving one to wonder how he would have fared in twenty-first century airports! What Wittgenstein was referring to, of course, is the importance of place as an arena in which creative processes can unfold (Törnqvist 2011). Since creativity is a characteristic of people, it is difficult to argue that a place or setting can be creative in and of itself any more than it can be happy, angry or curious (Törnqvist 2011: 25). Places, however, can offer conditions under which creativity can flourish.

In recent years cultural geographers and sociologists have become increasingly interested in the relationship between creativity and place (Scott 2000; Florida 2002). Within the context of contemporary Western urban life, this work has frequently described how creative people and industries tend to form clusters of activity in city neighbourhoods. It has been argued that the close proximity of like-minded people with a variety of relevant skills leads to interrelationships and generates positive feedback leading to new expressions and ideas (Scott 1999). Pierre Bourdieu (1993) called this a ‘creative field’, as in the dot-com boom of the 1980s in Silicon Valley in the United States (Koepp 2002) or Renaissance Florence (Törnqvist 2011). Research has often been policy-driven by way of an interest in how to cultivate creativity and stimulate economic growth through city planning. More recently, however, researchers have argued that the focus on urban environments has led to assumptions about where creativity is located that need to be challenged (Gibson 2010). They have looked elsewhere, finding that creativity is also manifest in small, suburban, rural and remote places with small populations, and that it is implicated in a range of social, economic and technical transformations peculiar to those localities (Gibson and Connell 2004; Gibson 2010).