Buzz and the Creative City: Traversing Atmospheres of the Urban Creative & Cultural Industries in Leeds

‘Buzz’ isn’t an unknown term in Creative and Cultural Industries scholarship, though it has received little by way of targeted investigation. This thesis, which uses ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches, explores the atmospheric terrain of Buzz as related to the Creative and Cultural Industries in the city of Leeds, UK. It is underpinned by original empirical research, namely both the audio and GPS data of ‘walking interviews’, with sixteen Leeds-based Creative and Cultural sector workers. Developed through the transdisciplinary lens of Geohumanities, a constellation of disciplines and methods that approach the human meanings of place, a new conceptualisation of Buzz is advanced that demonstrates the efficacy of the perceptual, experiential, and sensate space of the city on the Creative and Cultural Industries. Multiple new concepts are developed; Firstly, ‘The Layered City’ conceptualises different strata of urban space based upon various issues of access and openness, up to and including an atmospheric realm. Secondly, ‘The Buzz Cycle’ conceptualises the myriad cyclical dynamics and reciprocities of people and place within a given Creative and Cultural Industries milieu, and thirdly, ‘The Buzz Ecology’ conceptualises the wider city which is its context. In demonstrating the crucial micro-geographies and subjectivities of the individual, this thesis configures the milieu of the Creative City, and the experience of its Buzz, as an individualised and subjective, as well as collectivised and objective, terrain. In so doing, it meaningfully expands upon existing scholarship by advancing current knowledge into the role that place plays for the sectors, to newly include the intangible experiencing of the atmospheric terrain of Buzz in tandem with the more readily understood and scrutinised terra firma of the city.