The experience of citizenship may seem very far removed from both creativity and the economy, especially from the ‘community’ perspective of the AHRC's ‘Connected Communities’ scheme under which our project, Media, Community and the Creative Citizen, was funded. In a time when so much political discourse is focused upon economic competitiveness, it is striking that economists continue to struggle to include in their calculations of economic importance the outputs of acts of citizenship, especially where these are voluntary or nonprofessional in character. Where concessions are made, the tendency has been to add matters such as ‘wellbeing’ or ‘happiness’ to economic models (Layard, 2006; Frey and Stutzer, 2013). The economics of happiness, however, is based on psychology (how do I feel and what do I want more of?), not citizenship (how do I decide and act in concert with others, as part of our group?). As yet, economics based on cost benefit frameworks has not developed an ‘economics of citizenship’. Such a move conflicts with the discipline's commitment to individual motivation (or ‘rational choice theory’, where ‘rational’ means ‘wanting more of a given good’). Citizenship is a property of groups. It cannot be understood within the framework of methodological individualism. Thus, it remains the case, even when it is possible to speak of a creative economy (albeit as a contested term), that creative citizenship seems to be going too far.

Indeed, within the bounds of formal, disciplinary knowledge, the concepts of creativity, citizenship and economics all belong to different domains. The absence of a ready-made discipline is a disadvantage, in the sense that there's no body of knowledge or method to which our research is a further contribution. On the other hand it is an advantage in the sense that the field is open to new ways of understanding both economics and citizenship. That makes our research project itself a creative and civic act, even as it strives to describe something real, which in turn may serve to modernise interdisciplinary scholarship about both citizenship and creativity in the context of economic and cultural development. Not only is the work of research creative, it is also civic.