L’organisation sociale de la créativité métropolitaine. Du milieu des arts numériques à la scène du faire

One of the promises of the creative city doxa has regard to the metropolitan benefit of linkages between art, creative industries and technoscience. However, the few empirical studies that are available tend to show that the link between production in the worlds of artistic creation on the one hand and of cultural, creative and techno-scientific industries on the other does occasionally exist in the context of research and development programmes, but that these links are difficult to identify. In this paper, and based on the Lyon experience, we aim at going beyond the assumption that the mere contiguity of creative, research and industrial development activities at the metropolitan scale is sufficient to foster interrelations (between organizations and individuals) which give birth to the desired innovation process. This paper is based on a inductive approach and is structured around three main parts. The first one retraces the social origins of the digital creation milieu in the Lyon metropolis, from its infancy to its artistic institutionalization. The second aims at describing the praxis of digital arts and the social organization of this relational environment. The last one explores the ways in which it is imbricate in a metropolitan cultural scene that is linked to the makers movement and to the current digital transition. This in turn leads the authors to discuss the creative city concept.