Behind the Scenes: Placemaking and Preferential Circulation in the Making of an Innovative Micro-Cluster (Off-Off-Broadway, 1958-1976)

While the geography of innovation is often studied at the level of city-regions, main conclusions provide only a partial account of the dynamics unfolding within cities. In this article, we examine how a set of proximate organizational sites located within a city comes to foster innovation. Specifically, we study how the placemaking practices of the entrepreneurs who originate these sites shape the localized landscape of resources that innovators mobilize to innovate. Drawing on the historical case of the Off-Off-Broadway theater (1958-1976), we show that these distributed, independent practices embedded an array of non-redundant resources within a small geographical area and, by fostering the patterning of innovators' attendance across proximate venues, cohered into an innovative micro-cluster. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurs who originate such organizational sites play an active role in infrastructuring innovation within cities, with implications for how we understand the spatial organization of innovation.