Following from a public lecture at City University London, the articles discuss the interface between creativity, urban transformation, precariousness and social networking. This introduction places the lecture within the framework of North–South academic exchanges and in relation to how Latin American cities are responding to the rise of the creative economy in urban policy development. The main article, written by Néstor García Canclini, provides the foundation for an anthropology of precariousness and creativity in the context of globalised urban discontent and the transformation of space through information technologies. Voicing classical cultural studies concerns about identities, economy, global imaginaries and political resistance, he examines the strategies and networks that young creative producers, cultural entrepreneurs and artists use to navigate contradictory transnational processes. The article offers a renewed critical perspective into creative urbanism, connecting local cultural practices with global processes of neoliberal economic restructuring, urban violence and social exclusion. In doing so, it delineates the possibilities for an emancipatory transformation of urban space in times of increasing uncertainty.