The current financial crisis has thoroughly exposed the limits of economic rationality. Yet we remain surprised, left in disbelief, and yearn for economic rationality to return, still hoping that on a normal day the economy will follow an iron logic, and that economic actors will behave in a dispassionate way. Ash Amin makes the case for seeing the economy as so shot through with cultural inputs that ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ cannot be seen as separate arenas. Focusing on the power of passion, moral values, soft knowledge, trust and metaphor, he illustrates that the economy has to be imagined as a hybrid entanglement. The lecture goes on to mobilise this insight for a new understanding of the urban economy, one that moves beyond familiar invocations of culture as a new basis for urban prosperity.