The author begins with some reflections on the significance of monopoly rents to understanding how contemporary processes of economic globalization relate to localities and cultural forms. Firstly, while uniqueness is crucial to monopoly rent, the requirement of tradability means that no item can be so unique as to be entirely outside the monetary calculus. Secondly, the idea of 'culture' is more and more entangled with attempts to reassert such monopoly powers precisely because claims to uniqueness and authenticity can best be articulated as distinctive and non-replicable cultural claims. The author also discusses how cities and regions develop through attempts to garner monopoly rents, and how much the current interest in local cultural innovation and the resurrection and invention of local traditions attaches to the desire to extract and appropriate such rents. The knowledge and heritage industries, the vitality of cultural production, signature architecture and the cultivation of distinctive aesthetic judgments have become powerful constitutive elements in the politics of urban entrepreneurialism in many places. But this entrains in its wake wall of the localized questions about whose collective memory, whose aesthetics, and who benefits. However, by seeking to trade on values of authenticity, locality, history, culture, collective memories and tradition, capitalists open a space for political thought and action within which socialist alternatives can be both devised and pursued. Thus space deserves intense exploration and cultivation by oppositional movements that embrace cultural producers and cultural production as a key element in their political strategy.