Creative Cities: The Role of Creative Industries in Regeneration : Creative Cities: The Role of Creative Industries in Regeneration
Justin O’Connor School of Performance and Cultural Industries : Justin O’Connor School of Performance and Cultural Industries
Culture central to the contemporary City : Culture central to the contemporary City
Culture-led regeneration
The ‘creative city’
Creative industries and the City
Culture-led Regeneration : Culture-led Regeneration
1980s city governments faced:
contracting industrial base
increasing globalisation
erosion of the key traditional competitive functions of cities.
culture as the ‘new fix’
New role for culture : New role for culture Global image and attraction of ‘footloose capital’
Highly mobile and highly skilled personnel
Cultural tourists
Culture-led regeneration: investment in the urban fabric.
Property Led Regeneration : Property Led Regeneration Subsidised visual and performing arts, museums and heritage etc.
New build and ‘re-programming’ of 19th and 20th century industrial structures
Anchor private sector investment into entertainment, leisure and shopping facilities; cafes and restaurants; new type of up-market accommodation, offices and apartments.
Problems : Problems Regeneration viewed as physical regeneration at the expense of a more holistic vision.
The big regeneration projects about culture and consumption
Cultural consumption generates business, enhances property markets, has strong image effects, but has limits.
Property-led development : Property-led development Tends to involve high capital investment often at the expense of the local
Blandness, homogeneity
Social exclusion (real and symbolic)
Privatisation of public space
City centre at expense of suburbs
Property-led Regeneration : Property-led Regeneration Sustainability
Extent of Local Impact – economic and social
Question of wider benefits to the city - content frequently ‘art’, of ‘international quality’ – whose culture, whose image?
Used instrumentally with little feeling for the actual content.
Emphasis on cultural consumption rather than production
Can be destructive of spaces of creation and production
The Creative City : The Creative City
Culture-led regeneration attempt to re-image the city giving it a greater global profile.
Real creative vision involves much wider and deeper set of transformations.
Re-imaging must involve renegotiation of local identity - not just marketing exercise.
Creative City : Creative City
About building partnerships, inspiring visions, leadership, accepting painful change
About re-imagining the city, telling a different story about what it was and what it could become.
From Cultural to Creative Industries : From Cultural to Creative Industries Adorno – Culture Industry: culture as mass production for mass society.
Political economists: Cultural Industries
Different conditions of production and consumption: commodity and flow; public and private.
Need for innovation and authenticity - Risky business – dealing with unpredictability
Artists remain freelance ‘Artisans’
Break with artist centred cultural policy – value chains, access to production and distribution; industrial strategies for cultural purposes
Greater London Council
Cultural industries as new economy : Cultural industries as new economy Late 1980s/early 1990s
Fordism to Post - fordism – mass production to flexible specialisation;
National space to global/ local spaces
New economy – innovation, creativity, flexibility, reflexivity, responsiveness
CI’s no longer a remnant of the old but a template for the new
Cultural to creative industries : Cultural to creative industries ‘Creative industry’ DCMS 1998 mapping document
DCMS: individual creativity and exploitation of intellectual property rights, ‘creative industries’ to forefront of ‘new economy’.
Key role of information and knowledge services within the new global system, services based on creativity and innovation.
Creativity goes mainstream : Creativity goes mainstream ‘Creativity’ moved beyond classical cultural industries
Traditional attributes of (modernist) ‘artistic’ production - innovation, intuition, ‘out of the box’ thinking, rule breaking, rebellion – now crucial part of new economy as a whole.
Why are they growing? : Why are they growing? Education; leisure; disposable income
New technologies of creation, distribution and consumption
Consumption of cultural goods as part of lifestyle
Cultural component of material goods
Cultural component of service products
Information and communication now meshed with symbolic
Cultural consumption : Cultural consumption 1960s: ‘Expressive revolution’: transformation of western culture
Value shifts – collective to individual; from restraint to self-expression; from duty to self-realisation.
Creativity - reflexive construction of identity
Risk; responsibility for ‘life choices’
Cultural Production : Cultural Production Break the 9-5
Doing it for yourself
Learning by doing (make it up as you go along)
Fluid boundaries of work and play
Portfolio careers
Reason and Intuition
A new habitus
Why Cities? : Why Cities?
Global economy about networks and flows
– of capital, information, goods and services, people, ideas, images
Cities key nodes and command centres in global networks.
Why Cities? : Why Cities? Produce and process knowledge and information;
Harness R&D to new business opportunities;
Generate new skills and entrepreneurial energy;
Provide complex division of labour and institutional mix of dynamic post-industrial city.
‘commodified cultural production’ (Scott) : ‘commodified cultural production’ (Scott) High levels of human input
Clusters of small companies operating on a project basis
Dense flows of information, goods and services
Economies of scale in skills sourcing and know-how
Complex divisions of labour tying people to places
CIs and Cities : CIs and Cities Creativity, innovation, competitiveness at premium
Flexible, responsive, user-driven
Complex mix of large and small companies
Clusters and networks– ideas, information, support, trust
Why some cities not others? : Why some cities not others? Embeddedness
Tacit knowledge
Traditions
Institutions
‘Atmosphere’
Local identity
Urbanity
Art Worlds : Art Worlds Artistic milieus: artists
Also intermediaries, impresarios, agents, gallery owners, lawyers, craftspeople, technicians, specialist material suppliers etc.
‘Cool places’, ‘atmosphere’, ‘buzz’, ‘scenes’
Could not just be created - organic quality.
Independents : Independents Freelancers and micro businesses – part of a localised ‘scene’, ‘active consumers’, ‘near to the street’
Insider’s knowledge of the volatile and localised logic of cultural consumption
Creative milieus: active consumers became active producers of cultural products
Spaces, people, networks, exemplars, experiences, institutions – part of the creative assets of a city
Independents : Independents New sense of cultural identity and purpose,
New mix of cultural and commercial knowledge
New mix of emotional investment and calculation, of creativity and routinisation, of making money and making meaning
Operating in risky environment, using networks of trust and of information
Independents : Independents New habitus
Has to be learned - but tacit rather than formal learning.
Tacit, embedded knowledge is also part of the creative assets of a city
The Independents : The Independents
They thrive on easy access to local, tacit know-how – a style, a look, a sound – which is not accessible globally. Thus the cultural industries based on local know-how and skills show how cities can negotiate a new accommodation with the global market, in which cultural producers sell into much larger markets but rely on a distinctive and defensible local base.
Leadbeater and Oakley
Creative Urban Ecology : Creative Urban Ecology
‘meanings adhere to the urban landscape’ - used as factors in the production of cultural commodities
Meanings re-assimilated into the ‘urban landscape’, acting as ‘a source of inputs to new rounds of cultural production and commercialisation’, and ‘a further enrichment of the urban landscape’
Creative Urban Ecology : Creative Urban Ecology
Cultural production and consumption transform the landscape of the city through its ‘shopping malls, restaurants and cafés, clubs, theatres, galleries, boutiques’.
Creative Urban Ecology : Creative Urban Ecology This ‘revitalisation of the symbolic content’ of cities draws in city governments,
Link these transformations with ‘ambitious public efforts of urban rehabilitation in the attempt to enhance local prestige, increase property values and attract new investments and jobs’.
Creative Urban Ecology : Creative Urban Ecology
‘Their survival can be further assured where policy makers at production locals are able to work out effective systems for the provision of co-ordination and steering services directed to the amplification of these agglomeration economies’.
Creative City, Narratives of regeneration : Creative City, Narratives of regeneration
Scott links specific support for CIs with a wider management of the urban ecology - the symbolic infrastructure of the city.
Also a mobilisation of local urban identity - ‘creative cities’ – a narrative, usually by the city development agencies of local identity as a cultural resource.
New Urban Visions : New Urban Visions These narratives draw on:
Wider sense of urban identity
City as a theatre of identity
Wider sense of what the city is, what it might be
Alternative spaces: Spaces of imagination and new narrative of City
The Creative City (again) : The Creative City (again)
About building partnerships, inspiring visions, leadership, accepting painful change
About re-imagining the city, telling a different story about what it was and what it could become.
The Creative City : The Creative City What narrative resources does such a process mobilise?
What narratives does it use and transform?
How do such narratives resonate within the complexity and diversity of the city? (whose culture, whose city)
Manchester: Creative City : Manchester: Creative City Successful case of culture-led regeneration
Image
Cultural Industries growth
City council understanding, promotion and investment as key aspect of economic growth
Manchester: Original Modern : Manchester: Original Modern Strong role of popular culture, especially music
Peter Saville – Factory Records and Hacienda
Original modern as organising concept not marketing slogan
Manchester: Original Modern : Manchester: Original Modern
Historical background : Historical background Manchester – shock city of industrialisation
Challenge to London’s economic, political and cultural dominance
Response to challenges – plugged into global transformations
1930s in decline – though still ‘city of Empire’
1960-80 - collapse
Manchester: Narratives of Regeneration : Manchester: Narratives of Regeneration
G-Mex/ Bridgewater Hall
Central Manchester Development Agency
Olympic bids
IRA bomb – tabla rasa
Narratives of Regeneration : Narratives of Regeneration
Revitalised Retail and Commercial Core
Commonwealth Games
New Arts Infrastructure
Events and Festivals
Convention Centre and Hotels
City Centre Living – Cosmopolitan City
Narratives of Regeneration : Narratives of Regeneration
Entrepreneurial City - ‘Manchester Men’
Post -1987 – took different direction to Liverpool
From Confrontation to Co-operation
Public-Private Partnerships
Erosion of democracy
Howard Bernstein – ‘Enlightened Despotism’ (AH Wilson)
Narratives of Regeneration : Narratives of Regeneration
Understanding Role of Culture
Prioritising Design Quality
Rediscovery of the Urbanistic…
Deeper Resources of Energy and Creativity
Manchester: Shock City….
Alternative Narratives : Alternative Narratives CMDC: failure to attract large development Capital
Emergence of smaller local development capital
Small scale retail, arts and culture
Larger developers – Tom Bloxham and Urban Splash.
Urban Cultural Intermediaries : Urban Cultural Intermediaries Zukin: artist-led gentrification recouped by property developers
Manchester: peripheral city; small scale development grew out of cultural scene
‘Re-landscaping’ of city a work of cultural intermediation not at first recognised by City
New kind of local growth coalition based around culture and creative industries
Urban Cultural Intermediaries : Urban Cultural Intermediaries Olympic Bid – never went beyond traditional growth coalition networks
Newsweek – different worlds
Increasingly turned to Popular Culture and Music
Manchester Music : Manchester Music
Iconic representation of the City
Hatred and Despair – get out as soon as you can
(Love Will Tear us Apart )
The Smiths
Hall: Creative Cities : Hall: Creative Cities These creative cities were ‘societies troubled about themselves’;
They were in a state of tension, of ‘transition forward to new and unexplored modes of organisation… societies in the throes of a transformation in social relationships, in values and in views about the world’;
Creative cities and creative milieux ‘are places of great social and intellectual turbulence: not comfortable places at all’.
Structure of Feeling : Structure of Feeling Manchester: Transformation of Habitus
‘Structure of feeling’–a way of inhabiting a field of cultural production, linked to a local cultural field.
CIs in Manchester – ‘Thatcher’s children’ – oppositional, entrepreneurial by default, different sense to traditional idea of ‘the artist’, transposed to a more popular cultural notion of authenticity and ambition (neo-Bohemia?)
Manchester as a space where this emerged most clearly.
Shock City Narratives : Shock City Narratives
Wider resonances with history of city
Dave Haslam’s Manchester England
Ian Taylor et al: A Tale of Two Cities – first global city, not mono-cultural
Tale of Two Cities : Tale of Two Cities
‘It is this restless flux of the utopias of organised labour and the utopian dreams of urban fortunes, won through free trade and enterprise, that defines the parameters of local mancunian “structure of feeling” – a culture that sees itself as connected up to a larger world and a larger set of possibilities, rather than simply an industrial city caught within a narrow labour metaphysic.’
Tale of Two Cities : Tale of Two Cities
‘The dominant image of the Mancunian of the 1990s, of the street-wise “scally” (scallywag) doing business across the world or profiting from local initiatives in the entertainment business (the pop groups of the 1980s “Madchester” or the Olympic bid in 1992), we would argue is no overnight invention.’
Original Modern : Original Modern
Reworked narrative of past and future
Complex process of negotiation - draws on very real resources
Process not easy – negotiations, tactics - emergent rather than strategic logic
You Cannot Be Serious : You Cannot Be Serious
From Best Club to the McEnroe Group
1996 IRA bomb – Special Projects, new networks
Urbis – Rediscovering the City
‘Original Modern’ – Return of Factory
(24PP and Wilson)
Industrial City to Industrial City : Industrial City to Industrial City Shift of emphasis from industrial to urbanistic innovation
Drew on long standing narratives (first global city, entrepreneurial, open to change)
Drew on popular culture as symbolic of wider vibrancy and creativity
Peter Saville : Peter Saville
I felt that the Manchester brand had to build on its history, and of course the quintessential fact of that history is that it was the first industrial city. This was the foundation of my original modern theme, I reinterpreted ‘first industrial’ as ‘original modern’ - the terms original and modern being very characteristic of Manchester.
Peter Saville : Peter Saville
The attitude there is original, there is a wilfulness of Mancunians to do things their own way and it is a city concerned with the now. It knows it has a history but it’s not historically minded. Originality and modernity are values characteristic of Manchester, values which the city has epitomised. Original and modern thinking built it. My vision for the brand was the pursuit of the original and modern in this century.
Issues : Issues Symbolic management of Urban Spaces (Scott) – urban landscape creates input to cultural production in virtuous circle
Expertise, Influence and Power – the solidification of networks (Urbis)
Property versus Creative Assets
Urban Democratic Space (Bernstein)
Managing the Margins…
Issues : Issues Use and Abuse of Popular Culture
Selective use of popular culture: the excluded and the ignored
Literacy, Education and depression
Difficult traditions of popular culture
Venues and spaces under threat
Consumption not production
Uses and Abuses : Uses and Abuses Generated arts infrastructure
Chains not small retailers
Cultural Consumption rather than production
CIs not supported
Creative Production and Space : Creative Production and Space CIs need space and place
As much an issue of public policy as space for subsidised art
Urban ecology increasingly threatened by culture-led regeneration
Private spaces have a public function – spaces of innovation and experiment
Creative cities about hard economic choices
Beyond Cultural Policy : Beyond Cultural Policy
Support for creative production: Not artist centred – range of key actors and skills
About the non-human – things organise us!
Systems – about structures and autonomous processes
Sometimes about economic muscle and regulation
The Dark Side : The Dark Side
‘Benign narrative’ of culture and economics
Creative Milieus mobilised as economic policy
Creativity and culture about conflict, ‘unpopular culture’, the ‘dark side’: does not always sit well with policy makers
Urbanity and Modernity : Urbanity and Modernity
‘Creativity’ linked to the (urban) public sphere and to transformations of lifestyle and social structure
‘Creative Milieus’ involve cultural and political questions
Can you have creativity and innovation (modernisation) without the more difficult modernity that goes with it?
Creativity ? : Creativity ?
Creativity based on modernism not ‘traditional’ cultural values – golden mean, middle way, balance, slow acquisition of skills, discipline etc.
These values stripped away by discourse of ‘creativity’
Endless innovation – mirror of capitalism (‘all that is solid melts into air’)
Threats : Threats Instrumentalisation of culture
Collapse of culture into economic policy
Homogenisation, globalisation and erosion of local production
New work culture
Modernity: danger and opportunity!