The creative city does not exist

Marianna d'Ovidio

• Publisher: Ledizioni
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9788867053995
• eBook ISBN: 9788867054572
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Every city wants to become creative, perhaps even the most creative ever. But what does it mean to be a creative city? What images take shape as a consequence? What sort of city do we envisage? Which one are we actually building?In a journey that starts with Blade Runner and passes through English punk, Milanese creative workers and Star Wars, the book explores the features and outcomes of the creative city, penetrating its dark side but also identifying its assets. In the future, cities must be guided by a vision of a creative city able to be inclusive yet competitive, to open new public spaces and to be socially innovative. This book presents some of the tools that allow us to look at the city as a place whose air makes people free.

Chapter 1
The creative and cultural economy in cities

Since the demise of Fordism, immaterial value has been recognized as a central element for economic growth in Western societies, which has brought about changes in the organization of work, (de-routinized production and relatively open-ended working practices) as well as in the leading urban economic sectors (Scott, 2008a). This focus on the immaterial value has brought a renewed interest on cities as spaces for economic growth (O’Connor, 2004): in the last twenty years we are witnesses of a long and intricate process that can be broadly sketched with the following pattern composed by three levels.

Firstly, the heavy production left cities. By 1960s products were standardized, production routinized and decomposed into simple operations performed by product-specific or dedicated machines operated by semi-skilled workers. In the early 1970s as international competition increased and world market fragmented, firms became more and more cautious of long-term investments in product-specific machinery, as the market often disappeared before the machinery’s costs were recovered. The more unpredictable and unstable the market became, the more flexibility in production was required. Large plants were not able anymore to fulfil consumers’ needs and to follow the countless market niches, and therefore a new model arose, that of flexible production in small, differentiated, dislocated firms (Sabel, 1994).

Secondly, a general change in the consumption behaviour opened, or widened, the market for cultural goods. People have been changing their consumption style looking for distinctive, symbolic, cultural goods. There has been an increasing aestethicization of contemporary daily life, which pushes consumers to look for symbolic and aesthetic goods (Lash and Urry, 1994). Tastes evolve towards a search of culture-based goods, and more available time is used to consume cultural goods, to enjoy cultural events, to go shopping or to travel.

Finally, and this is the third process, the production of particular goods did not leave cities, because it had always profited from the urban atmosphere (Hall, 1998): the creative industry, or cultural, as many authors refer to it, remained within the urban borders, enjoying the cultural feeling distinctive of cities. Indeed, the city has been always considered the preferred site for the production of culture. From the Renaissance to the avant-garde artistic movements, the urban experience has been massively important for art, and in general, cultural production. The city is connected with culture in at least three facets. It is firstly a place where art is concentrated in buildings, art works and public spaces (e.g. Florence, Athens, Paris, Salzburg and so on). Secondly, people mostly consume culture in cities, and, finally, city is the place where diversities, migrants, artistic movements, museums, and in general cultural institutions, converge and come in contact (Featherstone, 1991).

As a major consequence of these transformations, we observe that culture and economy are more and more intertwined: culture is progressively commodified, while commodities take up more and more symbolic meanings. Art expositions, museums, as well as advertising industry, design-related activities, publishing and fashion are leading sectors in the urban economy, replacing, both symbolically and practically, the heavy industry of the Fordist period.

The increasing interest on cities as spaces of production and consumption has spawned considerable literature which tries to conceptualize the emergence of these new economic patterns in cities and metropolitan regions.

1 Post-Fordism

The transformation of the society since the late 20th Century, has been named post-Fordism by many authors who focused their attention on the changes in the economic system (both production and consumption) and in the society as a whole. Concisely, sociologists identified the new system as divergent from the previous one, named Fordism that was characterized by mass production of goods and services directed to a mass market. Changes in the production world have consequences in all sectors of society, in an intertwined way, from which is not possible to draw causal links. Obviously, analyses about post-Fordism touch many different aspects of the transformation of the society, of which we want here to highlight just a few.

In the early 1970s, thanks mostly to the increasing international competition and world market fragmentation, the market became more volatile, the demand more differentiated and consumers interest in products quickly decreased well before machinery’s costs were recovered.

Inevitably affected by the globalization processes, by the internationalization of the market, by the growing of the international competition and the flexibilization of the demand for goods, many large-scale mass production firms started to suffer a crisis mostly because their machinery became old very soon. The differentiation of the demand is one of the key variables in the analysis of the post-Fordism (Kumar, 1995): while a Fordism organization of production was based on mass scale, cheap and standardized goods, in the new kind of organization, production tends to be more differentiated and on a smaller scale. This novel pattern of production and consumption has been named flexible specialization (Piore and Sabel, 1984). Flexible specialization depends primarily on new information technologies, which allow for speedy changes of the output, eventually satisfying rapid changes in the demand side. Flexible technology therefore makes flexible specialization possible. The rise of flexible specialization and its diffusion is noted as responsible for the growth of a different organization of production: as large firms were less adaptable and more rigid to adjust themselves to the many little changes which the market requires, small firms were more suitable for the new flexible production.

Flexible demand required a more flexible production, therefore, in order to be competitive, firms experimented new flexible forms of organization, which allowed for rapid shift in output.

As a consequence, also the relation between the economy and the space has deeply changed. The main, visible effect was the emergence of industrial clusters in many regions of the world, while, at the same time, large, multinational firms restructured themselves in order to survive. It became clear that industrial clusters, composed by small, cooperating firms, were more able than big factories to afford the crises, and to afford the changes on the demand side (Bagnasco, 1977).

Moreover, new forms of cooperation were activated among industries. As large firms reorganize, they try to develop the same relations existing in industrial districts with their productive units. Different kinds of alliances between large and small firms, for instance, small units firm can cooperate together, or a district is built around a large firm, which has experts in marketing and finance working together with small firms for the production.

Such a transformation of production is particularly evident in industries that face pronounced volatility and product innovation in their niche market. Examples of these kind include electronics, designers clothing, craft products, and other light industrial consumer products. In organizational terms, the new market circumstances are said to require a radical transformation of the production system towards flexible intra-firm and inter-firm arrangements which can simultaneously combine the economies of scale, scope and versatility (Amin and Thrift, 2002, p. 572).

If these are the main visible transformation in the production side, there is no conclusive evidence of the demise of Fordist elements of mass production and consumption: indeed, Fordist and post-Fordist production co-exist in the same economy. If industrial districts and the rise of a more complex, more disintegrated economy are the most visible element taking into account by the literature dealing with post-Fordism, there are also evidences that the process is much more nuanced as it is sometimes delineated (Amin and Malmberg, 1992). Many large factories are able to revitalize themselves towards a more flexible demand, and a more flexible economy, without radical measures. Often it happens that large and small firms act together, no more as competitors, sometimes it happens that many small firms grow and develop around a large firm, which is not forced to dramatically restructure.

The attention towards the relation between economy and space brings us to look at the urban economy, which, for many reasons that will be tackled in the following pages, received a novel attention as the post-Fordist transition caused a reconsolidation of the traditional metropolitan areas and city-regions. As well as societies, cities transformed since mid-1970s when big production started to leave cities and many small firms dislocated to different places.

As we will see this had many consequences beyond the urban economy: from the reshaping of the urban labour market, to the transformation of the urban landscape itself, with factories’ buildings abandoned. Many factories were closed and, especially those located within the inner-cities, represented an urban planning challenge. The strong and symbolic heritage that the large urban plants represented, avoided their destruction and for long time they remained unused and even cumbersome in the cities. “Heavy industry has left heavy buildings” and in many places much of the huge area has been adapted, rather than redesigned. “The gigantic skeletons, threaded by pipes, tracks, waterways and old railway lines, and the tough, subtly replanted landscape, are left to speak for themselves” (Darley, 2003, pp. 202–204).

The interpretation of this changes opened a wide debate between those who started talking about a process of de-industrialization, and others, as for instance Soja, who developed a deep analysis of the industrial urbanism, namely, the geographical impact of the industrial production on the contemporary urban landscape (Soja, 2000). In his view, conceptualising the meaning of post-Fordism (transformation towards a regime of flexible accumulation), allows to understand that we are not facing a post-industrial society. Indeed, manufacturing still matters, in the sense that there is a rise of vertical disintegration, formation of districts, industrial complexes, neo-industrial space, flexibility: it is important to study all these features, in order to understand the contemporary transformations. We can grasp the real socio-economic transformation of the Post-Fordist society, only including the city into a wider regional analysis.

The effects of Post-Fordism are also reflected in politics and social relations. There is no space here to debate about the whole political economy of the contemporary society. To highlight the most important issues, we have to mention the decline of national class-based political parties; the rise of social movements and network based on single-issue politics; the decline of mass union; the slow transformation of local government from welfare dispensaries to job-creation agencies; the modification of the trade unions towards a cooperation in the industrial reorganization.

Changes in culture and ideology are as strong as those in the economy: the rise of individualist behaviour, the growth of an entrepreneurialist culture, fragmentation of values and lifestyles, and so forth. Among all, Sennett (1998) analyses the individual aspect and consequences of contemporary attitude towards work within the wider transformation of the economy and labour market.

2 Mass consumption

The mass consumption of cultural goods, as well as the importance of the symbolic value of certain goods is of course not a completely new phenomenon.

Film, newspapers, radiobroadcasts and designed clothes are all products imbued by a cultural meaning whose mass consumption has been developing since the last centuries: a large portion of the cultural consumptions has arisen thanks to the mass industrialization in the twentieth century, some others before. Without adventuring too much in the past, looking at the historical development of some of the cultural expressions of societies, and focusing in particular on the industrialization of culture, allows us to identify the main features of the cultural products today.

The historical analysis is organized keeping into account three elements, both from the production and the consumption side, which have contributed to the cultural economy to grow: the development of technologies, free time and available money, the search for symbols in consumption.

Firstly, by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the industrial revolution took place and it was a critical element for the development of mass consumption of culture, but it was also important for the moving of mass of population from the countryside to an urbanized environment, concentrating people in cities. Culture, in order to be consumed, needs free time and money. When discretional time and disposable income were available, mass consumption of culture was possible: in the period after the Second World War, the economic boom, but also the new lifestyles, were the main engines for the consumption of culture to expand. Finally, the rise of cultural movements, with highly revolutionary contents, changed deeply the way in which consume was performed. In the 1960s, new models of consuming arose.

2.1 Origin and rising of mass-consumption

The industrial revolution

The cultural industries started their developing process at the end of the ninetieth century when the industr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The creative and cultural economy in cities
• Chapter 2 Fashion and the creative city
• Chapter 3 Supporting the creative and cultural economy. An analytical framework14
• Chapter 4 Social networks in the creative and cultural economy. The case of Milan, Italy20
• Chapter 5 The attractiveness of Milan. Testing the creative class theory
• Chapter 6 Exploring city and creativity: the fashion industry in London, UK.
• Conclusions: the dark side of the creative city
• References