Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present

Ilja Van Damme, Bert De Munck, Andrew Miles, Ilja Van Damme, Bert De Munck, Andrew Miles

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367886424
• eBook ISBN: 9781351681797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This volume critically challenges the current creative city debate from a historical perspective. In the last two decades, urban studies has been engulfed by a creative city narrative in which concepts like the creative economy, the creative class or creative industries proclaim the status of the city as the primary site of human creativity and innovation. So far, however, nobody has challenged the core premise underlying this narrative, asking why we automatically have to look at cities as being the agents of change and innovation. What processes have been at work historically before the predominance of cities in nurturing creativity and innovation was established? In order to tackle this question, the editors of this volume have collected case studies ranging from Renaissance Firenze and sixteenth-century Antwerp to early modern Naples, Amsterdam, Bologna, Paris, to industrializing Sheffield and nineteenth-and twentieth century cities covering Scandinavian port towns, Venice, and London, up to the French techno-industrial city Grenoble. Jointly, these case studies show that a creative city is not an objective or ontological reality, but rather a complex and heterogenic "assemblage, " in which material, infrastructural and spatial elements become historically entangled with power-laden discourses, narratives and imaginaries about the city and urban actor groups.

Part I

Introduction

1 Cities of a Lesser God

Opening the Black Box of Creative Cities and Their Agency

Ilja Van Damme and Bert De Munck

Introduction

Making the claim that cities are ‘creative’ places is hardly original these days. For a good two decades already, a tsunami of academic opinions has engulfed urban theory and policy to assert the primacy of cities as key places to look at when discussing distinctive but related concepts such as the ‘creative city’, the ‘creative economy’, the ‘creative class’ or ‘creative industries’. Such is the state of the field today that anyone daring to delve deep into the genealogy of the creative city debate could easily fill a monograph by just doing so. Nevertheless, in this first, introductory chapter to this book, we aim to historically contextualise much of the recent literature on the relationship between cities and creativity. Moreover, with this introduction and the rest of our collective volume, we hope to infuse a certain open-ended historical reflexivity within a debate that until now has been mainly dominated by urban policymakers and urban theorists. By focussing on aspects of time and significance of place, this book aims to reveal and problematise the main ideological and epistemological grounds on which the city-creativity nexus is built. It is through historical description and by analysing the historical ‘fabrication’ of creative cities on both a discursive and material level that we have crafted in the following pages an innovative, interdisciplinary niche within the burgeoning creative city literature. This approach breaks away from an overtly deterministic, ahistorical, and essentialist approach towards the subject at hand.

The ideas and conceptual constructs that run through the remainder of this first chapter and volume are all informed by the notion that the ‘creative city’ is not a self-evident, objective or ontological state of being but rather a complex, heterogenic process of becoming—or better even, an ‘historical assemblage’ on a discursive and material level (on the notion of ‘assemblage’, read Marcus and Saka, 2006; Farias, 2011; Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth, 2011). Conceptualisations defining the creative city as a more or less ‘stable reality’—a trans-historical ontological unity, acting and driven by an inherent ‘natural’ logic—are no longer tenable in the light of present-day understanding and theories of how cities work and function. Within recent urban theory, the urban is increasingly understood as a complex and unstable reality, a hybrid and layered network made up of a multiplicity of human actors and nonhuman ‘actants’. The ‘urban’ is now referred to as a historic ‘constellation’ or as something ‘splintered’, ‘assembled’, ‘fabricated’ and ‘mythologised’ (see Massey, Allen and Pile, 1999; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Amin and Thrift, 2002; Gandy, 2011; Brenner, 2013).

In this book as well, a city not only becomes fabricated or mythologised for various reasons as ‘creative’ on a representational level; at the same time, such imaginaries are revealed to feed back into contingent and historic and place-specific economic and political practices and in the built form of the city, thus creating, eventually, path-dependent structures, stabilities and continuities over the long run. Therefore, the specific, relational combination or historical assemblage of ‘stuff’ (Molotch, 2003)—the myriad, and mostly historically very contingent ways in which values (freedom, tolerance, diversity), actors (academics, entrepreneurs, artists, inventors), institutions (museums, academies, universities), discourses, practices and inanimate physical ‘actants’ (buildings, commodities, technologies) have left physical and symbolic ‘traces’ in the urban fabric—will in this book be seen as constituting a creative city. What follows is not so much about what a creative city is or was, how it functions or how it can be best applied as an urban development strategy all around the world—a sort of approach that is in line with a dominant but in our opinion superficial historiography. Rather, throughout the following chapters, the focus shifts towards a historical description and analysis of concrete time- and place-specific contexts, people, discourses and material elements (e.g., mountains in the chapter by Saez and street signs in the one by Williams and O’Brien) acting as ‘mediators’ and ‘intermediaries’ in bringing about the creative city as a concrete lived and historical experience.

We do this by bringing authors from a wide range of disciplines together, all eager to break with reductionist and naturalising modernist viewpoints on cities and creativity. Given the importance of long-term fabrications or myths of the creative city as a discursive and material reality, a great deal of the participating authors are historians. But we also have included contributions from researchers working within management studies, urban cultural policy, sociology, education, architecture, media and culture, and geography. All share a strong believe in the value of historical approaches to contribute to and broaden current urban theory and policy.

In this first, introductory chapter, our goal is to open the main ‘black boxes’ on which our current, mainstream notions of the ‘creative city’ rest—those modes of thought and knowledge production that ‘no longer [need] to be reconsidered, those things whose contents have become a matter of indifference’ (Callon and Latour, 1981, p. 285). In a first section, we argue that the creative city paradigm has in the past twenty years become a black-boxed signifier for both its proponents and adversaries. The creative city has become a meaningful sign in itself, apparently understood and unquestioned regarding some of its basic and structuring assumptions. This had led to a curious situation in which the central notion on which the creative city debate rests—namely, the idea that cities have creative agency—is no longer seriously questioned or examined. In section two of this introductory chapter, we offer a way out of this deadlock by focussing precisely on the ‘agency of cities’ and describing the ways in which this notion has become deeply entrenched within urban theory. Following up on this, in a third and last section, we focus on the questions and choices from which this edited volume takes its cue, and we discuss how we hope to infuse new life in a concept that seems to have run out of steam.

From New Hope to New Fear: Historicising the Creative City Debate

This first section starts from the assumption that a certain set of historical changes, gaining traction from the 1970s onwards in Atlantic economies, has led to the construction of what Jessop (2004, pp. 166–170) calls an increasingly dominant and hegemonic discourse or ‘economic imaginary’ framing all broader societal struggles on various scales, namely that of the ‘knowledge-based economy’. The ascendance of this powerful and performative ‘master narrative’ (Callon, 2007) goes back to a series of influential treaties all proclaiming an inevitable rise in the West of what Touraine (1971) and Bell (1973) coined the ‘post-industrial society’. Such ‘post-Fordist’ (Piore and Sabel, 1984), ‘post-modern’ (Harvey, 1989a; Soja, 1989) or ‘post-capitalist’ (Drucker, 1993) geographies were believed to entail an irreversible dominance of a so-called ‘open’ form of free-trade globalisation, urging Western nations to abandon standardised mass production and to specialise in human capital formation and knowledge creation. It was believed that only by means of a system of flexible diversification, developed economies in America and Europe could outwit countries with alternative ‘competitive advantages’ (e.g. cheap labour, abundant raw materials; see Porter, 1985). This entailed using the new information and transport systems and fundamentally changing the nature of their production and technologies. The goal was producing and marketing goods and services with aesthetic, cultural and symbolic attributes (Lash and Urry, 1994; Zukin, 1996). Thus, rather than holding on to ‘old’ core productive industries (steel, textiles, petrochemicals, and so on), which it was thought anyway would eventually be delocalised in an increasingly global, liberal, ‘post-ideological’ world order, Western economic actors and policymakers were urged to invest in idea- and knowledge-heavy cultural and creative ‘industries’ or the ‘cultural economy’ (Scott, 1997).

It is unnecessary to repeat here in great detail the profound socioeconomic, political and cultural forces that shaped and transformed Western societies in the latter decades of the twentieth century (see for this Amin, 1994). It is well known how economic shocks and broader geopolitical changes—symbolised by the oil crisis in the 1970s and the fall of the communist bloc in the 1980s—all fed into each other to construct and reproduce performative economic beliefs and imaginaries centred on ‘knowledge’ and by extension ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ (Campbell, 2014). However, it is important to outline the role that cities played in the narratives and imaginaries focussed on the emergence of a so-called ‘new economy’. While after World War II, urbanisation entered a new phase—‘la revolution urbaine’ as the final phase of capitalist industrialisation according to Lefebvre (2003)—cities were rapidly assigned prime status within all sorts of debates on the ascendance of global capitalism. Castells (1989) saw them as important nodes within an emerging network society shaped by information technologies, while Sassen (1991), even more influentially, placed cities such as London, New York and Tokyo in command and control of an arising new global economy dominated by international flows of finance, commodity consumption and cross-border migrant movements. On a broader level, urban theorists of all types and denominations claimed the coming of a new type of ‘postmetropolis’, of which Los Angeles—spatially splintered and undefined, socially divided and fragmented, and deeply involved in industries and activities with a high symbolic and aesthetic-cultural value, such as fashion, the music industry and movie making—was often seen as a prime example (Soja, 2000).

It was in the midst of all this pre-millennium theorising on a perceived ‘crisis’ and eventual ‘triumph’ of Western urbanised societies (Harding and Blokland, 2014, pp. 56–87) that Landry and Bianchini published their 60-page exposition on The Creative City (1995; and Bianchini, this volume). The title was well chosen because it coined the belief that cities were ideal ‘vessels’ or ‘milieus’ for overcoming hard times of crisis and distress and forging something new. To the continuous threat of economic delocalisation, communal disintegration, physical decay and overriding fears of alienation and place estrangement caused by globalisation, Landry and Bianchini opposed a holistic, participatory and optimistic vision, focussing on the revitalisation of urban life through creativity. Harking back to ideas of the ‘good city’ by Geddes (1915), Mumford (1966) and Jacobs (1969) and revising some of the innovative, entrepreneurial efforts to upgrade deindustrialised cities in the 1980s and 1990s (Bianchini et al., 1988; Hall and Hubbard, 1998), The Creative City urged its readers and policymakers to replace modernist or technological solutions to urban problems—an instrumental mode of rationality and logical analysis—with free-for-all experimentation, originality, unconventionality and Edward de Bono-like ‘lateral’ thinking (Landry and Bianchini, 1995, pp. 16–17). Theirs was a bold agenda and plan that spoke directly to urban governments and was intended to turn cities into the ‘natural’ incubators of the newly arising knowledge economy.

The intervention of Peter Hall, who wrote the preface to Landry and Bianchini’s book, was instrumental in giving the notion of ‘creative cities’ the much-needed academic respectability (see Bianchini, this volume). In his own colossal Cities in Civilisation (1998), Hall admitted to have ‘shamelessly pillaged and borrowed’ (p. 8) from historical literature and urban theorists to describe knowledge formation, creativity and innovation as a generic formula of the urban ‘ecology’ itself. Urban creativity was ready to be tapped as soon as certain recurring urban conditions were in place, such as concentration of people, prosperity, diversity and communicative networks (see also Hospers, 2003). Halls’ deeper message, published during the euphoric heights of the first ‘dot.com bubble’, was one of hope and optimism. At the end of the twentieth century, he saw neither Western civilisation nor the Western city to be in decline or decay. Rather, he convincingly stated that his book ‘will be a celebration of the continued vitality, the continual rebirth of creativity in the world’s great cities; as the light wanes in one, it waxes in another; the whole process, it seems, has no end that we know of, or can foresee. The central question, now, is precisely how and why city life renews itself; exactly what is the nature of the creative spark that rekindles the urban fires’ (p. 23).

Despite early warning signs (e.g., Chatterton, 2000), Halls’ clarion call to arms was enthusiastically taken up from the 2000s onwards by ‘hard’, quantitative-minded economists, regional development experts and urban planners alike. Understanding the newly emerging ‘cultural economy’ and creative field of cities (Scott, 2000; Howkins, 2001); studying and developing key targeted cultural and creative industries (Caves, 2000; Hesmondhalgh, 2002; Hartley, 2005); rethinking cultural policy and urban management (Landry, 2000; Miller and Yudice, 2002); and planning, building and branding cities into new creative and knowledge hubs (Miles and Paddison, 2005) became all the rage over several, interlocking epistemic communities mainly in England and the United States.

However, the person who soon started dominating most discussions and worked tirelessly to spread the creative city ‘gospel’ all over the world, was, of course, Richard Florida. Hessler and Zimmermann (2008), among others, have cleverly remarked that his international bestsellers and controversial persona helped to transform much of the ongoing debate into one of ‘conspicuous euphoria, hysteria and affirmation’, feeding the belief ‘that creative industries, the creative class and culture will be the engine of the economy, and that cities will be both the condition of this development and its beneficiary’ (pp. 12, 20). His widely distributed books (Florida, 2002; 2004) and ensuing ‘tROCC’ (the Rise of the Creative Class) world tour—in which Florida was staged as the smart, cool and witty academic ‘rock star’ bringing a new dawn to city mayors, think tanks and influential businesspeople alike—not only fuelled massive commentary across public and academic media but also led to a lightning-fast uptake of his ideas within public policy circles and governance networks (Mould, 2015, pp. 45–58). In 2006, an official publication of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on Competitive cities in the global economy (2006) researched the creative city agenda to bolster the future resilience of cities, and about four years later, the United Nations built on the ideas in the report ‘Creative Economy: A Feasible Development Option’ (2010). In the meantime, almost every self-respecting civic leader from Australia to Austria and from China to Canada has drawn up extensive creative or cultural policy plans and action programmes. These are mainly aimed at upscaling the quality and ‘hipness’ of their cities to make them into competitive ‘breeding places’ for the ‘creative class’ to work in and for international mobile tourists and investors to believe in.

Simultaneously, however, a damning summation of the creative city agenda was growing. This was mainly due to the fact that, in the hands of Florida, the creative city had become an all too reductionist but also amorphous and contradictory idea expressing both ‘cosmopolitan elitism and pop universalism, hedonism and responsibility, cultural radicalism and economic conservatism, casual and causal inference, and social libertarianism and business realism’ (Peck, 2005, p. 741). This meant that both right- and left-wing politicians, academics and urban experts loved and/or hated the thesis, while each accused the other of hijacking the creative city agenda for their own ideological projects and specific political purposes.

Such discussions, however, should be more properly placed within broader historical evolutions shaping the outcome of Western urban cultural policies after World War II. In this period, classic Keynesian welfare measures aimed at the industrial labour populace had to be increasingly adjusted to cater for the growing public needs of a middle-class constituency and the demands of emerging grassroots urban movements focussed on environmentalism, peace, democratisation and equal civil rights (for women, gays, ethnic minoritie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Table
• Contributors
• Series Editor Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II From the Renaissance to Industrialisation
• Part III Modern Times
• Part IV Conclusions
• Index