Urban Subversion and the Creative City

Oli Mould

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138797048
• eBook ISBN: 9781317633242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Check out the author's video to find out more about the book: https://vimeo.com/124247409

This book provides a comprehensive critique of the current Creative City paradigm, with a capital 'C', and argues for a creative city with a small 'c' via a theoretical exploration of urban subversion.

The book argues that the Creative City (with a capital 'C') is a systemic requirement of neoliberal capitalist urban development and part of the wider policy framework of 'creativity' that includes the creative industries and the creative class, and also has inequalities and injustices in-built. The book argues that the Creative City does stimulate creativity, but through a reaction to it, not as part of it. Creative City policies speak of having mechanisms to stimulate individual, collective or civic creativity, yet through a theoretical exploration of urban subversion, the book argues that to be 'truly' creative is to be radically different from those creative practices that the Creative City caters for. Moreover, the book analyses the role that urban subversion and subcultures have in the contemporary city in challenging the dominant political economic hegemony of urban creativity. Creative activities of people from cities all over the world are discussed and critically analysed to highlight how urban creativity has become co-opted for political and economic goals, but through a radical reconceptualisation of what creativity is that includes urban subversion, we can begin to realise a creative city (with a small 'c').

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315757469-1

Sitting in a cafe on King Street, Newton in Sydney, I spy a postcard holder affixed to the opposite wall (see Figure 1.1). The holder’s header reads, ‘What creative life do you want for Sydney?’ Within the holder sit a number of postcards and flyers advertising art galleries, operas and theatre productions throughout Sydney, all of which were either sponsored, publicised or hosted by the City of Sydney, the city’s governing body. As can be seen in Figure 1.1, next to the esoteric question ‘What creative life do you want for Sydney?’ is the orange circular logo for the council and the ‘Creative City Sydney’ brand.

Figure 1.1 Postcard holder in Newtown, Sydney.

Source: Author’s photo, April 2013.

The brand is an initiative set up by the City of Sydney to use the ‘ongoing commitment to culture and creativity’ in order to, among other things, ‘affirm the centrality of the arts and creativity’ to the lives and economies of the city and ‘revitalize the Oxford Street Prescient [one of the main commercial streets in inner-city Sydney]’ (City of Sydney 2013a: n.p.). By deliberately enacting a number of policies aimed at encouraging artistic practice and creative industry activity and beautifying public spaces, the City Council has redeveloped a number of derelict buildings, fostered creative enterprise and staged citywide events celebrating the vibrant arts and cultural activity of the city. All these have been done as targeted activities that fall under the rubric of ‘Creative Sydney’, a suite of governmental actions specifically designed to aid urban development through the notion of ‘creativity’. Sydney then, like a multitude of metropolitan areas all over the world, is very much a Creative City, with a capital ‘C’.

Do you live in one of these Creative Cities? You may not be aware of it, but given the popularity of the ‘Creative City’ idea, there is a high probability that your current home city or town has enacted or has been developing policies designed to encourage primarily economic growth, but also social cohesion and cultural participation through the premise of ‘creativity’. Since the turn of the new millennium, many urban and regional governments from all over the world, from Sydney to Sheffield, from Manila to Madison, have been enabling strategies of development purporting to stimulate creativity among its inhabitants and, perhaps more predominantly, to bring in talented, educated and creative people from elsewhere in the hope of benefiting from their economic growth potential. Moreover, gargantuan financial sums have been spent on these endeavours. Large-scale creative economy infrastructural developments have been commissioned; many, many cultural institutions have been built; artistic events have been staged and sponsored; urban infrastructure has been upgraded and beautified; financial incentives have been offered for the relocation of creative individuals, projects and firms; marketing and branding offensives have been launched; research and development exercises have been given the green light; promotional campaigns have been initiated – all in the name making a city more ‘creative’. Indeed, the term ‘Creative City’ is now firmly entrenched in the parlance of urban politics. This is because, in the era where cities are run, managed and operated like corporations, they are engaging in competition with each other for the global flows of capital and, increasingly, for footloose talented and creative people. By effectuating a creative persona through a suite of policies, cities are looking to gain that vital competitive edge that will capture the people, creativity and, importantly, the economic rewards that they promise. Moreover, cities encourage these policies in the belief that the economic stimulus that comes from the presence of creativity diffuses throughout the city. By being ‘creative’, the city is more productive and innovative, thereby stimulating further economic rewards and creating a more attractive place for businesses and tourists to come to. In addition, being a Creative City (with a capital ‘C’) is purported to encourage social inclusion, cultural participation, poverty alleviation and housing stock renewal and generally creates a better place to live. The prosperous utopian idyll of a Creative City is indeed an intoxicating vision for many urban governments.

However, what does it mean to be ‘Creative’? How do we define creativity in this context? Moreover, how do you relate such an innate human affective quality to a city? How can an entire urban environment actually be creative? These questions are often at the forefront of academic (and to a lesser extent political) debates about the ‘Creative City’ as a paradigm, yet cities continue to adopt such policies and agendas without any definitive and rigorously obtained answers. In the race to become a Creative City and benefit from all that which ‘creativity’ can bring, cities are actually far from stimulating the productivity and innovative capacity of their inhabitants (as the lexicon would suggest), they are distancing themselves from realising such a vision. Rather than fermenting a ubiquitous upscaling of the quality of urban life, the Creative City in all its various guises has engendered and crystallised long-standing and existing urban conditions of economic inequality, social exclusion, cultural desertification and disengagement, and in some case, social and political unrest. As such, there are many dissenting voices regarding the Creative City paradigm, and how it is being enacted in contemporary cities. Accused of fuelling the gentrification process, many of the schemes that are formulated under the rubric of ‘making a city more creative’ are criticised for being just a policy ‘fad’ – simply the latest justification for an already ongoing process of economic urbanisation characterised by a privately led investment ethos that prioritises financial reward over any other social or cultural mandate. The associated creativity paradigms of the creative class, the creative economy and the creative industries, which contribute to the economically deterministic qualities of the Creative City paradigm, have also received similar critical rebuttal, given their political, economic and therefore systemic inextricability from the Creative City ideology. The political mobility and inherent ‘ease’ of applying this ideology means that it spreads from city to city, copying the perceived successful political and economic ‘model’ rather than engaging with the different set of localities, histories, cultures and social issues.

As such, the major problem of many of the policies embroiled within the Creative City rhetoric is that they have a deleterious effect on the social fabric and cultural diversity of cities, and have very little to do with affecting creativity in individuals at all. Moreover, such policies are designed to be replicable, to be globally mobile and reproduce homogenous urban spaces internationally. Put bluntly, they are actually the antithesis of creativity. The Creative City evangelists have hijacked the idea of creativity and turned it into an economically deterministic pastiche of what it means to be creative, packaged it and sold it to the world. Furthermore, embroiled within this process is the total reconceptualisation of ‘true’ urban creative practices – those of reappropriation, transgression, interventionism, subversion, resistance, activism and experimentation – into oppositional activities to be resisted or capitalised upon. The Creative City paradigm therefore, while being the latest iteration of an continual, politically systemic, gentrifying, capitalistic and urbanising policy discourse, is also (re)producing alternative creative practices (with a small ‘c’) as ‘the other’. These practices of urban subversion (as I have come to call them) have an iterative history, but are proliferating and becoming more ‘creative’ in reaction to (and between the cracks of), rather than in conjunction with, the contemporary Creative City ideology. These modern-day creative practices (that have a long, political and social urban history) can be identified and perhaps most accessibly articulated as creative urban subcultures, the more recognisable including parkour, street art, graffiti, skateboarding, urban exploration, yarn-bombing, buildering and flashmobbing, each with their own internal and interdisciplinary tensions. Yet, beyond such subcultures (or identifiable grouping of ‘subversive’ cultural and creative practices), there is a less teleological and more fluid, rhizomatic and experimental universe of everyday urban practices, where people are simply reconfiguring the city around them to express their cultures, beliefs, anxieties, frustrations, happiness and a whole range of other affective and emotional occurrences. The homeless ex-serviceman who chalked anti-war and biblical scenes on the Camden Town pavement on which he slept; the man who bought a tank and used it to voice his discontent at the local council; the little girl who decides to ignore the ‘do not climb’ sign to play on public art; the disabled man who built his own ramp to the Municipal Health Building in Juína as he was dismayed at a lack of ‘official’ action; and as the prologue recounted, the Frenchman who tightrope-walked across the Twin Towers in New York – all these instances are of people changing the city around them for their own desires (albeit with some more spectacular results than others). They are being creative. They are not led by economic and/or urban development requirements or by state-level political motivations (although, as will become apparent in this book, these may be subsequently inferred in the contextualisation and representation of their practices). They are inherently part of an affective, non-representational urban fabric of creative sociality. They are fundamentally being active urban citizens rather than passive consumers of a spoon-fed ‘Creative’ urbanism. However, within this broad idea of urban subversion, their resistance to, or indeed their inclusion in, the Creative City paradigm is a highly contested and fluid dialectic. This is because Creative City policies themselves are looking to such activities in order to maintain the uniqueness and innovative image that propels economic competitiveness, in other words to maintain their brand. Therefore we see commercialised forms of parkour and skateboarding, urban exploration tours of peri-legal sites, community-led planning interventions being sponsored by city governments and so on. But in so doing, the Creative City, despite rhetoric and ‘spin’ to the contrary, is ultimately reducing such activities to economically determined instruments of urban development and politically, conceptually and linguistically whitewashing any trangressional, subversive or resistive characteristics in favour of more putative urban and economic development aims that can be homogenised and replicated. And thus, returning to the original problem – the Creative City as the antithesis of urban creativity.

This book outlines how we can begin to disrupt this process. Because being creative is a critical attribute to being a city, so the notion is worth rescuing from the problems that plague it. Hence, through a vehement excavation of the Creative City paradigm and its various political vernaculars (namely the creative industries, the creative economy, the creative class and associated and incumbent lexicon), this book will analyse how the idea relates to the growth of urban entrepreneurialism more broadly and its associated deleterious impact upon the social and cultural fabric of cities and desire for homogenous urbanity. More than this though (as such critiques have been well-rehearsed in the last decade or so of critical urban studies literature), the book will theoretically explore how urban subversion has proliferated contemporaneously with(in) the Creative City, and detail the complex interaction between these idioms which are at the same time contested and related, present and absent, near and far, dichotomous and intermeshed, democratic and hegemonic, major and minor. By highlighting the economic instrumentalism inherent in the Creative City and positing it against an urban creative social fabric that is simply the desire to reconfigure the urban environment by active citizens, this book exposes the current Creative City idea to be too instrumental and formulaic and damaging to certain factions of urban life. The Creative City (with a capital ‘C’) therefore will be used as shorthand for the capitalistic, paradigmatic (bordering on dogmatic) and meta-narrative view of how creativity can be used to economically stimulate and develop the city (an argument developed further in Part I). In reaction to this, the book will champion a different kind of city (in Part II). This is not an attempt to go ‘beyond’ the Creative City by furthering its economic determinism, such as arguing for the use of cognitive-cultural capitalism instead (Scott 2014). Such an argument, however valid from an economic geography perspective, only serves to replicate the existing problem of the Creative City. Nor is it an attempt to replace an economistic view of creativity with one that focuses on a creative ecology of public-private initiatives, social engineering and place-making (Landry 2011). Such a view broadens the actors involved but creates similar outcomes. Nor it is an attempt to argue that the Creative City should re-engage with the notion of culture and publics (Vickery 2015). Rather, this book will champion the creative city (with a small ‘c’). Such a city embraces experimental and creative social interaction, and broadens our usage of urban functions, not constricts them, producing more heterogeneous and less homogeneous urban spaces – a city where skateboarders who reappropriate the ‘dead space’ of the undercroft area of the South Bank in London are not removed because the landlord wants to build more coffee shops, restaurants and other homogenous retail outlets; a city where squatters who have occupied a derelict area of Copenhagen and fostered an artistic community that serves local residents are not the focus of an eviction campaign; a city where recreational trespassers who are caught on top of a New York skyscraper are not arrested and charged; a city where the removal of inappropriate corporate advertising material by local residents is not criminalised; a city where if people want to shoot a short film on an under-used privately-owned plaza do not need to submit written notification and wait three weeks for a reply; a city where being creative is the very act of citizenship.

Methodologically, the book uses data gathered from over six years of travelling to cities around the world. Primarily, the book will draw on visual qualitative data from over 25 cities in ten countries on four continents (a collection of over 3,000 images and 200 videos), but also from a plethora of items gathered including promotional pamphlets, community papers, glossy magazines, discarded artistic artefacts and essentially anything that alludes to the creative practice of urbanites (official and illicit). Formal and informal interviews were carried out with people who instigate Creative City policies such as government officials, private companies and creative industry workers, as well as subcultural practitioners, cultural consumers and activists. Enlivened by vignettes, stories and explorations, this book weaves these together into a comprehensive ‘lived’ ethnography of urban experiences. In a ‘flânerie’ way, I encountered creative industry practitioners, policy-makers, academics, urban managers, architects, planners, subcultural participants and generally creative citizens, and registered (visually, textually and emotionally) their activities and engagements as they were performed across various spaces and places in many city that have been visited and lived in (see Kramer and Short (2011) for a more detailed explanation of this urban methodological practice). In some cases as an observer and in others as a fully fledged participant, I have witnessed first hand acts of urban creativity (subcultural, subversive, capitalistic and otherwise), experienced directly the Creative City paradigm in action (and in some cases contributed to it) and personally explored the urban environment that it effects. For example, I conducted parkour (irregularly) for a period of nine months in 2008, I have undertaken a number of urban explorations with practised participants and been involved heavily in campaigns to save subcultural spaces from ‘development’. Conversely, I have also worked for policy units that aimed to bring about certain factions of Creative City policy; I did internships in creative economy firms in Sydney for a period in 2005, and have consulted for specific municipal governments of creative strategies (namely Sydney, Tel Aviv and London). Combining these experiences makes for a holistic view of creative practices, both those that have contributed to economic development as well as those that try to resist it. All these data then will be used to exemplify the arguments put forward throughout the book and colour the debate with contemporary case studies relevant to the theory being discussed. While using vignettes from cities such as Seoul, Leicester, Shanghai, Bristol and others, there are a few key cities that stand out for special scrutiny. Given my intense study of Sydney’s Creative City policies and my interaction with them (as well as the amount of information that it produces), it was a suitable city to linger on. Also, London is used overtly as a city of study because of the amount of time spent there, but also because it is a city at the ‘forefront’ of economic globalisation (and all the problems therein entailed). For similar reasons, New York is used frequently. Also, given my work, experience and situ in the United Kingdom’s national political landscape, many of the UK’s Creativity-related policies will be analysed and utilised to further the arguments of the book.

Such geographical eclecticism could lead to accusations of empirical superficiality; however, it must be stressed that this book is a theoretical exploration of what the Creative City is, how it purports to help but ends up hindering and homogenising creative practices, and how we can think about subverting it. It touches upon empirical examples to illustrate particular points, but the empirics do not drive the argument. Moreover, given the nature of Creative City development and the fleetingness of urban subversion activity, any empirical observations will be rendered irrelevant within the course time. The Creative City paradigm is constantly changing its characteristics, and with it, so too is urban subversion changing as it reacts to it. Therefore to linger too much on empiricism would be to obfuscate the theoretical analytics of these ever-increasingly rapid changes. So, this book is meant as a way of navigating the inherent problems of the Creative City and to theoretically explore the way in which a creative city can be sought.

Moreover, there are a number of theorists, philosophers and key urban thinkers that are alluded to in this book. But again, I have utilised specific ideas from them in order to forge a course toward the realisation of a creative city. Granted, some ideas have greater influence than others (such as Deleuze and Guattari, for example), but it is because these ideas lend themselves most appropriately to the way in which the argument of the book progresses. As a result, the book is not aiming at questioning the politics and full theoretical oeuvre of any one (or more) author, such endeavours are more fully conducted elsewhere. Instead, specific ideas, theories and philosophies are utilised first and foremost to drive my argument. Moreover, the book should not be read as some sort of ‘Deleuzian’ or ‘De Certeauian’ account of urban creativity, but nor should it be approached as one without a theoretical mandate. On the contrary, the argument of this book forges its own theoretical disposition that draws from the crowd, and one that would see all urbanites members of a creative city.

The book is therefore structured into two main parts, which together chart the conceptualisation, critique and potential futures of the Creative City. Part I is a thorough archaeology of the Creative City paradigm and its incumbent ideologies and ontologies. It charts the growth in popularity of the idea and outlines the key protagonists of the paradigm and how it became a formalised and standardised ‘model’ that could be replicated across the world. To do so, though, it is necessary to delineate the concept into its three main (but of course, interrelated) constituent parts. Chapter 2 is a history of how the Creative City concept and the associated vernaculars were foregrounded. More than simply a novel idea that was conceived in isolation (as is often the perception purveyed in the critical literature), the Creative City was as systemic requirement of contemporary capitalistic urbanism. As outlined by Harvey (1989) city government structures have come to resemble corporate frameworks rather than postwar urba...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: the man upon a wire
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Epilogue: climbing Wooly
• Bibliography
• Index