Spaces of Vernacular Creativity

Rethinking the Cultural Economy

Tim Edensor, Deborah Leslie, Steve Millington, Norma Rantisi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415480956
• eBook ISBN: 9781134018444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Creativity has become part of the language of regeneration experts, urban planners and government policy makers attempting to revive the economic and cultural life of cities in the 21st century. Concepts such as the creative class, the creative industries and bohemian cultural clusters have come to dominate thinking about how creativity can contribute to urban renewal. Spaces of Vernacular Creativity offers a critical perspective on the instrumental use of arts and creative practices for the purposes of urban regeneration or civic boosterism.

Several important contributions are brought into one volume to examine the geography of locally embedded forms of arts and creative practice. There has been an explosion of interest in both academic and policy circles in the notion of creativity, and its role in economic development and urban regeneration. This book argues for a rethinking of what constitutes creativity, foregrounding non-economic values and practices, and the often marginal and everyday spaces in which creativity takes shape. Drawing on a range of geographic contexts including the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia, the book explores a diverse array of creative practices ranging from art, music, and design to community gardening and anticapitalist resistance. The book examines working class, ethnic and non-elite forms of creativity, and a variety of creative spaces, including rural areas, suburbs and abandoned areas of the city. The authors argue for a broader and more inclusive conception of what constitutes creative practice, advocating for an approach that foregrounds economies of generosity, conviviality and activism. The book also explores the complexities and nuances that connect the local and the global and finally, the book provides a space for valuing alternative, marginal and displaced knowledges.

Spaces of Vernacular Creativity provides an important contribution to the debates on the creative class and on the role of value of creative knowledge and skills. The book aims to contribute to contemporary academic debates regarding the development of post-industrial economies and the cognitive cultural economy. It will appeal to a wide range of disciplines including, geography, applied art, planning, cultural studies, sociology and urban studies, plus specialised programmes on creativity and cultural industries at Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels.

1 Introduction
Rethinking creativity: critiquing the creative class thesis

Tim Edensor, Deborah Leslie, Steve Millington and Norma M. Rantisi

Creativity is now a central concept for regeneration experts, urban planners and government policy makers who are attempting to revive the economic and cultural life of cities in the twenty-first century. For local policy makers, a key to the economic recovery rests upon the successful development of creativity and a creative class (Florida, 2002). These ideas have been accepted, almost uncritically, by city authorities around the globe, who are intent on promoting creative quarters, clusters and networks, ‘cool’ cosmopolitan neighbourhoods, and the ‘necessary’ pre-conditions for the arrival of this creative class.

In this book, we argue that discourses of the creative city privilege particular notions of creativity, producing a hierarchal ordering which champions specific forms of urban development. In this calculus, places are ranked against one another, creating attractive ‘hot spots’ – invariably downtown areas and cultural quarters – but also, implicitly, their spatial ‘other’: cultural deserts devoid of coolness. It is timely, therefore, to challenge such readings of creativity. We offer a critical perspective on the instrumental use of creativity for urban and non-urban regeneration and economic development. In particular, we examine how notions of a creative class construct restrictions around who, what and where is considered ‘creative’ and argue that an understanding of vernacular and everyday landscapes of creativity honours the non-economic values and outcomes produced by alternative, marginal and quotidian creative practices, and has the potential to move us toward more holistic, diverse and socially inclusive creative city strategies. First of all, we situate current conceptions of creativity within the recent neoliberal hegemony. Second, we discuss how creativity might be conceived otherwise and third, we discuss a broader spatial terrain within which creativity unfolds.

The rise of a creative city agenda in a neoliberal age

Much of the recent interest in creativity is linked to the fundamental economic restructuring since the early 1990s and the promise that creativity holds for bolstering economic development. Since the 1970s, the advent of globalisation – along with advances in telecommunications and transportation systems and a loosening of trade barriers – has levelled the economic playing field and altered the basis of competitive advantage. As mass markets become increasingly saturated, firms are seeking to differentiate their products and to compete on the basis of signs and symbols, as opposed to the physical attributes or functionality of commodities (Lash and Urry, 1994). Scott, for example, contends that a critical arena in which competition is being waged today is in the development of marketable outputs whose qualities ‘depend on the fact that they function at least in part as personal ornaments, modes of social display, aestheticised objects, forms of entertainment and distraction, or sources of information and self-awareness’ (1997: 323), namely as artefacts whose psychic gratification to the consumer is high, relative to their utilitarian purpose. From this standpoint, creativity is defined in terms of aesthetic experimentation or ‘innovation’, whereby planned obsolescence rests on a marrying of the cultural with the technical and commercial (Jameson, 1984). If novelty is the economic order of the day, creativity is perceived as the key ingredient.

The centrality of creativity – and by extension, arts and culture – to economic competitiveness is not only extended to marketable outputs; it has also become enmeshed in recent efforts at place making. Here, the emphasis is on the construction of spectacular spaces of culture and consumption, such as festival marketplaces, creative quarters and cultural facilities designed by world-renowned, ‘star’ architects (Evans, 2003; Bell and Jayne, 2003; Hannigan, 1999; McNeill, 2008). These forms of place making are seen to enhance the cultural capital attached to the commodities emanating from a city. Molotch, for example, suggests that ‘the positive connection of product image to place yields a kind of “monopoly rent” that adheres to places, their insignia, and the brand names that may attach to them’ (1996: 229). Scott (1999) similarly suggests that the temporal and spatial qualities associated with particular places are grafted onto the products produced in them and that these goods come to define their places of origin. Under this logic, creative industries foster the development of identities which feed back into new rounds of production.

This fusion of culture and creativity with the economy has been coupled with changes in state policy and support for the arts. Lily Kong (2000), for example, charts a transition from an era where culture and the arts were supported according to social and cultural rationales – under a banner of community development or ‘art for art’s sake’ – to an age in which urban policy makers have foregrounded the role of creative industries in economic development and urban renewal (see Evans, this volume). The 1980s marked a significant turning point as governments began adopting a neoliberal approach that involved an extension of market principles to state policies as a means to contend with global competition, industrial decline and market volatility (Harvey, 1989). With respect to the arts, public subsidies were increasingly viewed as a form of welfare and fell victim to broader cuts in public spending as governments were becoming less managerial and more entrepreneurial in their approach to service provision. This was particularly the case for cities, which faced less support from higher levels of government and were expected to take on more responsibility for leveraging their own revenues (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). In light of fiscal constraints and inter-urban competition for capital, creative industries were increasingly valued in terms of their ability to foster a new image for the city that would enhance its economic competitiveness and attract talent, shoppers and tourists. Under this new economic agenda, creative industries were viewed as a vehicle through which cities could distinguish themselves, as well as the goods and services they produced (Peck, 2005).

The broader political-economic context in which creativity has assumed economic significance cannot be divorced from prevailing academic discourses that have sought to capture and highlight the economic dimensions. The two most influential sets of works that have shaped creative industry policy, to date, include the publications of Landry and Bianchini (1995) and Landry (2000) on ‘creative cities’ and the publication of Richard Florida (2002) on the creative class. The ‘creative city’ concept was first introduced by Landry and Bianchini (1995) in their book entitled The Creative City and then refined and repackaged for a policy audience in The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators by Landry (2000).
The basic tenet of this concept is that cities are facing immense challenges with the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial era and need to be creative in thinking of solutions to urban problems. Urban development and renewal, they contend, must move beyond investments in the physical attributes of place and infrastructure – and consider the role that local cultural resources can play in urban revitalisation. Such cultural resources can shape the prospects for enhancing local connections as well as projecting a distinctive image for cities at a time when, it is contended, culture is becoming increasingly homogenised around the globe.

The creative class concept, developed by Richard Florida (2002), also acknowledges the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society and from a society based on the production of goods to one based on the production of ideas. Florida charts the rise of a new class of workers who are said to embody the knowledge demanded by this new economic order, a class that encompasses those working in science, research, law, education and training, arts, culture and technology. Florida presents the creative class as ‘the dominant class in society’ (2002: ix) in terms of its influence in developing new ideas, products and lifestyles. These workers are seen to be highly mobile and attracted to a diverse, tolerant environment open to unconventional thinking and new ideas. Florida’s battle cry, ‘Be Creative or Die’, has become a highly influential maxim for industry leaders and politicians (Dreher, 2002) and a key aim has been to produce more dynamic, entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan places that also embody liberal values towards difference, as grounded in Florida’s mantra of the three T’s: technology, talent and tolerance.
Florida’s arguments echo the earlier observations of Jacobs (1961) about the role of diversity in the economic prosperity of cities, and in terms of policy orientation there are strong parallels with the creative city concept in which the development and promotion of local cultural resources are championed as a way of enticing and retaining this class of people.

Limitations of the creative city/class agenda

The influence of the creative city and creative class concepts has spread far and wide, and this popularity suggests that this is an idea whose time has come.
However, we argue that such policy responses represent an instrumental capturing of creativity around a particular neoliberal economic and political ideology, related to fostering labour market participation, civic boosterism and competitiveness. In practice, this has translated into a privileging of particular entrepreneurial practices, urban locales and a meritocratic class.

Artist as entrepreneur

First, the creative practices associated with cultural and economic regeneration have become explicitly aligned with market-ready activities which redefine the artist as a creative entrepreneur. The concept of the ‘creative city’ has promoted the valorisation of particular forms of creativity, including a proclivity to promote only those cultural activities whose products are easily commodifiable in terms of intellectual property rights and copyright material, such as music and film. As a consequence, other forms of creativity that fall outside the creative city agenda tend to be marginalised. And a normative, constrained definition of the cultural economy can lead to policy decisions that further disenfranchise other types of cultural production. The privileging of an entrepreneurial notion of creativity is captured by Montgomery, who states that ‘creativity should be certainly be [sic] encouraged, but not without a concomitant commitment to enterprise, risk-taking and wealth creation’ (2005: 342–3). Such a stance precludes the consideration of ‘alternative creativities’ whose cultural products are not so easily commodifiable (Gibson and Klocker, 2005). In his critique of the creative class script, Jamie Peck (2005) demonstrates how the instrumental deployment of creativity in urban policy is imbued with the moral imperatives of the neo-Right, whereby the fostering of individual creativity is tied to the fulfilment of neoliberal economic priorities. The Cox Review of Creativity in Business in the UK (2005), for example, firmly equates creativity with enterprise and innovation: ‘“creativity” is the generation of new ideas – either new ways of looking at existing problems, or of seeing new opportunities, perhaps by exploiting emerging technologies or changes in markets’ (Cox, 2005: 2). Redefining the artist as ‘entrepreneur’ and risk taker has serious consequences for work conditions in the new creative economy. Whether at the scale of the individual, a single business, or even a whole city, the necessity of being prepared to act and respond creatively for your own survival is emphasised.

While popular accounts of independent creative workers often project a romanticised picture of self-fulfilment and independence from routine nine-to-five work schedules, academic scholars have drawn attention to how such work is characterised by high levels of insecurity (McRobbie, 1998; 2005; Gill, 2002). As McRobbie’s research on independent designers illustrates, creative workers often move from one project to the next, work in isolation and need to make a name for themselves by building up their own brand. Moreover, since much of the work they take on is freelance work for large corporations, as casualised labour, they must assume the risks and costs of their creative output. As a consequence, such workers become self-disciplining, neoliberal subjects, assuming full responsibility for any failings, working long hours to attain success and looking after their own self-interest (McRobbie, 2005). Banks (2009) further points out how distinc-tions between work and leisure become blurred for such people by virtue of a time squeeze generated by a concern with finding productive creativity in pastimes and pleasures.

The creative city script thus presents an idealised image of an entrepreneurial creative subject, neglecting the power relations, discipline and risks that confront members of the so-called creative class. Such a conception of creativity also neglects less commodified, alternative and often more subversive forms of creativity in the city, as we discuss in more detail below.

The focus on the urban

One of the most glaring inadequacies of the creative class thesis and its many advocates is its geographical specificity. We are particularly concerned over the consensus in cultural policy and academic discourse that privileges large metropolitan centres as sites of cultural production. There is no doubt that cities have been great centres of technological and cultural innovation and that within cities risks are taken, problems raised, experiments tested and ideas generated. Historically, people gravitate to cities for employment, stimulus or the comfort of strangers and today, certain renowned cities with economic, cultural and political power continue to act as magnets for social and commercial experimentation: ‘the innovative places the last time around look like being the creative places the next time around’ (Hall, 2000: 648). Accordingly, certain cities such as Manchester, Barcelona and San Francisco are held up as models of cultural dynamism worthy of imitation, and undoubtedly cities such as London or New York are dynamic centres of cultural production, and possess particular advantages in terms of supporting the creative economy. However, the instrumental use of arts and culture in strategies for urban renewal continues to venerate the metropolis as an especially unique environment, conducive to creative production and consumption to the exclusion of other spaces. Such policies fail to appreciate the complexities of urban living in a networked age. The developments of exurbia, networked culture and enhanced mobilities suggest that the experience of urban living is changing rapidly. And as Miles and Paddison (2005) argue, the tendency of contemporary approaches of cultural policies to overemphasise the centrality of large metropolitan areas as the principal realms for creative production and consumption implicitly denigrates the significance of peripheral, marginal and non-urban spaces. Florida (2002), for example, has encouraged a fascination with the ranking of cool cities, where the creative industries are said to flourish, into league tables. However, for every top ten cool city, there is also a ‘crap town’ (Jordison and Kiernan, 2006), and spaces beyond the urban or non-metropolitan in which other forms of cultural production are unknown, ignored and trivialised.

Cultural regeneration strategies not only privilege metropolitan areas, but within these areas tend to fetishise particular aestheticised spaces of production and consumption, such as the gentrified urban centre or bohemian cultural enclave. These spaces are often characterised by state-led spectacular flagship projects and events, together with the development of distinctive cultural quarters.
Strategies to cultivate such spaces involve urban design, an improved public realm and image campaigning to imprint a new identity on the urban landscape that is appealing to both local artists and the consumers of culture – and perhaps more importantly, institutional investors or tourists (Bell and Jayne, 2004; Gibson and Kong, 2005). Moreover, in line with much of the recent literature and the neoliberal policy focus on the relation between clusters and innovation (see Porter, 1998 for example), these centres generally represent a concentration of creative industries, as the co-location of activities is seen to enhance knowledge exchange and the generation of new ideas and practices, not to mention the potential reputation effects for a distinctive cultural quarter.

To date, however, there is a paucity of empirical evidence demonstrating that clusters provide sustainable vehicles for urban regeneration (Evans, 2005), and according to Zukin (2006), Román (2006) and Vicario and Martínez-Monje (2006), the concentration or agglomeration of creative industries may actually do more harm than good. First, a city’s comparative advantage may be undermined through the standardisation of cultural policy models, the serial reproduction of cluster forms and subsequent homogeneity of the built environment in terms of urban design, creative content and public realm. Indeed, given the tendency of local policy makers to reproduce anything that looks remotely successful, the twenty-first century has witnessed a global spread of similar cultural policy regeneration initiatives. Second, the concentration of resources and investment within clusters serves the exclusionary power of gentrification, creating attractive and desirable neighbourhoods which may force out the original urban pioneers through inflated capital and rental values. Zukin (1989; 1995) has shown, with her seminal work on Soho (New York), how culture-led renewal vanquished the conditions that led to the formation of artistic milieus in the first place. Third, the sheer scale of investment in major artistic flagship projects can divert resources away from much-needed investment in social development, as well as reproduce spatial inequalities in the geography of artistic and creative production.

As we discuss more critically below, we argue for a broader conception of creativity, one that recognises its practice outside the city, the downtown and the cultural quarter. The prioritisation of such spaces also has a class-based dimension, which we now highlight in the final section.

The priorities and politics of the middle class

In current conceptualisations, members of the creative class possess the appropriate qualities for producing creative work or products of value. In terms of their spatial preferences, they are drawn to locales with art galleries, chic shopping areas, heritage, museums, cafés and a reputation for cosmopolitanism and liberal attitudes towards sexuality, gender and other forms of difference. Yet, such an emphasis is shrouded in a particular set of middle-class values, and the implication persists that differently positioned social groups lack the necessary creative skills, cultural tastes and competencies to effectively operate within the creative economy, and even more, that there is a creative class – and therefore other classes that are not creative. The most uncreative class here seems to be the abject working class, but, as we discuss below, the suburban middle class also falls into this category.

The problems with this emphasis are twofold. First, as Haylett (2003) suggests, a state of being uncreative is redefined as a problem for the state to deal with.
Creativity in this context, therefore, becomes a discursive weapon to further problematise non-middle-class values and peoples. Second, and relatedly, there is a failure on the part of contemporary cultural policy to engage working-class communities within visions of cultural regeneration. Cities lacking the cultural capital bestowed by the presence of art galleries and upscale cafés have a more difficult job in attracting that class of creatives who aspire to be surrounded by such facilities and philosophies. Cultural regeneration, it would seem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Rethinking Creativity: Critiquing the Creative Class Thesis
• Part I: Governing and Practising Creativity
• Part II: Decentring Creativity
• Part III: Everyday Spaces of Creativity
• Part IV: Vernacular Creativity and Everyday Life
• References