After the creative City? PART ONE

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The Creative City is an idea, a theory, and a diverse range of urban policies for both cultural innovation and economic development.1 Within intellectual debates across Europe, the term ʻCreative Cityʼ is also becoming a symbolic marker of a now defunct era of economic optimism.2

Even Germany, who did not suffer the fate of the UK in the global financial crisis of 2006-8, is facing an era of city, regional and national budgetary scrutiny and reassessment, where caution, risk-aversion and insecurity are quickly morphing into cultural values. The crisis is not simply about contracting

resource allocation for urban development, but is generating what we in the UK call a ʻpoverty mentalityʼ or a perceived state of reduced possibility (whatever the material conditions of that state). The ʻpsychopathologyʼ of urban policy – the ʻdisorderingʼ of the policy mentality – is a something normally only understood in terms of its adverse impacts.

 

The issue is the City, not just urban regeneration

The psycho-political process of (ir)rationality within urban policy surely requires more attention from the thinking public. The original Creative City idea addressed this phenomenon to some degree. It was principally concerned with the way people in power ʻthoughtʼ and conceived ʻthe cityʼ as a space, place or platform for social, cultural and industrial activity. The Creative City idea asserted a challenge to the ideational basis on which policy decisions were made about the shape, function and development of the urban environment. It dispelled the assumption that a deductive, linear conceptual trajectory proceeds from the political public policy objectives of national government right through to and the urban policy implementation of particular cities. In other words, the Creative City was a challenge to the rationalist epistemologies that still seem to underpin the varied processes of political deliberation that determine our cities’ evolution.

 

Enlightened capitalism?

Throughout the ʻpre-crisisʼ era of inflated prosperity, the cry of ʻcreativityʼ carried with it a level of radical change to which only the political Far Left had previously aspired. Even though, in time, Creative City cultural policy would become an unwitting urban handmaiden of global neoliberalism, its use of cultural metaphors, artistic rhetoric, and near-anarchist social ideals, obviated the need to oppose capitalism. The kind of capitalism the Creative City had promised was enlightened, where surplus value simply became material for further redevelopment, in turn helping repair the damage capitalism inevitably causes. Profit no longer signified capital accumulation or increased monopoly over the means of production. Quite the contrary. It was the R&D money for the new search for knowledge, technological experimentation, communications and universal access to information.

 

Dialoge and urban cultures should have reigned

The original ʻCreative Cityʼ idea emerged in strength the mid-1990s as a kind of avantgarde cultural policy. In the UK, for example, it was framed by a growing political investment in urban regeneration, whose successive waves of redevelopment and renewal were originally driven by the fragmentation of

the fast-built post-War industrial infrastructure, along with increasing social problems in the ʻinner cityʼ areas. The avant-garde thrust of the Creative City idea was its potential to generate an alternative to the development of the neo-liberal city after the collapse of modernist urban paradigms in the 1970s. Where modernist was design-based, and understood the city as a series of task-driven activities, the Creative City was animated by dialogue and generative urban cultures. Rapid post-industrialisation and the rise of the communication industries in the 1980s made this reconfigured idea credible.

 

The artist would displace the engineer

The city could itself become a creative subjectivity, which first involved a re-thinking of the way its governing policies are thought-through and thought-out. Policy makers, urban planners, city officials, and even industrialists would talk to each other. Knowledge of the city would make its way out of the professional silos of city departments and professional services. New kinds of observation, language and conceptual frameworks would develop – not simply forming a new lexicon of urban life, but forming a city specific lexicon, where the urban-cultural particularity of a city would be registered in the forms of the dialogue it generated. The setting of an urban policy objective would be a creative act. The artist would displace the engineer as the model of professional labour in the hard physical contexts of the urban realm. This was not an exercise in neo-romanticism; from Constructivism to the Bauhaus to Situationism, the Twentieth Century European avant-garde understood this. Art was a laboratory through which new forms of urban life could be constructed – physically, aesthetically, spiritually and politically. We have not lost a sense of the interconnectedness of life, but the cultural politics of that interconnectedness. 3

 

1. This is a revised version of a paper prepared for MADE centre for place-making, Birmingham, November 2011: http://www.made.org.uk (accessed 12/02/12).
2. Talk of ‘after’ or ‘beyond’ the Creative City is now commonplace among UK urbanists and cultural policy researchers. It characterised a major seminar series in 2011 entitled ‘Creative City Limits’ (sponsored by AHRC, CABE and Urban Lab and hosted by University College London): http://creativecitylimits.wordpress.com/: (accessed 12/02/12). For the latest wave of books on the creative city and creative industries, see the following: Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti, eds. (2008) Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar); Lily Kong and Justin O’Connor, eds. (2009) Creative Economies, Creative Cities (London: Springer); Niina Koivunen and Alf Rehn, eds. (2009) Creativity and the Contemporary Economy (Liber/CBS: Denmark); (Andy, C. Pratt and Paul Jeffcutt, eds. (2009) Creativity, Innovation and the Cultural Economy (London: Routledge); Tim Edensor, Deborah Leslie, Steve Millington and Norma M. Rantisi, eds. (2010) Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: rethinking the cultural economy (London: Routledge).
3. The term Creative City was popularised by Charles Landry in the 1980s in part through his empirical research on cities like Glasgow, and his consultancy Comedia, subsequent international conferences (Glasgow, 1994; Helsinki, 1996; Huddersfield, 2000), and current creative urban strategy-making across the world. His ideas are articulated most clearly in the latest edition of The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (London: Comedia/Earthscan, 2009). His earlier influential reports include The Art of Regeneration: urban renewal through cultural activity (Landry, C., Greene, L., Matarasso, F., and Bianchini, F., Stroud, Glos.: Comedia, 1996).

All Photos by Jonatahn Vickery, except Title photo  by Chris Poulsen