Doing a Florida thing: the creative class thesis and cultural policy

In this paper, we discuss the screen media businesses and production milieu that has developed in the predominantly rural region of the Northern Rivers, Australia, over the past 20 years. Spread across a number of towns and small cities each at some distance from each other, this screen milieu would seem to go against the prevailing logic for screen media to concentrate in globally connected cities. Taking up Allen J. Scott’s suggestion that the new capitalism of the twenty-first century is producing restructuring effects in many of the interstitial spaces between large cities, this article examines the spatial assemblages of the screen media and related creative industries sectors in one such space. We demonstrate how screen media actors in this rural region are participating in the wider cultural economy and explore its cultural policy implications.     

The Ordinary City

As debates on globalization have progressed from an earlier phase in which commentators saw the intensification of world-scale flows and processes as the negation of local identities and autonomies, the city has been 'rediscovered' as the powerhouse of the globalized economy. Against the view that questions, for example, the continued specificity of the urban in an era increasingly mediated by locationally liberating, advanced telecommunications and rapid transport networks, some strands of urban research assert that cities are becoming more important as the key creative, control and cultural centres within globalizing economic, cultural and social dynamics. Building on these strands, this paper evaluates the assets that cities and metropolitan regions provide in an era of globalization. It attempts to develop an alternative perspective on the city based on the idea that contemporary urban life is founded on the heterogeneity of economic, social, cultural and institutional assets, and concludes by using this perspective to develop implications for urban policy and the quest for social and territorial justice.     

CREATIVE CITIES: THE CULTURAL INDUSTRIES AND THE CREATIVE CLASS

The aim of this article is to critically examine the notion that the creative class may or may not play as a causal mechanism of urban regeneration. I begin with a review of Florida's argument focusing on the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings. The second section develops a critique of the relationship between the creative class and growth. This is followed by an attempt to clarify the relationship between the concepts of creativity, culture and the creative industries. Finally, I suggest that policy-makers may achieve more successful regeneration outcomes if they attend to the cultural industries as an object that links production and consumption, manufacturing and service. Such a notion is more useful in interpreting and understanding the significant role of cultural production in contemporary cities, and what relation it has to growth.     

Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India: Art,Heritage, and Development in Ahmedabad,Gujarat

Using a critical cultural politics approach and deploying the concept of sentimental capitalism, this article problematizes the burgeoning creative economy discourse while analyzing spaces of art and heritage production in Ahmedabad, India. I situate the Cotton Exchange exhibit (April 2013) in an erstwhile mill in recent histories of mill closures, genocide, creative economy initiatives and development aspirations of revitalizing degraded space. I argue that in remaking place, art mobilizes sentiments—here, nostalgia and hope—while erasing violence and inequality. Sentimental capitalism is at work in the exhibition by mobilizing artisans as entrepreneurial agents not victims of capitalism; constructing art's aura of grassroots participation and artisanal empowerment while obscuring displacement and exploitation; and fostering cult‐like regard for art's intrinsic and instrumental value as non‐profit and its capacity to engender opportunity, recognition, and even property. While another spatial politics is possible, in Ahmedabad today, art is being mobilized to obscure dispossession and exploitation in the name of urban revitalization and heritage production.     

Towards ‘Embedded Non-creative Work’? Administration,digitisation and the recorded music industry

Abstract

For contemporary cultural policy, ‘non-creative’ work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of ‘embedded creativity’ with a more situated view of work’s cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this ‘embeddedness’, taking a ‘cultural economy’ approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of ‘admin’ to recorded music industries, after ‘digital disruption’. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing ‘creative industries’ as such. The intention is not to show that ‘embedded non-creative workers’ are in fact ‘creative’ but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of ‘cultural’ labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural ‘administration’ in the contemporary ‘creative economy’.     

Cultural Economy: Achievements,Divergences, Future Prospects

This paper reflects on two decades' scholarship in geography on cultural economy, assessing strides made against some of the expectations of early proponents. Cultural economy continues to be a polysemic term. In some quarters, it refers to a type of economic geography into which matters of ‘culture’ are absorbed. This work frequently focuses on the empirics of the so‐called ‘cultural and creative industries’. Others see cultural economic research as an opportunity to move beyond the epistemological constraints of ‘culture’ and ‘economy’, questioning their status as foundational categories. This latter approach has been used in a broader set of empirical projects encompassing technology, knowledge, and society. Contrasting threads of cultural economic research have helpfully moved geographical scholarship beyond paradigmatic limitations, but jostle somewhat uncomfortably within existing (and increasingly specialised) disciplinary and subdisciplinary fields. The risk is that by questioning the categorical underpinnings of much specialised research, cultural economy struggles to ‘belong’ in the increasingly coded and compartmentalised university setting. I conclude with a discussion of future prospects. Some measure of vitality could be achieved through incorporation of a cultural economy perspective into the pressing issues of climate change, human sustenance, and urban infrastructure planning. These are issues for which the polysemy of cultural economy could prove constructive, transcending technocentric market ‘fixes’ and bland assumptions about how best to ‘green’ our cities – promoting instead ethnographic interrogations of how humans access, use, exchange, and value financial and material resources as moral and social beings.     

Too Soon for Post-Feminism: The Ongoing Life of Patriarchy in Neoliberal America

In this paper, I seek to bring “patriarchy” back into focus in ways that make sense to a twenty-first century American audience. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the ways in which “feminism” has fallen, or is being pushed, off the contemporary political agenda, leaving a political vacuum with respect to, among other things, patriarchy as a system of power. In the second part of the paper, I use a number of films as texts to show how patriarchy in this sense persists quite vigorously and often brutally in contemporary society, not only as a thing in itself, but also as a form of power that intersects with, and organizes, major institutions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism: the industrial production site, the military, and the corporation. Finally, I reflect on the films not only as cultural texts, but also as political interventions that at least partially counter the post-feminist tendencies discussed in the first part of the paper.     

The Role of Theatre in Society: A Comparative Analysis of the Socio-Cultural Theories of Brecht,Benjamin, and Adorno

Abstract

This article analyzes the socio-cultural theories of Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht through the lens of the theatre, most especially as it pertains to the work of actors. It explores the forces of capitalism that determine how art is produced, distributed, and consumed. Following Adorno’s reading of Marx, actors are here posited as commodities whose labor is separated from the product they create for public consumption. This commodification raises various questions: How does a market economy shape the production and consumption of art? What is technology’s function in the commodification of art? What is art’s sociopolitical role and how does it apply to theatre? To address these questions I juxtapose the cultural theory of Adorno and Benjamin with Brecht’s epic theatre. This comparison exposes the ritualistic potential of the theatre to bring an audience together as a community through sharing a socially enriching event.     

Modelling the cultural industries

Alternative definitions of the cultural industries lead to the construction of different models of the cultural production sector of the economy and hence to a different array of specific industries which are contained within the sector. In turn this implies not just differing estimates of the contribution of the cultural industries to output and employment in the economy but also significant differences in the way economic analysis can be applied to the cultural sector as a whole. This paper begins by discussing the way in which an economic approach to interpreting the scope of the creative and cultural industries can lead to a reasonable basis for defining them. It then goes on to examine the content of six distinct models of these industries, asking the question: is it possible to find a common core group of industries on which all of the models agree? The paper then considers the implications of the models for economic analysis of the cultural sector, and finishes with some conclusions for cultural policy.     

The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism

Digital platforms are a nearly ubiquitous form of intermediary and infrastructure in society. By positioning platforms in the geographical political economy/ecology literature, this paper provides a critical analysis of platforms as a dominant form of rentier in contemporary capitalism. In doing so, I extend this work on rent theory beyond applications to land and nature so that it also includes platforms and data. I argue that the rapid rise of the “X-as-a-service” business model across nearly all sectors of the economy is creating rentier relations by another name. This model is premised on the platform latching onto and inserting itself into the production, circulation, or consumption process, thus creating opportunities to capture value. To better understand the operations and implications of platforms, I outline three key mechanisms: data extraction, digital enclosure, and capital convergence.     

‘Danger building site—keep out!?’: a critical agenda for geographical engagement with contemporary construction industries

In this paper, I seek to develop a more direct, sustained and critical engagement between social and cultural geography and contemporary construction industries. In setting out this agenda, I focus on the UK construction industry and a body of work outside of geography describing how the UK construction industry evidences and maintains a problematic array of working practices that are socially consequential. However, despite such potent critiques, recent geographical work on architectural practices, including that focused on the UK, has remained rather detached from the people, places, politics, and indeed problems, of contemporary construction industries. Nevertheless, recent geographical studies of architectural practice possess a significant potential to directly inform critical analysis of construction industries. It is only through such direct engagement with the contemporary lives of building practitioners that I argue geographical studies of architecture, and especially architectural practices, can recognize and realize its political and ethical contribution.     

Looking Forward by Looking Back: May Day Protests in London and the Strategic Significance of the Urban

This paper deals with the question of how oppositional movements can adapt their protest strategies to meet recent socio-spatial transformations. The work of Lefebvre provides several clues as to how an alternative discourse and appropriation of space could be incorporated in such protest strategies. One of the central themes in Lefebvre's work is that the appearances, forms and functions of urban space are constitutive elements of contemporary capitalism and thus that an alternative narrative of urban space can challenge or undermine dominant modes of thinking. What exactly constitutes the "right" kind of alternative discourse or narrative is a matter of both theoretical and practical consideration. The paper analyses one case: the May Day protests in London in 2001, in which a protest group, the Wombles, managed to integrate theoretical insights into their discourse and practice in a highly innovative manner. Since cities, and global cities in particular, play an ever more important role in maintaining the consumption as well as production practices of global capitalism; they potentially constitute local sites where global processes can be identified and criticised. It is shown that the Wombles effectively made use of these possibilities and appropriated the symbolic resources concentrated in London to exercise a "lived critique" of global capitalism. Since the Wombles capitalised on trends that have not yet ended, their strategies show a way forward for future anti-capitalist protests.     

Soft power,global governance of cultural industries and rising powers: the case of China

This article addresses the importance of cultural industries for the strengthening of the soft power of the rising powers and it seeks to understand how the cultural industries allow rising powers to shape the structures of their international environment. More specifically, studying the cases of People’s Republic of China and of the movie industry, my article focuses on the current evolution of the relationship between the Chinese authorities and the film industry, as well as on the development of the domestic film market. I further aim to draw up an inventory of China’s role within the global governance of cultural industries. Finally, I aim to highlight the global cultural competition that China faces, emphasizing the practices of the US administration and Hollywood. I argue that even if China is the current centre of gravity within the world economy, it still has a long way to go in order to shape the distribution of resources within the global governance of cultural industries and to play a crucial role in the international battle of cultural symbols.     

Global Markets, Local Home-working: Governance and Inter-firm Relationships in the Balinese Clothing Industry

Abstract: Within the industrialization process of the Indonesian economy, the manufacture of clothing has played a significant role. Besides Java, Bali has the second highest agglomeration of industrial activities within this sector. However, in contrast to Javanese clothing firms, which have a strong emphasis on Western-styled clothing, Balinese clothing firms focus on the manufacture of Batik and embroidery products. Based on the commodity chain debate, I will show in this paper how Balinese clothing industry is organized into and governed within the global and local economy. This aims in particular to unravel how these types of garments (Batik and embroidery) can shape and reshape buyer relations. The analysis will also include a discussion of aspects, such as product development and raw material procurement. Furthermore, since Balinese clothing companies organize their production activities within extensive networks of rural home industries, the driving forces behind these specific network co-ordinations will be explored.     

Work hard, play hard: selling Kelowna, BC, as year-round playground

A keen interest in place making and place selling is widespread in contemporary society. While the bulk of academic research has focused on studying the restructuring of large urban conglomerates, places beyond the exploding metropolis, by comparison, have received little attention, especially when it concerns Canadian landscapes. In an attempt to study the particularities of place making in contemporary smaller, more isolated communities—hinterlands—this work analyses the city of Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada. We argue that historically Kelowna, a small rural community specialising in ranching, forestry and fruit production, since the early 1980s, has been re-imagined and re-designed, on the one hand as an all-year playground and as an innovative frontier for high-tech industries; on the other hand, this post-Fordist reinvention contains a discourse of 'whiteness', one that entices by packaging 'place' in terms of 'sameness' and 'familiarity'. In contrast to large cosmopolitan post-industrial cities, hinterland-type cities are invented, sought and lived as geographies cleared from the 'elements' that make cities 'unsafe'.     

关于会展经济空间运动形式的分析——以北京、上海与广州三地为例

文章分析了会展经济的迅猛发展需要依托一定的资源,从北京、上海和广州等几个大城市的发展特征分析,会展经济的空间运动形式主要源于离散力和吸引力,会展经济的空间结构变化主要表现为会展场馆的空间聚集与扩散,饭店、公司、资金、技术和专业人才等会展经济的生产要素依此聚散。空间运动的路径是由大城市市区到市区外围地带,结果形成从中心到城市外围的合理布局。     

Refusing to be Toured: Work,Tourism, and the Productivity of “Life” in the Colombian Amazon

Starting from the contention that exercising a “right to tour” is predicated on the work of producing tourability, I examine how tourability itself is a contested process involving relations of land and labour. Examining the current “resource boom” of ecotourism in the Colombian Amazon, I use an analysis of work and capital accumulation to unravel a seemingly small act of refusal by the community of Nazaret that has barred tourists’ entry to their land. I argue that this act of refusal opens up space for critically examining the relationships of land and labour, especially through the production of “life”, in the accumulation of tourable places in contemporary global capitalism. Engaging literature on both tourism studies and land politics in the Amazon region, I contribute to the scholarship on tourism and work while examining how Indigenous landscapes are being made productive towards the ends of capitalism.     

后消费时代城市文化资本空间生产状况解析

近年来,以文化资源为消费目标的空间克隆生产逐渐成为我国城市营销发展的重要手段。本文从新马克思主义视角切入,以消费社会大众心理研究为基石,以"文化资本"为理论依据,探索文化进入市场循环生产的模式,并结合当代中国文化消费空间生产性状况,揭示其"异质的同质化"与文化认同偏差的弊病:一方面推崇所谓异质多样的空间以迎合大众消费心理;另一方面市场经济体制下文化与资本的结合,使文化不可避免地沦为市场的奴隶,最终导致文化断层。文章最后在简要对比国内外文化资本空间生产状况的基础上,套用资本循环理论探讨其症结之所在。     

European Capital of Culture Designation as an Initiator of Urban Transformation in the Post-socialist Countries

Since 1985, the EU has designated cities as European Capital of Culture (ECOC) for 1 year at a time. Various ECOCs have used the designation as a tool to revive the city space. The cultural initiatives, such as the ECOC designation, are the EU's political instruments, whose significance has increased during the recent decades, and through which the EU aims to influence various political objectives, such as the unity of the Union and economic growth. These particular objectives were brought into the focus of the ECOC initiative during the Eastern enlargement of the Union. Since 2007, various Central and Eastern European cities have aimed to regenerate their economy through large construction projects, developing and repairing public spaces, investing in creative industries and transforming the image of the city, with the help of the ECOC brand. On one hand, the investments have recreated the cities with a unified modern look and an up-to-date atmosphere. On the other hand, the ECOC designation can be criticized for homogenizing the urban spaces in European cities by forcing the cities to follow certain criteria and expecting them to obey certain cultural values and trends in the urban development.     

Materialism, Mode of Production, and a Millennium of Change in Southern Mexico

In this paper, I ask why the insights of classical (i.e., materialist) Marxism are not more commonly used by archaeologists of recent academic generations. With evidence from the Soconusco region of Mexico, I explore the relationship between the economic base and political superstructure of the region’s inhabitants as well as evidence for the transformation from a kin-ordered to a tributary mode of production. Major esthetic and political transformations occurred across the region when naturalistic standards were replaced by abstract Olmec-style representation beginning approximately 1,400 cal. B.C. In contrast, macrobotanical, ground stone, and faunal patterns from the site of Cuauhtémoc (along with patterns from across the Soconusco) indicated that a major transformation of the economy occurred during the Conchas phase (1,000–850 cal. B.C.). Along with the marked intensification of subsistence production, the Conchas phase was also when the first system of conical mounds were built at the top three tiers of political centers in the Soconusco. I argue that the use of modes of production holds unrealized potential for a materialist interpretation of the past and that the development of a tributary mode of production helps explain the changes in the Soconusco after 1,000 cal. B.C.