The Role of Art and Culture for Regional and Urban Resilience

Philip Cooke, Luciana Lazzeretti, Philip Cooke, Luciana Lazzeretti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351365741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book analyses the influence of art and culture as an engine to promote the resilience of regional and urban economies. Under a multidiscplinary perspective, the book examines the contribution of some creative regions and cities as places in which processes of transformation, innovation and growth are activated in response to external pressures. Through different theoretical frameworks and empirical investigations and suggesting a critical discussion of the notion of resilience, the authors argue that cultural and creative resources may offer a sustainable model in order to afford different typologies of shocks. The book will appeal scholars of regional and urban science and cultural and creative economies and will open up a number of considerations for policy makers.

This volume was originally published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.

Responding to and resisting resilience

Luciana Lazzeretti and Philip Cooke

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this Special Issue is to contribute to the still under-researched debate on regional and urban economic resilience by proposing some reflections focused on the contribution of art and culture to revitalization of de-activated spaces. In this sense, the idea that some creative regions, ‘corridors’ or cities are also resilient is to be examined to see the extent they are capable of re-energization. This means not only preserving but also transforming themselves in response to external pressures, generating local development, innovation and growth. The contributions included then offer, using a multidisciplinary perspective – in terms of theoretical approaches, research methodologies and empirical findings – an interesting contribution to a better understanding of the concept of this specific kind of regional and urban resilience. The Special Issue is composed of eight articles.

Introduction

In a report to the Environmental Advisory Council to the Swedish Government, as input to the process of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa from 26 August to 4 September 2002, a leading ‘resilience’ thinker – Carl Folke – and celebrated colleagues, including, Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling (Gunderson & Holling, 2002) began with the following announcement:

Emerging recognition of two fundamental errors underpinning past polices for natural resource issues heralds awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management. The first error has been an implicit assumption that ecosystem responses to human use are linear, predictable and controllable. The second has been an assumption that human and natural systems can be treated independently. However, evidence that has been accumulating in diverse regions all over the world suggests that natural and social systems behave in nonlinear ways, exhibit marked thresholds in their dynamics, and that social-ecological systems act as strongly coupled, complex and evolving integrated systems. (Folke et al., 2002)

The explicit scepticism of ‘engineering’ resilience in this context, recognition of the more non-linear ‘ecological’ variety and the article’s emphasis in the title referencing ‘adaptive capacity’ in a complex world of rapid transformations are welcome. And yet, the criticism of the second ‘error’ regarding the non-linearity of social–ecological systems is not as reassuring as it seems. Moreover, it is more anxiety-inducing than it first appears. And this is a possible inkling that all is not well with the ‘ecological’ notion of resilience when applied to social–ecological systems or even more simply social systems.

In his famous book, Normal Accidents, the organizational sociologist Charles Perrow (1984) theorized the causes of disasters such as Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown and – more prosaically – the Chicago Mercantile Futures Exchange’s ‘flash crash’ MacKenzie (2011). Thus, on 6 May, $1 trillion was wiped off the value of markets in the space of 10 14;minutes. Perrow’s alert to such crises and terminology for systemic crashes more generally is defined as a situation of ‘tight coupling’: where there is very little ‘slack’, ‘give’ or ‘buffer’, and decisions need to be taken in what is on any ordinary human scale a very limited period of time (e.g. in the ‘flash crash’ five seconds). Systems that are both ‘tightly coupled’ and ‘highly complex’ are an organizational contradiction, says MacKenzie (2011):

Crudely put, high complexity in a system means that if something goes wrong it takes time to work out what has happened and to act appropriately. Tight coupling means that one doesn’t have that time. Moreover, (Perrow) suggests, a tightly coupled system needs centralised management, but a highly complex system can’t be managed effectively in a centralised way because we simply don’t understand it well enough; therefore its organisation must be decentralised. Systems that combine tight coupling with high complexity are an organisational contradiction. (MacKenzie, 2011, p. 18)

So, this paragraph effectively adds a third problematic condition (integration) to the first two (tight coupling and high complexity) of Folke et al.’s (2002) characterization of social–ecological systems. As noted, Perrow (1984) and MacKenzie (2011) see these linked characteristics as an organizational contradiction or, put another way, a disaster waiting to happen. Because of these contradictory elements, it is hard to escape the further two conditions about resilience that socio-ecological systems are also both capable of displaying linearity (lock-in to path dependence) and thresholds of indeterminate decline as well as recovery. These last two characteristics combined, that is, declining path dependent lock-in, are seldom stressed in the sub-consciously optimistic accounts of resilience thinkers inside or outside the socio-spatial and economic geographic sciences.

If this seems unfair, given that the Folke et al. (2002) article is some 15 years old and while they were alluding to environmental mismanagement disasters such as Three Mile Island but not failures in the US financial or art systems, it nevertheless brings into question the reliability of their analysis of resilience whether in ecological or social–ecological systems. Some aspects of systemic modern work such as stocks and bonds trading, which are highly computerized and processed through algorithms that operate at microsecond (millionth of a second) speed, mean they are a primitive species of artificial intelligence (AI) since the best human reaction time is 140 milliseconds (thousandths). Thus, an ‘engineering’ resilience metaphor may also be, peculiarly, at least partly admissible today.

Aesthetic and economic spheres

Either way, Folke et al. (2002) are unappreciative of linear ecological system models but their interpretation of non-linear social–ecological models is also open to serious questioning. Accordingly, in this brief introduction to the Special Issue on ‘The Role of Art and Culture for Regional and Urban Resilience’, we have encouraged contributors to be willing to think about the validity of the resilience concept in their articles. It is currently a driver of analyses of economic in relation to other macro-social and ecological relationships, including the variety, nature and change impulses to systems of art and culture. These too are faced with resilience shocks, tests and other disasters which they confront independently or in other system articulations (Hughes, 1991). A systems analysis of comparable appreciative depth is undoubtedly needed to determine whether art and culture are ‘floating signifiers’ of socio-economic and spatial development and planning, meaning very little for what occurs in places such as Wall Street, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the City of London. This is harder to do than it might seem for those who hold that art is indeed an independent sphere or system of the kind critiqued in Folke et al. (2002). For example, those lucky enough to admire the ‘colour field’ paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman or Clyfford Still’s purer form of ‘abstract expressionism’ at London’s Royal Academy exhibition in autumn 2016 may have been reminded of Rothko’s ‘revenge on the bourgeoisie’ in 1959. He had been commissioned in 1954 to paint and select from up to forty mural-scale canvases for the main Four Seasons restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s modernist Seagram building in Manhattan. His subsequent decision to withdraw the commission, initially brokered by designer of the Four Seasons restaurant Phyllis Lambert and co-architect Philip Johnson, scandalized the Manhattan of that ‘Mad Men’ era. The breach of contract meant that he repaid his $35,000 commission to the Seagram company. Even notorious artist Jackson Pollock’s famous ‘Blue Poles’ mural which was temporarily hanging in the smaller Four Seasons restaurant awaiting the delivery of Rothko’s own canvases lasted longer.

Why Rothko’s ‘revenge’? It is worth briefly recounting this remarkable expression of the separate resilience systems that contradict the spheres of aesthetics and economics. Rothko was a poor immigrant from Dvinsk, Russia born in 1903 and described by Jones (2002) as ‘ … intense, solitary, leftwing, used to poverty and failure’. Talking later, on record, of his by then more successful career to an editor of Harper’s Magazine, Rothko explained that he took the commission ‘to upset, offend and torture the diners at the Four Seasons, that his motivation was entirely subversive … so they feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up’ (Jones, 2002). There follows one of two classical references underlying Rothko’s creative motivation towards the murals. The first is found in Florence and is Michelangelo’s vestibule of the Laurentian Library, leading from the cloister of the Medici church of San Lorenzo built in approximately 1524–1526. Jones (2002) sees it as ‘ … Michelangelo’s most audacious architectural creation, one of the most staggering of all his works - and the most modern. It is the anteroom of death’. The second influence were the houses in Pompeii, city of the dead, particularly at the Villa of Mysteries where the interior decoration of sombre walls with broad expanses of black and red inspired his project. His aim for this was recorded as a desire to create a ‘Dionysian’ anti-architecture against the rational order of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building and torment the bourgeoisie’s anticipation of a pleasant supper.

The narrative of these events further suggested his own confusion about modernity:

Rothko wanted to prove that painting could exert power - that he could subvert his brief as a “decorative” artist and transform an up-market restaurant into a space dominated by sublime art. Rothko was trying to revive the idea central to modernism - that art can shatter our assumptions. But no artist in New York in 1959 had that kind of power. Sitting amid the buzz and excess of the Four Seasons, Rothko must have felt that he had been deluded - that the wealthy diners were not going to be harrowed. That art could not change anything. That his paintings would just be decoration after all … (Jones, 2002)

Surprisingly, perhaps, Rothko’s misanthropic version of his motivation meant a myth of spirituality and optimism was created by the power elite of American art. This satisfied his collectors, as it expressed a perceived reverence for art as shared with other abstract expressionists embarked on an established aesthetic and spiritual journey. Poignantly, in 1970, Rothko committed suicide – as did other abstract expressionists like Ashille Gorky, Pollock and sculptor David Smith. But, before his death, he gave nine (actually offering as many as thirty) of the intended murals to the director of London’s Tate Gallery where they bleakly hang – as Rothko requested – in a low-lit, grey-walled, exclusive room in the Tate Modern. The remainder are now found in galleries in Japan and Washington DC. A key inference from this episode is that art may conquer the resilience of a specific corporate commission but not its collective ideological power. Ironically, Rothko’s generosity was to a gallery bequeathed to the public by the corporate power of UK sugar benefactor Henry Tate, founder of Tate & Lyle. Corporate power is precision-engineered to express art’s fragile dependence on such asymmetric power systems.

By contrast, abstract expressionist Clyfford Still (like Van Gogh) scarcely sold a painting in his life. Unlike the commissions, sponsorships and patronage available to the Manhattan art world of the 1950s. Still eschewed them all. Whereas, encouraged by trusted advisers, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Jackson Pollock to paint his biggest painting ‘Mural’ for her new Manhattan townhouse hallway; Pollock in July 1943 duly signed a gallery contract with Guggenheim. The terms were $150 a month and a settlement at the end of the year if his paintings sold. For Still, there was none of this. He started a tough life in his ‘lostland’ moving over ‘the burning plains’ of depression-era North Dakota, eastern Washington and the prairies of southern Alberta, Canada. His self-reliant, outsider status meant that he would alienate the world of art criticism – a principle he saw as akin to ‘throwing the money lenders out of the temple’. Accordingly, he limited the presentation of his work, famously turning down not only sales, but also severing any gallery representation from 1951 to 1969, including an invitation to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1957. The only gifts of his work were to the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo NY and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Later, after his death but designed to his specifications (no other artists, dedicated to a city not a museum, no bookshop or café), the Clyfford Still Museum, an independent non-profit organization in Denver, Colorado, finally opened its doors in November 2011.

In those circumstances, even Rothko’s ‘principled’ right of refusal meant that the markets for art and economy operated more clearly in separate spheres. The US economy was booming from the huge wartime and subsequent Cold War defence build-up but to the artists contributing to the New York School (for many, a preferred name to ‘abstract expressionists’) for whom European art was in ruins, fellow-artist Barnett Newman wrote:

We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world destroyed by a great depression and a fierce World War, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of paintings that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. (Newman, 1969)

Most abstract expressionists had left-wing ideals and were opponents of social and economic inequality. This was enriched by immigrant intellectuals and ideas like surrealism, existentialism and Jungian psychology. Eventually, their view was at odds with a society increasingly concerned with the consumer lifestyle, fuelled by economic success and proliferation of the mass media. Still, however, lived up to the nickname of the abstract expressionists as the ‘irascibles’. His rejection of consumer society, the New York artworld and the monetization of his artistic output was total and rejected until his death. It took a Maryland legal ruling to allow four of the paintings in his will to be auctioned to endow his own memorial museum. On this theme, Still’s existential opposition to capitalism in practice is testimony to the dream that art and markets can exist as separate systems or spheres. To that extent, Still’s own resilience outmatched the upward regression line of the fluctuating art booms of his lifetime.

Resilience shocks and system repercussions

This inquiry into the economics and aesthetics of particular resilience ‘shocks’ to the art world has served three objectives which are reflected to varying degrees in the papers of this Special Issue. These include massive resilience shocks such as depression, global war, the ‘shock of the new’ as expressed in abstract expressionism, and individual resistances to the capitalist market. First, the three vignettes from abstract expressionism show how art has its own variety of relational work in the ‘art economy’ rather like high finance (speculation, acquisitions and commissions). We have identified three instances of variety in terms of the power relations of the art market. The first of these is ‘patronage’ as revealed in Pollock’s willing, if mildly principled, acceptance of Peggy Guggenheim’s ‘retainer’ contract or project fee. The challenge of ‘Mural’ was a direct aesthetic test as Pollock wrote to his brother: ‘as exciting as hell’. But Guggenheim’s patronage also gave him entry to the ‘art system’ of an avant-garde that was taken seriously by the critics, curators and collectors whose opinions mattered. The second instance is expressed in Rothko’s breach of contract with his specific commission and its corporate rather than individual ‘relational work’ (Zelizer, 2012). Here, an oppositional, aesthetic ideology is operating in a relationship where the artist is testing the resilience of his counterparties, informed by emotion as much as reason and even confused by his analysis of reason as represented by modern architecture. This worked against his more emotional, Dionysian appreciation of the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii. Thus, from the Seagram family to the Four Seasons diners, Rothko’s struggle against consumer society revealed itself to be futile. Finally, Clyfford Still succeeded in ways that Rothko was unable to. Himself a victim of the resilience failure represented by the depression-era into which he was born, he produced great art which transcended the ‘art system’ by his rejection of art criticism, art galleries and commissions of any kind. Still’s was the most distant of the separate spheres of art and economy, ultimately revealing that, except for the ‘work relation’ of money as pay, the two really can exist as distinctive systems.

Finally, connecting to the papers in this Special Issue, readers may be interested to notice the variety of types of relationship that occur according to these system differences. To delineate just a few distinctions, the following are offered for consideration. First, Turin was founded on the patronage of the Agnelli family until it decamped administratively to Amsterdam and London after merger with Chrysler. The second act that emphasizes a distinctive form of municipal ‘patronage’ reminiscent of (another) Guggenheim Museum, in Bilbao, is the Calatrava extravaganza in Valencia’s pre-recession bid to become an iconic global city. Although this has been seen by some as ushering in a major resilience downturn (for Spain), our authors here, while sceptical of resilience analysis more generally, are far from judging it a failure. The Rothkoesque crisis of confusion category may be most closely imitated by weaknesses of system integration on a particularly grand scale. Another ‘car cluster’ is characterized by the ‘long emergency’ of post-Fordist deindustrialization. Detroit stands as a post-industrial disaster where resilience is notable only for its absence. However, an even greater test of urban investment commissioning facing resilience is supplied by another paper on disasters, the one caused by the Kobe earthquake in Japan. In the latter case, Kobe may have recovered relatively well although hampered by Japan’s twenty-five-year economic stagnation. Smaller scale, more integrated deindustrialized industrial districts (IDs) in Italy are, albeit variably short-term in impact, marked by initiatives showing an ability to transition into creative economy activities that offer alternatives to their resilience crises.

Finally, the nearest equivalent macro-case or category of contrarian optimism in the face a long ‘resilience emergency’ is Slovenia’s response to the global financial crash of 2008 and northern England’s de-industrialized austerity and public expenditure cuts. Unsurprisingly, these had affected arts expenditure first of all but this has been responded to by an outpouring of energy throug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Responding to and resisting resilience
• 2 Turin and Lingotto: resilience, forgetting and the reinvention of place
• 3 The Calatrava model: reflections on resilience and urban plasticity
• 4 Resilience in ruins: the idea of the ‘arrested dialectic’ in art after resilience’s failures
• 5 Adaptation, adaptability and resilience: the recovery of Kobe after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995
• 6 Resilience and the role of arts and culture-based activities in mature industrial districts
• 7 Blue notes: Slovenian jazz festivals and their contribution to the economic resilience of the host cities
• 8 Beyond resilience: learning from the cultural economy
• 9 Tourism and regional economic resilience from a policy perspective: lessons from smart specialization strategies in Europe
• Index