The Creative City

Vision and Execution

James E. Doyle, Biljana Mickov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317037057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Creative City: Vision and Execution, edited by James E. Doyle and Biljana Mickov, challenges the popular understanding of the Creative City, by bridging the gap between the Creative City as concept and the Creative City as practice and, in so doing, provides a contemporary template for policy makers, city planners, and citizens alike. The book will offer researchers and pragmatists a series of real-life examples of successful cultural and creative practice throughout Europe, reflecting on the analysis and thinking that forms our contemporary understanding of the creative city. It will examine and explain the changes to the concept of the 'creative city', explore its connectivity to the cultural sector as well as other sectors and practices across Europe and will serve to illustrate the perspectives of Cultural Managers, Educators, Professionals and Researchers from the creative sector in Dublin and Europe. This book will present the reader, and the cultural sector at large, with a new reality based on the quality of contemporary creative practice. Doyle and Mickov address cultural trends such as sustainability and social networking and how they value-impact our attitudes towards culture and the creative city By recognizing that we live in a time of rapid change, which affects all systems, financial models, resources, the economy and technology, we also recognize that the creative process is at the heart of our responses to these changes.

PART I

Witnessing the Creative City

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Chapter 1

Culture in the Global City

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JOHN HOLDEN¹

The world is getting increasingly citified, so does what happens in cities matter to more and more of us? In 2008, for the first time in history, the proportion of the global population living in cities passed 51 percent. China has gone from having 18 percent of its population living in cities in 1978 to 50 percent today, and in the US, 80 percent of people live in cities. Even if you don’t live in a city, you are still likely to get your news, entertainment and quite possibly your value system from cities. The trend shows no sign of stopping, so it looks as if our future will increasingly be an urban one.

I think this is an interesting question because I find the role of culture in the life of cities something of a conundrum. I look at the lists of the world’s most livable cities, as they appear in magazines like Monocle, and am struck by the fact that most aren’t places that I’d want to be, even when they have lovely cultural infrastructures. I mean, Fukuoka at number 14? Portland at number 21? And neither New York nor London making the grade? Come on! On top of that, some places that are very rich in the culture of the past, like Kyoto or Florence might be very nice, but they just don’t cut it as pumping, happening and global cities.

Then you’ve got the fact that the financial districts of even the world’s most prosperous cities are as dull as ditchwater; just look at Wall Street and the City of London—utterly awful.

So for me successful cities are places that are culturally and financially active, right here and right now: they combine the making of money with the making of meaning. These are cities that people actually want to move to; places where history and news are made, and where living artists thrive. Places that get drawn and painted, and built and written about in real time. Often these are places that surprise and confound and are not entirely comfortable, and if you want me to name names, then I’d put Berlin and Istanbul high on my list.

I also find it interesting that in the West the role of the traditional arts in the life of cities seems to be changing. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, any city with ambition wanted to host a world-class museum, an orchestra and maybe an opera house (for example there are opera houses in the gold-rush town Central City, Colorado, and in Manaus in Brazil).

But today, by contrast, some of those traditional arts institutions are in crisis in American cities, and they are under threat in parts of Europe. And the reason for that is because the importance of the arts is no longer an unquestioned given. Politicians and private philanthropists everywhere are asking some difficult questions: what value do the arts and culture provide to the place where I live? Does it matter if the traditional arts disappear?

And there are equally important questions that city politicians must ask of themselves: how should they react to the changes that are going on in arts funding patterns? What responsibilities do they have in relation to culture? How do they optimize the regulatory and fiscal tools at their disposal?

Now, answering these questions is made more difficult than it otherwise would be, because we are collectively in a muddle about some of the important terms in the debate, especially the words “culture” and “value.” We no longer have a shared understanding about what they mean. And we are also troubled by the metrics of culture: how do we measure and compare across the arts landscape and beyond?

I will attempt to provide a simple conceptual framework that will help us to talk about the role of the arts and culture in the city. After that I will argue that a city without the arts is doomed to economic, social and political failure. And then I will suggest some approaches that cities should take when it comes to culture.

So, let’s start with the Cambridge academic Raymond Williams. In 1976 he wrote that culture was one of “the two or three most difficult words in the English language.” Back then culture essentially had two different meanings—and most people still think about culture in this way.

On the one hand culture meant “the arts”—and the arts were an established canon of art forms (opera, ballet, poetry, etc. etc.), each of which contained its own hierarchies. Now the arts were enjoyed by only a small part of society, one that was also generally speaking well educated and rich; and this social elite defined itself not just through money and education, but through the very act of appreciating the arts, and that’s why the arts themselves came to be labeled as elitist.

So that was one meaning of culture; but there was another one, a more anthropological meaning that extended to include everything that we did to express and understand ourselves as individuals within a group, from cooking to sports to dancing to watching television.

The problem was, and still is, that these two meanings of the same word became oppositional. Culture in the sense of the arts and popular culture were mutually exclusive: one was high, the other was low; one refined, the other debased. As an individual, you could aspire to high culture, but by definition, high culture could never be adopted by everyone; that was a logical impossibility—if everyone adopted it, it would be popular culture. And, to invert the logic, if under this old model popular culture was popular, that meant the arts must be unpopular. Oh dear.

But don’t despair, because this old either/or model of culture, that a lot of people still cling to, is redundant. The meaning of culture has to be radically rethought because two things have happened. The first is an obvious one, and that is that the old notion that somehow particular forms of culture are inherently better than others—by which I mean that they are more capable of bearing intense meaning—that idea has been untenable for quite some time. In fact it became crystal clear in the 1960s that the best cultural responses to the Vietnam War came not from the opera house or from literature; instead they came from journalism, film and rock music, and the high point was when Jimi Hendrix played the “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock.

So the question is no longer “is theater better than TV drama?” or “is ballet better than street dance?” Instead the debate about cultural quality moves to niches: is that a good Othello, is that a great TV program, how do these jazz musicians rate? And so on.

That’s the first reason why we have to rethink the relationship between the arts and the rest of culture. The second imperative for a rethink flows from a much more recent, and much more fundamental, shift in the way that the cultural system works.

Let me explain what I mean. My contention is that now, for practical purposes, we no longer have the arts and the rest of culture. Instead, there are three, deeply interrelated, spheres of culture: funded culture, commercial culture and home-made culture. Unlike the old high art and popular art they are not separate or oppositional; instead they are completely intertwined. However, they are different from each other in important ways.

Funded culture is the type of culture that needs support from governments or philanthropists. This type of culture is defined not through theory but by practice: what gets funded becomes culture. Therefore, who makes these decisions about what to fund, how those decisions are made and hence who gets to define this type of culture are matters of considerable public interest. Who gets funded to do what, and how a society decides to allocate the power to make funding decisions—whether these decisions should be taken in the boardrooms of corporations or by national or city politicians who are accountable though the ballot box or by arm’s-length expert agencies—all of these are intensely political questions.

The next type of culture, commercial culture, is equally pragmatically defined: the consumer is the ultimate arbiter and if someone thinks there is a chance that a song or a show will sell, it gets produced. Success or failure is market driven, but crucially access to the market—the elusive “big bucks record deal” that Bruce Springsteen sings about in his song “Rosalita,” or the stage debut, or the first novel—those are controlled by a corporate elite who are just as powerful as the arbiters of funded culture. The really important thing here is that both in funded culture and in commercial culture there are gatekeepers who define the meaning of culture through their decisions. In both cases, if you are an artist you have to overcome an obstacle in order to get your work in front of an audience.

But in the third sphere of culture—home-made culture—that is no longer the case. Home-made culture extends from the historic objects and activities of folk art through to the post-modern punk garage band and the YouTube upload, and here the definition of what counts as culture is much broader; it is defined by an informal self-selecting peer group, and the barriers to entry are much lower. Knitting a sweater, singing in a choir or writing a song and posting it on Facebook might take a lot of skill, but they can be done independently without much difficulty—the decision about the quality of what is produced then lies not in the hands of an expert, but in the hands of those who see, hear or taste the finished article.

In the past 30 years we have seen an explosion of activity in this third space of home-made culture. Let me ask you: what proportion of the 20-year-olds that you know are in a band, or curate their photographs, or make films with their camcorders? 100 percent, right? Everyone under the age of 25 seems to be an aspirant musician, poet, writer or filmmaker. In part that’s because the means of production have become cheaper and easier to use. You can now make a film on a $200 camera and edit it on a laptop, instead of needing a crew of 50 unionized workers and a capital-intensive studio.

But the really revolutionary technological innovation has been the internet. What the internet has done—uniquely and irrevocably, and in an incredibly short space of time—is to enable people to use culture to communicate, collaborate and make money in ways that are entirely new.

This has played havoc with the business models of the music, film and broadcasting sectors. And it has changed the possibilities for all three spheres of culture and all forms of cultural expression within them, presenting not only a wealth of new opportunities (such as new audiences, new art forms, new distribution channels) but also a set of questions (what to do about intellectual property; what to fund; how to educate young people; and censorship for example).

By fundamentally changing the rules of the game, this revolutionary technology has also changed the role of culture in people’s lives. Instead of being passive consumers of culture, dumb audience members sitting in the dark in silence, nowadays we all take on positions as producers and consumers, authors and readers, performers and spectators all of the time. We graze in comfort across these three spheres of culture without a second thought. Each of us moves fluidly through our cultural lives, creating our sense of individual and collective identity as we go; and we increasingly define ourselves by what we choose to watch, read and listen to and so on.

And just as this integrated model of culture explains how and why the arts and culture together have become more important for individual people, by extension it explains why this big cultural landscape has become more important to cities and why culture will, I think, become more and more important in the world of politics and policy.

Because under the old model of culture the high arts could be dismissed as a narrow elitist pursuit; commercial culture could be written off as populist entertainment; and home-made culture could be patronized as “amateur.” But put all three together into one completely interlinked and interwoven activity, and culture transforms into being what Jordi Marti, the former Head of Culture in Barcelona, calls “the second ecosystem of humankind.”

Now, if all that sounds too high-falutin’ and theoretical, let me present you with some of the reality of how culture now affects the life of cities and nations.

First, this broad sweep of interconnected cultures has become economically important. In a publication I wrote a few years ago, with the admittedly uninspiring title of Publicly Funded Culture and the Creative Industries, I looked at the ways in which the funded arts and the money-making cultural industries were inseparable—because of the way that ideas and skills are shared, because of the way that one creates a market for the other, and because of the way that people make a living by operating right across this cultural landscape.

A couple of examples: the famous British actor Sir Ian McKellen appeared in Lord of the Rings, but was classically trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company; and the TV advert for a brand of bread called Hovis has a backing track that uses Dvorak’s New World Symphony played, I believe, by the publicly funded Hallé Orchestra. And on and on these connections go. My point here is that so-called high arts are not divorced from the economy of the rest of the creative industries: they are an absolutely essential driver of those industries.

And together they form a significant sector of the economy—where I come from in the UK the creative economy accounts for between 7 percent and 11 percent of GDP, depending on what’s included. That’s a lot of money and a lot of jobs. In most OECD countries this is one of very few parts of the economy that is significantly outperforming the rest. But rather than thinking of it as an economic sector, I think we should be thinking of the creative economy as an economic system; and, like all systems, it needs all of its parts in order to function.

A second area of economic growth is in cultural-led tourism, which is why you see cities from Abu Dhabi to Oporto and from Hong Kong to Sydney investing heavily in new cultural buildings. And then there is urban regeneration, where culture has refreshed parts of cities and led to huge increases in property values.

Suffice to say that cities all around the world have realized the importance not only of the creative economy itself, and the jobs it creates, but also the knock-on effects of cultural activity as an attractor of a highly educated workforce for other sectors.

In many cities, smart public sector investment is driving private sector ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I WITNESSING THE CREATIVE CITY
• PART II ASSESSING GOVERNANCE
• PART III NEW POLICY PATHS
• PART IV FUTURE VOICES