Deciphering the Global

Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects

Saskia Sassen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135908331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Saskia Sassen is Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.

Part 1

Scalings: Global Microspaces

Chapter 1

Postindustrial Bohemia

Culture, Neighborhood, and the Global Economy

RICHARD LLOYD

If it is the case, as Walter Benjamin claimed, that “every epoch…dreams the one to follow,” (1999, p. 13) then perhaps we need to think of that space of the urban avant-garde called bohemia not as a thing erased by globalization — with its presumed leveling and homogenizing tendencies — but rather as a mode of spatial practices whose true importance is only fully realized in the intersections of global economic forces and postindustrial urban restructuring. For Benjamin, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades were dreamworlds anticipating the onset of the mass spectacles of consumer capitalism (Benjamin 1999). Also in the nineteenth century, the throng of underemployed artists and intellectuals colonizing the garrets, cabarets, and cafés of the French capital hatched a durable dream of the artist in the city, with all the romanticized lifestyle connotations attached to this position: heroic self-sacrifice, rejection of bourgeois morality, art for art’s sake. This dream remains alive, only now contributing to the production of a symbolic economy that commands ever greater attention in the contemporary metropolis.

Indeed, though the cultural legacy of bohemia has long been considered to be disproportionate to its size and frequency, until recent decades its economic impact has been little treated. After all, the field of cultural production, and especially the position staked out by the avant-garde, operates according to principles that seem to reverse ordinary economic logic (Bourdieu 1992). But macrostructural transformation at the fin-demillenaire confounds this popular judgment. Elements of the modernist bohemia persist; as Brooks (2001, p. 67) points out, “The French intellectuals designed ways of living that are by now familiar to us all,” and in fact, bohemia and its familiar lifestyle affectations are only more frequent in the present period. But the cities that host these enclaves have changed dramatically, and the interaction between bohemia and the new urban economy requires that old premises of bohemia’s cultural autonomy and economic marginality be retired.

To capture the intersection of cultural continuity and structural change, I advance the concept of neo-bohemia, identifying a mode of spatial practices increasingly central to strategies of capital accumulation in select urban neighborhoods. Neo-bohemia signals both continuity and change. There is sufficient resonance between the ideologies and practices of contemporary urban artists and those of previous generations to render them legibly bohemian. Still, the new bohemia also contributes to novel outcomes under the conditions of structural transformation associated with economic globalization. These conditions are (1) new geographies of industrial production, transforming the economic base underlying neighborhood formation in older cities; (2) a changing urban occupational structure favoring educated and adaptable workers and demanding greater flexibility at all levels of the occupational hierarchy; (3) increased polarization, as the older blue-collar middle class is squeezed and as the city becomes hardened into stark contrasts of privilege and devastation; and (4) increased emphasis on the immaterial attributes of the commodity form, that is on symbolic value generated via aesthetic differentiation.

Among urban scholars, the most noted element of the new bohemia has been the correspondence between the agglomeration of artists and alternative subcultures in a district and the subsequent local improvements in amenities and class of residents known as gentrification. But if this is the most obvious contribution made by the artist in the city to capital valorization, it is nonetheless typically not well understood in terms of its broader spatial and historical context. Analysis of artist-led gentrification suffers from an overemphasis on spectacle and a tendency to treat residents strictly as consumers, failing to grasp that they are simultaneously workers in a reconstituted urban occupational structure.

The problem is not that urban scholars have failed to notice the proliferation of new bohemias but rather that they are too often blinded to the real importance of these spaces. Scholarly judgment is impaired by nostalgic commitment to the modernist bohemia that leads contemporary heirs to be quickly dismissed as shallow and inauthentic, by the conviction that the logic of gentrification is already known and is apparently unchanging, and, finally, by a notion of what constitutes production that is still locked in industrial-era modes of categorization and analysis. All of this amounts to a missed opportunity, for the new bohemia is a particularly sharp lens onto the dynamic interplay between the forces of economic globalization and the existing forms of both built environment and cultural styling within the city.

Neo-bohemia signals a mode of spatial practices central to new strategies of capital accumulation, confounding notions of bohemia’s social alterity and economic marginality. Shifting relations of production in the global city entail a new workforce, amenable to post-Fordist contingency and competent to the requirements of an increasingly aesthetic economy. As in the modernist bohemia, creative individuals derive benefits from urban association. Global shifts in capitalism elevate the importance of these practices to the reconfiguration of the neighborhood as a site of accumulation. The concept of bohemia retains utility, but its contribution to the contemporary production of neighborhood space must be reexamined in geohistorical context.

This proposition finds support in the most unlikely of case studies for a volume that purports to navigate the labyrinth of scales and spaces through which the global economy is actively produced. In addition to rebooting a concept — bohemia — typically taken as a quintessential artifact of modernism, this chapter, though primarily analytic rather than descriptive, derives from ethnographic work, a method usually considered by its very nature to be local and ahistorical (Burawoy 2000). Moreover, this ethnographic work is undertaken at the neighborhood level in the city of Chicago, the prototype of a metropolis forged by the dynamics of the national, mass-production society. In fact, leading attempts to capture the signature spaces of global urbanism insist — explicitly or implicitly — on Chicago’s morphological obsolescence, focusing instead on Manhattan’s hypervalorized financial district (Sassen 2001) or on the decentered sprawl of Los Angeles — almost metaphorically mirroring the dispersals of global capital (Dear 2002; Soja 1996) — or more recently on the proliferating slums of the developing world (Davis 2006). But as we see in Chicago — or in Brooklyn or a range of other anachronistic places — former industrial neighborhoods, once strongholds of white ethnics, political machines, and organized labor, are now playing a new role in the global economy, ironically drawing on the legacy of the old bohemian dream.

From Sweatshop to Distraction Factory

A relatively nondescript brick building in Chicago’s Wicker Park district, once a white ethnic enclave and site of light industry nestled along the El line on the near northwest side of downtown, tells a surprisingly rich tale of social transformation. Erected in the early twentieth century, this building housed a dressmaker’s sweatshop where young immigrants, most likely Polish women living in walking distance toiled (Coorens 2003). It captures the character of place and period. Chicago, the shock city of the frontier, was a national center of industry whose explosive growth was fueled largely by European immigration. The sweatshop, with its cramped work conditions, piece-rate compensation, and intimate scale, is a signature space of early twentieth-century laissez-faire capitalism.

By midcentury, the building and its surrounding district were already growing increasingly anachronistic. The hyperexploitative labor relations were undermined by government regulation, labor union power, and the end of the stream of new European immigrants whose daughters might be slotted into the line. Chicago’s identity as an industrial titan now rested on the hulking steel mills of the South Shore, not the West Side’s comparatively puny industry. Of course, the economic hegemony of even these large-scale enterprises would prove stunningly fragile, as would the institutional arrangements at both the municipal and national scales that characterized mature Fordism. The 1970s were a period of extreme crisis, in Chicago as elsewhere, that we now understand as the birth pangs of the reregulations associated with globalization and an increasingly neoliberal mode of governance.

Mirroring the malaise of the industrial order, the building had fallen into disrepair, languishing underused as a storage facility, while the neighborhood around it was steadily losing population. By the 1980s, it housed a “shooting gallery,” where heroin and other narcotics were sold and ingested. Outside, street prostitution thrived. This seedy commerce might be read as the consequence of an economic shift that could only leave this building a relic, a sign of the progressive displacement of industry that robbed the neighborhood of a more legitimate economic base.

But in 1989, the old brick building became home to a new occupant, the Urbus Orbis Café, which catered to and helped to make visible the growing number of young people, many with artistic aspirations, who were moving into the neighborhood. The opening of Urbus Orbis marked a new turn in the neighborhood’s identity, and in its modest lifetime the café was hailed as a premier site in the constitution of Chicago’s new bohemia. Wicker Park had languished in obscurity throughout the 1980s, its mostly Latino population struggling to make a community within an increasingly derelict urban landscape, but by the middle of the next decade it was a widely recognized site of cultural innovation and a generator of urban cool in which artists, musicians, and young professionals sipped coffee and admired the locally produced artwork decorating Urbus Orbis’s exposed brick walls.

Despite its popularity, in 1998 Urbus Orbis succumbed to the many perils that beset small businesses, including in this case the gentrification of the neighborhood, which made operation increasingly expensive. An antique store followed with an even shorter tenancy in the same space. In 2001 a tenant with considerably deeper pockets rehabbed the building into an odd combination of television studio and residential space. It became home for an installment of MTV’s popular program The Real World, a pioneer of the reality television wave. The Real World sets up an eclectic cast of young people in a domicile of putative urban cool and turns cameras on their presumably unscripted experience for the vicarious entertainment of a global audience.

If the hip was once constituted in connection with outlaws and alienation, it is now an urban amenity, exportable through the circuits of the global commodity chain. MTV’s selection of the loft to stage its exercise in cinema semi-verite ratifies the ongoing status of the neighborhood as hipster ground zero in Chicago, a designation Urbus Orbis once helped facilitate. Meanwhile, local artists and hip kids have been markedly ambivalent toward MTV’s cooptation of a neighborhood aesthetic over which they feel proprietary (Kleine 2001). This is characteristic of new accumulation strategies, with bohemian activity in the city translated into a means to profit for other interests, even against the ideological opposition of those who make the scene.

The strange odyssey of this squat brick structure from light industry to residential media object is as good a place as any to begin examining the new role of old neighborhoods and cultural tropes in the shifting geography of capitalist accumulation. Whereas the story in Chicago was once steel and stockyards, now it is culture and technology. Inherited structures of the industrial past are marked by the new spatial practices characterizing this shift. The building has gone from sweatshop to postmodern distraction factory, where everyday life, leisure, and image production merge. Trendy nightclubs, artists’ lofts, and the offices of multimedia design firms currently occupy similar structures around the neighborhood. Local residences that once housed a blue-collar labor force now accommodate artists, students, and educated young professionals thriving on the local ambiance of urban cool.

These transformations are fully decipherable only by taking account of forces that are global in scope. Against traditions of neighborhood study in Chicago that tended to treat local communities as “mosaic little worlds” (Hannerz 1980, p. 19-58), making sense of the emergent culture of Wicker Park requires a multiscalar and historically sensitive conceptual frame. Industry displacement and the decline of blue-collar community is one obvious outcome of macrostructural transformation. So is the breakdown of the institutions of the urban industrial order, replacing welfare state liberalism with a more entrepreneurial, or neoliberal, mode of local governance. New modes of interurban competition now revolve around the signature enterprises of the global city — corporate administration, but even more the production of innovations in a range of producer services and creative industries (Florida 2002; Sassen 2001). In this environment, new strategies of good government promote privatization and the production of lifestyle amenities geared to the specific tastes of a new class of knowledge workers, whose interests soundly trump those of working class or minority coalitions (Clark et al. 2002; Sites 2003).

As Sassen (2001) documents, a chief characteristic of the global city is the elevation and overvalorization of finance and other high-end producer services; indeed, these sectors provide a better measure of the coordination of global economic activity from big city perches than does the standard indicator of corporate headquarters (Sassen 2001). These highly specialized and innovative sectors are particularly reliant on the advantages of dense urban agglomeration and are therefore resistant to the dispersal seemingly enabled by telematics and digital communication. To these exemplars of postindustrial production must be added the production of culture — a sector of increasing import to first-world economic fortunes and one equally bound to urban locales, by both long tradition and immediate requirements. The hypermobility of capital — increasing the complexity of financial instruments and transactions and requiring a host of specialized services — has also been accompanied by the heightened aestheticization of the economy. As Jameson (1991, p. 4) notes, “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods…at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.” Rather than being merely anachronistic, neighborhoods like Wicker Park, once predicated on the spatial practices of blue-collar manufacturing, are reconfigured as strategic sites in the novel economy of the aesthetic.

Spatial Practices

Henri Lefebvre’s (1974) concept of spatial practices highlights the active and dialectical nature of this socially produced space. A neighborhood like Wicker Park is not an empty container in which social processes unfold. Elements of the neighborhood’s cumulative character, including its old brick buildings, are a source of opportunity and constraint that actively structure a trajectory of activities across time, even as such activities transform the neighborhood. Moreover, just as the concept of spatial practice avoids discounting the contributions of space to process, it also resists the ecological fallacies associated with many past conceptions of neighborhood, privileging space over time. The ecological properties of the Wicker Park neighborhood are not sufficient to compel the outcomes I document. Neo-bohemia is produced in the dialectical interplay between the structuring influences of local exigencies and the needs of particular global forces for hitting the ground in specific types of thick environments. Thus, social theory cannot confine observation only to the neighborhood space but must continuously take into account the structuring forces of history and the wider social field.

The richness of the unadorned brick building on North Avenue is found in its continual reinscription by the social dynamics in which it is embedded, the active social reproduction of the building and the neighborhood by shifting social practices. Social space is inscribed by history and remains a dynamic and dialectical work in progress. Just as the exemplary building in discussion here is not reduced to relic, neither is the neighborhood. To understand the new...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Deciphering the Global
• Part 1: Scalings: Global Microspaces
• Part 2: Translocal Circuits and Their Mobilities
• Part 3: The Political: Shifting Spaces and Subjects
• Contributors
• Index