Reinventing a Small, Worldly City

The Cultural and Social Transformation of Cardiff

Ana Gonçalves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317068495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Focusing on Cardiff, the capital city of Wales in the UK, this book reflects on a contemporary small European city – its development, characteristics, and present struggles. Following a century in which it was dubbed the world's 'coaltropolis', the decline in demand for coal meant that Cardiff endured an acute process of de-industrialisation. In seeking to address this and the related high levels of unemployment, it has experienced a process of cultural and social reinvention since the 1980s, and more significantly after Wales turned into a devolved nation in the late 1990s. Cardiff's development from a small port into a capital city is examined and special attention is paid to the city's cultural and social transformation in recent decades that has relied on the expansion of specific cultural clusters and tourism, which have been decisive for the transformation of its cultural identity and in shaping the city's individual and collective memories and identities.

Cardiff epitomises a quintessential case of urban reinvention, cultural regeneration, and social transformation, lying between two apparently contradictory paradigms: the need to respond to global demands and the effort to maintain its cultural distinctiveness and Welsh roots. Therefore, it sets the scene for a wider reflection on small cities, especially in the European setting, and what generally characterises these cities: their liveability, cultural creativity and community empowerment, as well as the fact that they facilitate mobility and social interaction. These worldly cities, the book contends, present interesting opportunities and challenges at the urban, economic, social and cultural levels that rely on more human-scale, people-based approaches to cities, thus defying existing urban hierarchies and categorisations.

1
Small cities and cultures

Lewis Mumford understood the city as ‘a geographical plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity’ ([1937] in LeGates and Stout, 1996, p. 185). More than seven decades after its writing, this description remains fairly up to date.

Cities are not only the physical materialisations of human imagination, but also perform economic, social and cultural functions as great agglomerations of people and are the loci of diversity in all its forms. As such, cities have always been the focus of considerable interest and reflection, not only in urban studies, but also in the humanities. Cities are, according to the insight offered by Michel de Certeau, ‘the most immoderate of human texts’ (1984, p. 92), ‘in which are inscribed values, beliefs, and the exercise and struggle for power’ (Short et al., 1993, p. 208). However, if the city is metaphorically conceived as a text, it should also be acknowledged that ‘it is written as well as read, (re)constructed as well as (re)interpreted, and (re)produced as well as consumed’ (ibid.).

Cities are ‘fluid entities’ (Allen et al., 1999, p. 96). They are underpinned by the flux of change and encompass never-ending flows of people and goods. Indeed, due to their metamorphic condition over time, they constitute palimpsests formed by a succession of overlapping layers that reflect the influence of different historical periods (Barata Salgueiro, 2006, p. 14). Depending upon their specific historical formation, physical and geographical contexts, planning policies and strategies, cities are characterised according to particular definitions and fall into, or are planned and designed to fall into, particular categories, such as ‘global or world cities’ (Hall, 1966; Sassen, 2000, [1991] 2001b; Robinson, 2002); ‘megacities’; ‘megalopolises’ (Gottman, 1961); ‘metropolises’ (Sutcliffe, 1984; Scott, 1990); ‘post-industrial cities’; ‘postmetropolises’ (Soja, 2000); ‘small cities’ (Robertson, 2001; Garrett-Petts, 2005; Bell and Jayne, 2006; Lorentzen and Van Heur, 2013; Norman, 2013); ‘compact cities’ (Dantzig and Saaty, 1973; Breheny, 1995; Jenks et al., 1996; Burton, 2000; Neuman, 2005); ‘(global) city-regions’ (Scott, 2001); ‘core cities’;¹ ‘cosmopolises’ (Sandercock, 1998, 2003; Soja in Scott and Soja, 1996); ‘creative cities’ (Hall, 2000; Florida, 2005; Scott, 2006); ‘OPENCities’² (Clark, 2008, 2010); or ‘ideopolises’ (Jones et al., 2006), among many others.

This chapter establishes the conceptual map that orients the study of contemporary small cities and cultures. More specifically, it aims to shed light on the role of small cities in the present competitive globalised and globalising world and on how much these cities have changed, especially since the 1970s, due to processes of urban regeneration and economic restructuring which have ineluctably led to profound social and cultural transformation in the urban sphere. Therefore, it is important to tease out how aspects of liveability, cultural creativity and community empowerment perform in relation to the physical environment and economic forces.

In recent years, and driven by the post-modern stress on visuality which has steered the progressive aestheticisation of everyday life, most cities in the West have invested in the development of tourism and consumption, which now constitute the quintessential backbones of urban culture(s) and society(-ies). Visually enticing spaces of consumption are intently foregrounded in place promotion campaigns that seek to attract transnational audiences. The growth of consumer culture experienced since the 1960s has profoundly altered people’s lifestyles and contributed to the manifestation of new forms of leisure and entertainment that are deeply entrenched in an unprecedented hedonistic quest which is avidly pursued by contemporary societies. Conspicuous consumption has thus become the leitmotif of cities’ cultural offer; tourism and events and city spaces have become increasingly spectacularised so as to please mobile audiences.

However, as cities struggle to meet global demands and the expectations of the present global order, where economic-driven cultural replication seems to have become the norm, they are also pressed by the need to preserve their historical legacies and individual and collective memories, which are essential to maintaining a city’s unique cultural identity. Cities are affected by these globalising processes and find themselves at an uneasy crossroads between globalisation and localisation, homogenisation and heterogenisation – a paradoxical reality that has given birth to the ‘glocalised’³ condition into which many find themselves thrust nowadays. But if, on one hand, globalisation is inciting countries and cities to resort to the same promotional strategies and practices to place themselves at the level of other successful countries and cities, with the leading goal of gaining global investment and international tourism, on the other they are enhancing their distinctive attributes in order to overcome their competitors and show they possess something that others do not. The cultural diversity boasted by each city simultaneously is important to the ‘sameness’ that people expect to find among destinations and contributes to the formation and reinvention of a city’s cultural identity. As UNESCO’s World Report on Investing in Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue (2009) highlights, ‘[w]hile it is true that globalization induces forms of homogenization and standardization, it cannot be regarded as inimical to human creativity, which continues to engender new forms of diversity, constituting a perennial challenge to featureless uniformity’ (p. 11).

Small cities in a globalised/ing world

‘Cities are back’ (Parkinson, 2000 in CC, 2007b, p. 5). Since the urban crisis of the 1970s, which was characterised by failed urban renewal projects and the resulting social turmoil, aggravated by the oil crisis and its devastating impacts on cities’ economic performance, there has been a renewed and growing interest in cities and urban life. Cities have risen like phoenixes from the ashes as the drivers of regional and national economic growth, yielding the understanding of ‘cities as growth machines’ (Logan and Molotch, 1987). Spearheading economic boosterism, many cities have, since the last quarter of the twentieth century, pursued physical renaissance through processes of inner-city rejuvenation, gentrification and waterfront revitalisation – especially in the case of port cities – and have experienced the inevitable social and cultural transformations these urban undertakings entailed, responding to the requirements of the new global system.

The world is becoming more urbanised at a vertiginous pace and processes of urban sprawl in recent decades have been inextricably linked to conditions of globalisation. Urbanisation is increasingly underpinned by geographical specialisation and spatial restructuring, processes that emerged in the post-1970s period as a result of the economic, political and sociospatial transformations that were taking shape worldwide. Indeed, the globalising process led by the capitalist model of production, distribution and consumption that has been in place for more than four decades, and that has come to replace the failed Fordist–Keynesian regime of accumulation, has introduced important changes in cities, especially in the Western world. A major idea is that cities, which have themselves become the material manifestations of the new global order, act as important economic powerhouses. This has entailed new ways of understanding and conceptualising cities, but also new ways of planning urban spaces in order to turn them into more competitive sites for the world economy.

Long before the advent of capitalist industrialisation, let alone that of globalising capitalism, cities were already the hubs of political and economic systems, at the forefront of social and cultural change. They have always been understood as ‘the crucibles of the new, places of mixing and the creation of new identities … the cradles of new ideas’ (Massey et al., 1999, p. 1), as the ‘foci of changing patterns of interconnections’ (ibid., p. 102) and ultimately as physical magnets for social interaction. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cities embraced the advent and innovations of modernity, namely the soaring rationalisation of political and economic life, technological advances in transport and communication and the exceptional agglomeration of people that turned these sites into socially and culturally dynamic arenas. Indeed, cities do not exist without people, their ‘mental life’ (Simmel, 1957) and the social relations of their inhabitants, who are forced to live collectively despite their differences.

The propinquity experienced in cities may, in fact, foster the development of new social interactions in the form of particular groups or communities that share practices of identification (Mulhern, 1998, p. 111), but it can also be at the origin of social tension and conflict, since ‘cities are spaces where strangers stay and move in close proximity to each other’ (Bauman, 2011a, p. 60), and host ‘a mosaic of little social worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate’ (Park, 1952, p. 24). Nevertheless, the city is a privileged arena for social interaction, ‘like a magnifying glass concentrating the rays of the sun onto a small patch of ground’ (Massey et al., 1999, p. 17). This is why Bauman contends that ‘[c]ity living is a notoriously ambivalent experience’, which simultaneously attracts (‘mixophilia’) and repels individuals (‘mixophobia’) (2011a, p. 64).

As spatial constructs that can only be understood within their specific historical, cultural and economic frameworks, which are simultaneously local and international, transnational and/or global, cities are gauged by their physical existence, which consists of their physicality – that is, the built environment composed of buildings, roads, streets and squares constructed and shaped over time. This resulting patchwork of past and present generations echoes but also opposes the prevalent structures of hegemonic power, as the city also produces the existence of interstitial spaces of contestation and resistance that enable the expression of dissident voices and alternative discourses to the mainstream culture.

Cities have always been metaphorically understood as imagined geographies that encompass the whole world. They are gauged by a never-ending flow of people, goods and services, within structures of capital and power, both material and symbolic. Indeed, given their pulsing vibrancy and dynamism, grounded on the networks of the human relations that they accommodate, cities embody particular atmospheres and feelings. As such, abstract or subjective adjectives are often used to characterise the emotions or perceptions that a city transmits to its dwellers and visitors – ‘a cosmopolitan city’, ‘a cosy city’, ‘an inclusive city’, ‘a beautiful city’, ‘a busy city’, ‘an (un)inviting city’, among others. That is why Robert Park claimed that a city is not ‘merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction’, but ‘a state of mind’ (in Park et al. [1925] 1984, p. 1). This ‘state of mind’ is strongly dependent upon people’s everyday life rhythms and movements in the public realm and in their personal spheres. These rhythms characterise the different groups that occupy and appropriate the city’s spaces at different times of the day and the (uneven) relations of power established between and within those groups.

However, differences between cities are grounded not only in their specific historical contexts and social and cultural backgrounds, but also in how they perform in the present world economic system and how successfully they integrate the capitalist discourse into their spaces and practices and meet the demands of the new global order. It seems that cities’ success now equals economic competitiveness, and therefore the main concern that orients contemporary cities’ strategies to compete with their peers is attracting global investment and international tourism. That is done especially through a focus on the development of tourism and consumption spaces and activities, whose visual spectacularisation is created to be particularly enticing to eclectic audiences.

Globalisation has simultaneously produced and been produced by specific socioeconomic changes. These include, for instance, the internationalisation of capital; the development of more advanced information technologies, hence the so-called ‘information age’, which is at the origin of today’s ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996); and the improvement of means of transportation, all of which have contributed to the so-called ‘time and space compression’, reflecting McLuhan’s ‘global village’ (1962; 1964). These changes have entailed the transformation of the urban fabric, leading to the introduction into the urban vocabulary of the ‘global city’ concept, which had been preceded by the ‘world city’ discourse. According to Peter Hall (1966) in his work on ‘world cities’ – a term originally coined by Patrick Geddes in 1915 – these are cities that have experienced major population growth, that have become the centres of political power and are the site for leading economic functions. They constitute a plexus of locations where ‘a quite disproportionate part of the world’s most important business is conducted’ (p. 7). Moreover, they boast important transportation connections with other locations throughout the world and are leading centres for the production and dissemination of knowledge and information, as well as other cultural products.

Global city literature, on the other hand, was introduced into urban studies in the 1980s and is now extensive. Its leading theoriser has been Saskia Sassen, with her representative book entitled The Global City – first published in the early 1990s – in which she focuses on London, New York and Tokyo as the epitomes of the global city, but also with other important books and articles throughout the 1990s and 2000s that endorse the global city theory (1996a, 1996b, 1999a, 1999b, 2001a, 2001b, 2002a, 2002b, 2006). In step with Sassen’s stance, global cities are ‘strategic sites for the management of the global economy and the production of the most advanced services and financial operations that have become the key inputs for the work of managing global economic operations’ (2006, p. 32).

Indeed, global cities constitute leading spatial nodes (Mollenkopf, 1993) of economic, political, social and cultural control in a hierarchically defined network of cities, with their large-scale economies or urban areas, and are oriented by competitive capital accumulation. Global cities are the centres of business decision-making, with their transnational companies (TNCs) and global business operations, and they act as the headquarters for the ‘new international division of labour’ (NIDL), which establishes a dichotomy between those who control businesses and those who perform low-skilled and low-paid functions. These cities control producer and financial services (including banking and finance, management and consultancy, legal services, insurance, accounting, advertising, telecommunications and computing) which are concentrated in enclaves of ‘wired’ (Finnie, 1998) ‘global grids of glass’ (Graham, 1999): infrastructures often occupied by TNCs in central business districts (CBDs), where advanced technologies are concentrated and facilitate the work of globalisation and where new corporate transnational elites move vertically.

With the main goal of attracting mobile investment to the city, one of the most recurrent urban processes of spatial and socioeconomic restructuring adopted by many cities in recent decades has been the gentrification (a term coined by Ruth Glass in 1964) of previously undervalued working-class neighbourhood areas into private-led residential and office complexes for privileged corporate dwellers. This process often entails the displacement of lower-income residents, who cannot afford rising housing prices, and consequently leads to the transformation of the neighbourhood’s character (Zukin, 1982; Mills in Duncan and Ley, 1993; Ley, 1994; Smith, 1996; Butler, 1997; Pacione, 2001; Lees et al., 2007). As Deutsche emphasised, ‘[t]he decline of neighbourhoods, rather than being corrected by gentrification, is in fact its precondition’ (1996, p. 75).

Another example of urban regeneration undertaken by many port cities in the Western world has been waterfront revitalisation. The regeneration of such areas was initiated in North America in the 1960s and later spread to Europe and Australasia during the 1970s and 1980s. This stemmed from the need to create new urban centralities and to assign a new imagery to these areas, which had become neglected and derelict due to the overriding process of deindustrialisation experienced after World War II that had deprived cities of their previous functions. In addition, the justification to revitalise waterscapes in some particular cases found resonance in the requirement to stage a particular festival or mega-event that would catapult a given city’s international status. This was the case of Barcelona’s water-front revitalisation as part of the preparations to host the Olympic Games in 1992, and of Lisbon’s eastern waterscape area regeneration so that it could welcome 1998’s World Exhibition (Expo ’98). As Jauhiainen contends, there was ‘a sort of euphoria’, especially in the late 1980s, among local authorities and civic leaders; their ‘goal was to create an image of a thriving city, to shift the city’s international rank and get a larger piece of the “floating” international investment for the city’, by ‘convert[ing] the old degraded port to a “festival–type” area’ (1995, pp. 20–21).

Although each city developed its own masterplan based on its specific physical characteristics or the government’s urban policies and strategies, many have adopted an identical rationale, following a replication of similar patterns of spatial development and focusing on the water’s aesthetic value. Thus, previously abandoned ports have been turned into new mixed-use office and residential complexes, where buildings of historical significance have been refurbished and new and iconic ones built and where upmarket retail services, festival marketplaces, leisure areas and public amenities have been created (Sieber in Rotenberg and McDonogh, 1993, p. 173). New functions and land uses have been assigned to these areas, such as ‘high-value housing, heritage-related activities, water-based ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Small cities and cultures
• 2 Cardiff: the making of a city
• 3 A city in the making: culture and society
• Conclusion
• References
• Index