Culture and Sustainability in European Cities

Imagining Europolis

Svetlana Hristova, Milena Dragi?evi? Šeši?, Nancy Duxbury, Milena Dragi?evi? Šeši?

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317677147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

European cities are contributing to the development of a more sustainable urban system that is capable of coping with economic crises, ecological challenges and social disparities in different nation-states and regions throughout Europe.

This book reveals in a pluralistic way how European cities are generating new approaches to their sustainable development, and the special contribution of culture to these processes. It addresses both a deficit of attention to small and medium-sized cities in the framework of European sustainable development, and an underestimation of the role of culture, artistic expression and creativity for integrated development of the city as a prerequisite to urban sustainability. On the basis of a broad collection of case studies throughout Europe, representing a variety of regionally specific cultural models of sustainable development, the book investigates how participative culture, community arts, and more generally, creativity of civic imagination are conducive to the goal of a sustainable future of small and medium-sized cities.

This is an essential volume for researchers and postgraduate students in urban studies, cultural studies, cultural geography and urban sociology as well as for policymakers and practitioners wanting to understand the specificity of European cities as hubs of innovation, creativity and artistic industriousness.

Section III
Culture for sustainable development in urban policies and practices

9
A place in the city

Recognizing creative inclusion¹

François Matarasso

The state consists not merely of a plurality of men, but of different kinds of men; you cannot make a state out of men who are all alike.

—Aristotle, The Politics, II.ii (1992, 104)

A few years ago, in the basement room of an asylum seeker hostel in Utrecht, I watched a performance by five young men from the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The show used physical theatre, dance, music, and poetry to weave tough personal experiences with fantasies of Western cultural icons such as J-Lo and Beyoncé. It also challenged attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers:

Things are not always what they seem at first glance….

But people are lazy.

The young men made their work with the support of professional artists from Dox, a theatre company based in Utrecht since 1997.² Dox offers one-year training courses, full-time or part-time, to young people with diverse cultural and social backgrounds who work with directors, artists, and choreographers to produce new shows that are toured in the Netherlands and abroad. The young trainees also learn how to pass on their skills through peer education. Het is maar … was part of that programme and toured to Dutch festivals and refugee centres between 2005 and 2006; I saw it in the context of a community arts festival organised in 2006 by Vrede van Utrecht.

Het is maar … had artistic integrity, style, and panache, and it gave a platform for self-representation to a group of marginalized people who are often described with hostility by others. Indeed, it could be argued that the social marginalization of asylum seekers and other “unpopular” people is facilitated by restricting their opportunities for unmediated representation in cultural and political discourse, whose antagonism thereby goes unchallenged. But this piece also raises the question of why these young creative people are marginalized in the first place. Now that cities vie with one another to be seen as creative, contemporary, and competitive, even recognising the “diversity advantage” (Wood, Landry, and Bloomfield 2006, 60), they might be expected to capitalise on the full potential of their talent bases. These young men would agree with Richard Florida (2008) about the importance of where you choose to live, although, unlike the secure and well-resourced “creative class” that cities are now keen to attract, these men had few obvious advantages. Their assets were human: the courage, resourcefulness, and resilience they had shown in getting to Utrecht, and the creativity, imagination, and energy they were putting into their theatre, even as they waited to find out whether they would be allowed to stay and contribute to the city they had asked to join.

There is a tension here that is only made more acute in the changing conditions of the 2007–2008 financial crisis and the prolonged recession it has caused. In the 1990s, as neoliberal economic policies became orthodoxy, the idea took hold that establishing a certain kind of creative and cultural milieu – or perhaps just an image of it – was essential to cities’ capacity to attract and keep young talent (Florida 2002). Its champions often focused on a narrow section of any urban community: the affluent (or prospectively affluent) and well educated who were supposed to drive consumption, growth, and prosperity in a cultural version of trickle-down economics.³ But in making cities more attractive to the “creative class,” cultural policy risks neglecting the needs and interests of other less obviously or commercially creative groups, such as those young asylum seekers, or even increasing their exclusion from the changing urban environment. Were this to be the result, it would be unacceptable in itself and, as research increasingly suggests, undermine the value of any apparent economic benefit (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009; Stiglitz 2012). To see why, and what measures might at least mitigate some of the problematic aspects of these policies, it is worth looking again at some well-established ideas, not least the relationship between the city, culture, and creativity.

Cities are glamorous. Since the zenith of Babylon, Athens, and Rome, the city has been represented as the place where things happen, where new ideas and fashions are created, where governments are toppled, where students are educated and money made. Cities are young, even when – like Utrecht, Nottingham, or Lyon – they are ancient, because they constantly renew themselves, shedding old skins like snakes. They are concentrated and monumental, drawing in collective resources and radiating outwards (and now upwards) their economic and cultural power. Their landmarks – Notre Dame, Ponte Vecchio, or the Tivoli Gardens – signify them to the world. Cities recreate themselves symbolically with apparent ease. Few people outside Spain knew much of Bilbao before Frank Gehry endowed it with that icon of contemporary consumer tourism, the Guggenheim Museum. Millions who have never been to Bilbao now have an instant image of the city, though that may be quite unrepresentative of its citizens’ daily realities.

By contrast, rural districts make do with being “not-cities,” as they have since at least the time of Virgil and Horace. They are cast as territories of retreat, idealized landscapes of permanence contrasted with the city’s mutability. More prosaically, rural areas offer most people only the hard, grinding labour of producing food. It has never been surprising if their brightest and hungriest youth follow the yellow brick road to the city as soon as they can. Populations grow, and the land cannot always support so many, while advances in agricultural technology reduce the need for hands. It happened in Europe in the nineteenth century, as millions left to work in cotton mills, iron works, and potteries, swelling the population of Bradford from six thousand to almost two hundred thousand between 1800 and 1850. It is happening today in China, Brazil, India, Nigeria, Mexico, and many other countries. But the favelas of Rio are not as photogenic as Copacabana: Oz wasn’t called the Emerald City for nothing. In 2008, humanity passed a historic landmark: for the first time, most humans lived in cities. Some of them are bigger than countries: there are 145 nations with fewer citizens than any one of the world’s twenty-three most populous cities,⁴ and, of those megacities, only six are in the developed world (Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Osaka, and Paris) – small wonder that urbanization has become such an urgent concern of policy makers, planners, and professors.

Cities are crucibles of innovation, albeit to varying degrees, so it is not surprising that creative industries, culture, and creative thinking about urban planning and management should become prominent in debates about the modern city. Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini outlined an early manifesto in 1995, arguing:

Future competition between nations, cities and enterprises looks set to be based less on natural resources, location or past reputation and more on the ability to develop attractive images and symbols and project these effectively. Indeed the urban renewal process can itself become a spectacle, as, in David Harvey’s words, aesthetics comes to replace ethics in contemporary urban planning.

(Landry and Bianchini 1995, 12)

The creative city theories that emerged during the 1990s have become influential in some very different places, despite, or perhaps because of, the wide variety of approaches taken, from the narrowly instrumental to the holistic and visionary (Landry 2000; Florida 2002). Their dissemination and adoption was facilitated both by a globalising economy and by the growing importance of culture as a source of consumer goods and as a creator of meanings at a time of weakening political and religious values, at least in Europe.

The rise of the creative city parallels the rise of the neoliberal globalisation that became the dominant economic model during the 1980s under the banner of the “Washington Consensus.” Among other tenets, this ideology required governments to remove restrictions on businesses’ ability to move goods, capital, and skilled workers across national borders. Among its diverse consequences was increased pressure on cities to retain or attract investment in a global marketplace (although freedom of movement was a variable concept).⁵ City competitiveness became established in urban policy and rhetoric. International bodies such as the OECD promoted it, while even the smallest cities began to compare themselves, not always for very clear reasons, to unspecified competitors. Place marketing became fashionable, and quality of life, including cultural facilities, was used to promote the image of cities. In Europe, Glasgow raised eyebrows when, as European Capital of Culture in 1989, it transformed a title previously awarded to candidates like Athens and Paris into an effective rebranding strategy. The “Glasgow’s Miles Better” campaign won awards and became a much-imitated model. In the cultural sector, people began talking of “world-class” galleries and theatres without clarifying how that comparison might be meaningful to the local people who attended and paid for the facilities. The rhetoric of cultural self-promotion inflated throughout the 1990s in line with the overpriced stocks traded in the twenty-four-hour markets, and, like them, the connection between what some people were prepared to pay and the use value (or artistic value) of what was being bought became increasingly tenuous.⁶

The financial meltdown in September 2008 brought economic, social, and political effects that are neither understood nor exhausted. Both consequences and responses are disputed. But the critics of economic neoliberalism have long questioned its tenets on the operation, rationality, and regulation of free markets (Chang 2010) as well as the limits and transferability of market principles (Sandel 2012). But most of all they have challenged the idea that increases in economic inequality are necessary or effective in increasing overall wealth (Stiglitz 2012). In 2008, the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein observed, “The distribution of income worldwide and within countries became very skewed – a massive increase in the income of the top 10% and especially of the top 1% of the world’s populations, but a decline in real income of much of the rest of the world’s populations” (Wallerstein 2008).

Evidence for this increase in global inequality is so abundant that advocates of the policies associated with it largely accept its existence, arguing either that it is a necessary means to the greater good of increasing overall wealth or even – in the words of the current mayor of London, Boris Johnson – that “some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and… is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity” (Johnson 2013). London, whose financial institutions played such a notable role in the financial crisis, does indeed show the pattern of inequality considered economically desirable by its mayor, with 16 percent of the citizens among the poorest tenth of the UK population nationwide and 17 percent in the richest tenth.⁷ This trend has been tracked and reported on nationally by the Office of National Statistics:

Between 1977 and 1991 the share of total disposable income received by the top fifth of households (or quintile group) increased from 36 to 42 per cent. The shares received by each of the lower three quintile groups fell, in the case of the bottom quintile group from 10 to 7 per cent.

(Jones, Annan, and Shah 2008, 1)

We will return to the critical issue of inequality, but, for now, it is necessary only to observe an association between the rise of a certain idea of city competitiveness superficially expressed in creative and cultural terms and the dominant economic ideology of the past thirty years. A belief in unregulated competiveness – with increasing inequality as an unavoidable, and more or less undesirable, by-product – has become so normal as to pass almost unnoticed today. But it is not so obvious why the creative industries, and particularly cultural infrastructure and services, should have come to be seen as assets in the competitive advantage sought by urban leaders, planners, and theorists. The explanation is connected, at least in part, to the changing role of culture in the consumer societies that developed after the end of the Second World War and, with renewed vigour, since the 1980s. The most striking aspect of this is the huge growth in culture’s importance during these decades, first in the developed world but gradually – and partly because of the globalization enabled by new information and communication technology – everywhere else.

At this point, it may be necessary to clarify what is meant by culture and art. Rather than the familiar distinction between artistic and anthropological concepts, I take culture to encompass everything human beings do to express their beliefs and values. Some of that is deliberate, but much of it is more or less unconscious: it is just the ideological stream in which all human beings swim, which shapes their thought and action and to which they contribute in turn – if they are able. And like a stream, it is fluid and changeable, so that what is acceptable today may be less so in ten years’ time, and vice versa. In this characterization, art is a part of culture, but it has a distinct value as a creative toolbox that enables people to tinker knowingly with that culture – to create new expressions that symbolically and materially affirm, question, reposition, or otherwise engage with that cultural environment that surrounds and supports them. If culture is the expression of values, then art enables the construction (and deconstruction) of those values. It is how humans make and share meaning – privately among family and friends and publicly with strangers, though, again, the degree of consciousness involved is complex and variable. Culture and art have always been inseparable from wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• COST statement
• Series introduction
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• SECTION I Culture and sustainable development of European cities: what are the issues?
• SECTION II Europolis as a project: envisioning more sustainable cities
• SECTION III Culture for sustainable development in urban policies and practices
• SECTION IV Making the city resilient: building communities through artivism
• Index