Making Cultural Cities in Asia

Mobility, assemblage, and the politics of aspirational urbanism

June Wang, Tim Oakes, Yang Yang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317535829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

This book examines the vast and largely uncharted world of cultural/creative city-making in Asia. It explores the establishment of policy models and practices against the backdrop of a globalizing world, and considers the dynamic relationship between powerful actors and resources that impact Asian cities.

Making Cultural Cities in Asia approaches this dynamic process through the lens of assemblage: how the policy models of cultural/creative cities have been extracted from the flow of ideas, and how re-invented versions have been assembled, territorialized, and exported. This approach reveals a spectrum between globally circulating ideals on the one hand, and the place-based contexts and contingencies on the other. At one end of the spectrum, this book features chapters on policy mobility, in particular the political construction of the "web" of communication and the restructuring or rescaling of the state. At the other end, chapters examine the increasingly fragmented social forces, their changing roles in the process, and their negotiations, alignments, and resistances.

This book will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers concerned with cultural and urban studies, creative industries and Asian studies.

Part I
Assembling new models

Global networks and state aspirations

Section introduction

The chapters in Part I investigate the network politics that enable and constrain the flow of ideas, models, and other forms of information. The first three chapters by Justin O’Connor and Xin Gu, Cheng-Yi Lin, and Diganta Das (scholars who themselves have experienced transnational mobility) depict the political construction of global networks constituted by mobile actors, and the institutional frameworks within which these actors operate at various scales, thus providing case studies in the mobile flow of ideas within the broader context of global capitalism. Regarding the worldwide spread of ‘cultural city’ urban development strategies, one prevailing thesis calls attention to the broad context of neoliberal globalization and, in particular, the surge of competitive-driven city-making resulting from so-called flexible specialization in late capitalism. Attention here is directed to the geography of flows – specifically, policy mobility – which is typically assumed to move from the global north to the global south (Prince, 2012). These chapters pay attention to the ‘interplay of forces where a range of actors mobilize, enroll, translate, channel, broker and bridge’ (Allen and Cochrane, 2007, p. 1171) the travelling of policies, ideas, and best practices, which, as argued by Marxist scholars, has always been structured by power relations in the broader context of capitalism (Brenner et al., 2011; McCann and Ward, 2011; Merrifield, 2012; Peck and Theodore, 2010).

Fields of power are reconstituted, in other words, through networks connecting places by virtue of the symbolic power carried by such networks in the first place. They create mental maps of ‘best cities’ for policy that inform future strategies. Cities are thus constituted through their relations with other places and scales (McCann and Ward, 2011). In this light, these chapters respond to questions such as:

• What are the geographic trajectories of mobile cultural/creative city policies?
• How is the cultural/creative city policy network structured by a city’s internal characteristics as well as by external linkages among cities?
• What are the institutions that condition how policies are territorialized in specific locations?
• What resources, discursive and material, have been mobilized from wider geographic territories or different scales to establish the infrastructure for formulating and implementing local urban cultural policy?

The next five chapters, by Amy Zhang, Jay Bowen, T.C. Chang, Yang Yang, and June Wang focus more on municipal and national states in Asia and how new policy agendas are assembled through political and socio-economic alignment of various actors, discourses, and materials that have gained prestige in their strategic shift to cultural/creative city development, and the dynamic, contingent and perhaps path-dependent features of this process. Regarding the issue of urban competition, postcolonial scholars reject the idea that Asian cities are merely passively globalized; rather, empirical studies featuring place-based observations frequently uncover ‘home-grown’ ideas and/or selective adoption of the cultural/creative city package by a calculating local state (Roy and Ong, 2011). Often employing an analytic of assemblage, the postcolonial approach argues for new geographies of theory and deploys alternative ways of thinking that approach cities as sites of intersection between networked topologies and territorial legacies (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; McFarlane, 2011; Ong and Collier, 2005). In this process, various actors deliberately select particular elements and then create and promote them in new packages. The formation of assemblage, which relies on the hard labour of agency to ‘draw disparate components together, forge connections between them, and sustain these connections in the face of tension’ (Li, 2007, p. 265), is a process of political alignment.

In many Asian cities where the developmentalist model prevails, the state has been one of the most influential actors. Sites such as Singapore, South Korea, and China illustrate how state apparatus draws together disparate ideas and practices to forge new ‘worlding’ agendas (Roy and Ong, 2011). As such, the situated initiatives of cultural/creative city-making serve the goal of global city status in the midst of inter-city rivalries on the one hand, while shaping new regimes of urban governance that privilege new logics, techniques, and practices in zones of exception on the other. Here, these chapters centre around questions like:

• What are the discursive outcomes of creative/cultural cities productions in Asia?
• How have mobile policy models been re-articulated and re-contextualized in specific spatial and political economic contexts?
• To what extent does the cultural/creative cities model provide a new ‘technology of government’ for ordering and reshaping state–society relations in Asia?

References

Allen, J., and Cochrane, A. (2007) Beyond the territorial fix: regional assemblages, politics and power. Regional Studies, 41(9): 1161–1175.

Brenner, N., Madden, D.J., and Wachsmuth, D. (2011) Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory. City, 15(2): 225–240.

Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Li, T.M. (2007) Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society, 36(2): 263–293.

McCann, E., and Ward, K. (eds) (2011) Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age. London and Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

McFarlane, C. (2011) Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Merrifield, A. (2012) The urban question under planetary urbanization. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, n/a-n/a.

Ong, A., and Collier, S.J. (eds) (2005) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Peck, J., and Theodore, N. (2010) Mobilizing policy: models, methods, and mutations. GEOFORUM, 41(2): 169–174.

Prince, R. (2012) Policy transfer, consultants and the geographies of governance. Progress in Human Geography, 36(2): 188–203.

Roy, A., and Ong, A. (eds). (2011) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. New York: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

1
Creative clusters in Shanghai

Transnational intermediaries and the creative economy

Justin O’Connor and Xin Gu

Introduction

In 2005 the Shanghai municipal government adopted a ‘creative industries’ strategy. Explicitly derived, via Hong Kong, from the UK government’s rebranding of the ‘cultural industries’ in 1998, ‘creative industries’ was not at the time officially recognized as a policy term by the national government in Beijing. This intentionally put Shanghai at the cutting edge of China’s next wave of modernization. Shanghai’s embrace of the ‘creative industries’ has to be seen as part of the Chinese national government’s new round of economic and symbolic modernization – a shift from the 1980s/90s gaige kaifang (reform and opening) to Hu Jintao’s emphasis on gaige chuangxin (reform and innovation) (Pang, 2012: 8). However, in enthusiastically adopting the term ‘creative industries’ ahead of Beijing (the capital and national government remained cautious and settled on ‘cultural creative industries’), Shanghai asserted its traditional role as the engine of China’s cultural and economic modernization.

At the same time, the city officially recognized a number of ‘creative industry clusters’ (CICs) and promoted their expansion as a key element of this strategy. Over the next five years these official clusters grew to around ninety in number. The active promotion of CICs was also part of Shanghai’s aspiration to become a modern, global metropolis. Many of the CICs were high-profile, photogenic destinations attracting media and tourist attention, providing Shanghai with another facet in its accumulation of image capital. Though Shanghai was by no means alone in its promotion of CICs – by 2012 many Chinese cities and towns had built or had plans to build CICs in some shape or form (Yang, 2011; Kern et al., 2011; Keane, 2012) – it was Shanghai that witnessed their most rapid growth and provided some of the emblematic CIC models for other cities and towns to copy. In addition, as we shall see, CICs in Shanghai drew much more explicitly on the urbanistic dimension of clusters (rather than the ‘industry base’ tradition of socialist planning common in these other cities) with which they were associated in the West.¹

Shanghai’s adoption of both creative industries and CICs thus combined its commitment to economic modernization with its aspirations to become a global city, incorporating high levels of cultural and symbolic capital. It could be seen as an example of ‘fast policy’ (Peck, 2002), where Chinese cultural and economic policy became further plugged into global policy flows. On the other hand, their adoption/adaptation is deeply marked by the specificity of both China and Shanghai. In this chapter we explore some of the complexities of this adoptive/adaptive process in Shanghai, focusing on the role of intermediaries. In doing so we will draw on the literatures around ‘cultural intermediaries’ and ‘policy mobilities’ which have informed recent debates on urban policy transfer, especially around creative economy/creative cities.

Intermediaries and policy mobilities

Cultural intermediaries have figured intermittently in the literature on cultural/creative industries since the 1980s. They were initially associated with the large-scale transformations of the cultural economy, helping to transform the field of cultural consumption, challenging established cultural hierarchies, changing the relation between consumption and identity, and promoting more hedonistic and ‘aesthetic’ consumer experiences. They also opened up new fields of cultural production by altering attitudes to work, career and life-course among producers while also bringing highly reflective and aesthetic–informational inputs into the production process. Early literature tended to link cultural intermediaries to epochal claims around ‘postmodernity’ (Featherstone, 1991) and the new ‘economies of signs and space’ (Lash and Urry, 1994). In the last decade, however, they have been associated more narrowly with constructing markets, mediating between production and consumption in particular circumstances:

They construct value, by framing how others – end consumers, as well as other market actors including other cultural intermediaries – engage with goods, affecting and effecting others’ orientations towards those goods as legitimate – with ‘goods’ understood to include material products as well as services, ideas and behaviours.

(Maguire and Mathews, 2012: 552)

As these authors acknowledge in passing (Maguire and Mathews, 2012: 551), cultural intermediaries also contribute to the production of symbolic value in urban spaces. This process was first identified by Sharon Zukin in Loft Living (1982), an account (still unsurpassed) of the ways in which artists and intermediaries (such as local events magazines, café owners and trendy retailers) began to turn a run-down industrial district into the height of bohemian chic. In a later book she termed this process of culture-led gentrification, in rather binary fashion, the transformation of a working-class vernacular into a gentrified landscape of power (Zukin, 1991). A more positive role was given to ‘working-class bohemians’ in Manchester in the mid-1990s, who were active in transforming a derelict landscape into one which seemed to promise a different future (O’Connor and Wynne, 1996; O’Connor, 2004; O’Connor and Gu, 2010).

Though these and other accounts emphasized the role of cultural intermediaries in opening up spaces and places for cultural production and consumption in the city, there were intermittent acknowledgements that these were also engaging with the local authorities in some sort of emergent ‘creative city’ policy coalition. The successful rezoning of New York’s SoHo witnessed a new level of contact between artists and City Hall (Zukin, 1982). Manchester’s music scene eventually produced an urban cultural adjunct to the existing growth coalition (O’Connor, 2004; O’Connor and Gu, 2010). So too with the musicians of Austin, Texas (Grodach, 2001; Grodach and Silver, 2012). A growing intersection between cultural intermediaries and urban government can also be seen writ large in Currid’s (2007) account of New York. Cultural intermediaries not only contributed to the ‘relandscaping’ of urban areas and created new symbolic values (frequently recouped by developers) but also worked to facilitate a meaningful interaction between these new forms of urban cultural production/consumption and policy-makers.

The rise of this new policy coalition across the 1990s could be seen as an emergent ‘epistemic community’: ‘a network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area’ (Haas, 1992: 3). As initially described, this epistemic community has four features:

• 1 a shared set of normative and principled beliefs which provide a value-based rationale for the social action of community members;
• 2 shared causal beliefs which are derived from their analysis of practices leading or contributing to a central set of problems in their domain and which then serve as the basis for elucidating the multiple linkages between possible policy actions and desired outcomes;
• 3 shared notions of validity, i.e. intersubjective, internally defined criteria for weighing and validating knowledge in the domain of their expertise; and
• 4 a common policy enterprise, or a set of common practices associated with a set of problems to which their professional competence is directed, presumably out of the conviction that human welfare will be enhanced as a consequence.

(Haas, 1992: 3)

This aptly describes the emergent, transnational policy community of cultural (and later creative) industries and creative cities experts in the 1990s – primarily in Europe, North America and Australia, and increasingly in Latin America, South Africa and East Asia (including Hong Kong and Taiwan but not mainland China). Its members were consultants and consultant–practitioners, local/regional government officers, cultural space managers, academics and representatives of national (British Council, Goethe Institute, etc.) and transnational cultural agencies (UNESCO, Ford Foundation, European Commission, etc.). Their emergent community was extended and consolidated across a series of conference...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Assembling new models Global networks and state aspirations
• 1 Creative clusters in Shanghai Transnational intermediaries and the creative economy
• 2 Local planning practices and institutional innovation of the creative city The case of Taipei City
• 3 Sub-national neoliberalism through city restructuring and policy boosterism The case of Hyderabad, India
• 4 Arts districts or art-themed parks Arts districts repurposed by/for Chinese governments
• 5 Spaces of restriction and leisure Seoul's vision of the creative city
• 6 Housing the arts in a developmental state Renaissance City Singapore
• 7 Displaying Han–Tang culture in urban development projects in Xi'an, China
• 8 Worlding through shanzhai The evolving art cluster of Dafen in Shenzhen, China
• Part II Encountering the cultural/creative city Negotiation, resistance, and community aspirations
• 9 Accessing spaces, negotiating boundaries The struggle between cultural policies and creative practices in Malaysia
• 10 Global knowledge and local practices Reinventing cultural policy in Busan, South Korea
• 11 ‘Creative class' subversions Art spaces in Beijing and Berlin
• 12 Making cultures and places from below New urban activism in Hong Kong
• 13 The cultural grassroots and the authoritarian city Spaces of contestation in Singapore
• 14 Gentrification in the mill lands of Mumbai Changing spatial practices and everyday life in working-class chawls
• 15 Afterword Creative city policy and social resistance
• Index