The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy

Global Perspectives

Carl Grodach, Daniel Silver, Carl Grodach, Daniel Silver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136201783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy brings together a range of international experts to critically analyze the ways that governmental actors and non-governmental entities attempt to influence the production and implementation of urban policies directed at the arts, culture, and creative activity. Presenting a global set of case studies that span five continents and 22 cities, the essays in this book advance our understanding of how the dynamic interplay between economic and political context, institutional arrangements, and social networks affect urban cultural policy-making and the ways that these policies impact urban development and influence urban governance. The volume comparatively studies urban cultural policy-making in a diverse set of contexts, analyzes the positive and negative outcomes of policy for different constituencies, and identifies the most effective policy directions, emerging political challenges, and most promising opportunities for building effective cultural policy coalitions.

The volume provides a comprehensive and in-depth engagement with the political process of urban cultural policy and urban development studies around the world. It will be of interest to students and researchers interested in urban planning, urban studies and cultural studies.

Part I

Urban cultural policy as an object of governance

1 A different class

Politics and culture in London

Kate Oakley

Introduction

When then London Mayor Ken Livingstone said:

I think one of the things that cements our strength as such a strong financial centre, and gives us the margin over places like Frankfurt, is that once you have had a hard day’s work, this city has a diversity of offerings in terms of cultural and leisure services, unrivalled anywhere else.

(Livingstone 2008)

he was neatly summarizing a relationship between culture, economic growth, and urban living that had, by then, become axiomatic in policy circles.

What is striking about the statement (and the many others like it) in the context of Livingstone’s own career, however, is how much of a departure it represents from his first stint in charge of London in the 1980s. At the time, Livingstone was associated with the Greater London Council’s (GLC) “cultural industry” policies (Bianchini 1987), the emphasis of which was firmly on culture as a source of production, and indeed of jobs for Londoners, particularly those from working-class backgrounds and ethnic minorities. By 2005, just into his second term as London’s elected mayor, and with responsibilities for both cultural policy and economic development, the emphasis is on culture as consumption. These policies helped to develop lifestyle offerings of a city keen to keep its financial and business elites from decamping to other cities, in particular Frankfurt.

Behind the rhetoric, actual policy shifts were somewhat less dramatic. London has always been concerned with how its culture and leisure offerings add to the city’s attractiveness to tourists and investors, and throughout Livingstone’s two terms in office in the 2000s, work continued on supporting the cultural industries in their productive capacity. One could argue that cultural industry development was linked to the employment of certain communities; however, these claims would be hard to sustain. And yet, the rhetoric matters and tells us something about the sense of political possibilities. The policy emphasis was different in the second of Livingstone’s times in office and the sense of constraint much greater, particularly when it came to making structural interventions in the economy.

The figure of Livingstone, leader of the GLC from 1981 to 1986, and elected mayor of London from 2000 to 2008, runs throughout this chapter. This would be the case in any chapter on London’s urban politics, in which he has been a major player for many decades; however, it is particularly relevant to discussions of London’s cultural policy. Although Livingstone’s own utterances on culture are relatively rare, his connection, first with the GLC, and then with the Mayor’s Commission on the Creative Industries, makes him an iconic figure. Moreover, Livingstone has a certain candor, which is rare in modern politicians.

In a fascinating interview with geographer and former board member of the Greater London Enterprise Board, Doreen Massey (Massey 2007b), Livingstone explores the tensions and contradictions facing a politician, one who still self-identifies as being on the left, in grappling with the financial juggernaut of modern capitalism. After arguing that the GLC “did everything possible to prevent the decline of manufacturing, and nothing whatsoever to encourage finance and business services,” Livingstone ruefully admits that, “coming back to the job after a fourteen-year gap, that battle had been well and truly lost,” and that finance and business services, “just drives the whole London economy” (Massey 2007b: 3). Like most politicians of the time, Livingstone accepts that this pattern is set – arguing that 80 percent of London’s jobs growth in the next decade would be in these sectors, though there is also, he says, a “creative layer of industry, which we are really looking to encourage … and which leavens the whole pattern” (2007b: 3).

To what degree and in what way this “leavening” is supposed to occur is not made clear, but beyond the obvious arguments about diversifying what was becoming a finance-dominated economy, lurks a set of assumptions about how the cultural industries work and who they employ. Later in the interview, when Massey presses Livingstone about the degree to which the financial dominance of London’s economy makes it a center for the production of neoliberalism and the high levels of inequality associated with that, Livingstone falls back on two arguments. One is that neoliberalism (which he prefers to call globalization) had “good and bad sides,” an example of the former being that Shell, along with working on hydrogen fuel cells, has established a “Muslim workers group.” The second is a more conventional argument for greater redistribution – including a Tobin tax¹ – which Livingstone favors – alongside a tax on the super rich, but in either case, “I don’t waste my breath trying to persuade [Prime Minister] Gordon Brown.” To Massey’s (2007 b: 4) suggestion that the dominance of finance itself is the problem, Livingstone argues impotence:

This is not the world you create, it’s the world you’re in. What, effectively, has happened with the growth of financial services in London is that it’s driven land costs and house prices and the cost-base up to a level where nothing else can get off the ground … You do everything possible to build the industries in the creative sector, and try also to sit down and look at issues such as the London Living Wage and so on. But ultimately we’re locked into that set-up.

The chapter analyses how a notion – the cultural industries – born in the social democratic politics of London in the 1980s, was refashioned and reframed to meet the demands of a global financial center in the early twenty-first century. It also looks at the role of cultural industry in the production of inequality. As the global financial crisis continues to undermine the fabric of the UK’s economy, it also asks what is the future for urban cultural politics in London and how it can be reinvented.

The GLC and the cultural industries

The development of a cultural industries strategy by the Greater London Council in the 1980s has been well covered elsewhere in the literature (Bianchini 1987, 1993; Garnham 2005; O’Connor 2009). As Bianchini (1993) argues, the 1970s was a period when, across Western Europe, urban cultural polices became more politicized and more important. Linked to a whole range of post-1968 social movements – environmentalism, feminism, gay and ethnic minority activism – leftist urban governments sought to develop policies that moved away from the traditional arms-length arts policies, in favor of a more consciously politicized stance. In so doing, the emphasis also moved from a traditional “high arts” argument to one that embraced aspects of popular culture, particularly those associated with “alternative” culture, fanzines, independent film makers, radical publishers, and so on.

In the case of London this was part of a broader political strategy, which was attempting to reconstruct the left of British politics, at that time stunned by the success of Thatcherism. The fracturing of the Labour party’s traditional working-class vote (Hobsbawm 1981) was to be countered by a broader appeal to ethnic minorities, women and the young, an appeal that took cultural political form in the embrace and support of commercial popular culture, particularly manifested in free festivals and events. Ethnic minority, or “black arts” as it was called at the time, became the subject of particular public reimagining in cinema, theater and festivals, while training schemes aimed at improving the representation of ethnic minority workers within the cultural sectors were established and funded (Bianchini 1987).

At the same time, the GLC’s Industry and Employment committee under the influence of figures such as Robin Murray and academic Nick Garnham, was developing approaches to the “cultural industries” that sought to break down distinctions between subsidized and commercial culture, as well as notions of “high and low.” As most people’s cultural consumption was hugely shaped by market forces, cultural policy needed to take account of this, they argued, and could thus include public investments in commercial enterprises such as recording studios, publishing houses, and magazines, and even commercial sports organizations (Garnham 1990).

Any analysis of the market for cultural products, Garnham argued, suggested that cultural policy should focus on distribution, including subsidizing audience and market research for small cultural businesses, in an attempt to help foster self-sufficiency and offer a genuine alternative to the current gatekeepers. Alternative distribution channels, particularly in terms of broadcasting, were considered by the GLC, but as with many of its cultural industry policies, these remained ideas rather than practical interventions. The GLC was dismantled before they ever saw the light of day.

All this optimism, all this booming and soaring – London after big bang

At the time of writing, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the so-called “big bang” de-regulation of financial markets has just passed, amidst a deepening global economic crisis. The significance of October 27, 1986 was captured by one commentator as the, “remaking of Britain in the image of a laissez-faire free market economy,” (Lanchester 2010: 168) and what followed big bang was little short of a cultural revolution. The growth in finance and the continuing decline of manufacturing had major implications for already highly uneven economic geography of the UK, where London came more and more to resemble a city state within the national economy (Ertürk et al. 2011).

These trends had implications within the city itself, ones that were not particularly palatable for many of its inhabitants. As the city became more globalized, London ceased to resolve its traditional labor shortages by pulling in workers from the North of England, Scotland, and Wales and began to draw on a global pool of highly polarized labor. Although there was an overall growth in employment in London of 13 percent between 1997 and 2006, more than 85 percent of these jobs were taken by residents born outside of the UK (Ertürk et al. 2011). At the top of this labor market those in finance and business services, education, medicine, and the cultural industries – a well-skilled labor force – found employment. At the bottom, for unskilled migrants in low paid service jobs, wages were substantially eroded (Gordon et al. 2007). The overall rise in property prices, in a city where a third of the housing stock is still in social ownership, concentrated wealth still further, and raised the question: “who and what is London for?” (Ertürk et al. 2011: 6).

Finance, as Livingstone pointed out, took much of the credit for driving London’s economy; however, it was a vehicle with strongly polarizing effects. While London accounted for some 31 percent of the finance services sector workforce by the time of the 2008 crash, with other finance jobs being spread around larger regional centers in the UK, it had an almost total monopoly of high end finance jobs, particularly in areas such as private equity and hedge funds. Even within London such jobs were heavily concentrated in the square mile of London’s financial district, in Canary Wharf² and Mayfair.³ In terms of driving the rest of the economy, however – presumably through a combination of direct employment, lending to businesses, and taxation – the record was distinctly poor. For most of the boom years, the finance sector made about half the contribution to government tax receipts that declining manufacturing paid (Ertürk et al. 2011), while around 5 percent of lending from such institutions went to UK-based businesses (Hutton and Nightingale 2011).

However, as Doreen Massey has argued, the “global” status of London has also been discursively used to justify some of the policies that have favored London’s development over that of the rest of the UK, mobilized as she says, “to justify the untouchability of London’s financial and business sectors” (Massey 2007a: 40). It was a strategy in evidence when the UK government objected to French and German support for the Tobin transaction tax on the grounds that “the UK” would pay around 70 percent of it. In fact, the majority of such a tax would be paid by the City of London and Canary Wharf, rather than say Birmingham or Aberdeen. As Massey argues, that London sought to reinvent and project itself as the global city par excellence was the outcome of a political contest, one in which neoliberalism triumphed and sought to present the market as a natural way of organizing society, to which politics could only respond (Mirowski 2009).

Despite his well-publicized differences with the national, “New Labour” government in the 2000s, Livingstone took a much more accommodating, less confrontational stance on what one might call the neoliberal settlement than his first regime had taken. While Labour local government in the 1970s and early 1980s had sought to explore a number of radical alternative ways of restructuring local economies, by 2004 the assumption was that London government, “cannot really reverse these strong, deep-rooted factors” (GLA 2004: 8).

The compensatory element of neoliberalism was presented by Livingstone, in a strange nod to Thatcherism, as an “opening up” of the networks of “old white men,” who had previously dominated the City of London. A more dynamic era meant that “international capital had become “more progressive, less racist and sexist” than its forerunners (in Massey 2007a: 3). As such it is a diversity that ignores questions of social class, or as Massey puts it, “London’s poor … are caught in the cross-fire of the city’s reinvention … the employment generated by the new growth is not for them; it is a different class project entirely” (Massey 2007a: 166).

Culture comes back – the creative industries commission

As Bilton (2010: 257) argued in the 1980s, the GLC’s marriage of democratic arts policies and support for cultural enterprises was grounded in a social democratic politics that, while not reflected at the national level, produced a “paradoxical alliance between left-wing local authorities and right-wing central government – which laid the foundations for Britain’s influential creative industries policies more than 10 years later.”

By the time “creative industries” was taken up in London over a decade after the GLC’s experiment, the alliance was instead between a Labour London administration, headed by an independent mayor⁴ and a “New Labour” central government. In this case, despite some rhetorical differences, the sense of constraint about what was possible in terms of economic development was shared by both sides. Deregulation, particularly in the media sectors, has already resulted in a deterioration of the working conditions for freelancers (Ursell 2000; Blair 2001). The willingness of public administrations to intervene in market structures was considerably diminished. Those who were excluded or disadvantaged by the market remained a concern of public policy, but the state’s responsibility was to help them “compete” within the market, or if this was impossible, to provide some level of welfare.

As an example of such an alliance, the Mayor’s Commission on Creative Industries was set up in London in 2002. It followed the Mayor’s Economic Development Strategy, published the previous summer, which had emphasized the importance of the creative industries to the London economy. This was reinforced by another report, Creativity, London’s Core Business (LDA 2002b), which identified the creative industries as the fastest growing sector in London’s economy, and the source of one in every five new jobs.

The Commission met over a six-month period between 2002 and 2003 and took evidence from academics, policymakers, and practitioners before publishing its report and recommendations. These were to be acted on by a unit within the London Development Agency dubbed, somewhat unimaginatively, “Creative London.” The Commission was described as “business led” (LDA 2002a); however, in reality it was somewhat more diverse. While featuring representatives of “big business” – Yahoo and Sony in this case – the Commission also featured organizations such as Haringey Arts Council (an arts development charity), B3 Media (a training and support agency that worked with ethnic minority filmmakers and artists) and the Area10 Artists Collective. Some of these organizations had been active in one form or another since the 1980s, and had adapted to the various “languages” of contemporary policymaking. This discourse emphasized skills training and qualification while retaining other core ele...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Urbanizing cultural policy
• Part I Urban cultural policy as an object of governance
• Part II Rewriting the creative city script
• Part III The implications of urban cultural policy agendas for creative production
• Part IV Coalition networks, alliances, and identity framing
• Index