The idea of the Creative City is a product of the 1990s. Of course, the idea has long roots in a Euro-American narrative of the city as a primary site for commercial and industrial development or ‘modernisation’, and as a locus for a certain quality of experience we call ‘modern’. The Creative City involved a reframing of this narrative at a moment when the Fordist-Keynesian settlement had broken down. That is, where ‘Fordist’ industrial production moved overseas and cities were expected to operate more independently—and entrepreneurially—inside and outside the Keynesian planning frame of the nation-state. The Creative City drew specifically on the cultural, even aesthetic, dimensions of the city, deemed to have been side-lined by the functionality of the Fordist city, as exemplified by the top-down architectural and planning regimes of Le Corbusier and Robert Moses. These ‘soft’ cultural capacities—unruly, messy, intuitive, iterative, emotional—were now to be the drivers of a new kind of post-industrial city. On the one hand, this agenda responded to the multiplying demands to take back control of the city, symbolically represented by the events of 1968 and articulated conceptually by Jane Jacobs (1985) and—more robustly—by Henri Lefebvre (1992). Cities were for people, not the other way around. On the other hand, this cultural dimension not only made cities liveable but was now set to become a benign economic driver for a post-industrial future. In this sense, the Creative City and what came to be known in 1998 as the ‘creative industries’ emerged at the same time, though they have not always remained so close.
The re-invention of the city mobilised a broad coalition of actors and aspirations under the shared ‘imaginary’ of the Creative City (Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008). As such it could take multiple directions. For some it meant investing in the arts and cultural infrastructure, hoping to attract global companies and their equally footloose senior staff. Or an iconic building could be catalytic for the local population, declaring a new future for the city, and maybe bringing in cultural tourists for good measure. These could be part of a city’s ambitious bid for international cultural (or sporting) events, and the ever-growing conference trade—attempts at ‘re-branding’ which extended to the various ‘city of culture’ programs that were emerging and, after 2004, the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN). Some of these cities sought a deeper and longer-term renegotiation of their identities and aspirations. Very few actioned that full transformation of urban governance envisaged by Franco Bianchini and Charles Landry in their 1995 book, in which the language ‘of instrumental, rational and analytic thinking’ would to be supplemented by one that could describe the ‘messy’ aspects of urban life, those ‘which are subjective and not quantifiable: memory, emotions, passions, senses, desires, all of which engender motivations and loyalties’ (Landry and Bianchini 1995: 15).
In the early noughties, the Creative City would be increasingly re-oriented around Richard Florida’s (2002, 2005) concept of the ‘creative class’. This was a continuation of the strategy of ‘attracting footloose talent’ but with economic metrics and analytics, benchmarks and indexes to back it up. Florida’s account focused on cultural infrastructure but more in terms of up-market, trendy leisure amenities and the kinds of ‘lifestyle districts’ that had proliferated in cities across the globe—celebrated in newspaper travel sections and in-flight magazines. Florida embraced the vibrancy of urban living—gays, bohemians, multi-ethnicity—but the urban community it explicitly targeted was a professional-managerial class, expanded to include artists, but in which ‘blue-collar’ workers (threats to tolerance and creativity) were not so welcome. Finally, though Florida eulogized the ‘soft infrastructure’ of creative urban landscapes, the creative class would require housing, leisure and entertainment amenities, up-market hospitality and retail, perhaps a gallery or two—and this required capital investment and development green-lights. These were enthusiastically forthcoming, as witnessed by the tsunami of global capital-led urban transformation over the last two decades, whose sheer scale and reach has now outgrown the quaint term ‘gentrification’. In short, Florida’s ‘creative class’—socially exclusive, consumption-oriented, capital-intensive, top-down, and justified entirely by hard economic metrics—helped deliver almost the exact opposite of that promised in the Creative City imaginary.
Developing new forms of cultural production able to take the place of the old industries was a more difficult challenge; despite it being presented as part of the Creative City package it tended to develop in a different space. Of course, investing in a city’s cultural infrastructure, alongside the lifestyle zones of the creative class, was essential for any creative industries strategy; in practice such a strategy required more detailed research and long-term investment than many cities were capable of providing. Cities were privileged sites for the creative industries, as these worked within agglomeration economies and complex ecosystems, where cultural consumption and production would ideally form a virtuous circle. In practice, however, the returns on consumption were quicker and bigger than those gained from investing in a set of creative micro-businesses. Up-market apartments and hospitality ventures drove out creative workspace and affordable housing. In any event, in the age of neoliberal austerity, few cities had the capacity for any forward-thinking long-term industrial strategy. A de facto creative industry recipe emerged, which combined elements of Landry’s creative city and Florida’s creative class with the ‘start-up’ entrepreneurial ethos that now animated much of creative industries thinking. This is what we call the ‘creativity bundle’.
The ‘creativity bundle’ has three aspects. First, the ‘creative entrepreneur’, based on long-standing images of the free creative artist, able to act and innovate ‘outside-the-box’. Second, the ‘creative milieu’, semi-autonomous networks of these creative entrepreneurs embedded in local urban places, and through which new ideas emerge, circulate, mutate and accelerate. Third, ‘networks of micro-enterprises’, operating in a zone between the firm and the market, between competition and collaboration, between the worlds of work and the social, operating as a kind of ‘ecosystem’ not amenable to top-down state planning or corporate control. In short, creative industries demanded new kinds of cities, which facilitated new kinds of creative milieus, new kinds of enterprises, and new kinds of subjects able to autonomously create and innovate. Importantly, though this could be seen as a city-wide agenda, it could be scaled down to manageable proportions through the idea of the ‘creative cluster’ or ‘hub’—these two forms combining production, consumption, urban image-making and high-profile capital projects for public sector and private developers alike. It was in this form, we suggest, that the idea of the creative industries or creative economy moved from the cities of the Global North to those of the Global South.
The Creative City has been seen as ‘fast-policy’ (Peck 2005) an easily transferable piece of ‘policy-technology’ (Kong 2014). Across the Global South, it could make multiple appeals to particular interests and collective aspirations in ways that could assemble powerful local coalitions. The Creative City covered projects around heritage, building new art galleries and concert halls, promoting festivals and cultural tourism, developing housing and up-market retail and leisure facilities, creating start-up and co-working spaces and so on. These coalitions were animated by a powerful imaginary, articulated especially by international agencies such as the British Council and (latterly) the Goethe Institut, as well as supranational agencies such as UNCTAD and, above all, UNESCO. This imaginary was of a new kind of development, a new connection to the global, and a new path to a viable future. To ratify the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, or to join its Creative City Network, was to be part of a new global club of moderns, this time articulated around culture and human creativity, both of which the Global South possessed in abundance—and Asian Cities were second to none.
The Creative City might be embraced as an Asian possibility, but it was marked with the provenance of the Global North. As with other developmental agendas issuing from the Global North, the transfer of both the imaginary and the policy technology of Creative City was fraught with multiple issues of replication, transposition and translation. There were familiar problems of ‘catching-up’ with a Western model, one to which the more one sought to approach, the more it receded into the distance. So too the well-worn problems of identity—of what ‘creative’ could mean in the context of an ‘Asia’ that represented a long-standing binary with ‘the West’ but was also multiple, distributed and diverse. And for many cities the familiar problem of resources—infrastructure, capital, knowledge, technology. Were Asian cities to be pulled finally into orbit of Western modernity, their cities replicated non-places of global consumption? Or would we see another set of half-finished projects, the semi-ruins of another failed modernity? Maybe some cities could take it and make it their own, transform it in their image; or perfect it, run it higher and faster than any western city had previously imaged?
Was the Creative City, then, about ‘elite dreaming’ (Ong 2011: 17), local development coalitions seeking to tap into the global modern, or did it speak to local communities about a new kind of involvement and validation, a new empowerment? Was ‘creative’ a further iteration of Euro-American modernism or could it encompass the very different aesthetics and cultures of Asia, embedded in cities with a very distinct historical trajectory from that of the Western mythos? How were these fault-lines—some old, some new—to be negotiated at a time when the Global North itself is in some sort of disarray?
The chapters in this book cannot address all these questions, but will mostly touch them obliquely through case studies. At the same time, their Asian location necessarily introduces a new dimension to the Creative City by locating them within the debates of globalization and cosmopolitanism—both of these mediated by those ‘ubiquitous technologies’ increasingly seen as a necessity in developing creative cities. However, the tendency of the Creative City discourse to be dominated by economic rationality and technology-led development cannot simply be equated to the ‘neo-liberal’ approaches common in Western discourse. This book suggests a ‘civic’ dimension be added. Many Asian cities are certainly undergoing top-down planned culture-led urban regeneration, but this is also developed in many cases via public and private partnerships, setting new examples for developments in other cultural and creative sectors previously closed off from public participation. The creative city is an invitation for citizens to renew their cosmopolitan imaginary, facilitated by the emergence of embedded ubiquitous technologies: this need not always break in favour of global corporations and authoritarian government, new possibilies, new sites of contestation and imagination may also emerge.
As opposed to debates in the West on ‘third spaces’ or the ‘public sphere’, the Asian creative city can be viewed as a new development phase, a turning point, even an awakening from an industrial and developmental marginalisation of the cultural public sphere. These new imaginaries, trajectories and narratives contribute to new dialogues and collaborations between the State, the Public and a range of private actors rather than a zero-sum opposition of state and market. In order to explore these issues, this book looks at creative city politics in a global urban context, and at the different trajectories across Asia, from the multiple terminologies deployed by creative cities to the different agencies and processes involved in their implementation. This book also frames these issues in terms of a distinctive urban public space. The adoption and adaptation of different ‘cosmopolitan imaginaries’ helps structure creative spaces as (often contested) sites where the local (or regional) meets the global.
This book aims to use the ‘creative cities’ paradigm as part of a wider process involving first, a rapid de-industrialisation in the region that has left a void for new development models, resulting in a popular uptake of cultural economies in Asian cities; and second, the congruence and conflicts of traditional and modern cultural values leading to a necessary re-interpretation and re-imagination of cities as places for cultural production and cultural consumption.
This book responds to the absence or lack of Asian representation in the creative cities literature. However, the book does not attempt to cover all Asian cities but endeavours to represent some of the Asian regions through various case studies. It seeks to recognise and highlight the rapid rise of these cities and how they have stepped up to the challenge of transforming and regenerating themselves, especially in the ‘Asian century’. It also aims to re-define what it means to be an Asian creative city and generate more dialogue and new debate around different urban issues.
This book is divided it into five parts starting with a set of historical and conceptual overviews, moving through a series of critical case studies, and ending with reflections from practitioners in the field.
In Part I, Conceptualising Creative Cities in Asia, we contextualise and prepare the subsequent empirical chapters by situating Asian creative cities as sites for political, cultural and social conflicts in the new Asia century. There are four chapters presenting overviews of the Creative City. Justin O’Connor, starting out from the policy transfer literature looks at the idea of a global ‘creative class’ as articulated around a Creative City imaginary. It locates this imaginary in a particular moment of time, as part of a re-articulation of US hegemony after the Asian Financial Crisis, as well as an interpellation of new global youthful subjects seeking a different modernity. The chapter tries to suggest why this creative city moment might be breaking down. Michael Kho Lim looks at the relationship between the Creative City and branding strategy, using an ‘imaginary’ global city in the Philippines as a case study. He argues that the effective application of city brandin...