The Cultural Economy of Cities

Essays on the Geography of Image-Producing Industries

Allen J Scott

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781446236178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Culture is big business. It is at the root of many urban regeneration schemes throughout the world, yet the economy of culture is under-theorized and under-developed.

In this wide-ranging and penetrating volume, the economic logic and structure of the modern cultural industries is explained. The connection between cultural production and urban-industrial concentration is demonstrated and the book shows why global cities are the homelands of the modern cultural industries. This book covers many sectors of cultural economy, from craft industries such as clothing and furniture, to modern media industries such as cinema and music recording.

The role of the global city as a source of creative and innovative energy is examined in detail, with particular attention paid to Paris and Los Angeles.

PART 1

PROPAEDEUTICA

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The three chapters that constitute the first part of this book are concerned with establishing some basic lines of investigation of the cultural economy generally, and of the cultural economy of cities in particular. Chapter 1 provides a synthetic overview of the entire terrain of inquiry, stressing the importance of cultural-products sectors as foci of economic growth and urban development in modern capitalism. Chapter 2 is a review of general processes of locational agglomeration. Here, an analytical language is developed which is then deployed in later chapters in detailed empirical descriptions of the economic geography of the cultural economy. Chapter 3 builds on this material by showing how creativity and innovation in the cultural economy can at least in part be understood in terms of an underlying spatial field of economic and social relationships. The discussion in all three chapters reflects passim upon the interplay between the local and the global dimensions of the modern cultural economy, and this theme is picked up again repeatedly throughout the remainder of the book.

1

INTRODUCTION TO THE CULTURAL ECONOMY OF CITIES

As Peter Hall (1998) has shown in enormous historic and geographic detail, cities have always played a privileged role as centers of cultural and economic activity. From their earliest origins, cities have exhibited a conspicuous capacity both to generate culture in the form of art, ideas, styles, and ways of life, and to induce high levels of economic innovation and growth, though not always or necessarily simultaneously. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, a very marked convergence between the spheres of cultural and economic development seems to be occurring. This is also one of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary urbanization processes in general.

These remarks are based on the notion that capitalism itself is moving into a phase in which the cultural forms and meanings of its outputs are becoming critical if not dominating elements of productive strategy, and in which the realm of human culture as a whole is increasingly subject to commodification, by which I mean that the culture we consume is to ever greater degree supplied through profit-making institutions in decentralized markets. In other words, an ever widening range of economic activity is concerned with producing and marketing goods and services that are permeated in one way or another with broadly aesthetic or semiotic attributes (Baudrillard, 1968; Lash and Urry, 1994). There are, to be sure, vast expanses of contemporary culture that remain external to (and even in opposition to) this nexus of relationships, though rarely are they immune from at least some partial form of absorption into the general system of commodity production. Consider, for example, the ways in which aspects of black consciousness, feminism, punk fashion, or gay lifestyles have been incorporated into the design specifications of consumer goods. Rap music and gangsta clothing represent another manifestation of the same phenomenon, and are currently strongly in evidence in much of the cultural economy of contemporary Los Angeles.

Such goods and services (let us henceforth designate them cultural products) are extremely heterogeneous in their substance, appearance, and sectoral origins. In some cases they flow from traditional manufacturing sectors engaged in the transformation of physical inputs into final outputs (e.g. clothing, furniture, or jewelry); in other cases, they are more properly thought of as services in the sense that they involve some personalized transaction or the production and transmission of information (e.g. tourist services, live theater, or advertising); and in yet other cases, they may be thought of as a hybrid form (such as music recording, book publishing, or film production). Whatever the physico-economic constitution of such products, the sectors that make them are all engaged in the creation of marketable outputs whose competitive qualities depend on the fact that they function at least in part as personal ornaments, modes of social display, forms of entertainment and distraction, or sources of information and self-awareness, i.e. as artifacts whose symbolic value to the consumer is high relative to their practical purposes (cf. Bourdieu, 1971). Of course, there is considerable overlap between these sorts of cultural products and purely utilitarian objects and there is an enormous range of intermediate products (such as kitchen utensils, luxury cars, downtown office buildings, and so on) that are complex composites of the symbolic and the utilitarian. This phenomenon is a reflection of the tendency in modern capitalism for cultural production to become increasingly commodified while commodities themselves become increasingly invested with symbolic value.

As this two-pronged movement occurs, the cultural economy is coming to the fore as one of the most dynamic frontiers of capitalism at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Further, with the growth of disposable consumer income and the expansion of discretionary time in modern society, the consumption of cultural products of all kinds is expanding at an accelerating pace. In this book, I argue that the specifically geographic meaning and impacts of this vigorously evolving situation are proving to be extremely complex, and they are especially evident in a number of giant cities representing the flagships of a new global capitalist cultural economy (Knox, 1995).

Place, Culture, Economy

Place and culture

Place and culture are persistently intertwined with one another, for any given place – as it is understood here – is always a locus of dense human interrelationships (out of which culture in part grows), and culture is a phenomenon that tends to have intensely local characteristics thereby helping to differentiate places from one another. The point is sharply underlined by the work of cultural critics, urbanists, and historians like Clark (1984), Davis (1990), Schorske (1980), and Zukin (1991; 1995) among many others, who have described the extraordinarily rich cultures that are to be found in a variety of urban settings.

As we begin the twenty-first century, however, a deepening tension is evident between culture as something that is narrowly place-bound, and culture as a pattern of non-place globalized events and experiences (Appadurai, 1990; Morley and Robins, 1995; Peet, 1986; Webber, 1964). Thus, on the one hand, and even in a world where the ease and rapidity of communication have become watchwords, place is still uncontestably a repository of distinctive cultural conventions and traditions. On the other hand, certain privileged places represent points from which cultural artifacts and images are broadcast across the world and this same process has deeply erosive or at least transformative effects on many local cultures. The geography of culture, like the geography of economic activity, is stretched across a tense force-field of local and global relationships (Featherstone, 1995; Robertson, 1992), with the production of culture tending to become more and more concentrated in a privileged set of localized clusters of firms and workers, while final outputs are channeled into ever more spatially extended networks of consumption. Accordingly, if the cultural traditions and norms of some parts of the world are under serious threat at the present time, others are finding widening and receptive audiences. In fact some places, and nowhere more so than in the heartlands of modern world capitalism – places like New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo, to mention only a few of the most obvious examples -continue to be unique and highly creative generators of culture, and above all, to function as the bulwarks of a new cultural economy of capitalism. Whatever the political consequences of this predicament-laden situation may be, it does not so much herald a trend to absolute cultural uniformity across the world as it does an alternative and subtle kind of regional cultural differentiation articulated with an expanding structure of national and international cultural niches (e.g. adolescents, environmentalists, art collectors, and so on).

One of the reasons – though not the only reason – for this claim about the reassertion of place as a privileged locus of culture is the continued and intensifying importance of massive urban communities characterized by many different specialized economic functions and dense internal social relationships. Large cities in modern capitalism are typically the sites of leading-edge economic activity in the form of substantial agglomerations of industrial and business activity. These cities also represent nodes of location-specific interactions and emergent effects in which the stimulus to cultural experimentation and renewal tends to be high. In this context, many complex interactions between the cultural and the economic are set in motion. Local cultures help to shape the character of intra-urban economic activity; equally, economic activity becomes a dynamic element of the culture-generating and innovative capacities of given places. This comment applies, of course, to forms of economic activity that are concerned with non-cultural as well as cultural products (Salais and Storper, 1993; Thrift, 1994). However, in cultural-products industries, the connection has special significance because of the intensity and idiosyncrasy of the relations between the cultural attributes of place and the qualitative aspects of final outputs. The contrasting cases of Los Angeles and Paris – two places that figure prominently in this book – sharply exemplify this point (see below).

In these senses, then, place, culture, and economy are symbiotic on one another, and in modern capitalism this symbiosis is reemerging in powerful new forms as expressed in the cultural economies of certain key cities. At the same time, the more the specific cultural identities and economic order of these cities condense out on the landscape, the more they come to enjoy monopoly powers of place (expressed in place-specific process and product configurations) that enhance their competitive advantages and provide their cultural-products industries with an edge in wider national and international markets. As Molotch has written:

The positive connection of product image to place yields a kind of monopoly rent that adheres to places, their insignia, and the brand names that may attach to them. Their industries grow as a result, and the local economic base takes shape. Favorable images create entry barriers for products from competing places. (1996: 229)

It should be clear already from these preliminary remarks that the present account seeks to go beyond – though not to abandon entirely – the notion of the cultural economy of cities as either (a) the commercialization of historical heritage, or (b) large-scale public investment in artifacts of collective cultural consumption in the interests of urban renovation (Bassett, 1993; Bianchini, 1993; Frith, 1991; Kearns and Philo, 1993; Landry and Bianchini, 1995; Moulinier, 1996; Wynne, 1992). What is of primary concern here is an exploration of the intertwined effects of capitalist production processes and the ever increasing cultural content of outputs, and the ways in which these effects make themselves felt in the growth and development of particular places.

Fordist and post-Fordist places

Notwithstanding these emphatic remarks about the importance of place as a crucible of cultural and economic interactions, they require serious qualification depending on what moment in the historical geography of capitalism we have in mind.

In particular, in the era when Fordist mass production held sway in the cities of the US Manufacturing Belt, a very different set of relationships between place, culture, and economy prevailed from those that seem to be observable today in so-called post-Fordist cities (Dear, 1995; Scott, 1995). This is not to say that large Fordist industrial cities were not at this moment in time stamped by distinctive cultural formations (the variegated social landscapes of Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh provide obvious and persuasive evidence to the contrary), or that their economies were bereft of cultural-products industries. However, the production apparatus of Fordist industry was focused above all on reaping the advantages of economies of scale through the standardization of products and the cultivation of mass markets. As a result, the cultural content of much of the consumer output of Fordist industry tended to become subservient to the more functional design imperatives imposed by the need for manufacturing efficiency and competitive cost-cutting (Sack, 1992). Production for specialized niche markets was relatively restricted, and even elite consumption at this time was much influenced by the functionalist, minimalist aesthetic of high modernism (cf. Banham, 1960; Giedion, 1948). In the 1930s, the Hollywood film industry itself had ambitions – only in part ever realized – to turn out films on the same technological and economic principles as automobiles in Detroit (Storper and Christopherson, 1987). Frankfurt School critics among others were deeply troubled by the ‘eternal sameness’ of mass society and its alleged incompatibility with serious cultural values (Adorno, 1991; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972); and even as late as the 1970s, cultural geographers like Relph (1976) were lamenting the ‘placelessness’ that they tracked down to prevailing forms of large-scale urbanization and industrial development. What few of the prevailing critics of mass society envisioned – though whether or not they would have applauded its development is altogether another matter – was the major restructuring of capitalist social and economic relations that began some time in the early 1970s and the emergence of new cultural-products sectors together with increasingly differentiated and fragmented consumer cultures. This restructuring was manifest above all in a strong shift away from Fordist forms of production and by the remarkable proliferation of new post-Fordist or flexible industries. The reasons underlying this historical change and the precise modalities of its occurrence are the subject of much debate at the present moment (see, for example, Boyer and Durand, 1993; Leborgne and Lipietz, 1992; Jessop, 1992) and need not detain us here. What is of interest is its expression in a new kind of cultural economy and in the rise of new patterns of urbanization.

We are, in short, currently observing the appearance of a distinctly post-Fordist cultural economy in the advanced capitalist societies (Crane, 1992; Lash and Urry, 1994). This remark does not signify that mass production has no place in today’s cultural economy, but it does reaffirm the idea that a vast extension is taking place in an assortment of craft, fashion, and cultural-products industries throughout the advanced capitalist economies, along with a great surge in niche markets for design- and information-intensive outputs. A provocative but revealing manner of designating this trend might be to label it as a postmodern expression of changing consumer tastes and demands involving a general aestheticization and semi-oticization of marketable products (cf. Albertson, 1988; Baudrillard, 1968; Harvey, 1989; Soja, 1989; 1996). Not that these products – for the most part – possess what Benjamin (1973) alluded to as auratic quality. They range over the gamut from, say, masterworks of cinematic art or designer jewelry to, say, tourist souvenirs or throwaway shopping bags, with the vast majority representing goods and services that trade on the basis of short- or medium-term fashion, information, and entertainment value, and on their merits as social markers (Ryan, 1992).

On the supply side, these characteristics of cultural products encourage firms to engage in highly competitive marketing strategies based on insistent differentiation of outputs. On the demand side, consumer demands are apt to be unstable and unpredictable if not outright faddish (Crewe and Forster, 1993; Hirsch, 1972; Peterson and Berger, 1975). The net effect is that the technology and organization of production tend strongly to flexible specialization, meaning that firms concentrate on making small and specialized batches of output for tightly defined but constantly changing market segments (Piore and Sabel, 1984; Shapiro et al., 1992; Storper and Christopherson, 1987). In locational terms, firms subject to this sort of productive-cum-competitive regime typically converge together into transactions-intensive agglomerations. Examples can be found in (a) traditional centers of craft production that have experienced a renascence in the post-Fordist era (as in the cases of the Third Italy and other areas in Western Europe), or (b) resort centers like Las Vegas, Rio de Janeiro, or the cities of the French Riviera, or (c) most importantly for present purposes, those large metropolitan areas as mentioned earlier that are rapidly becoming the principal hubs of cultural production in a post-Fordist global economic order.

Empirical Observations on the Cultural Economy of Cities

Not only are there many different centers of cultural production in the modern world, but each also tends to be quite idiosyncratic in its character as a place. This idiosyncrasy resides in part in the (necessary) uniqueness of the history of any given place, and in part in the very functioning of the local cultural economy which in numerous instances, through round after round of production, becomes ever more specialized and place-specific. As capitalism globalizes, moreover, the cultural economies of cities become, if anything, yet more pronounced. In light of the observation of Adam Smith that ‘the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market’ (1970: 121), globalization enhances the likelihood of vertical disintegration and agglomeration within the cultural economies of individual cities and provides new possibilities for inter-city differentiation (cf. Scott, 1988a). Our task now is to assess the empirical meaning and theoretical logic of these phenomena.

Employment in the cultural economy of American cities

Let us begin with a scrutiny of some simple statistical measures of employment in cultural-products sectors in American cities. Unfortunately, we are severely hampered in this task by the deficiencies of official sources of data and above all by the limitations imposed by the US Standard Industrial Classification (SIC). The main problem in this regard is that the categories of the standard classification are rarely fully informative, and this is especially true in the case of the cultural economy. Many sectors, even at the four-digit level of definition, are made up of collections of establishments whose outputs are quite disparate in terms of their cultural attributes. For example, SIC 232 (men’s and boys’ furnishings) includes establishments that make high-fashion items such as ties and fancy shirts as well as establishments that produce cheap, standardized, utilitarian outputs such as work clothes. Furthermore, the standard classification frequently provides no direct or explicit information whatever about certain noteworthy segments of the cultural economy (such as recording studios, multimedia industries, or tourist services). The data for different SIC categor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• PART 1 PROPAEDEUTICA
• PART 2 TWO CRAFT INDUSTRIES: COLLECTIVE ORDER AND REGIONAL DESTINY
• PART 3 CINEMA, MUSIC, AND MULTIMEDIA
• PART 4 LOS ANGELES AND PARIS
• PART 5 CODA
• References
• Index