City of Quarters

Urban Villages in the Contemporary City

Mark Jayne, David Bell, David Bell

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351951289
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Demography

In cities throughout the world, there is an increasingly ubiquitous presence of distinct social and spatial areas - urban villages, cultural and ethnic quarters. These spaces are sites where capital and culture intertwine in new ways. City of Quarters brings together some of the most prominent authors writing about urban villages to provide the first systematic and multi-disciplinary overview of this high-profile urban phenomenon. They address key questions such as 'What is the role of urban villages and quarters in the contemporary city?' and 'What are the economic, political, socio-spatial and cultural practices and processes that surround these urban spaces?' Blending conceptual chapters with theoretically directed case studies from all over the world, this book includes issues such as local and regional development strategies, production, consumption, the creative industries, popular culture, identity, lifestyle, and tourism.

Chapter 1
Conceptualizing the City of Quarters

David Bell and Mark Jayne

This book examines the increasingly ubiquitous presence of distinct social and spatial areas – urban villages – in our cities. Created either through the enhancement of historically distinctive areas, or by developing and generating signatures for previously economically, culturally or spatially ambiguous areas, urban villages or quarters seek to appeal to the consumption practices of the emerging nouveau riche of the professional, managerial and service classes. Promotion of conspicuous consumption – art, food, music, fashion, housing and entertainment – is at the fore in these urban ‘shop windows’ (Hall and Hubbard, 1998: 199). Moreover, in recognition of the complex plurality of the contemporary urban villages, more prosaic ‘low’ street culture, working-class traditions, ethnicity, sex and sexuality are also increasingly commodified in narratives of place. In urban villages, the symbolic framing of culture becomes a powerful tool as capital and cultural symbolism intertwine; the symbolic and cultural assets of the city are vigorously promoted – but also contested – as cities are branded as attractive places to live, work and play in.

In contrast to these planned or institutionally-developed urban villages, however, there are a host of other areas, districts or neighbourhoods that must be added to the kind of spaces and places that what we think about when we think of the city of quarters. Ghettos, red-light zones, neighbourhoods and areas where there are concentrations of marginalized groups and activities, often divided along the lines of class and ethnicity, are bound up in the political, economic, social, spatial and cultural forces which have led to the proliferation of the kind of urban villages outlined above.

Over the past 15 years, there have been a growing number of essays theorizing urban villages as part of broader structural transformations associated with urban change. A major aim of this book is to synthesize the concepts and arguments associated with this literature into one volume for the first time. However, while urban villages are present in cities across the world, no one story or example tells all (Thrift, 2000). While the same kind of gentrified residential city enclaves, gay villages, ethnic quarters, ghettos, red-light zones and creative and cultural quarters, can be a commonplace feature of the urban landscape, there are significant differences between them. The theoretical and case-study material presented in City of Quarters examines the role of urban quarters in terms of structural, political, economic, social, cultural and spatial change, and also investigates how specific urban villages are discursively and differentially constructed. This introductory chapter initially outlines the theoretical terrain that has informed understanding of urban villages and finishes with a brief overview of each chapter.

Conceptualizing Quarters

The past twenty years have witnessed the global reconstruction of economic, political, social, cultural and spatial practices and processes, which have had a profound impact upon the nature of urban life. This has been theorized as a movement to late or advanced capitalism, underpinned by a shift from Fordism to post-Fordist flexible accumulation. Related to these profound changes has been the decline of manufacturing industries and an increase in the importance of the service sector. This has been coupled with social and demographic forces that saw the simultaneous increase in mass unemployment, and the rise of a ‘new petite bourgeoisie’ (Giddens, 1973). These processes have been reproduced in space by conditioning the social production of the built environment (Knox, 1987).

In 1989 Peter Marcuse outlined how political and economic change was leading to American cities becoming increasingly quartered. Identifying five types of residential quarters – the dominating city, the gentrified city, the suburban city, the tenement city and the abandoned city – Marcuse showed that these city quarters were not separate isolated units, but that each was intimately and intricately linked to each other, forming a mutually dependent whole. Although he described a city becoming increasingly fragmented, Marcuse argued that this was not a random spatialization, but quartered through new urban social and spatial patterns that reflected economic, cultural and symbolic hierarchies.

These new socio-spatial urban configurations – variously labelled as post-industrial, post-Fordist, or post-modern – have been described by theorists such as Davis (1990), Harvey (1989a), Knox (1987), Soja (1989) and Zukin (1982), as being very different from their predecessors. Underpinning such urban change was economic recession that led to a dramatically declining manufacturing base, unemployment and physical decline in North American and European cities. City authorities (previously focused on local welfare and service provision) met this ‘urban crisis’ with ‘a new urban politics’, designed to foster economic development and local growth (Harvey, 1989b). Competition between cities engendered an entrepreneurial risk-taking by local government agencies in an attempt to respond to economic, social and cultural change. This ‘new’ city is not only characterized by programmes of place promotion or new public-private partnerships, but is visibly more spectacular. Economically and symbolically rejuvenated city centres with agglomerated business and financial districts feature gleaming high-rise office blocks, waterfront developments, and ‘urban villages’ surrounded by high-technology business clusters, a veritable archipelago of elite enclaves, out of town mega-malls, fragmented neighbourhoods and ‘edge cities’ (Knox, 1987; Soja, 1989; Zukin, 1982).

These physical and symbolic attempts to improve the urban environment are what Landry (1995) considers as initiatives to promote a ‘creative city’. Designed to make the city more liveable, these encompass aesthetic improvements of soft infrastructure, ranging from the building of squares, the provision of benches and fountains, to the greening of streets and improved public spaces, the establishment of late-night shopping and ‘happy hours’, and cultural events and festivals. Augmenting this has been the support and promotion of creative and cultural industries such as advertising, architecture, visual and performing art, crafts, design, film, music, performing art, publishing, media and new media. With buildings and facilities such as museums, art galleries and art centres, theatres, convention and exhibition centres, as well a supporting cast of restaurants, café bars, delicatessens, fashion boutiques, and other cultural facilities – the buzz of ‘creativity, innovation and entrepreneurialism’ brought about by the clustering of these activities in certain areas of the city centre is seen as crucial to contributing to the competitiveness of cities (Florida, 2002).

Such strategies of urban redevelopment seek to cultivate a symbolic economy based upon activities and products such as finance, investment, information and culture (art, food, fashion, music and tourism). Following the language of urban decline pre-1970s, and the dominance of residential, retail and business growth in suburban areas, it is clear that these economic and cultural discourses have now become overwhelmingly focused on city centre regeneration. Whether as a pro-growth economic strategy in more successful cites or an attempt to stabilize a declining economy in cities further down the urban hierarchy, the city centre is now seen as having great potential for a new cycle of economic, social and cultural post-industrial investment (Castells, 1977; Harvey, 1989a; Knox, 1987; Sassen, 1991, 1994; Soja, 1989, 1996).

This is graphically shown by Sharon Zukin (1982) in her famous study of the development of Loft Living in SoHo, New York. This exemplar of the growth of an urban village unpacked the political and cultural economy of consumption-led gentrification of a run-down and abandoned area of the city. Zukin describes the colonization of old industrial buildings that enabled and sustained an infrastructure of musicians, artists, craftworkers, entrepreneurs and cultural producers. These ‘urban pioneers’ created a vibrant scene that was youthful, dynamic and attractive to particular market segments of consumers and producers that in turn attracted other creative and entrepreneurial people as well as middle-class professional and managerial gentrifiers (see also O’Connor, 1998; O’Connor and Wynne, 1996). This final group, however, brought higher house prices, concerns with visual standardization, clean streetscapes and expensive shops, thus displacing the initial wave of gentrifiers to other parts of the city.

Central to the vitality of new city spaces are the social identities, lifestyles and consumption practices of managerial, professional and service classes. Similarly, the presence and promotion of, among others, lesbian and gay, youth and ethnic social groups, help to create a vibrant atmosphere in the city centre. This is an urban renaissance based on wealth creation associated with consumption (and the production of consumption), the cultural and service industries, with a focus on visual attractions which encourage people to spend money – including an array of consumption spaces from restaurants, museums, casinos, sports stadia and specialist and designer stores (and not traditional industry and manufacturing). This is a post-industrial economy based on the interrelated production of such economic and cultural symbols and the spaces in which they are created and consumed. As such, ‘sociability, urban lifestyles and social identities are not only the result, but also the raw materials of the growth of the symbolic economy’ (Zukin, 1998: 830).

Such urban spaces are dominated by consumption, urban lifestyles and cultural events that Mafessoli (1996) describes as epitomizing post-industrial/post-modern urbanity. The new ‘carnivalesque’ spaces (such as urban villages), while being centred on private consumption, are argued to create a collective sense of belonging (to those with the symbolic and economic capital to join in). In these areas, membership is expressed by paraphernalia (clothes, lifestyle, taste). Post-industrial identities and lifestyles, while being distinctively grounded in local social relations, are expressed in terms of a fluidity of social relations no longer limited to the physical spaces of the city but expanded into virtual spaces – in, for example, advertising and media images – of the consumer society (Mort, 1998; Wynne and O’Connor, 1998). Thus, as Zukin (1998) shows, while there has been a global proliferation of the same kinds of malls, office complexes and urban villages, it must be remembered that it is the very specific localized social relations that makes each of these spaces and places unique.

Increasingly, then, the economic and cultural vitality of cities is founded on provision of consumption spaces that include the broadest variety of restaurants, theatres, shops and nightclubs and so on (Crewe and Lowe, 1995). The presence of such consumption spaces is vital precisely because they represent cultural and economic success. In general, the most successful cities contain the most culturally and socially diverse and innovative spaces of consumption. Hence, more successful cities attract a broader range of capital and investment, tourists and visitors, and in turn attract other innovative and entrepreneurial people: the symbolic success of cities is central to creating a sustainable broad economic base.

However, it has been shown that the kind of cosmopolitan, entertaining, vibrant, and ‘happening’ post-industrial spaces such as urban villages are underpinned by strong regional economies with professional post-industrial business cores (Castells, 1977; Sassen, 1991, 1994; Soja, 1989, 1996; Wynne and O’Connor, 1998). The stimulus for these conditions often appears to be the existence of an innovative political and institutional vision, and/or the activities of entrepreneurs and cultural intermediaries – urban ‘movers and shakers’ who are mediators and representatives of ‘good taste’ (whether as part of a structured media and advertising strategy or as fashionable individuals about town) – and cultural producers and artists who stimulate a snowballing of economic and cultural innovation. These instigators create a critical infrastructure of sites, citizens, social relations and forms of sociability relevant to the urban post-industrial symbolic economy.

Central to the vitality of such redevelopment strategies is the attraction of mobile capital, culture and people that could potentially go elsewhere. Cities must attempt to offer something unique in terms of generalized ‘aesthetic’ features and attractions (such as public art, theatres and historic buildings), plus chic places to live and work, if they are to add symbolic weight to their competitiveness (Zukin, 1998). For example, each city strives to identify/promote itself with reference to unique activities, places, events or people associated with its city/region/country. In order to compete, the ability of cities to innovate and attract the widest variety of symbolic and economic activities, new spectacular experiences, events and spaces of consumption, is paramount.

It is clear, then, that in this vision of the restructuring of cities (particularly those that have most successfully moved to a service- and consumption-based economy from a historic focus on manufacturing production), that particular social and spatial forms of urban life have been produced. However, while some urban spaces are developed around the consumption practices of the ‘new petite bourgeoisie’, as Marcuse (1989) showed, in other parts of the city (such as inner-city or suburban residential areas) there is an ever-widening gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. For example, the declining industrial city with unemployment, fiscal problems from the erosion of the tax base, and poor households in poor areas, is characterized as being plagued with violence, vandalism, housing, abandonment and urban unrest. Moreover, new kinds of flexible deregulation of the labour market ensure that it is only insecure, low status and low paid jobs that are generated by the demands of gentrifiers, tourists, conference delegates and other affluent consumers. It is this regime of flexible accumulation that creates these new spatial and social relations; landscapes of consumption and devastation co-exist in intimate relationship to one another (Davis, 1990; Harvey, 1985; Zukin, 1982). Moreover, uneven development is not only manifest within but also between cities in a new urban order (Harvey, 1989a; Savage and Warde, 1993).

Reading City of Quarters

In Revitalizing Historic Urban Quarters (1996), Tiesdell et al. outline interesting and useful case studies, ranging from downtown USA and historic quartiers of Europe, in order to discuss a number of issues concerning the economic potential of quarter gentrification, architectural design, heritage, tourism and housing associated with structural urban change as outlined by Zukin (1982), Soja (1989), and Harvey (1989). City of Quarters seeks to build on that progress, but advocates a more critical stance in order to unpack the political, economic, social, cultural and spatial construction (and contestation) of the conceptualization not only of planned or institutionally-developed urban quarters, but also of a range of other associated urban spaces and places. In doing so the collection of essays brings together thinking and case studies relating to Marcuse’s mutually dependant city quarters, not only within, but between cities in different parts of the world and at different positions in the urban hierarchy.

City of Quarters is divided into four parts that reflect the urban practices and processes noted above – urban regeneration; production and consumption; identities, lifestyles and forms of sociability; and excluded and marginalized neighbourhoods. While individual chapters to some degree touch on each of these interrelated topics, each has a specific weighting.

Part 1 is a series of theoretical and empirical contributions that address how cultural quarters have been utilized as motors of economic and physical regeneration. Chapters discuss the development, branding and ‘marking out’ of quarters within particular urban and regional contexts and point to the accompanying social and spatial polarization of cities. Part 2 looks at the interface of production and consumption in urban quarters as cities try to compete in a post-industrial urban hierarchy characterized by intense competition. Chapters are focused on the creative industries, tourism and the cultural economy of villages and quarters. Part 3 presents case-study material and theoretical discussion relating to the importance of identities, lifestyles and forms of sociability in urban villages as cities seek to attract flows of global capital, culture and people by generating ambiences of cosmopolitan urbanity. Topics covered include conviviality, multiculturalism and sexuality. Part 4 opens up debate on how urban quarters and neighbourhoods are conceptualized by policy-makers, and identifies the need for a more integrated approach to planning for urban living. Chapters discuss the concept of the urban village as a socio-spatial model; community responses to prostitution in red-light districts; the mis-match between ‘top-down’ urban regeneration initiatives and community agendas in former industrial urban areas. The final substantive chapter outlines a blueprint for progressive planning for localities in urban areas. This is followed by a concluding chapter that draws together the themes discussed in this volume, and identifies key issues relating to the City of Quarters.

Part 1 opens with Gordon Waitt’s examination of Pyrmont-Ultimo, which he describes as the newest ‘chic quarter’ of Sydney (Australia). Waitt’s chapter tells an archetypal tale of the social and spatial transformations of a post-industrial city. Practices and processes are identified relating to economic and cultural globalization; neo-liberal urban politics; place marketing, civic boosterism; and the gentrification of historic manufacturing and industrial areas by property developers (on behalf of white-collar professionals). Waitt describes the development of the urban village in parallel with the ‘corralling’ of excluded and marginalized social groups into decaying neighbourhoods, thus highlighting a cityscape dominated by social divisions – an exemplar of uneven post-industrial urban life.

Pyrmont-Ultimo is thus a shining example; a symbol of successful inner-city revitalization, one element of a re-imaginging of the city by an urban elite seeking to establish Sydney as a world city. This urban village is the location of financial institutions and knowledge-rich global companies, and offers a haven of cosmopolitan consumption cultures for middle-class residents and tourists. However, as Waitt notes, Pyrmont-Ultimo is also a symbol of the growing divisions between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in our cities. Nevertheless, while café-bars, delicatessens, loft apartments and harbour views make up a landscape of cosmopolitan consumption, this particular urban village lacks an essential facility of city centre living: Pyrmont-Ultimo does not have a supermarket to service its residents.

Following on from Waitt’s Australian tale of social and spatial polarisation, Malcolm Miles takes us to Spain and, with a similar tale of gentrification, outlines an historic precedent for the contemporary urban change that has unfolded in el Raval, Barcelona. In line with the city’s desire to further raise its profile as a locus of cultural tourism, Miles argues that the redevelopment of el Raval as a cultural quarter (with its flagship building the Museu d’Art Contemporani, MACBA) is centred on provision of tourist attractions rather than locally-embedded production and consumption cultures. Miles shows that the development of this residential area represents a new colonialism where the needs of the city’s diverse publics have been disregarded under pressure from the demands of the global tourism market.

Miles goes on to contextualize the development of el Raval with reference to two contrasting and famous urban planning traditions: firstly, Idelfons Cerdà’s plan for the city of Barcelona in 1854 and secondly, Baron Haussmann’s infamous redevelopment of Paris around the same time. Miles concludes that the contemporary redevelopment of el Raval is more akin to Haussmann’s oppressive planning regime than to Cerdà’s liberalism. Urban planning in contemporary Barcelona is underpinned by a ‘Haussmannization’ of the city – urban change oriented towards gentrifiers and tourists rather than for egalitarian or socially beneficial regulation; an argument that is easily applicable to the p...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of List of Contributors
• 1 Conceptualizing the City of Quarters
• PART 1 Urban Regeneration
• PART 2 Production and Consumption
• PART 3 Identities, Lifestyles and Forms of Sociability
• PART 4 Rethinking Neighbourhoods/Rethinking Quarters
• Bibliography
• Index