Cities and Creativity From the Renaissance to the Present by Damme Ilja van Munck Bert De Miles Andrew

Author:Damme, Ilja van,Munck, Bert De,Miles, Andrew [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-07-23T20:00:00+00:00

From Urban Complexity to a Spatial Culture of Innovation

The notion of an urban-scale spatial culture of innovation has clear resonance for Landry’s democratic ideal of the creative city (Landry, 2000). By rendering the inevitably elusive concept of ‘creativity’ (here used interchangeably with ‘innovation’) as a broadly social rather than psychological quality, it becomes more accessible as an object of research. The question of urban manufacturing creativity is, however, rather ill-served by current research into the postindustrial cultural economy—not least because the definition of creative cities and their ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002) is largely premised on the absence of manufacturing industry. It is not simply that scholars in this area have ignored manufacturing altogether; Scott (2000, p. 40), for example, has argued for the inclusion of vertically disintegrated modes of artisanal production in the cultural economy. Rather, the strong theoretical emphasis in the literature of the cultural economy on the city as a semanticised space (e.g., Lash and Urry, 1994) can occlude a parallel consideration of the materiality of urban space. Acknowledging the material dimension is essential to realising creativity as an emergent social phenomenon in spatial culture rather than merely a goal-orientated, individualised one (Hanna, 2005; Czikszentmihalyi, 1988). It also has particular relevance to historical industrial cities such as Sheffield where, in the absence of formal technical education, simple corporeal presence in the innovative milieu is likely to have played a relatively greater role in ‘learning the trade’ through enabling a nonreflexive process of knowledge acquisition.

The idea of manufacturing creativity as an emergent social phenomenon in urban spatial cultures is implied by Marshall’s (1920, p. 224) famous dictum that the mysteries of an industry are found ‘as it were in the air’ of a city, to the extent that they may be learnt ‘unconsciously’ by children. Unlike another claim made for city air—that it ‘makes you free’, the value of Marshall’s insight is difficult to empirically assess with any accuracy. His metaphor, however, clearly indicates that a successful industrial cluster is more than the sum of its parts, implying the existence of a missing conceptual link that, from a spatial cultures perspective, is supplied by the materiality of the city itself.

Marshall’s notion of agglomeration economics resonates strongly with Jacobs’ prescient characterisation of cities as socio-spatial systems of ‘organized complexity’ (Jacobs, 1993, p. 564). In information theory, organised complexity refers to a state of ‘high entropy’—information-rich systems that are neither too uniform to be interesting nor too chaotic to be unintelligible (all too often the industrial city is characterised in the latter sense) but poised somewhere in between. ‘Information’ is said to reside in the mesh of relationships that comprise the system overall, but any local element of that system contains at least a partial description of the larger entity. For Jacobs (1970), organised complexity describes the urban conditions in which ‘new work’ arises from ‘old work’ through an essentially contingent process she sees as essential to sustaining urban economies. Jacobs’ work on urban structure, for example, on the importance of

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