Popular Music and Cultural Policy by Shane Homan Martin Cloonan Jen Cattermole

Author:Shane Homan, Martin Cloonan, Jen Cattermole [Shane Homan, Martin Cloonan, Jen Cattermole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367597979
Google: pV4UvwEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

On the ‘creative city’

The contemporary global preoccupation with the creative city throws this contradiction into sharp relief. The idea of the city as creative, innovative, a meeting place for the exchange of goods and knowledge, has been around for centuries. People have been travelling to cities for work and human contact since cities began. But 10 years ago an American economics professor reversed that analysis with the proposition that it is the jobs that follow the people – that is, that the corporate headquarters want to be where the ‘creative class’ is – and that any city wanting to attract high-end business should concentrate on attracting the ‘creative class’. Florida’s (2002) creative class consists of urban professionals in the arts and entertainment industries, IT, education, business, law and finance, the main criterion for membership apparently being white-collar salary-earning capacity. This class has been theorised in other ways: in 1984[1979] Bourdieu called it the ‘new petite bourgeoisie’, and in 1993, the ‘dominant class’. It is Ley’s (1996) ‘new middle class’, Brooks’ (2000) ‘new upper class’ or, as he calls its members, ‘bobos’ (bourgeois bohemians). Smith (2002) called them gentrifiers. McGuigan (2009) suggests they are what would ‘otherwise be called routinely the professional-managerial class’ (p. 293) – the inner and middle-suburban denizens that the Australian media know as the ‘AB demographic’, being high in both cultural and financial capital.

Florida’s (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class and league tables of more and less creative cities sent city governments all over the world into a competitive scramble for well-paid professionals from somewhere else, mainly through providing the cultural infrastructure, bike paths, al fresco dining, small bars and general authenticity that the creative class apparently desires. The creative city-inspired urban renewal strategies that accompany these efforts (Porter and Shaw 2009) have been analysed over the last decade by a range of theorists and commentators, many of whom conclude that they mostly do not work (e.g. Malanga 2004, Berry 2005, Kotkin 2005, Peck 2005, Vicario and Martinez Monje 2005, Shaw 2006, Atkinson and Easthope 2009). That is, they tend not to attract the footloose global elite unless the hard infrastructure is installed too – the starchitect-designed galleries, convention centres, luxury hotels, office buildings and car parks – which makes it look rather like neoliberal development-as-usual. Most creative city strategies are indeed economic development strategies which – if they are successful – become gentrification strategies. Their success is measured in terms of decreasing vacancy rates and increasing rents – anathema to the fundamentals of the independent creative subcultures that feed city cultures everywhere.

Creative city strategies do not easily accommodate practising artists. The national government arts funding body, the Australia Council for the Arts, has found that the relative financial disadvantage of practicing artists – musicians, composers and songwriters, visual artists and craft practitioners, actors, directors, dancers and choreographers, writers and community cultural development workers – has worsened over the past 20 years (Throsby and Zednik 2010). In the Australia Council report, Do you really expect to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.