Culture and the city
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2015
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Oakley, K.
O'Connor, J.
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Source details - Title: The Routledge companion to the cultural industries, 2015, Ch.15, pp.201-211
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When Peter Hall asked, ‘Why should the creative flame burn so especially, so uniquely, in cities and not in the countryside?’ (Hall, 1998: 3) he summed up a line of thinking about the relationship between culture and the city that is both ancient and full of contemporary political resonance. The continuing importance of cities as centres of cultural production, the use of culture in city branding, the reliance on developing the cultural industries as an economic panacea and the contest over the right to city spaces, all attest to the depth and resilience of these links. Though clearly the site for cultural policy development in the last thirty years, the city is also where many of the contradictions and conflicts of the cultural industries and wider cultural policy that this volume identifies, are made manifest. The evidence suggests that most cultural industries are biased to the urban; that is, cultural industries are more likely to be found within cities. There are a variety of reasons for this. The tendency for cultural workers to co-locate, sometimes within a few city streets of one another, is driven by the need for cultural producers to swap ideas and contacts, socialise together and trade industry gossip (Currid, 2007; Lloyd, 2006). Communicating these ideas is best done face to face, even in activities such as advertising or videogames production that make much use of digital technology. Indeed research suggests that the higher up the value chain – and the closer to the creative elements of production – the more likely it is that face-to-face interaction will be important (Pratt 2006, 2009). While this is true of other ‘knowledge based sectors’ – the trading and investment activities of the financial services industry also tend to cluster, for example – the urban co-location of cultural activities also owes something to the urban environment itself. Opportunities for cultural consumption are generally greater in cities than elsewhere, and the link between production and consumption is strong. Put simply, musicians are generally keen consumers of music, comedians hang out at comedy clubs and filmmakers go to the cinema a lot. Moreover, the exchange of ideas on which cultural production thrives is commonly found in an interpenetration of the formal and informal, commercial and non-commercial fields in which cities are rich: public art galleries combined with street art, subsidised theatre alongside commercial shows, branded arenas for rock concerts and clubs and bars for up-and-coming bands. In some cities there are reputational effects by which they have become associated with certain ‘scenes’, as in the case of Austin, Bogota or Detroit and popular music, and this can create a virtuous circle whereby people interested in a cultural practice are drawn to these cities or to neighbourhoods within cities. For firms in the cultural industries, and for the associated leisure sectors from bars and clubs to coffee shops and independent retail, being located in certain areas can be invested with what is sometimes referred to as ‘symbolic capital’ (Currid, 2007; Harvey, 2000; Lloyd, 2006). Despite the success of some cities in developing a strong cultural-industry base in one or more sectors, these developments often prove difficult for city authorities to understand, let alone control or support. This seemingly organic mix of conditions appears intensely difficult to replicate, leading to the common misunderstanding that public policy makes little difference, or the invisible hand of the market is at work. More likely the policies that make a difference, from higher education costs and cheap transport or workspace to licensing laws and immigration rules, have not been enacted with the cultural industries in mind, but have nonetheless provided a beneficial set of conditions. The growth in importance of creative industry/creative economy policies and the rhetoric of urban competiveness means that cities have in recent decades sought to ‘operationalise’ these factors and they have done so in a way characteristic of this stage of neoliberalism (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2014; Davies, 2014; O’Connor, 2011). There has been a rise in ‘active state’ policies from the expansion of higher education, including in so-called ‘creative’ subjects, to public investments in workspaces, studios and incubators, publicly funded networks and intermediaries (O’Connor and Gu, 2013), and tax ‘breaks’ devised to lure firms, particularly in the media sectors, from one urban location to another. While under the guise of urban regeneration, ‘flagship’ cultural buildings, arts districts and waterfront developments have been promoted in cities from Bilbao to Abu Dhabi. At the same time, these policies, as Grodach and Silver note (2013: 3), have been conducted within an overall framework of deregulation, privatisation and with a concurrent ‘reframing of traditional progressive policy goals such as diversity, inclusion, quality of life and sustainability, as facets of urban growth’.
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Copyright 2015 Kate Oakley and Justin O’Connor for selection and editorial matter; individual contributions the contributors