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Article Excerpt
The term "sustainable creative city" has become a fashionable notion in contemporary urban governance (Oakley 2004). The idea of the "sustainable city" originated in the 1960s, when urbanists and planners introduced such notions as the "mixed land use," cultural and socioeconomic "diversity," "dense" and "compact" urban environments, and the "vitality" of city centers (Jacobs 1961; Lynch 1981; Nijkamp and Perrels 1994; Jencks, Burton, and Williams 1996; UTF 1999). These notions reflected a positive value placed on public spaces, a higher quality of life, and access to services (Alexander and Tomalty 2002). In the 1980s the need to stop urban sprawl and revitalize city centers through an "urban renaissance" reinforced the idea of the sustainable city (Montgomery 1994; Bianchini 1995; Landry 2000). This new sustainability was to be achieved via property-led and culture-led regeneration (Healey and Shaw 1993; Healey 1995; Evans 2001). Culture-led regeneration presupposed increased leisure and consumption activities, including the nighttime economy (NTE), and development of creative and cultural industries that led to recognition of creative producers as full stakeholders in the environment of cities.
Despite its long history, the notion of urban sustainability has serious shortcomings, the main one being an unresolved dispute over exactly what must be sustained (Matarasso and Landry 1999; NSF 2000). This debate highlights two candidates for sustaining: the process and the structure. The extensive work on newly formed creative quarters in the United Kingdom failed to explain why apparently well-planned and sustainably structured creative quarters lack vitality, whereas unplanned and edgy parts of the city often attract thousands of people (Crewe and Beaverstock 1998; Brown, O'Connor, and Cohen 2000; Newman and Smith 2000; Thornley 2000; Moss 2002; Crewe 2003; Hemphill, Berry, and McGreal 2004). The failure to re/ create vitality is due to the emphasis that planners and governing bodies place on the design of urban space (as in Montgomery 1998) instead of on the process of its production, informed by the patterns of everyday life of the diverse stakeholders (Lefebvre 1991). The design approach masks the fact that the main driving forces that enliven the place and the factors that sustain each participating actor are usually historically embedded and may lie outside the delimited space of the quarter (Molotch 1998). Emphasis on structure does not help to reveal the nature of the dynamic relationships among stakeholders who are involved in different activities and possess different bargaining power and real and symbolic rights over the place (see, however, Sharon Zukin's work on artists as pioneers of gentrification [1982]). Even if researchers accept the primary role of process over structure, the question of what kinds of cultural and socioeconomic reproduction should constitute the sustainable creative city remains (Haughton and Hunter 1994; NSF 2000; Krueger and Savage 2007).
Controversially, many authors see the sustainable creative city as a tolerant yet gentrified, clean and comfortable place mainly servicing the needs of the middle classes and the creative elite (Molotch 1998; Florida 2002b). Other accounts, though more sympathetic to local values, street life, and "grounded" activities (Jacobs 1961), also are biased toward cultural idealism.
The explanations underlying the process of production of creative spaces are twofold. In one reading only the creative class sustains the sense of vitality in the creative city, via face-to-face interactions, consumption, entertainment, and "experiences" (Florida 2002b). In this context, maintaining the amenities--restaurants, coffee shops, wine bars, and similar facilities--where these interactions occur represents a tool for sustaining the creative city itself. This vision prioritizes consumption structures over production processes, places creative businesses in an inferior position, and undermines the interests of noncreative workers, who still, it is believed, constitute two-thirds of the creative city's labor force (Peck 2005).
If this picture somehow looks one-sided, so does the opposite paradigm, in which the vitality of the creative city is seen as the result of economic development based on creative production. According to this vision, the main role belongs to actors such as customers, suppliers, and appropriate employees who contribute to the firms' cluster formation, whereas the "industrial atmosphere" (Marshall 1920) (meaning "vitality"?) is considered a result of their interactions. This vision similarly undermines the shareholders' rights of the creative underclass composed of start-ups and "losers," leaving little room for representatives of transgressive subcultures and other people who do not directly contribute to economic prosperity. Even when authors take the broader view of culture, accommodating groups with different cultural values and contradictory everyday practices, the choices involved in weighing their contributions to the production of "scenes" of the creative city are left to the subjectivity of policymakers (Silver, Clark, and Rothfield 2006).
The real creative city is not a city of equals (Camagni, Capello, and Nijkamp 1998). Instead, it is a place where conflicts over differences and power and identity struggles confront the ideal of uncontentious diversity, where the monopoly of single company challenges the ideal of balance and where concerns about property rights question the ideals of vitality and sustainable public space. What is usually missing in discussions on urban sustainability is the question of how heterogeneity or social and cultural diversity is tolerated--or not tolerated--and what the acceptable level of tolerance is (although the issue is well discussed in Chatterton 2000).
There is growing evidence of increasing inequalities in creative cities, many of which were ranked high on the Richard Florida's "inequality index," based on the gap between high-income and low-income residents (2003). That, along with increasing investment in the sustainable development of cities, has provoked a reassessment of the principal agendas, shifting emphasis toward the notion of "just" sustainability introduced in the new context of neoliberal politics, which applies requirements of justice and equity to stakeholders in creative cities (Campbell 1996; Agyeman and Evans 2004; Redclift 2005). This approach, however, usually exaggerates the conflict of stakeholders' interests and the struggle between "good" and "bad" vitality rather than highlighting the asymmetrical but possibly cooperative nature of interdependencies between the powerful and the powerless or, using the ecological metaphor, the symbiosis between "wolves" and "lambs" in the complex, open, and self-regulating urban ecosystem that is characterized by counterintuitive behavior (Bilton 1999; Portugali 2006). (1)
Wolves, Lambs, and Sustainability
In this article I address some of the above points. First, I consider in detail the sustainability of individual creative producers, defining "sustainability" in relation to the producers' interrelated and complex "organization ecologies" (Grabber 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2004a, 2004b; Grabher and Ibert 2006). The organization ecologies, developed through time and across the space, are revealed in "traded and untraded interdependencies" (Storper 1989) expressed as the multiple economic and social transactions that the participants ought to conduct if they wish to perpetuate their existence (Grabher 1995; Camagni, Capello, and Nijkamp 1998; Bachev 2005). (2) I emphasize the inequalities among creative producers, who range from the creative elite to the creative underclass. My focus, however, is on the nature of the symbiosis and interrelational reproduction of both wolves and lambs rather than on prioritizing one over the other. This interrelatedness means that not all creative producers can be sustainable even if the industry in general is.
I also emphasize that only in part do the stakeholders' transactions and processes of reproduction influence and receive influence from a particular place. I argue that the street, which forms the core of the creative quarter, operates, in terms of property rights, not as a public space, as it was commonly accepted, but as a "common" (Coase 1960,1992; Demsetz 1967; Hardin 1968). Indeed, the street is not hygienic and unsubtractible by members of the public space but an area of contestation among contradictory interests of stakeholders to be found in the mix of neighboring land users and visitors to the area. The notion of a common accommodates nonexcludability and subtractibility of the street (Berkes and others 1989; Clapp and Meyer 2000) and permits the relationship between the sustainability of the stakeholders and that of the place in which they operate to be made more explicit. (3) The strength of different stakeholders and the level of their "ownership" of the common depend on the number and intensity of interactions they perform on the street, combined with their power position. The most involved stakeholders are the homeless, prostitutes, drug dealers, flaneurs, and tourists, because their typical transactions relate mostly to the street (Fyfe 1998). However, they lack any legal power over the place. Consumer-oriented cultural producers (theaters, music venues, and art galleries) and services (shops, bars, restaurants, pubs, and clubs) also gain a great deal from the common of the busy street, where the level of "coincidence" with the flows of customers is the highest (McCann 1995). Other creative actors operate as producer services (Pratt 2007)--film, television, and advertising companies. They are weaker stakeholders, they do not display their products in the window, so to speak, and therefore they have an indirect relationship to the street (Firm A 2003). Cultural producers of both kinds are profit makers and taxpayers in the area. The street as a common is not only an arena for conflict between interested stakeholders, as it can be, for example, for creative businesses and participants in the NTE--a part of the experience economy. It is also a melting pot for stakeholders' differences....
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