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Article Excerpt
Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, creative-economy strategies have become attractive, even fashionable, in several cities in Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Taipei, and Seoul. A variety of factors motivated the diffusion to Asian cities of what were essentially the culture-driven strategies for urban regeneration popularly adopted in British, European, and U.S. cities in the 1980s and 1990s (Bianchini 1993; Kong 2000; Miles and Paddison 2005). The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s prompted national and city governments to look for alternative economic strategies, particularly given their reluctance to abandon their aspirations to become global cities. At the same time, the culture-led strategies in the West had had "the most dramatic consequences both physically in transforming the urban landscape and in building their economic performance" (Miles and Paddison 2005, 833). Although the exact manner in which knowledge about the creative economy has circulated and diffused has differed from destination to destination (Kong and others 2006), a normative policy script has clearly captured official imaginations in the Asian context. Such a policy script can be characterized as follows: To compete in the new creative economy, cities should seek to implement particular initiatives such as encouraging creative-industry clusters, incubate learning and knowledge economies, maximize networks with other successful places and companies, value and reward innovation, and aggressively campaign to attract the "creative class" as residents (Gibson and Kong 2005). Such an approach has been most marked in cities, but policies promoting growth of the creative economy as a competitive strategy have emerged at various scales and in increasingly diverse places, from municipalities to national and even multilateral trading regions (Yusuf and Nabeshima 2005).
CULTURE-LED URBAN REGENERATION, THE CREATIVE CITY, AND SUSTAINABILITY
The main focus of the literature on culture-led urban regeneration, the creative city, and creative economy has been on U.K. and U.S. cities. Writing in the context of the latter, Richard Florida argued that cities should focus on attracting creative people and promoting creativity as a way to achieve regeneration (2002). Though severely criticized, Florida's arguments have captured the attention of policymakers in many parts of the globe. In the context of the United Kingdom, the British government's recognition of the value of cultural investment to urban regeneration is born of a sense that culture is "a source of prosperity and cosmopolitanism in the process of international urban competitiveness, ... a means of spreading the benefits of prosperity to all citizens, through its capacity to engender social and human capital, improve life skills and transform the organizational capacity to handle and respond to change ... [and] a means of defining a rich shared identity[,] ... thus engender[ing] pride of place and inter-communal understanding, contributing to people's sense of anchoring and confidence" (Comedia 2003).
Just how much such strategies actually address local issues of identity, interaction, and understanding, apart from economic ones, is often questionable, however. Deborah Stevenson argues that "the 'social' of social inclusion has become synonymous with the economy to such an extent that participation in society (full citizenship) can only be achieved through participation in the economy" (2004, 126). In this way, culture becomes implicated in reproducing inequalities as opposed to automatically revitalizing the public sphere (Miles and Paddison 2005, 836). In fact, Steven Miles and Ronan Paddison go on to argue that "the most dangerous aspect of cultural investment is that it simply does not sit comfortably in the context for which it is intended" (2005, 837). Other writers sounding caution include Graeme Evans, who is concerned that the measures of impact are all too often focused on economic impacts rather than on long-term sustainability (2005); Peter Johnson and Barry Thomas believed that effects such as enjoyment, appreciation, and such softer aspects of the arts' impact are left insufficiently acknowledged and promoted (2001). In fact, Keith Bassett made this argument as early as the 1990s, arguing that economic regeneration is not necessarily accompanied by cultural regeneration, which involves community self-development and self-expression (1993, 1778). In short, all of these critics argue for a sustainability that goes beyond economic terms and considers issues such as social inclusion, social cohesion, and community development.
In this article I focus on notions of sustainability beyond the economic; specifically, I am concerned with issues of environmental, cultural, and social sustainability. I treat environmental sustainability in terms of the sustainability of urban spaces as valuable repositories of human (personal and social) meaning and simultaneously as livable, rejuvenated spaces. For example, a pertinent issue would be how historical spaces can be preserved and reused without compromising development. At the same time, one must also consider how new urban spaces are introduced into the landscape and how they integrate into the fabric of existing urban environments, revitalizing the cityscapes or standing as jarring new symbols of modernity that do not articulate with the language of existing urban forms.
Conventional wisdom about cultural sustainability emphasizes the ability of culture to "forge a productive diversity for the human species" as well as to "nurture the sources of cohesion and commonality," recognizing culture to be "the glue of similarity ('identity,' literally) that grounds our sociability." In turn, social sustainability calls for systems, structures, and programs that allow "our participation as autonomous yet social beings" (IJECESS 2008). Social sustainability suggests healthy social interaction, protection of the vulnerable, and respect for social diversity.
Cultural and social sustainability are closely intertwined in the context of this article. I refer to cultural sustainability as the ability to create local cultural content, embed indigenous idioms in cultural products, and, possibly, devise unique cultural forms that underscore a local sense of identity and indeed, nationhood, particularly in the face of globalizing and potentially homogenizing forces. Such cultural sustainability should be able to nurture cohesion and develop common identity without suggesting a simultaneous xenophobic rejection of external influences. Closely related would be the idea of social sustainability, emphasizing the social dimension of cultural activities whereby a socially sustainable cultural policy/activity is one that enables social inclusion and the building of community bonds. Such social sustainability is possible or achieved either when cultural activity has a strong social basis to begin with or when it has the desired social effect.
SHANGHAI AND SINGAPORE
To address my research questions, I analyze the case of Shanghai and Singapore, two dynamic cities in Asia selected for their similarities and simultaneous differences. Both are predominantly Chinese, despite having significant migrant (long-term and transient) populations. Both have reputations for being bustling commercial centers, although neither city is well known for cultural vibrancy or leadership. Shanghai invariably plays second fiddle to Beijing, which has the reputation of being the cultural capital of China, and Singapore has long struggled to shrug off its image as a cultural desert. Both have aspirations to develop their cultural depth and standing, not least to gain the symbolic cultural capital necessary to shore up their global-city status/aspirations. Both have also recently discovered the potential of the creative/cultural industries, with both Singapore's national government and Shanghai's municipal government actively pursuing the economic potential of creative industries (Kong and others 2006). Both have fairly recently (re)constructed their cultural monuments or are in the process of doing so. Singapore's Esplanade, National Library, and National Museum, and Shanghai's Museum, Library, and Grand Theatre have given the cities some iconic cultural structures.
Yet these two cities have different nation-building imperatives and political ideologies. Singapore is a young nation, having gained independence only in 1965, and is a small city-state, with about 4.8 million residents (ss 2008). Shanghai has a rich history within the much longer traditions of the larger Chinese polity and nation and is now confronted with an exploding population of well over 18 million (NBSC 2007). Issues of environmental, cultural, and social sustainability thus have similar yet different meanings in these two fascinating cities.
To address issues of environmental, cultural, and social sustainability in Shanghai and Singapore I have picked two categories of creative/cultural spaces. The first comprises the state-vaunted edifices of Shanghai Grand Theatre and Singapore's Esplanade--Theatres by the Bay, both of which provide space for the performing arts. The second comprises more organically evolved visual arts clusters: Moganshan Lu in Shanghai, with its artists, photographers, designers, and architects; and Wessex Estate in Singapore, with a similar mix. These spaces began organically, but state agencies have come to recognize their potential and have intervened to assist their development. Although these are not the only spaces of creativity and arts in Shanghai and Singapore and do not fully reflect the range of creative/cultural policies in the two cities, I selected them because they represent two vastly different types of spaces--the monumental versus the everyday and the state-initiated versus the organic.
I base my analysis mainly on primary data drawn from approximately sixty interviews conducted between 2005 and 2007 with artists, performers, playwrights, designers, photographers, directors, and others in the "artistic class," with "ordinary" Singaporeans and Shanghainese, and architects, managers, planners, and developers responsible for the sites....
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