Artists in the city. Another way of looking at artists’ studios (original) (raw)
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The use of cultural amenities as a tool for strategic planning and the incorporation of the symbolic value of culture by capitalist modes of production have been widely studied. At the same time, debates surrounding the emerging concepts of creative economy and industries have fostered economic development strategies promoting clusters of creative activities. The case of the Territoire de la culture et de la création, in a Paris suburb, illustrates an hybridisation of these two kinds of strategies. As we will explain, the promotion of creative activities (mainly film industries) within the frame of a large urban project should not be seen as an economic strategy but as a planning strategy. Here, supporting creative industries is not this urban project’s goal but its tool. It is a means to give value to a brownfield area, before launching a large and expensive urban project requiring private investors.
Leipzig's visual artists as actors of urban change (MSc Thesis)
This paper looks at the role of visual artists for urban change in Leipzig through the study of artist’s livelihoods and their engagement with the city in form of urban pioneering and professional development. Visual artists are actors of urban change in Leipzig because they share a sense of place attachment and common identity with the city. This leads to the attraction and retention of artists who are expanding and diversifying the existing cultural economy. Visual artists along with their exhibition and house projects have visible impact on the re-urbanisation of the city and the gentrification of specific neighbourhoods. This paper adapts previously identified city attraction factors to the group of visual artists to identify specific processes that govern their urban and economic positions at a transition from higher education to professional artistic practice. Through qualitative methods, this research articulates causation, tensions and contradictions that describe the livelihoods of visual artists within a complex contextual realm between artistic autonomy and an expanding neo-liberal field.
Pushing Borders. Cultural workers in the restructuring of post-industrial cities. PhD thesis
2017
This research explores the agency and positioning of cultural workers in the restructuring of contemporary cities. This positioning is ambiguous. Cultural workers often lead precarious professional lives, yet their significant symbolic and cultural capital is widely mobilised in the service of neoliberal urban restructuring, including ‘creative city’ flagship developments and gentrification. But cultural workers’ actual agency, their reactions to urban processes that exploit their presence, and their relations to other urban social groups, are poorly understood and hard to decipher. This thesis addresses these issues through three articles. Paper I examines a process of artist-led gentrification ongoing in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York. It shows that artists, gallerists and other members of the local art scene contribute to sustaining gentrification through their everyday practices and discourses. The gentrification frontier is constructed on an everyday level as a transitional space and time in the scene members’ lives. Gentrification is de-politicised by discursively underplaying its conflictual components of class and racial struggle. Forms of resistance to gentrification amongst scene members are found, but they appear to be sector-specific and exclusive. Finally, scene members tend to fail at establishing meaningful relationships with long-time residents. Paper II brings the perspectives of long-time residents in Bushwick to the forefront. Examination of the emotional and affectual components of displacement reveals that these aspects are as important as material re-location to understanding displacement and gentrification. The encounter with newcomers’ bodies in neighbourhood spaces triggers a deep sense of displacement for long-time residents, evoking deep-rooted structural inequalities of which gentrification is one spatial expression. Paper III examines the case of Macao, a collective mobilisation of cultural workers in Milan, Italy. There, cultural workers have mobilised against neoliberal urbanism, top-down gentrification, corruption, growing labour precarity and other regressive urban and social issues. The paper considers the distinctive resources, aesthetic tactics and inaugurative practices mobilised and enacted in the urban space by Macao and it argues that by deploying their cultural and symbolic capital, cultural workers can reframe the relations between bodies, space and time, and hence challenge power structures. Cultural workers might not have the power to determine the structural boundaries and hierarchies that organize urban society, including their own positioning in it. Nonetheless, through their actions and discourses and subjectification processes, they can reinforce or challenge those borders.
Young artists and the development of artistic quarters in Polish cities
2014
The phenomenon of artistic quarters has been explored by many researchers interested in the spatial behaviours of artists in North American and Western European cities. Their analyses have often focused on the impact of this occupational group on transformations of selected urban areas: the arrival of artists as pioneers in degraded, problem neighbourhoods and the evolution of those neighbourhoods, which then attract more established artists, followed by creative professionals and non-creative gentrifiers. As over time the built environment, functions, cultural, gastronomic offer and ambiance of such areas change significantly, their progressive mainstreaming and commercialization prompt some artists to venture into new districts and spaces. The article first offers a review of existing findings with respect to artistic quarters and their transformations. The discussion of the possible stages of development of artistic quarters present in literature is followed by the application of this theoretical framework in the context of Polish cities using the examples of Krakow and Katowice. These significant regional capitals represent two major types of urban centres in Poland: a city with medieval roots, and a city which emerged during the 19th-century industrialisation process. The phases of evolution of the artistic quarters in both cities are analysed by examining the spatial perceptions of students of artistic majors. The analysis shows that the transformations of urban spaces in terms of their functions and perceptions as artistic quarters are not as straightforward and linear as earlier studies might suggest. Krakow’s more vibrant artistic life and its historic, concentric urban structure, combined with strong commercial pressures, are conducive to the development of new artistic quarters, although its traditional city centre continues to some extent to maintain its position on the artistic map of the city. In contrast, in Katowice the chaotic spatial structure of the heart of this historic industrial region makes the flow of artists more difficult and less likely, as they tend to concentrate in a poorly delineated area of the inner city. In addition, as the case studies reveal, spatial choices of artists are not only dependent on a city’s development path and its built environment but are also to a significant extent shaped by the diverse artistic backgrounds of its creatives and a host of factors linked with post-socialist transformation and neoliberal urban policies.
The knowledge city against urban creativity? Artists' workshops and urban regeneration in Barcelona
European Urban and Regional …, 2011
Nowadays, knowledge, culture and creativity are cornerstones of cities’ strategies for local development. Following different approaches, cities are trying to develop knowledge and creative districts/neighbourhoods to foster economic growth in the new economy. Nevertheless there are several contradictions between the knowledge economy and the creative economy as motors for urban development. Through the study of artists’ workshops located during the 1990s in an old industrial neighbourhood planned to be a new knowledge district of Barcelona, these contradictions are explored and the policy results are explained.
Hobson’s choice? Constraints on accessing spaces of creative production
Successful creative production is often documented to occur in urban areas that are more likely to be diverse, a source of human capital and the site of dense interactions. These accounts chart how, historically, creative industries have clustered in areas where space was once cheap in the city centre fringe and inner city areas, often leading to the development of a creative milieu, and thereby stimulating further creative production. Historical accounts of the development of creative areas demonstrate the crucial role of accessible low-cost business premises. This article reports on the findings of a case study that investigated the location decisions of firms in selected creative industry sectors in Greater Manchester. The study found that, while creative activity remains highly concentrated in the city centre, creative space there is being squeezed and some creative production is decentralizing in order to access cheaper premises. The article argues that the location choices of creative industry firms are being constrained by the extensive city centre regeneration, with the most vulnerable firms, notably the smallest and youngest, facing a Hobson’s choice of being able to access low-cost premises only in the periphery. This disrupts the delicate balance needed to sustain production and begs the broader question as to how the creative economy fits into the existing urban fabric, alongside the competing demands placed on space within a transforming industrial conurbation.
European Planning Studies, 2019
This paper unpacks the emergence of Leipzig, Germany as a creative city in the context of post-industrial, post-socialist urban transformation and examines the transformation of a former cotton-spinning mill, the Baumwollspinnerei, into an internationally renowned cultural quarter. It develops an analytical tool – the POSES Star Framework – to systematically outline multiple spillover dynamics (political, organizational, spatial, ephemeral, and social) of a cultural quarter onto a neighbourhood and within a specific urban planning and policy context. The application of POSES to the Baumwollspinnerei demonstrates that internal social and organizational spillovers outweigh the external political, ephemeral, and spatial spillovers onto the urban cultural landscape. We argue that this spillover differential reveals the Baumwollspinnerei’s prioritization of inter-organizational concerns for site development and profile as opposed to a more active engagement in Leipzig’s urban and cultural political discourses.