For some time now, the relationships between culture and the economy have focused the interest of researchers, both in the cultural, economic, and political fields. The use of ‘cultural industries’ first, and ‘creative’ ones today, as a local and regional economic engine has fully entered the agendas of policymakers and investors. In our context, YProducciones’ research on the matter is well known. However, it seems to us that the analysis of the social repercussions of ‘urban regeneration’ policies through the promotion of these industries has not yet been deepened. This analysis is usually limited to intra-sectoral issues (the extreme precariousness and flexibility of work in culture) or the population displacement associated with the ‘gentrification’ processes that accompany the emergence of ‘creative districts’.
We sense, however, that the implementation of economic models based on culture and creativity entails even deeper social inequalities. We recently discovered the work of the
From Creative Economy to Creative Society
(pdf), the SIAP team, formed by Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert, advocates for a kind of “third way” alternative to the merely economistic policies of promoting the creative sector and the community cultural development policies tout court.
Their proposal is based on the promotion and cultivation of what they call, using what seems like a complete oxymoron, “natural cultural districts.” We don’t quite grasp the difference between these “natural cultural districts” and what, by opposition, would be ‘artificial cultural districts’, but it seems to us that the analysis on which the SIAP proposal is based points to some reflections to take into account: Firstly, Stern and Seifert point out that most urban regeneration policies through the promotion of creative industries fall on a misconception of creativity according to which it is still understood as an innate gift enjoyed by a few chosen individuals. On the contrary, creative processes can be understood as collective processes that depend on a complex infrastructure of social and spatial networks. It is in this sense that Stern and Seifert propose to define the cultural sector as an “ecosystem” – a term copied from the one used, in a similar sense, by Reinaldo Laddaga in his
Aesthetics of emergence
-.
The individualistic conception of creativity is associated with what Stern and Seifert call “winner-take-all labor markets“, that is, labor markets in which a select few obtain extraordinary benefits compared to a large majority whose work is not only poorly paid, but also lacks recognition and is made invisible. As Richard Florida himself observed in 2005, just three years after the publication of
The rise of the creative class
– the book that almost all of the policies to promote the creative sector that we are discussing follow to the letter -: ” Perhaps the most outstanding of what I consider the externalities of the creative era has to do with the increase in social and economic inequality. Less than a third of the workforce – the creative class – is employed in the creative sector of the economy. […] And what is even more discouraging, inequality is considerably more pronounced in the leading creative regions. […] The creative economy is giving rise to a pronounced social and political polarization. “
It seems to us that in their study Stern and Seifert do not delve sufficiently into the processes from which this social polarization results. Following Florida’s teachings, the political leaders of cities with global pretensions have launched themselves into a frantic competition; in this singular race, cities exhibit and offer their charms in order to attract the members of that creative class who are to become engines of economic development. Let’s take the case of
The city itself is offered as the stage for work and economic activity in the age of creativity, among other things because creative work is no longer done in a specific time and space, as we well know. The city is offered as a stage for a lifestyle-work. The question that Stern and Seifert do not quite formulate is: who is in charge of maintaining and fine-tuning that stage? who operates the engine room of the creative classes’ lifestyle? and what is the social cost of that division of labor? While the creative classes enjoy a lifestyle that is in itself a mode of production -so that pleasure and work appear inseparable- in the “wonderful” environment of the cultural and technological districts of urban centers, those two-thirds of the population to which Florida referred and who are not employed in the creative industries -among whom are those in charge of maintaining the immaterial factory that is the city- live in other parts of the metropolitan areas.
This spatial nuance would not be relevant if it were not because it is there where a curious dissymmetry occurs with respect to the instrumentalization of culture: while in the creative districts it is used as an economic resource, capable of generating symbolic and monetary value, in the periphery of urban centers culture is used as a resource in a completely different sense: It is intended that, through the policies of “proximity culture” or “community cultural development”, culture acts as a kind of social glue that, without knowing very well how, improves the living conditions of these communities and especially of the groups considered in “situation of risk” or “special attention”, among which are usually young people, women or migrants. In an article published in 1995 and titled
Aesthetic evangelists: conversion and empowerment in contemporary community art
, Grant Kester examined what he calls “the moral economy” of community artistic practices; it is true that his analysis is very rooted in the American context, but we can draw some useful conclusions for ourselves: his main objective is to point out “to what extent those of us committed to a progressive cultural practice might be inadvertently corroborating certain structural features of conservative positions“. This doubt or suspicion has an extensive journey that Kester unravels meticulously throughout the article (which deserves a careful reading). This suspicion is based on the idea that the moral economy of the Victorian era persists in the practices of some artists who work with communities; this is so when these practices take for granted, in a more or less implicit way, that ” the “causes” of poverty and loss of agency are mainly individual rather than systemic. Within this dynamic, the subject of reform (the “poor”, the “indigent”, etc.), is understood as a kind of resource or raw material that has to be transformed “. As Kester very well clarifies, “no one will oppose that someone is able to give a positive turn to their life, however what is potentially sacrificed with this testimony is the recognition that people do not lack a roof simply because of their low self-esteem, but because of an entire range of political and economic forces that [conservative thought] longs to obscure and naturalize“.