Cultural Economy Planning in Creative Cities: Discourse and Practice

While a growing body of research analyses the functional mechanisms of the cultural or creative economy, there has been little attention devoted to understanding how local governments translate this work into policy. Moreover, research in this vein focuses predominately on Richard Florida's creative class thesis rather than considering the wider body of work that may influence policy. This article seeks to develop a deeper understanding of how municipalities conceptualize and plan for the cultural economy through the lens of two cities held up as model ‘creative cities’ — Austin, Texas and Toronto, Ontario. The work pays particular attention to how the cities adopt and adapt leading theories, strategies and discourses of the cultural economy. While policy documents indicate that the cities embrace the creative city model, in practice agencies tend to adapt conventional economic development strategies for cultural economy activity and appropriate the language of the creative city for multiple purposes.     

The Limits to Artist‐Led Regeneration: Creative Brownfields in the Cities of High Culture

Despite the burgeoning literature on creative cities, seldom explored is the context of cities rich in cultural capital but more orthodox in their approach to preserving the autonomy of culture. This article discusses the status of artistic spaces occupying abandoned industrial premises (‘creative brownfields') in historic cities that traditionally shape their policies around prestigious cultural institutions (‘cities of high culture'). Based on comparative insights from St Petersburg and Lausanne, the article explores the relations and tensions between mainstream cultural governance and creative brownfields. While there is no lack of creative brownfields in these cities, their wider urban impact is found to be marginal; moreover, these sites represent dispersed instances of temporary occupations rather than situated clusters of creative actors. More than coincidental, this (lack of) spatialization is argued to result from a particular governmentality—that of high culture—which disregards, rather than promotes, spaces of alternative cultural governance. The article conceptualizes creative brownfields in cities of high culture as the ‘soft infrastructure' of cultural production, in contrast with those in ‘creative cities' as the ‘hard infrastructure' of urban production. The article also calls for a recognition of the local context of regulation and accumulation in understanding the cultural/urban interplay.     

Contradictions of the Climate-Friendly City: New Perspectives on Eco-Gentrification and Housing Justice

As local governments and corporations promote ‘climate friendliness’, and a low-carbon lifestyle becomes increasingly desirable, more middle- and upper-income urban residents are choosing to live near public transit, on bike- and pedestrian-friendly streets, and in higher-density mixed-use areas. This rejection of classical forms of suburbanization has, in part, increased property values in neighborhoods offering these amenities, displacing lower-income, often non-white, residents. Increased prevalence of creative and technology workers appears to accelerate this trend. We argue that a significant and understudied socio-environmental contradiction also occurs where the actual environmental outcomes of neighborhood transformation may not be what we expect. New research on greenhouse gas emissions shows that more affluent residents have much larger carbon footprints because of their consumption, even when reductions in transportation or building energy emissions are included. We describe an area in Seattle, Washington, the location of Amazon's headquarters, experiencing this contradiction and show a distinct convergence of city investments in low-carbon infrastructure, significant rises in housing prices and decreases in lower-income and non-white residents. We conclude with a discussion of a range of issues that require more attention by scholars interested in housing justice and/or urban sustainability.     

Creative Mediations of the City: Contemporary Public Art as Compass of Metro Manila's Urban Conditions

In this article, public art is proposed as creative agency mobilized to form urban imaginaries. These alternate visions are largely facilitated by artists and art collectives using urban communities as performative grounds. These projects promote a view of art as an effective channel for ‘recentering’ — the identification of a multitude of centers that endlessly fracture and shift, very much resembling the nature of cities themselves. An alternate vision of the city through cartography informed by contrast, temporality and ephemerality is proposed alongside dominant representations of the city. Works by artists Alma Quinto, Mark Salvatus and Wire Tuazon are representative examples of such strategies. Diverse in tactics and platforms, defined by site‐specific mediations, the projects facilitated by these artists reveal the uneven conditions that beset Metro Manila and its outlying areas. Quinto's altered Urban Plan/Duyan is the result of her engagement with women in an informal settler community in San Andres Bukid, Manila, while Salvatus's web‐based Neo‐Urban Planner is an astute observation of the obsessive yet futile ordering of people and space by the state. Tuazon's Amphibian installation is a commentary on the encroachment of multinational interests in local communities. These interventions are foils to state‐ and private‐led urban development schemes. Their strength lies in their direct engagement with the sphere of public dialogue and self‐determination. These artistic practices and strategies are shaped by community interaction, revealing that meanings residing in urban forms are relentlessly negotiated by the numerous actors that inhabit the city.     

Territorial Stigmatization and Territorial Destigmatization: A Cultural Sociology of Symbolic Strategy in the Gentrification of Parkdale (Toronto)

Territorial stigmatization is one of the most powerful concepts for understanding how social, spatial and symbolic processes are intertwined in producing contemporary urban inequality. Through a detailed case study of Parkdale, a Toronto neighbourhood that has been profoundly shaped by its long association with poverty, single room occupancy housing and psychiatric survivors, this article works at the points of intersection between the rapidly expanding literature on territorial stigmatization and wider social scientific interest in gentrification‐led displacement. Drawing on archival research, participant observation and interviews with residents, it demonstrates how territorial stigmatization, and a new allied concept, territorial destigmatization, operate in Parkdale. Territorial stigmatization and destigmatization work across three dimensions: legal, material and discursive. Using conceptual tools from cultural sociology to foreground symbolic elements of these three dimensions, two strategies of territorial destigmatization are delineated: one that operates in concert with gentrification‐led displacement, and the other that works to symbolically reinscribe stigmatized persons and housing forms. To complement and sharpen territorial stigmatization research, recent findings from studies of stigma are integrated to show how psychiatric survivors and housing advocates in Parkdale use territorial destigmatization to offset gentrification‐led displacement.     

Avoiding the ‘SoHo Effect’ in Baltimore: Neighborhood Revitalization and Arts and Entertainment Districts

This article investigates how state‐sponsored ‘arts and cultural districts' and ‘creative placemaking' revitalization strategies affect urban neighborhoods, using the Station North Arts & Entertainment (A&E) District in Baltimore, Maryland (USA) as a case study. Through ethnographic participatory methods and 39 qualitative interviews, we studied the activities and attitudes of various stakeholders within Station North. Since its designation as an arts and entertainment district in 2002, a number of public–private partnerships have helped increase home values in Station North, suggesting that the ‘branding' of Station North has been successful. While the institutions involved in the district, including community development corporations and local universities, are careful to insist that they do not want to displace low‐income residents, many interviewees expressed concerns that these institutions exert influence outweighing that of longtime residents. While a certain level of gentrification has occurred with the arrival of new residents, we argue that the people who are most likely to be displaced from the arts and entertainment district in the future are, paradoxically, artists, especially those who wish to buy homes and settle in the district. After discussing the case of Station North, we consider broader implications of the use of arts for urban revitalization.     

基本药物制度的实施对无锡市社区医药消费行为影响分析

基本药物制度已成为一个全球化的概念,是一个国家医药卫生政策的核心。建立国家基本药物制度是惠及民生的重大制度创新,是我国近期医药卫生体制改革的重点和难点。文章以无锡市为例,研究了基本药物制度实施对社区医药消费行为的影响,并提出了相关建议。     

Organizing The Ordinary City: How Labor Reform Strategies Travel to the US Heartland

In New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, formal alliances between labor unions and community organizations have spurred successful workplace and policy organizing campaigns. As a result, the institutional form of the community–labor coalition is travelling to smaller, less unionized and more politically conservative cities, where the replication of established organizing strategies must contend with political, economic and institutional differences that often go unnoted. Comparing community–labor alliances in Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago, this article identifies heretofore unobserved conditions of possibility for successful urban labor organizing in the US. Compared to smaller cities, Chicago and the large urban areas from which ideal practices are abstracted feature higher levels of union membership, significantly more funding of basic social and neighborhood services, and larger immigrant communities. Operating with minimal human services and limited recourse to the social and institutional networks of immigrant workers, labor coalitions in St. Louis and Indianapolis face recurrent barriers to identifying workplace problems, mobilizing low‐wage workers and sustaining citywide reform campaigns. This indicates geographical limits to the current organizing model and highlights the limitations of urban scholarship derived from large cities unrepresentative of urbanity as a whole.     

文化创意产业集聚区效益的定性分析——以广州市为例

我国大城市的文化创意产业是借城市更新置换出来的土地而集聚发展起来的。本文以广州市为例,在阐释近年来借城市更新而发展起来的文化创意产业集聚区用地特征的基础上,试图分别从经济效益和社会效益两个角度,评估集聚区已产生的效益和预期的效益。研究显示,广州的文化创意产业集聚区可以从多方面对城市产生积极的影响,但由于存在一些尚未解决的问题,其效益仍未能全面体现。总体而言,集聚区的社会效益比较容易实现,也较为明显,经济效益则有待进一步提升。     

中国县域旅游城市文化产业安全现状、实践与思考——以赤水市为例

赤水被誉为"黔北明珠""、国际最佳休闲旅游城市",是历史文化悠久、贵州省最具影响力的县级国际旅游城市。赤水在全国范围内知名度不高,旅游综合实力不强,国际影响力与"国际最佳休闲旅游城市"这一称号实难相称,文化基础转化为税收、旅游收入等硬实力的能力不足,文化软实力距丽江、平遥等一流县域旅游城市存在一定差距。本文试从文化产业安全角度进行研究,梳理历史现状、剖析问题成因,结合实践给出对策。