Will the real Creative City please stand up?

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Will the real Creative City pleasestand up?Paul ChattertonPublished online: 01 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Paul Chatterton (2000): Will the real Creative City please stand up?,City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 4:3, 390-397

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390 CITY VOL. 4 NO. 3

Will the real Creative Cityplease stand up?

Paul Chatterton

Something has been troubling me. It isthat, apparently, the cities we live inhave become creative. What I mean

by this is that the various attempts totackle social and economic decline in urbanareas over the last few decades haverecently found new expression throughdiscourses of creativity and the ‘creativecity’. These discourses have made their wayinto the centre of urban policy debates(Landry and Bianchini, 1995; Landry, 2000)and have been pursued through severalinternational conferences (Glasgow, 1994;Helsinki, 1996; Huddersfield, 2000). Severalcommentaries have also emerged on howthe creative city concept has been put intopractice by urban authorities (e.g. see TonyHarcup in issue 4(2) of City in relation toLeeds).

As a result of this new vocabulary,certain cities such as Barcelona, Cologne,Bologna and even Huddersfield havegained the tag ‘creative city’. But whatdoes this rather nebulous term mean? Itrefers to a new ‘method of strategic urbanplanning and examines how people canthink, plan and act creatively’ (Landry,2000, p. xii). A city is being creative, then,when people adopt new and different waysof looking at the problems which they face.In what follows, I want to explore some ofthe ideas associated with the creative cityconcept which were explored at an epony-mously named conference in Huddersfieldin May 2000. I then want to take a closerlook at some issues which arise from amore critical analysis of the creative cityconcept. In particular, I want to explore in

more detail the links between ethics, valuesand creativity, and the types of creativitywhich are tolerated within the creativecity.

The most recent Creative Cities con-ference occurred in Huddersfield, WestYorkshire, near where I was born amongstthe mill towns of the east Pennines whichthese days I didn’t much associate with eithercityness or creativity. While people’s percep-tions of Huddersfield may extend to clothmills and its role at the centre of textileproduction during the industrial revolution,Lowry’s matchstick people, or perhaps thenew McAlpine football stadium, for fewerpeople, I imagine, it would extend to that ofa creative urban milieu. Nevertheless, severalsignificant shifts have occurred in this townand it has experienced a partial cultural, andin some ways economic, turnaround. Indeed,it often comes as a surprise to learn thatHuddersfield includes 1660 listed buildings,an amount second only to Bristol and West-minster in the whole of England.

While much of the recent upturn may be aresult of its propinquity to its more flourish-ing and cosmopolitan urban neighbours ofLeeds and Manchester, several rounds ofEuropean aid and the establishment of auniversity in 1992, over the last decade thetown has embarked upon a number of itsown innovative and risky policies to developthe creative industries in the local economy.The foremost of these, the ‘HuddersfieldCreative Town Initiative’, established when itwas selected as one of the 26 EuropeanUnion Urban Pilot Projects (UPPs) out ofover 500 entrants, was used as the backdrop

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CHATTERTON: THE REAL CREATIVE CITY? 391

for the conference. Through this Project,Huddersfield received £2 million to spend on16 projects over three years to highlight whatcould be achieved if people thought, plannedand acted creatively. The reasoning behindthe Creative Town Initiative is explained inthe following way:

‘Medium and small sized towns likeHuddersfield whose locational advantages,natural resources and traditional skills basehave long since disappeared exist all overEurope. Many have gone into decline,perhaps terminally, so they have not beenable to adjust to the demands of the newglobalised economy. They often suffer deepseated deprivation with all the socialconsequences that entails and live in a cycleof exacerbating difficulty. Huddersfield untilrecently was just such a place, but over thelast decade it has fought its way out of thisvicious cycle by recognising and nurturingwhat the people of Huddersfield can offerto their town’s renewal in the face ofadversity.’

The strategy for renewal which emerged inHuddersfield was based upon ‘principledopportunism’—in effect taking advantage ofopportunities in the market economy. TheInitiative’s approach focused upon develop-ing a distinctive cultural industries quarteraround several projects such as CreativeLofts—combined living and working unitsfor young entrepreneurs, the LAB project fortraining local unemployed people and theKirklees Media Centre. In all, it has achievedsome success, for example, it has identifiedand supported 6000 ‘creative firms’ whichearn £150 million and now account for 4% ofthe workforce. However, what would havebeen achieved without this framework is notclear, nor are the effects of prioritizing thecultural industries rather than other clusterssuch as the environmental sector.

From this backdrop, the conferenceexplored a host of other examples of creativeurbanism from around the world. Theseincluded Wise Eyes Communication whichdevelops indigenous arts and crafts in schools

in Durban, South Africa; the Gate Project inTurin entitled ‘Living not Leaving’ which,partly funded through the EuropeanRegional Development Fund, aims to involvepeople in the regeneration of the largestopen-air market in Europe; and Kulturkœl-dren Tapestry Weaving project which focuseson the integration of immigrant, refugee andDanish women into mainstream society.

Several commentaries were also given fromspeakers on the nature of creativity and thecreative city. Charles Landry, architect of theconcept, suggested that we need to make anumber of ‘software changes’ to the way wethink to create a high-risk, low-blame culturewhere the change process is not elite-led. SirPeter Hall outlined the usual aspects of a neweconomy after de-industrialization associ-ated with knowledge and creative industries,and Charlie Leadbeater, author of Living onThin Air (see review in issue 4(2) of City)trawled through the well-worn buzz wordsof the knowledge economy such as ‘dynamicclusters’ and ‘adaptive innovation’. On amore inventive note, Professor Ken Robin-son, Chair of the National Advisory Com-mittee on Creative and Cultural Education,gave an impassioned and entertaining speechconcerning the way in which the currenteducation system stifles rather than promotescreativity. He summed up by saying that the‘education system needs a more generousdefinition of creativity to harness people’stalents’. Dr Andy Pratt from the LondonSchool of Economics outlined that creativityentailed collectivity, reflexivity, boundaryspanning and risk taking while Dr FrancoBianchini, from DeMontford University,spoke of the need for contradiction withincreativity and made the rather insightfulcomment that ‘most creative acts in historydo not happen under conditions ofdemocracy’.

The agenda set out for the creative citythrough this conference, then, seems excitingand ambitious. It should be. Three-quartersof the European population live in urbanareas, much of which is blighted, in bothimage and reality, by poverty, poor health

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and housing, crime and environmental degra-dation. The need for cities to regain theircreativity has intuitive appeal—many citiesare anachronistic giants struggling to restruc-ture out of their industrial past and urgentaction is needed to build a new urbaneconomy. Much of this new economy isbased upon the well-worn couplet of ‘learn-ing society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ andsome notion that cultural or symbolic ratherthan productive industries have a key role toplay in this transformation.

So, while the rhetoric of the creative cityspeaks of a ‘call to action’ and a ‘paradigmshift’ in the way we think about cities, whatdoes the concept have to offer for theproblems facing cities? The concept hasmoved from mere rhetoric over the lastdecade and could provide good medicine forurban areas around the world which arebeing slowly crushed by the weight ofunimaginative bureaucracy and entrenchedpower blocs. In this sense, a conceptualtoolkit has been developed which has beenadopted by many urban authorities over thelast 10 years. Following this toolkit, to becreative is simply to do something in a newway. The toolkit is laden with buzz words:‘innovation matrix’, ‘holism’ and ‘creativelifecycles’ and draws upon gurus of creativethinking such as Edward De Bono and hisconcepts of lateral thinking. Rather thanpresenting narratives on how this toolkit hasenabled creative urban renewal in particularplaces, I want to explore critically a numberof issues within the concept.

The first relates to its tendencies towardsreductionist and simplistic understandings ofthe processes of urban and regional develop-ment. In particular, the ‘toolkit’ approachdirects people to opportunistic rather thanstrategic thinking, which can overlook ormarginalize more structural problems facedby urban areas such as their place in theuneven flow of capital around the globe, lackof democratic accountability and an unsus-tainable growth of ecological footprints.These problems remain intact while a moresanguine story of urbanism is written

through the lens of the creative city. Theexample of Newcastle upon Tyne illustratesmany of these points. While ambitious cul-ture- and creative-led renewal strategies arebeing put into place in the city centre, mostnotably through large-scale corporate leisuredevelopments, the expansion of the Quaysarea and its joint bid with Gateshead for theEuropean City of Culture, other parts of thecity continue to experience problems of highunemployment, out-migration and a declinein welfare service provision.

In many instances, then, the creative city islittle more than a rhetorical device which canplacate the hearts and minds of local council-lors and politicians that they are actuallydoing something whilst doing hardly any-thing at all. In practice, it is part of a broadershift towards new forms of entrepreneurialurban management used to boost the imageof ailing cities and persuade highly mobileglobal capital and professional and serviceclasses that urban areas are interesting andsafe places to live (Harvey, 1989; Jessop,1997). It is also about presenting a sanitizedpicture of urban life. Peter Hall in a homageto Keynes’ view of the growth of leisure timerecently commented:

‘In the intervening years [since the 1930s],something remarkable has happened: in theadvanced economies, we are almost arrivedat that condition . . . in that we canguarantee the resources necessary for atleast a decent minimum of existence.’ (2000,p. 640)

Aspects of the creative city approach, then,continue to overlook the stark inequalitieswhich characterize life for countless urbandwellers.

Second, numerous discourses haveemerged to describe contemporary urbanlife, yet some striking variances exist betweenthem, especially those about evening andnight-time activity in cities. In particular,while the creative city concept may pointtowards the night-time economy as a place ofvitality, serendipity and as a new source of

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wealth for cities, recent comments made bythe media, police and government havefocused upon the increasing lawlessness ofcity centres at night. A language of ‘yobculture’ has emerged to outline the linksbetween evening city centre activity, highalcohol consumption and violence/crime anda growing conflict between city centre resi-dents and revellers.1 By introducing newpowers to instantly shut down pubs for 48hours and proposals for on-the-spot fines forrowdy behaviour, a war is being waged onwhat the government sees as a ‘yob city’rather than a creative city. As the chairman ofthe Police Federation commented: ‘chaoticscenes in town centres are certain to increaseunless more investment is poured into polic-ing . . . We are living in a pretty violent place.Lots of our towns and cities during certaintimes are pretty tough’ (The Guardian, 3 July2000, p. 5). The claim by the Police Federa-tion in May 2000 that British city centres arebeing taken over by ‘anarchy and disorder’ atpub closing times presents a picture of citycentres as ‘no go’ areas during the night.

Third, creative and cultural developmentschemes in cities pioneered by independent,small-scale operators are now increasinglybeing squeezed out and dwarfed by large-scale, profit- and car-oriented corporatedevelopments such as multiplexes, casinos,super-pubs, shopping malls and office parks.John Hannigan’s Fantasy City (1998) charac-terized this corporate cultural city throughthe emergence of enclaved ‘urbanoid environ-ments’ dedicated to the consumption needs ofmiddle-class consumers. In particular, corpo-rate ownership of city centre entertainmentand leisure infrastructures (bars, clubs, restau-rants, cafes) has never been higher in Britishcity centres and rising property values blocksmall-scale independent operators in favourof nationally recognized branded entertain-ment outlets. While the inflationary dynamicof city-centre property markets shouldermuch of the blame, some must also lie withlocal authorities who do not take a strongerline on the types of cultural developmentsoccurring in city centres. At some point,

public bodies have to say no to greater levelsof large-scale corporate developments inurban cultural infrastructures.

Moreover, the creative city concept needsto be tempered through a grounding in notjust the ‘buzz’ and glamour of cities, but alsothe ‘hum’—the everyday, mundane, the ordi-nary and the drabness which makes up lifefor urban dwellers. In contrast to the newcorporate playscapes in cities, large swathesof urban areas function on a less glamorousand spectacular basis and meet a range ofother, more basic, needs for its inhabitants.Creativity, then, is all around us in the‘ordinary’ city—in the markets, taxi ranks,bingo halls or the betting shop (Figure 1).

A further difficult issue concerns theownership of the creative city concept andwhether poor communities in cities are fullyengaged in agenda making. The simpleanswer is no, unless progress is made towardseliminating fundamental structural inequal-ities of wealth and power. Much of theagenda is still elite-led and we have toquestion whether we are serious about open-ing up the creative process to the mostmarginalized groups in society. Recentexperiences from the New Deal for Commu-nities initiatives in the UK have demon-strated the extreme reluctance which localand central government bodies have indevolving democratic and financial power.Concern towards social inclusion does lie atthe heart of the creative city and this is aworthy conviction. However, it raises theissue of who is doing the including andexcluding and why. Many groups do not seethemselves as ‘excluded’ and are not waitingfor power to be devolved to them and arebusily being creative in their own way.

Which leads us to the final, and in manyways the most fundamental, issue concerningwhat is meant by creativity in the creativecity. In a similar way to sustainability, theterm creativity is so ambiguous and overusedthat it is rendered meaningless. Everyone canbuy into the concept—after all who doesn’twant to be creative? However, what willsociety tolerate under the banner of crea-

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tivity? The dominant examples of creativitystill come from the artistic and culturalworld—a theatre in education group, a smallcraft workshop, a media centre, a recordingstudio. What happens when we look beyondthese limits?

For some, graffiti or subvertising, whetherartistic or political, is a creative act concern-

ing one’s relationship with the surroundingenvironment and society but others includ-ing the police and local authorities disagree;squatting is a creative use of long-standingderelict urban space, but private landlordsand the police will disagree; the (dis)organi-zations of ‘reclaim the streets’ and ‘criticalmass’ have devised imaginative and creative

Figure 1 Life in the ordinary city. Photograph: M. Duckett.

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ways, often using the internet, to highlightthe dehumanization of our cities by automo-bile dependency, but again many includingthe police will disagree; those who ‘guerrillagardened’ drew upon the creative impulses ofpagan festivals associated with May Day totransform the sterility of Parliament Squarein London, but again, most politicians, thepress and the public disagreed.

Moreover, numerous ‘anti-capitalist’events, variously dubbed J18, N30, M1 andmost recently S26 in Prague, have beenlinking struggles all over the world as acreative response to what many protesters,human rights and peace campaigners andanti-globalization activists see as the excessesand cruelty of global institutions such as theInternational Monetary Fund, World Bankand the World Trade Organization. Suchevents, drawing upon direct rather thanrepresentational forms of democracy, derivetheir energy from the creativity and inven-tiveness of participants. Old and new mediaforms, ranging from web pages and videocameras to home-made banners and whistles,are used to convey messages and make the

event. The following photographs (Shown inFigures 1 and 2), taken in moments of protestand liminality in cities, offer contrastingresponses on the theme of urban creative.

This brings us on to the link betweenethics, values, democracy and creativity.Does creativity entail any shared values orethical codes? It was suggested at the con-ference that creativity is not the same asfreedom of action or expression but entailsresponsibility and a sense of limits. Moreo-ver, when an action induces fear it certainly isnot creative. So from this perspective, crea-tivity demands responsibility and duty. Butto whom? At the heart of a creative city is acreative citizen, and the creative citizen isencouraged to share the vision for the crea-tive city laid out by the civic leaders. It isclear from the above examples that somepeople hold values which are not accepted bycivic leaders—their actions may be creative,but their means are seen as undemocratic. Ifmost creative acts in history did not happenunder conditions of democracy, then takingcreativity seriously entails living with andembracing ethical contradictions and con-

Figure 2 Police ‘Tactical Support Group’ force people along Whitehall into London’s Trafalgar Square as thousands‘guerrilla gardened’, Parliament Square, May 2000. Photograph: J. Pickerill.

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flicts and challenging dominant social normsand laws.

So, other ways forward? Firstly, are citiesthe best model for unleashing creativitywhile ensuring decent levels of equality?Radical thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin,Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard andLewis Mumford have all pointed towards theneed for the decentralization and deconcen-tration to avoid the negative effects of urbanlife such as overcrowding, poverty, environ-mental decay and alienation. More recently,Colin Ward (1989) and Murray Bookchin(1992) have convincingly made claims forthinner, greener and more humane urbansettlements. Creativity which is based uponmore equal and localized human relation-ships, then, may only be possible outside thecity as we know it.

Further, education is at the heart of crea-tivity. Ken Robinson’s auguries concerningthe damage done to creative instincts by theconventional schooling system where youngpeople, with all their latent creativity, growup to be uncreative adults stifled by thehumdrum of modern working life asaccountants, call centre operators or teachers.

The challenge, it seems, would be to create aneducation system which doesn’t just valueacademic intelligence, but also creativity inall its guises, especially those which challengesocial norms. A way forward, then, is tobuild an agenda for creativity which chal-lenges rather than reinforces social and eco-nomic norms and is serious about embeddingradical alternatives and shifting power andresources. However, the weakness of thecurrent creative city concept is that for it tobe acceptable for a liberal audience of policymakers and politicians it has to dilute orexclude unpalatable definitions of creativity.

One of the speakers at the conference,Julia Middleton of Common Purpose, sug-gested that we need a ‘mass of little solu-tions rather than a masterplan’. What kindsof little solutions are these to be? While wecan all agree to activities which tinker at themargins such as Local Exchange TradingSystems (LETS), credit unions, action zonesand even the odd protest outside McDo-nalds, what about actions which presentstronger challenges to the way we live ourlives? It was also suggested by Julia Mid-dleton that a good citizen is a difficult

Figure 3 Protestors gather round the scaffold tripod at ‘Reclaim the Streets’, Newcastle, 1999. Photograph: J. Pickerill.

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citizen—one who knows how the systemworks and is able to challenge it. Mythoughts turned to the three McLibel trialsand the unbreakable creativity of Morrisand Steel, the GM protestors ripping upcrops in Watlington, Oxfordshire in 1999 ina defiant act of creativity against corporategiants in the bio-food industry, or RachelWenham and Rosie James from TridentPloughshares, who despite facing prisonsentences, creatively smashed up a Tridentsubmarine in Barrow in Furness last year.

But how serious are we about such ‘diffi-cult’ and ‘challenging’ forms of creativity?Are the Creative City’s progenitors ready foran army of creative, difficult and oftenunlawful citizens to chip away at the worldwe live in, in the hope of replacing it with adifferent one? I agree with the high principlesof the creative city agenda in that there needsto be a paradigm shift of radical proportionsin the way we conduct our economic andsocial life. But in practice, who will take upthis agenda and champion the occasionalnecessity for undemocratic, and illegal, crea-tivity? If we are to take the creative cityconcept to its logical extreme, then theCreative City also becomes a toolkit forurban disorder and unlawful activity. Is thisthe intention? If those promoting the creativecity agenda are serious about creative acts inwhatever form, then they need to pay moreattention to legislation such as the CriminalJustice Act (1994) and the Prevention ofTerrorism Act (2000) which are eroding theright to protest and act creatively. TheCreative City in its liberal guise, then,remains a non sequitur. Until we have aserious debate concerning values and ethics,the creative city will remain a comfortable‘feel-good’ concept for consultants, policymakers and politicians rather than a seriousagenda for radical change.

Notes

1 See ‘Blair to propose 48 hour shutdown for rowdypubs in summit on lawlessness’, The Guardian, 3 July

2000; ‘Police win powers to shut down thug bars’,The Observer, 2 July 2000; ‘Colonising the night’,The Guardian, 12 September 2000; ‘Straw to targetdrink-related crime’, The Guardian, 18 July 2000;‘Yob culture turns life in north’s “party toon” into anightmare’, Independent on Sunday, 16 April 2000,p. 5.More information can be found on Huddersfield’sCreative Town Conference at:http://www.creativetown.com/Examples of other forms of urban creativity can befound at:http://www.eco-action.org/efau/aulast.htmlhttp://www.agp.org/agp/http://www.gn.apc.org/rts/http://come.to/londoncm/http://tapp.cjb.net/An earlier draft of this article which includesresponses from other authors can be found on theUrban and Regional Regeneration Bulletin:http://www.ncl.ac.uk/curds/urrb/

References

Bookchin, M. (1992) Urbanisation Without Cities. NewYork: Black Rose Press.

Hall, P. (2000) ‘Creative cities and economicdevelopment’, Urban Studies 37(4), pp. 639–649.

Hannigan, J. (1998) Fantasy City. Pleasure and Profit inthe Postmodern Metropolis. London: Routledge.

Harvey, D. (1989) ‘From managerialism toentrepreneurialism: the transformation of urbangovernance in late capitalism’, GeografiskaAnnaler 71B(1), pp. 3–17.

Jessop, B. (1997) ‘The entrepreneurial city: reimagininglocalities, redesigning economic governance orrestructuring capital’, in Jewson and McGregor(eds) Transforming Cities. London: Routledge.

Landry, C. (2000) The Creative City. A Toolkit for UrbanInnovation. London: Earthscan.

Landry, C. and Bianchini, F. (1995) The Creative City.London: Demos.

Ward, C. (1989) Welcome Thinner City. London:Bedford Square Press.

Dr Paul Chatterton is lecturer in Geographyat The Centre for Urban and RegionalDevelopment Studies, University of New-castle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne NE17RU, UK, and an activist and campaigner onvarious environmental and social issues.E-mail: [email protected]

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Will the real Creative City please stand up?