Book Launch - Cities, Cultural Policy and Governance
Centre for Creative Industries May 29 2012
Gay Hawkins
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
University of Queensland
Let me cut straight to the chase and say – this is a great book.
Conceptually innovative, phenomenally wide-ranging and empirically rich, Cities,
Cultural Policy and Governance offers a new way to understand the centrality of
the city, of the metropolis, in the generation of cultures – formal, profitable,
informal, non-marketised, globalized, local and more.
As Volume 5 in the groundbreaking Sage series ‘Cultures and Globalization’ – this
book takes us into the city - well many cities in fact - to investigate exactly how
urban conglomerations have become critical nodes in complex networks of
global flows of people and cultural goods. And to show how cities have also
become central to emerging forms of transnational governance.
It’s a banality to say that cities matter – this book shows us how they are coming
to matter more and more and why. Not only are more people living in cities than
ever before, but city powers (literal and symbolic) are increasingly displacing the
role of the national in a multitude of different registers. As the introduction by
Isar, Hoelscher and Anheier claims ‘the globalization issues of today seem to peak
in cities’.
In this way then the book argues for the value of a city centric perspective on a
range of pressing contemporary issues from immigration to the future of civil
society. This is a convincing claim that is completely endorsed by the nine
conceptual chapters that follow the intro on issues such as:

the dynamics of branding,
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
debates around creative cities theory and practice,

governing diversity and multi-ethnic urban spaces,

and the geopolitics of global governance.
The value of the city as a conceptual tool or framework to think with is further
endorsed with the extraordinary series of case studies on particular cities that
then follows. From Abu Dhabi to Istanbul to Amsterdam we range across a
remarkable variety of analyses of the multiplicity of urban forms and issues and
also their resonance and reiteration across vast geographic and historical
difference. We get a wonderful sense of how cities are both unique but also
similar – shaped by the specificities of their own patterns of immigration,
economic development and forms of rule but also wrestling with the same issues
of how to manage millions of people in confined spaces all struggling to have
meaningful lives.
For those of you who have not yet read the book – and I urge you to – this gives
you a short account of its structure and focus. The singular achievement of this
focus is that it completely undoes a category like ‘global city’ – by opening up this
increasingly clichéd term to close and considered new thinking and empirical
investigation.
For example in Chpt 1 Katherine Sarikakis asks what does ‘global’ mean in terms
of new forms of cultural and financial policy processes – and the ways these
policy fields come to intersect and interact? She offers a wonderfully rich
answer to this question that includes some fascinating ‘policy maps’ that trace
how international policy regimes get played out in specific urban cites and
constellations of networked institutions. She shows how the hegemonic power of
various corporations, govt bodies and NGOs becomes durable and is enhanced by
the dynamics of urban clustering and increasingly dense international
connections and networks of co-operation. I have yet to read a more convincing
account of how cultural governance in the city is implicated in global capital
flows and globally active governance mechanisms.
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Similar conceptual innovation is offered in Ramon Lobato’s incisive account of
the centrality of informal economies in the organization of cultural production,
circulation and consumption. Again we see how ‘the global city’ becomes a
complex hybridised mix of the regulated and unregulated, of local networks of
circulation mixed up with global flows, and of markets forms that reveal the
remarkable diversity of processes of economization. It is impossible to think of
‘the market’ as a singular, uniform organization after reading this chapter
In Stuart’s essay on the ‘Creative Cities Discourse: production and/or
consumption’ we see him wrestle with the issue of Brisbane - and maybe I am
projecting here or reading between the lines - but it seems to me that the subtext
here is how useful is a Creative Cities framework when you are confronted with a
distinctively uncreative city such as Brisbane: a city where all the cultural
production action seems to be largely elsewhere? Freeing up policy is one
strategy but I’m not sure that the solution of waiting until we all become
consumer/producer hybrids is really going to deliver. The hidden issue that this
chpt raises is in what sense is it possible to legislate for creativity? In what sense
is the force of lively cultural production dependent on the viability of a market,
on consumers willing to buy cultural goods, or a variety of other impossible to
determine variables? By way of comparison he looks at suburban creativities, at
Beijing, at Seoul and at Lagos. This comparative gaze is fascinating – particularly
when you try and think about Brisbane and Lagos in the same breath????
Lagos is emblematic of the planet of slums – of a future of cities as catastrophic
sites of absent infrastructure, gross inequality, and phenomenal experimentation
and everyday creativity as people struggle to make a life. Lagos has also been
investigated by one of the world’s leading contemporary architects Rem
Koolhass in a Harvard funded project on the city. Koolhaas went to Lagos with
students over a 2 year period trying to figure out how the city functioned, how
people made do without functioning water, electricity, waste mgt, housing and
more. Stuart discusses the vibrant pirate film industry there, the rise of
Nollywood as evidence of a vibrant creativity emerging without any state
support. Koolhaas discusses the entrepreneurialism of water, housing and
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transport solutions that seek to adapt to chaos – creating ingenious alternative
systems. For Koolhaas Lagos is at the forefront of a troubling globalizing
modernity, as he says ‘Lagos may not be catching up with us – we may be
catching up with it’.
My point here is not to celebrate the ingenuity of poverty, to claim some
essential and life affirming relation between massive hardship and creativity.
Rather it is to say that we are witnessing multiple global cities of the future
where the possibilities or conditions for creativity are immensely variable and
where forced innovation and adaptation probably doesn’t feel at all like creativity
more like survival.
This kind of tension between the top down policy driven forms of urban
governance and cultural regulation, and bottom up practices of survival and
everyday innovation is – to my mind – best explored in Asu Askoy and Kevin
Robbins essay on Istanbul, one of my favourites in the book.
I chose to read this chapter because I am going to Istanbul for a holiday in 2
weeks. And if that sounds like some bourgeois cosmopolitan cliché it is. Istanbul
is right up there as the wannabe trendy person’s must visit destination, rated
European Capital of Culture in 2010 – Istanbul ticks a lot of boxes in terms of the
links between cultural policy, gentrification and rapid economic growth. ‘Cool
Istanbul’ emerges in this nexus.
Askoy and Robbins begin with a discussion of ‘urban atmosphere’ – of that
ineffable phenomenon you sense of affective power connected to space, street
life, and the overall exp of an urban environment as alive. They then go on to
explore how the area of Beyoglu in the oldest part of Istanbul – a heartland of its
cosmopolitan and immensely culturally diverse history – is being made over by a
city govt intent on controlling development in the interests of building tourist
markets and the emerging brand of the city. In this process the local artists,
bohemians and urban immigrant poor that have coexisted for a long time – and
that were crucial to ‘atmosphere’ - are being pitted against each other or
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squeezed out – in the interests of cleaning up the image and making the area
more appealing to visitors. It’s a classic story but here we see how it plays out in
the specificity of Istanbul’s history and political process. What the authors argue
with such force is for the right for people in Istanbul to live ‘inspirational lives’.
Not aspirational lives, which we hear a lot about in Australia, but lives that are
valued because they are worth living and because they matter and because they
make a difference to defining the present moment, to making an atmosphere.
Sure this is an idealistic formulation but it foregrounds how urban atmosphere is
also often a signal of atmospheres of democracy – as Latour terms it.
Of forms of civic interaction and exchange and tolerance where people from
diverse backgrounds in cities are able to lead lives marked by belonging,
permanence and connection rather than radical vulnerability, disturbance and
conflict. Having some control over urban space seems to be central to civic
atmospheres and this control means allowing for diverse activities and
interactions rather than standardization and incipient authoritarianism.
There is much more I could say about this book – including the wealth of
comparative data amassed in the City Suites section at the end documenting how
different trends in urbanization play out in 9 sample cities – but we are running
out of time and I’d rather finish with the panel.
So let me conclude with congratulations to everyone involved in producing such
a richly documented and intellectually sophisticated account of the diversity of
city cultures and their variable relations with global processes.
It’s a pleasure to launch such a rich and important collection.