Creative City Limits: Urban Cultural Economy in a New Era of Austerity

在过去的二十年里，英国的研究和政策议程强调创造力是经济复兴，规划和设计的强大新“动力”。特别是，“创意城市”已经成为一个有影响力的模板和叙事，努力刺激增长和振兴城市社区。政策制定者和规划者热切地委托并采用了一系列创意城市战略，以获得预期的就业和收入增加效果，从尝试培育艺术区到努力“孵化”创意产业集群。它们还努力鼓励建立知识资源、社会多样性和文化媒介的重要基础设施;这不仅是提高城市经济活力和竞争力的一种方式，而且越来越多地成为解决社会凝聚力问题和转变公民身份观念的一种手段。在日常生活层面，建筑、设计和软件等创意产业重塑了商业交易和公共服务消费的方式。1999年成立的政府城市设计顾问CABE，可以被视为公共和私人对文化提升或文化参与城市空间的兴趣日益增长的具体产物。2008年9月出现的信贷紧缩和随之而来的全球经济危机对这一创造性的经济议程提出了重大考验。可以说，创意城市的概念是在信贷推动的金融服务和真实的房地产长期繁荣的背景下蓬勃发展的。政策制定者和文化从业者往往受益于、依赖和瞄准新形式的高端消费、企业赞助和以房地产为主导的城市复兴。因此，过去18个月英国金融业的急剧崩溃和房地产市场的暴跌，对过去20年占主导地位的创意议程提出了重大挑战。这一新的研究网络将为重新评估创造力在城市经济增长中的地位提供一个重要论坛。它将借鉴在过去二十年的长期繁荣中基本上被政策制定者边缘化的批判性学术观点。与此同时，它将确定现有研究和实践中的重点差距，这些差距往往源于未能在不同但相关的学科对话中建立联系。该网络着手解决以下四个关键问题：（一）为什么文化、知识和城市之间的关系是理解英国经济结构转型的核心？（二）近几十年来，艺术家、建筑师和其他创意从业者、机构和网络在增强和质疑经济政策和投机议程方面发挥了什么作用？城市复兴以及英国建筑和城市设计的变化如何体现了新的劳动分工、阶级结构和不均衡增长模式？㈣文化、技术和城市在可持续性和社会正义问题上未来可发挥什么样的民主作用？该网络将由伦敦大学学院城市实验室和CABE协调，并将于2010年11月至2011年5月在伦敦、索尔福德和普利茅斯举办四次研讨会。这些活动将汇集英国和海外学者、艺术家、规划师、建筑师和其他主要利益攸关方，并将通过一个在线论坛和2011年在泰特英国美术馆举行的一次公共活动进一步讨论。该网络产生的材料和调查结果将被汇编成一份政策报告和一本经过编辑的学术论文集。这些不仅将对现有的创意城市模式进行地理和历史上的细致入微的批评，而且将作为重塑政策和概念框架的重要手段，以刺激新的创意城市未来。

The last two decades have marked the emergence and proliferation in the UK of research and policy agendas emphasising creativity as a powerful new 'motive force' for economic regeneration, planning and design. In particular, the 'creative city' has acted as an influential template and narrative for efforts at stimulating growth and rejuvenating urban communities. Policy-makers and planners have eagerly commissioned and adopted an array of creative city strategies to reap perceived employment and income-enhancing effects, ranging from attempts at nurturing art districts to efforts at 'incubating' clusters of creative industries. They have also sought to encourage a critical infrastructure of intellectual resources, social diversity and cultural intermediaries; not only as a way of improving cities' economic vitality and competitiveness, but increasingly as a means of addressing issues of social cohesion and transforming notions of civic identity. At the level of everyday life the creative industries of architecture, design and software have reshaped the way business is transacted and public services are consumed. The establishment in 1999 of a governmental urban design advisor, CABE, can be seen as the specific product of this growing public and private interest in culturally upgrading or culturally engaging with urban spaces.The credit crunch and accompanying global economic crisis which came to the fore in September 2008 poses significant tests for this creative economic agenda. Arguably the creative city notion has flourished within the context of a long credit-fuelled boom in financial services and real estate. Policy-makers and cultural practitioners have often benefited from, relied on and targeted new forms of upmarket consumption, corporate sponsorship and property-led urban regeneration. The dramatic collapse in the UK's financial sector and property market slump over the last 18 months therefore presents significant challenges for the dominant creative agenda of the last 20 years. This new research network will offer an important forum to reassess the place of creativity in urban economic growth. It will draw on critical academic perspectives largely sidelined by policy-makers during the long boom of the last two decades. At the same time it will identify gaps of emphasis within existing research and practice, often stemming from a failure to connect across distinct yet related disciplinary conversations. The network sets out to address the following four key questions:i) Why is the relationship between culture, knowledge and cities central to understanding the transforming economic structure of the UK?ii) What role have artists, architects and other creative practitioners, institutions and networks played in augmenting and contesting economic policy and speculative agendas in recent decades?iii) How has the urban renaissance and the changing design of the UK's buildings and cities manifested new divisions of labour, class structures and patterns of uneven growth?iv) What future democratic role can culture, technology and cities play in issues of sustainability and social justice?The network will be co-ordinated by UCL Urban Laboratory and CABE, and will be organised around four workshops to be held in London, Salford and Plymouth between November 2010 and May 2011. These will bring together UK and overseas academics, artists, planners, architects and other key stakeholders, and will be further discussed through an online forum and a public event to be held at Tate Britain in 2011. The material and findings produced by the network will be assembled to create a policy report and an edited collection of academic essays. These will provide not only a geographical and historically nuanced critique of the existing creative city model, but act as an important means of reshaping the policy and conceptual frameworks necessary to stimulate new creative urban futures.