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April 23, 2010
In his Cultural Policy Blog Ben Eltham refers to recent paper by Stuart Cunningham and Terry Flew, entitled Creative Industries after the First Decade of Debate. Eltham's interest is in the debate about the relationship between neo-liberalism and creative industries.
Mine is with their emphasis on the way that cultural policy since the 1970s had been moving from a supply-side, artist-centered approach to one that gave stronger consideration to consumer demand
and cultural markets and to the small to-medium enterprises (SMEs) in the creative industries.Cunningham and Terry Flew say:
the creative industries have come to evolve what has been termed an “hourglass” structure, with a small number of major players in each sector sitting alongside a myriad of individual enterprises, small companies, and networks of creative talent ... As these individuals and small groups are relatively new and not highly concentrated, and as “portfolio careers” characterized by multiple jobs across different sectors are often the norm for these segments of the creative workforce, they lack the political power and lobbying clout of big corporations, established trade unions, and traditional arts organizations. Yet there is growing evidence that such loosely configured creative networks are a core source of innovation in the arts, media, and culture..
This was meant to be a point against those who argue for a neo-liberal governance of the creative industries. I cannot see it myself, but I do think that it is an accurate account of the emergence creative industries in the new digital economy. This emergence is associated with the gentrification of the inner city that runs counter to the anti-urban discourse of suburbia. The latter was based on a flight from the crime, violence, squalor and disease of the inner city that started in the 1950s.
The inner city is seen as a “cesspool” of “social parasites, druggies, skinheads, homeless and lefties”—a conglomeration of human misfits. Once largely abandoned to the workingclass amid postwar suburban expansion, relinquished to the poor and unemployed asreservations for racial and ethnic minorities, the terrain of the inner city is suddenly valuable again, perversely profitable.
This process of gentrification and the creative industries has shifted from the comparatively marginal preoccupation in a certain niche of the realestate industry in the 1970s and 1980s to the cutting edge of urban change. It is is simultaneously a response and contributor to a series of widerglobal transformations: global economic expansion in the 1980s; the restructuring of national and urban economies in advanced capitalist countries toward services, recreation and consumption; and the emergence of a global hierarchy of
world, national and regional cities.
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