Policy and Protest in the Creative City
Despite vast amounts of money being invested in Liverpool, the UK’s 2015 indices of multiple deprivation found the city to be the fourth most deprived local authority district in the country. Culture-led regeneration has been a central tenet of Liverpool’s economic ‘revival’ since the 1980s. Yet, the implementation of ‘creative cities’ policy has been contested in numerous ways—it’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy, Anthony Killlick’s case study shows. A summary.
In the decade 2010-2020 Liverpool City Council will have had 64 per cent of its central government funding cut. According to the Centre for Cities, that amounts to a reduction of around £816 per person annually. Deficits such as these have been cauterised by councils all over the UK through the sell-off of public assets and a sharp increase in redundancies in many councils. In the case of Liverpool, a recent investment prospectus points out that the city now attracts £1billion worth of private investment per annum towards a pipeline of £14billion in investment schemes. This level of surplus capital absorption has rendered huge changes to the ‘fabric’ of the city.
Yet despite the billions being poured into Liverpool, the UK’s 2015 indices of multiple deprivation found the city to be the fourth most deprived local authority district in the country, with the most severe deprivation being found at the ‘inner core’ which surrounds the city centre. Culture-led regeneration has been a central tenet of Liverpool’s economic ‘revival’ since the redevelopment of the Albert Dock in the 1980s. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly given the above comments, the implementation of creative cities policy has been contested in numerous ways. As Kenn Taylor notes, Liverpool has a history of community-led regeneration strategies that are conducive with a ‘do-it-yourself mentality’ whereby disenfranchised communities have taken such matters into their own hands.
Recent efforts to construct a ‘creative quarter’ on the city’s north shore dock are indicative of this, as residents have mobilised against the project. This is the sort of ‘unintended consequence’ of capital expansion described by Peter Lindner in his work on the disparity between creative cities policy and its ‘on the ground’ implementation. Lindner points out how, rather than simply being seamlessly transferrable from one city to the next, such policy is ‘articulated’ in site-specific ways that arise from its meeting with localised forms of urban governance and discourse, which it then both transforms and is transformed by.
Creative city policy ‘assemblages’, then, are made up of different constituent parts (commercial businesses, public institutions, artist organisations and the like), which ‘accommodate, envelop and conceal, conserve and carry on the potential for opposition’. The ways in which individual cultural workers operate within, between and around the constituent parts that make up site-specific assemblages of creative cities policy is a question that is often looked at from the perspective of protest or resistance. From Lindner’s point of view, resistance is a constituent part within an assemblage that changes and shapes the implementation of policy within a specific place.
Yet while assemblages may create possibilities for shaping the localised implementation of policy, the broader market-driven economic restructuring of cities continues apace, as does the colonisation by capital of near enough every sphere of life. As has been discussed by Simon Winlow and others, neoliberal market expansion not only tolerates, but requires and assimilates forms of artistic ‘rebellion’ as frontiers of commodification in the development of a ‘resistance market’.
In this situation forms of cultural expression (as well as certain ways of living) are either subsumed within the parameters of the ever expanding creative economy or deemed ‘illegitimate’ and shutdown altogether. This is a process of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have described as the ‘excision of the incommensurable’, the annihilation of that which resists any place within a system of relations instrumentalised towards meeting the needs of capital.
But the ‘incommensurable’ is often that which enriches our experience of the world. It may not have any financial future, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. To experiment (to try, and fail, and try again) requires areas, spaces, venues and organisations that are allowed to operate at a distance from the market. In a recent journal article I have tried to outline the ways in which one particular arts organisation called Dumbulls, an arts gallery, practice facility and rave space on Liverpool’s north shore dock, campaigned against its closure during the construction of the new ‘creative quarter’. While the campaign sharpened distinctions between different logics of creativity, the article focuses on the specific tactics that enabled Dumbulls (successfully for now, it seems) to cast its very ‘incommensurability’ with the creative economy model as central to its cultural value, its ‘legitimacy’.
Having occupied, renovated and recently purchased what was formerly The Bull, an old dockers pub built around 1840, the campaign against the closure of Dumbulls used forms of communicative action that were centred around the formation of a creative space based on principles of autonomy, anti-corporatism and ‘DIY culture’. These principles are best exemplified in the community film screenings organised as part of the campaign, which created what Miriam Ross has called an ‘interstitial viewing space’ that is situated somewhere between the highly regulated space of the corporate multiplex, in which ‘we are governed rather than asked to participate’ and the conversely relaxed, person-centred space offered by the home viewing of films.
Dumbulls provided a space for those whose work is generally unacceptable within the cultural parameters set by larger arts institutions. The congealing of many incommensurable components within these screening events- films with no economic future, donation based fees, and an interstitial viewing space- is that which enabled the organisation to argue (to city councillors and developers) that their organisation actually fit in with the new ‘creative quarter’ vision.
This was Dumbulls’ precise and tactically articulated version of ‘DIY creativity’, which was put forward as a form of defence against profit-oriented discourses. The result (for the time being, at least) is that plans for a ‘creative quarter’ that existed on paper (that is, in theory) had to be altered in the process of their material implementation. The ways in which these logics (or, as Lindner might call them, constituent parts of an assemblage) are yet to change and shape each other in the long-term remains to be seen.
