Interruptions: Testing the Rhetoric of CulturallyLed Urban Development

Malcolm Miles

[Paper first received, August 2004; in final form, January 2005]

Summary. Since the 1980s, the cultural industries have gained a key role in strategies to deal withurban problems, seen as able to provide a new economic base in post-industrial settings. Cases offlagship cultural institutions such as Tate Modern or the Guggenheim in Bilbao imply that acultural turn in urban policy delivers urban revitalisation. Following the turn in Glasgow’sfortunes after being European Capital of Culture in 1990, it is easy to understand how cityauthorities and developers alike are captivated by cultural projects. But there are questions: isadvocacy for the creative industries to be trusted? To what extent can policies and strategieswhich are successful in one city be mapped onto others? And to what extent do culturalproducers, such as artists, subscribe to the party line? An increasing number of voices of dissentin the arts suggest an alternative approach to urban regeneration. This paper questions therhetoric of the cultural industries and investigates emerging alternative scenarios.

Introduction

Since the 1980s, in the UK and US, the arts(within a broader category of the culturaland creative industries) have gained a keyrole in strategies to deal with urban problemsfrom social exclusion to the rehabilitation ofpost-industrial sites. Persuasive advocacy onthe part of professionals and organisationswithin the cultural industries has been afactor in persuading governments that, inpost-industrial situations, the cultural indus-tries, and related knowledge sector of elec-tronic communication and higher education,can provide a new economic base. A smallnumber of successful cases tends to beadvanced as evidence that a cultural turn inpolicies for urban renewal can deliver revitali-sation of post-industrial cities. These casesoften centre on a new flagship cultural insti-tution. Examples include Tate Modern inLondon and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. In

other cases, an entire district may be redesig-nated as a cultural quarter. Examples includethe Rope Walks Quarter in Liverpool and ElRaval in Barcelona. The latter also includesa flagship venue, the Museum of Contempor-ary Art, Barcelona (MACBA). Apart fromdrawing visitors into an area, such venuesand recodings of a district tend to encouragea proliferation of small, broadly culturalbusinesses, from graphic design and architec-tural design firms to designer-bars and bou-tiques, all catering for a new cultural class,as it were.

Following the turn in Glasgow’s fortunesafter being a European Capital of Culture in1990, it is easy to understand how city auth-orities and developers alike are captivated bycultural projects. As Sharon Zukin notes: “somuch of the dominant capitalist economyhas . . . undergone a cultural turn” (Zukin,1996, p. 226). The allure of redeveloped

Urban Studies, Vol. 42, Nos 5/6, 889–911, May 2005

Malcolm Miles is in the School of Art and Performance, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, Earl Richards Road North, Exeter,EX2 6AS, UK. Fax: 01392 475012. E-mail: m.f.miles@plymouth.ac.uk.

0042-0980 Print=1360-063X Online=05=05-60889–23 # 2005 The Editors of Urban Studies

DOI: 10.1080=00420980500107375

waterfront sites such as Baltimore’s harbourdistrict, London’s docklands or Cardiff Bayprovides an aesthetic gloss for commercialschemes which frequently erase all traces ofthe histories of their sites. But there are diffi-culties. The recoding of a district as a culturalquarter may lead to gentrification—a shiftfrom multiple to single occupancy and fromrent to owner-occupation of housing being akey aspect of this—and a marginalisation (orperipheralisation) of dwellers who becomeconstituted as a residual public. A culturalzone can easily be read as a zone of affluence.But setting that contentious (and complex)issue aside, there are still questions: is advo-cacy for the creative industries itself creative(like creative accounting)? And to whatextent can policies and strategies whichare successful in one city be mapped ontoothers in which conditions differ? As JohnMyerscough (1988) argues, Ipswich lacksthe grounded cultural infrastructure ofGlasgow and would not produce a similarreturn on the same culturally based invest-ment. Similarly, while Barcelona is advancedas a model of a successful cultural economy(Degen, 2004), it remains exceptional onaccount of a unique cultural heritage and thepolitical impetus to revive Catalan cultureafter the end of the Franco period, quiteapart from a policy to attract cultural ratherthan mass-market tourism from the early1990s onwards (Dodd, 1999). To see culture,with its legacy in liberal reformism of a uni-versal benefit, as a universal solution topresent-day urban problems may, then, beromantic.I wonder, too, whether advocacy for the

cultural industries as general problem-solvers is based on more than vested interest,or may represent a co-option of culture tothe agenda of marketisation. My first aim,then, in this paper, is to reflect on the culturalturn in urban redevelopment. I start by recon-sidering this cultural turn, asking what ismeant by culture, examining aspects of cultu-rally led urban redevelopment and askingwhether Adorno’s use of the term ‘theculture industry’ to denote an industry ofmass deception remains valid. But my

second aim—because I think cynicism isrequired in the present political and culturalclimate, but is not by itself enough—is toask how cultural producers such as artistsmight contribute critically to processes ofurban change. I do this by looking at a smallnumber of art projects which do not subscribeto the dominant agenda of culturally led urbanredevelopment, but operate in urban settings.These are not widely known and tend to beabsent in art journals (which foreground artin gallery spaces). Such projects may,however, offer an alternative form of culturalintervention to conventional public art.

Voices of Dissent

I am encouraged in this investigation by criti-cality on the parts of some artists working inurban situations today. This is the more inter-esting because many artists have gainedmaterial benefit from the cultural turn inurban policy through commissions for publicart or the provision of new gallery spaces inwhich to exhibit their work. Among the dis-senting voices are those of Sarah Carringtonand Sophie Hope (the artist group Bþ B)

In the UK the integration of art into theGovernment’s policy on social inclusionand regeneration relies heavily on utopiannotions of art as an empowering tool . . .The ‘art pill’ is now dished out by NewLabour in an attempt to empower andeffect change through the participatoryvalues of art (www.welcomebb.org.uk).

George Yudice observes a similar situationin the US

No longer restricted solely to the sanctionedarenas of culture, the arts would be literallysuffused throughout the civic structure,finding a home in a variety of commu-nity service and economic developmentactivities—from youth programs andcrime prevention to job training and racerelations—far afield from the traditionalaesthetic functions of the arts (Larson,1997, pp. 127–128; cited in Yudice,2003, p. 11).

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Yudice points out that this is a defensiveposture after attacks on the arts in Congressand threats to the survival of the NationalEndowment for the Arts (NEA), from whomthe above was drafted. Multifunctionality inthe arts mirrors multitasking in post-industrialpatterns of flexible employment (see Sennett,1998) and seems to be led by the artsfunding system. Bþ B note complexitieswhich interrupt the scenario of culturally ledredevelopment. They argue that art’s aestheticdistancing of reality offers either a criticalspace, or a resignation to the world as given(the better future reassigned to an aestheticdreamland equivalent to Heaven); and thatart subsumed to the agenda of a regime dedi-cated to marketisation will not retain a radicaledge. Perhaps the art pill is a placebo. Perhapsthe rhetoric is hollow.

My concern echoes Monica Degen’s in hercritique of the aestheticisation of spaces inBarcelona and Castlefield, Manchester (2002).And as a cautionary tale, I would cite therebranding of the UK as Cool Britannia byNew Labour after the 1997 election victoryand the failure of the Millennium Dome(which I take in some ways as an emblemof Cool Britannia). The Dome and TateModern, while contrasting cases in terms ofvisitor numbers, are not far apart on thesouth bank of the Thames. Both are flagshipcultural sites. Tate Modern has exceededexpectations of visitor numbers to become akey node of metropolitan cultural life, whilethe Dome attracted only a fraction of itsintended numbers despite insistent media pro-motion and special offers on ticket prices.Tate Modern, of course, is free—although itscafe, restaurant and bookshop are not. Yetthe oddest thing seems that Tate Modern hasa collection of modern art, which is a special-ist interest and for most an acquired taste,while the Dome attempted to display thesupposedly universal qualities of the nation’svalues, spirituality, diversity and technologi-cal achievements. Tate has moved the culturalcentre of London across the river (aided by anew bridge) but has done so less by convertingthe city’s diverse publics to modern art thanby becoming a new social space, a place to

meet, eat, buy books and be seen. Tate iscool, and this results from a marketing exer-cise, but through an understatement whichenables its publics to entertain the notionthey have produced that cool themselves. Itis the success of Tate Modern not the failureof the Dome which continues to attractpublic authorities and private developersalike to the strategy of culturally led urbanredevelopment. But it may be the Domewhich better represents the rhetoric of a uni-versalised cultural intervention in nationaland urban life.

It may be also that interventions of a morespecific and localised kind, as I read in theart projects I cite in the second part of thepaper, have a greater resonance for thosewho encounter or participate in them. If so,perhaps for at least a few people, culturalwork is a means to a new approach to themany problems which beset city dwelling ina post-industrial period.

1. Urban Culture and Policy

In this section, I begin by noting the ambigu-ities which attend the term culture. This begsthe question as to what and in particularwhose culture is utilised in urban redevelop-ment. I then examine the vicissitudes of cultu-rally led urban redevelopment since the1980s. Finally in this section, seeking anappropriate theoretical framework, I reconsi-der Adorno’s argument on the culture industryas an industry of mass deception.

1.1 Culture and Cultures

There are ambiguities in the use of the termculture in strategies for culturally led urbanrenewal. Beginning The Cultures of Citieswith a reference to cities as centres ofculture, Sharon Zukin rehearses some of theterm’s uses

The Acropolis of the urban art museum orconcert hall, the trendy art gallery andcafe, restaurants that fuse ethic traditionsinto culinary logos—cultural activities aresupposed to lift us out of the mire of our

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everyday lives and into the sacred spaces ofritualized pleasures (Zukin, 1995, p. 1).

The list implies a series of social stratamore complex than a set of social classes: ahigh art elite whose cultural capital may notequate with money capital; new bohemians,yuppies who like rubbing shoulders withartists and social others in cultural spaces;consumers of ethnic foods, who favourhybrid cuisines. Yet all are metropolitantypes of some affluence. Absent from the listare those without access to consumption.Zukin writes, still, from a concern for socialjustice and her use of the term ‘cultures’(rather than ‘culture’) in her title indicates aconcern for the everyday ways of life whichconstitute culture in an anthropologicalcontext. This recognition of the ordinaryinformed the inception of cultural studies asan academic discipline in the 1960s andZukin cites Raymond Williams’ The Countryand the City (1973).Zukin’s analysis of culturally led redeve-

lopment in New York City affirms that culturein redevelopment tends to be Culture—thetraditional high arts of the MetropolitanMuseum or the avant-gardism of the Museumof Modern Art. This, she points out, doesnot mean that artists embrace the agendaof culturally led redevelopment, althoughtheir production feeds an industry in whichthe insertion of new cultural spaces raisesthe value of surrounding real estate whilemuseum boards of trustees offer networkingopportunities to developers. Zukin remarksthat the cultural labour force depends on arange of ways to earn a living—making artand washing up in bars—and that many in thearts “are supposed to live on the margins . . .used to deprivation” (Zukin, 1995, pp. 12–13).The growth of an arts infrastructure in thepast two decades, and in the UK a significantincrease in public funding for arts manage-ment since the 1990s, may have taken culturalmanagers into a more affluent lifestyle—ableto eat in the restaurants which denote acultural zone (in which it is more likely thatimmigrants rather than artists will washdishes)—but a majority of artists who do not

gain international reputations remain in amarginal economic category. But the cultureof the cultured class is cultivated; it is likethe cultivation of taste in the 18th century; itis equally a way of life expressing the valueof culture (or culture as a value) in acts ofcultural consumption which extend beyondthe visual and performing arts to design andarchitecture, new media, food and drink,fashion and modes of transport.What emerges is a meaning of culture

specific to the spaces of post-industrial urbanredevelopment. It bridges the anthropological(a way of life or, more carefully stated, a set ofhabits of everyday living which express andarticulate a set of values) and the aesthetic(the arts and their appreciation by suitablyeducated minds). It is the culture of a class,diverse in background but with a disposableincome, which uses cultural spaces. WalterBenjamin (1999) noted that the Paris arcadessimilarly housed a new class of window-shoppers and observers of others observingthemselves.

1.2 Culture in Redevelopment: Strategies andAttractions

Part of Zukin’s purpose is to draw attention tocontestable and conflictual aspects of culturein a climate in which city authoritiescompete globally to rebrand their cities, inwhich image is all. She remarks that whileculture offers ways to deal with difference italso “offers a coded means of discrimination,an undertone to the dominant discourse ofdemocratisation” when styles which emergeat street-level—ripped jeans, for instance—“are cycled through mass media, especiallyfashion and ‘urban music’ magazines . . .where, divorced from their social context,they become images of cool” (Zukin, 1995,p. 9). I share Zukin’s concern that “Thecacophony of demands for justice is translatedinto a coherent demand for jeans” (p. 9).Recent advertising by Nike confirms thepotential for marginalisation to be subsumedin consumption when urban basketballspaces, in Berlin as in New York, are signedby what look like municipal notices but are

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in fact elements in an advertising campaignrelying on recognition by a target public(Goldman and Papson, 1998; von Borries,2003). But if cultural consumption is ameans to defuse dissent—Zukin commentsthat “culture is also a powerful means of con-trolling cities” (Zukin, 1995, p. 1)—for cityauthorities it may be more a competitiveedge in a campaign for inward investment.By commissioning a highly visible piece ofpublic art or employing an internationallyrecognised architect, a city may purchase aplace on a notional international culturemap. The decision by Barcelona’s city auth-orities to site a World Trade Centre designedby I M Pei on its redeveloped waterfrontdenotes such intention to be a world city.

The specifics vary, but culturally led urbanredevelopment tends to include the following:the insertion of a flagship cultural institutionin a post-industrial zone, often a waterfrontsite, to lever private-sector investment in thesurrounding area and attract tourism; the des-ignation of a neighbourhood as a culturalindustries quarter for small- and medium-size businesses in the arts, media and leisure.The definition of what qualifies as a culturalindustry varies, Allen Scott (2000) taking thebroadest approach to include furniture manu-facture, leather, perfume and other commod-ities alongside the arts and film in cities suchas Los Angeles and Paris. For Myerscough(1988), the focus was more narrowly on thevisual and performing arts and heritage; andfor Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini(1995), it is the arts, media and cultural con-sumption which contribute to a creative city.Given that culturally led redevelopmentoccurs in deindustrialised conditions, it isnot surprising that outposts of cultural recod-ing are geographically juxtaposed with areasof residual deprivation. Graeme Evans(2004, p. 71) notes that Hoxton in London,an area of multiple deprivation for manyinhabitants, is also “the capital’s trendiestarea”. Like New York’s SoHo in the 1980s,it combines a cluster of arts and mediavenues, including the White Cube Galleryin which the work of artists such asAntony Gormley is shown, with increasingly

high-rent apartments. Evans remarks that thecultural industry quarter models currently pro-moted in urban regeneration “tend to neglectboth the historical precedents and the sym-bolic importance and value of place andspace” (Evans, 2004, p. 91). Citing Landry(2000), he argues elsewhere that the voguefor culture does not include broad represen-tation of cultural producers or communities,which “mirrors the professionalisation andbureaucratisation of both cultural and otherpublic policy realms and decision-makingstructures” (Evans, 2001, p. 277). The out-come is a growth in cultural infrastructurebut not in support for cultural producerssuch as artists, writers and performers.Members of those groups may individuallygain from the provision of new venues, butthis does not in itself support the experi-mental, non-market-led production of newwork. Further, many new cultural buildingsin the UK were allocated capital fundingfrom the national lottery on the basis ofprojected visitor numbers supplied by culturalindustries consultants, but not revenuefunding. One casualty of this system was theEarth Centre in Doncaster, on the site of aredundant colliery and employing redundantminers, which closed when visitor numbersfailed to match targets which may have beenunrealistic.

It seems that Tate Modern can capitalise onits occupation of a redundant industrial site, itsex-industrial building having “a fashionablysquatted aspect” (Leslie, 2001, p. 3), but atthe Earth Centre an imaginative response toenvironmental sustainability, with reed-bedwater cleansing and gardens for arid places,fails in a less glamorous location more thantwo hours by rail from London. Tate Modernresponded to employment needs in South-wark, one of London’s poorest boroughs,through a training programme for localpeople which more or less guaranteed theman interview for jobs in security and catering,but the lesson remains that, first, capital pro-jects do not always survive; and, secondly,although catering is the largest sector inTate’s employment it does not admit the oper-atives to the cultural realm or affluence of

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which the museum is an emblem. Failuressuch as that of the Earth Centre do notinhibit cultural industries advocates, anymore than a lack of evaluation of benefitsinhibited the commissioning of public art inthe 1980s and early 1990s. According toSara Selwood, in a book ironically titled TheBenefits of Public Art (1995), the claimsmade for commissions and projects werelargely so vague as to be undemonstrable.Public art gained from the fluency of itsadvocates—the arts breed effective verbalcommunication—and a willingness of gov-ernment through the Arts Council to backcampaigns for schemes such as Per cent forArt (through which a percentage, usuallyone, of capital budgets would be reserved forart and craft commissions or projects) andwas in some ways a dry run for the successof cultural industries advocacy (Landry,2000; Landry and Bianchini, 1995) in per-suading municipal authorities to adoptnotions of a creative city. There is a tendencyto generalisation in statements such as

In a number of American [sic] cities,leading strategists of ‘downtown rejuvena-tion’ have argued that arts-led investmentis the most efficient way of beginning theprocess of raising morale and developing‘atmosphere’ in . . . low-status and mori-bund districts (Bianchini et al., 1988, p. 14)

and to aestheticisation as in “Urban designis essentially about knitting together differentparts of the city into a coherent artefact”(Landry and Bianchini, 1995, p. 28). Thismight be set beside Jane Jacob’s remark that“a city cannot be a work of art” (Jacobs,1961, p. 373; original emphasis).

1.3 Contestable Terms

A difficulty is that meanings of culture as thearts, a way of life and means of a symboliceconomy may be fused as if they denote aunified concept. A further difficulty is that cul-tural policy tends to remain instrumentalistdespite the insights of complexity theory(Byrne, 1997; Cilliers, 1998) that outcomesof a given intervention cannot be predicted

in the way assumed in the rational planningmodel of the inter- and post-war periods, butwill be affected by even minor shifts in con-ditions. This adds to the difficulty ofmapping solutions from one city to another.A third difficulty is that the benefits of culturalredevelopment are unevenly distributed. Iaccept that cultural flagships can contributeto more confident perceptions of a city,including by some of its publics as well asinvestors or tourists. Writing on Glasgow in1990, Peter Booth and Robin Boyle say thatthe opening of a new gallery for the BurrellCollection “was undoubtedly the catalystthat drew the different components together”(Booth and Boyle, 1993, p. 31). In the UK,cases such as Tate Modern, Tate of theNorth in Liverpool (to be European City ofCulture in 2008), the Lowry Museum inSalford and the Baltic in Gateshead (with thenearby Sage centre for chamber music) canbe advanced as having changed external per-ceptions of their sites. But, as the arts havemoved in the UK from being administeredas a public service to being managed asbusinesses paying their way in increased prop-erty values, job creation and tourism, sowhat is sometimes called urban regeneration(with an implication of community benefit)has become urban redevelopment. RosalynDeutsche (1996, pp. 49–109) notes the unevenbenefits of redevelopment in New Yorkwhen homeless people, some evicted as anoutcome of gentrification, were cleared fromspaces such as Grand Central Station byMayor Koch. The art displayed in iconic cul-tural spaces meanwhile becomes emblematicof a new affluence, this reading displacingreadings based on its histories of productionand reception which include histories ofdissent and refusal of art’s commodification.Esther Leslie writes

Tate Modern is not just trendy, but in thevanguard of a reinvention of culturalspaces worldwide . . . the expertise of artworkers is leased out to business and edu-cation, with online gift shops, travel plan-ning, digital reproductions for downloadand so on (Leslie, 2001, p. 3).

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In an uncanny mix of elitism and populism,Tate retains a role of interpreting modernvisual culture in the selectivity of its exhibitsand portraying itself as free of the classaspect of museum-going. It remains, how-ever, an instrument of liberal reform, in itsearly days at Millbank having offered aneducation in taste and behaviour for thelower classes (Taylor, 1993) and today pro-viding free admission to a modernised culturalambience which may be no less subject tocodes of behaviour—although the value towhich the code lends coherence might nowbe consumption rather than liberal education.The modernisation of Tate, which for Leslieis marketisation, masks possible argumentsas to whose culture is promoted, in thecontext of complex cross currents of class,race, gender and cultural as well as moneycapital. In other cases, too, cross-currentscomplexify the situation: Booth and Boyle(1993, p. 40) cite criticisms of Glasgow’sCapital of Culture programme, promoted bySaatchi and Saatchi, as marginalising thecity’s working-class culture and emphasisingcultural tourism to the detriment of supportfor local cultural producers; and JuliaGonzalez (1993, pp. 84–86) notes a contestof values between the internationalism ofBilbao’s elites represented by the Guggen-heim and a grassroots interest in the artsas articulating Basque nationalism. WhileDisney stands for a depoliticised globalculture and Guggenheim is an internationalart venue brand, it may be that local culturesare both more politicised and under threat.Joost Smiers (2003, p. 103) reports, forinstance, that “Little is left of the Egyptianfilm industry” as a result of a mix of factorsincluding censorship, a boycott of Egyptianfilms by some Arab states after the country’sseparate peace with Israel and “competitionwith American [sic] products”. He adds that“By the end of the 1980s Brazilian cinemahad been all but destroyed . . . from theresults of the hegemony of the neoliberalproject” (Smiers, 2003, p. 103). Still, whencities are sites of increased migration and thepervasive discourse is of difference, culturaldialogue offers a potential ground for

contestation and a non-confrontationalmeans to maintain a creative tension withindifference.

In the 1970s, Raymond Williams saw inpopular culture

a complex argument about the relationsbetween general human development anda particular way of life, and between bothand the works and practices of art and intel-ligence (Williams, 1976, pp. 80–81).

In 1995, Landry and Bianchini stated that

Ethnic ghettoes are unlikely to contribute tosolving the wider problems of cities [while]New ideas can be generated through cul-tural crossovers, as in the success ofyoung British Asians who have synthesised‘bhangra’ music (Landry and Bianchini,1995, p. 25).

Justin O’Connor sees cultural intermedi-aries (entrepreneurs in popular music, forinstance) playing key roles in the new econ-omies of sites such as Castlefield (O’Connorand Wynne, 1996; O’Connor, 1998). Inanother way, also addressing current urbanconditions, the Creative Partnerships schemefunded by the UK government links artistswith schools in which they are seen as inject-ing a creative energy which will have generalbenefit to the education system. In bothcases—difference and education—the artsare perceived as catalysts to the solution ofsocial problems. Yudice (2003) outlines a par-allel scenario in the US. This is an extensionof the argument used for public art in the1980s and early 1990s (Shaw, 1991), thatpublic art contributes to place identity andacts as a catalyst for economic recovery.This might reflect a view that social problems,such as street crime, are produced by depri-vation; arts advocates are adept at annexingnew social agendas and governments seemglad to accept this. (Cynically, I would saybecause the arts are cheaper and arts projectseasier to understand than deeper enquiry intosocial problems.) But the result, in an ethoswhich requires auditable outcomes for publicexpenditure, is that the solutions favouredtend to be in the form of cultural

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economies—new areas of consumptiontrading on cultural identities—rather than aregeneration of local cultures.New terms are inserted in the argument but

lack specificity, denoting a lack of specificunderstandings and a hegemony of top–down strategies which displace grassrootstactics. The term ‘vibrancy’, for instance, isused by Andrew Kelly in Bristol’s (failed)bid to be a European Capital of Culture in2008

For cities to develop, not just as regionalcentres, but on the national and inter-national scale, they need to become cultu-rally vibrant (Kelly, 2001, p. 16).

This is reminiscent of the Arts Council’s AnUrban Renaissance

The arts are crowd-pullers. People findthemselves drawn to places which arevibrant and alive (Arts Council, 1989).

The publication asserts that the arts are acatalyst for regeneration, a magnet fortourism and business, enhance the visualquality of a city’s environment and provide afocus for community and individual develop-ment. This is a succinct summary of whathas become a well-rehearsed case. Likemuch cultural advocacy, it cites referencesto ‘American’ models without looking tothe specifics of evidence. Similarly, CityCentres, City Cultures, produced for theCentre for Local Economic strategies(CLES) in 1988 claims that

in many towns and cities the best strategicprogramme for improving the quality oflife might well turn out to be based ondeveloping a coherent and wide-rangingarts and cultural policy (Bianchini et al.,1988, p. 10).

But if in the 1980s cultural provision stillhad something of a public-benefit ethos, inthe 1990s the market-led approach of modern-isation has fed into it, so that Landry andBianchini argue that “forming a wellworking public/private partnership is itself acreative act” (Landry and Bianchini, 1995,p. 51). Really?

1.4 Marketisation or Public Benefit?

Today’s market emphasis contrasts with thepublic-benefit ethos of post-war liberalism inarts policy, even more with the social policyemphasis of the Greater London Council(GLC) in supporting community arts in the1970s which extended the efforts of theWilson government to democratise culture inthe late 1960s. Jenny Lee, the first UK ArtsMinister, echoed the concerns of working-class intellectuals like Raymond Williamsand Richard Hoggart by promoting regionalpolicies and a

bridging of the gap between . . . the ‘higher’forms of entertainment and the traditionalsources—the brass band, the amateurconcert party, the entertainer, the musichall and pop group (Jenny Lee; quoted inWillett, 1967, p. 203).

But determination of cultural norms tendsto remain with an arts bureaucracy whichreproduces an older parochialism, so thataccess is widened to a culture predeterminedin the image of the governing cultural body.Arts publics are thereby rendered passivereceivers of culture rather than beingempowered to shape cultures. This liberal-reformist attitude persists in the findings ofa panel chaired by architect Richard Burtonin 1989–91 on the Per cent for Art policy.Burton’s report seeks to make “contemporaryarts and crafts more accessible to the public”and places “more interesting and attractive”(Shaw, 1991, p. 16) and relies on a univers-ality of cultural value. John Willett com-plained in 1967 that “The weakness of thepolicy of the last twenty years is that itrests on assumptions which are very seldomdiscussed” (Willett, 1967, p. 220) andperhaps something similar could be saidnow, even if the assumptions have movedfrom public benefit to globalised consump-tion. Marketisation, however, is clothed in anew rhetoric of social development inwhich the arts are utilised as representingnon-commercial (aesthetic) value at thesame time as taking on an increasing rangeof social issues. There was a precedent to

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an extent in the uses of community arts pro-jects, such as painting murals on the gableends of housing terraces, in the 1960s and1970s, but perhaps then the publics forsuch projects were more specifically ident-ified than the cultural tourists or investorsof today’s urban rebranding, and moreinvolved in production of the work.

The extent to which the arts are now seenas problem-solvers is seen in the statisticsfor Single Regeneration Budgets (SRBs) inthe UK. Of 66 SRBs in England in 1998–99, 31 included a cultural project; linkedfunding from bodies such as English Heritageand the environmental charity The Ground-work Trust brought the total support for cul-tural projects in SRBs that fiscal year tomore than £100 million (Selwood, 2001, pp.60–65). This is in the context of a rise in gov-ernment annual funding for the arts to anaverage of £204.5 million in the years1994–99 (Selwood, 2001, p. 183). Culturein SRBs, in other words, generated a budgetin 1998/99 equivalent to about half that ofthe arts in the public sector (although morethan £100 million was added to the latterfrom sponsorship). These figures can beseen also in context of £241.7 million ofnational lottery money distributed by theArts Council and more than £300 million dis-tributed by the Heritage Lottery Fund incapital schemes many of which contributedflagship projects to post-industrial urbanredevelopment.

That the urban cultural turn is not alwaysbased on evidence for sustainable benefits toa city’s publics is shown in studies of Bir-mingham’s rebranding of its central businessdistrict around Centenary Square as a culturalzone; jobs were created, but tended to be tem-porary, part-time and low-paid (Loftman andNevin, 1998). But rather than deconstructthe socioeconomic case for the arts, I wantto draw attention to another difficulty: the pri-vileging of the visual in culturally led urbanredevelopment, again citing Bristol. Thismight seem a tangential argument, but Iwant to draw a parallel between this and theprevailing top–down approach of culturallyled urban redevelopment.

1.5 Legibility or Interpretation from Above?

Bristol’s bid to be a Capital of Culture exem-plifies this. Kelly revives Kevin Lynch’s(1960) concept of legibility in a campaignfor Bristol Legible City. A booklet producedto explain the concept states

Think of great cities and what makes themso distinctive, impressive and attractive.Without exception, the experience of thepublic realm—the quality of public spacesand the aesthetics of buildings anddesign—plays a huge part in shaping posi-tive perceptions of a city (Bristol LegibleCity, 2001a).

Another interprets the aim through expla-nation of a new signage system across the city

It’s about building an identity for Bristolthat can grow beyond signs to encompasseverything from bus shelters and kiosks tostreet furniture and sculpture, becominga symbol of a confident and successfulEuropean city (Bristol Legible City,2001b, p. 13).

Here, a public art programme provideslandmarks and Kelly states that the LegibleCity project brings together for the first timein a British city “a multidisciplinary team . . .to consider the issue of city identity and leg-ibility” (Kelly, 2001, p. 36). The new signsfeature maps of the immediate environs,using a traditional bird’s-eye viewpoint. Itwould have been interesting to see a street-level visualisation of routes through theurban landscape, even more so to draw atten-tion to the multisensory aspects of a city’sstreetscapes—the smells, textures, soundsand so forth. But my point was that thelegible city is a visual city and this involvesa power-relation which Doreen Masseydraws out in Space, Place and Gender

It is now a well-established argument, fromfeminists but not only from feminists, thatmodernism both privileged vision over theother senses and established a way ofseeing from the point of view of an author-itative, privileged, and male, position. Theprivileging of vision impoverishes us

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through deprivation of other forms ofsensory perception. . . . But, and moreimportant . . . the reason for the privilegingof vision is precisely its supposed detach-ment. Such detachment, of course, canhave its advantages, but it is also necess-arily a ‘detached’ view from a particularpoint of view. Detached does not heremean disinterested (Massey, 1994, p. 232).

This is more than a by-pass of Kantian aes-thetics; it is the imposition of the dominant,masculine viewpoint of the conventional cityplan which uses an ability to see-over (oroversee) as a metaphor for having power-over and was developed as a form of cartogra-phy following Alberti’s invention of a deviceto map accurately a city’s streets from a view-point on its circuit of walls in the 15th century,but is not the only possible means to mapa city.I want to take this a little further before

returning to the main argument, not leastbecause it emphasises the relation of urbanrepresentation (of which cultural rebrandingis an aspect) to power. French Marxist philo-sopher Henri Lefebvre (1991) theorised thatall societies have characteristic spatial prac-tices—the perpendicular roads of a Romancity with a standardised siting of key functionson the axis throughout the Empire, forexample—and that these are ideological. Hethen differentiated what he called conceptual(or representational) space from lived spaces(of representation). Conceptual space is epit-omised by the architect’s drawing, the townplan and the architectural metaphor used byDescartes when he writes, in his Discourse(1637), of an ‘engineer’ drawing regularplaces. Conceptual space is constituted by aunified, consistent and coherent system ofsigns—such as Cartesian co-ordinates—which, from another viewpoint, reduces theworld to that system as if reality, if it exists,is only represented by it and cannot be directlyexperienced. In one way, conceptual spaceallows all kinds of operations which wouldotherwise be impossible, like planning a cityand then building it according to a planwhich the builders cannot see on the ground

(but according to which they are directed). Itcan also be argued that there is no possibilityto articulate raw experiences, only to ‘cook’them (to use a term from Levi-Strauss)through language. In another way, however,conceptual space marginalises what Lefebvrecalls lived spaces (plural), the spaces of andaround the body, of association and memory,of desire and hope, of shifting meanings, over-laid, as it were, on the spaces of buildings andstreets, cutting at times through the grain ofthe vista. But Lefebvre (1991, pp. 78–79) isat pains to point out that lived spaces, evenin Tuscany at the time in which perspectivewas invented, remain accessible to rural andurban dwellers. In extraordinary circum-stances such as the toppling of the VendomeColumn during the Paris Commune of 1871,the reproduction of meanings which takesplace (and precedence) in the routines ofdaily life and labour is interrupted by a pro-duction of new meanings in liberatory acts(which reenact a shift of power as in thedestruction of a statue of the figurehead ofthe deposed power).I would read the visual city, and the legible

city, despite its progressive aspects as pro-posed by Lynch, as that produced in a univer-salised conceptual spatial realm and the city ofmultisense impressions, multiple and overlap-ping actualities, as produced in somaticspaces. Lefebvre does not see these as separ-ate but as superimposed and complementaryrealms.I am left asking why Kelly chose to base his

campaign on Lynch more than 40 years afterpublication of The Image of the City. It maybe that Kelly’s approach reflects the assump-tions of that era in other ways—notably ingiving primacy to professionals rather thandwellers in the determination of his envisagedCity of Culture. The arts advocacy of the1980s, which sought the inclusion of art inthe built environment and promoted artist-designed street furniture, likewise retained aprofession-based model of urban change.There were proposed links between planners,architects, engineers, designers and artists,but limited recognition of the tacit expertiseof dwellers on dwelling. If, in the 1960s,

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then, legibility was a progressive idea indealing with the spaces between buildingswhich signature architecture ignored, itemphasised design and, for me, is out-datedby the 1990s literature of an architecturaleveryday informed by Lefebvre (Bordenet al., 1996; Harris and Berke, 1997; Cline,1997; Hill, 1998; Wigglesworth and Till,1998). Bristol Legible City sought to integratethe work of regional, national and inter-national artists’ and designers’ in a long-term programme to “make the city easier tounderstand and more familiar” (BristolLegible City, 2001b, p. 13) but the accent ison designing things rather than the informaland often invisible traces of occupationwhich constitute a familiarity of urbanspaces for many dwellers. Looking aroundBristol’s cultural zone, the Harbourside area,today I find, crossing an artist-designedbridge, life-size bronzes of famous BristoliansThomas Chatterton, William Penn and HenryCabot, to whom Cary Grant was later added,in a theme park developed by a public–private finance initiative (perhaps the kind ofcreative partnership envisaged by Landryand Bianchini). These statues reproduceexclusions of race and gender in defining thepublic sphere; I doubt that doing away withplinths changes the power relations involved.

What does happen, familiarly, is that tour-ists photograph each other sitting (orwalking for Cary Grant) next to the famousold men, hoping to find a little rubbed-offstar-dust in the snapshots. In a not dissimilarway, claims for universal benefit in cultureinform a tendency to universal solutions tourban problems, supposing that benedictionis given from a position of power. This isdespite departures from the conventionalpower relation of professional to dweller(‘user’, as Lefebvre critically employs theterm) in radical planning (Sandercock, 1998)and the shift of allegiance from a publicbenefit to a market-led ethos in arts manage-ment and urban redevelopment. The culturalterrain remains all-encompassing in thescope attributed to it and continues to privi-lege the visual sense through a primacy ofimage and dominance of design professionals

in the implementation of the images designed.Zukin sees such reductiveness “to a coherentvisual representation” as a common elementof culturally led redevelopment schemes, sothat

culture as a ‘way of life’ is incorporatedinto ‘cultural products’, i.e. ecological,historical, or architectural materials thatcan be displayed, interpreted, reproduced,and sold in a putatively universal repertoireof visual consumption (Zukin, 1996,p. 227).

And Bianchini writes that

There are conflicts between . . . maintainingprestigious facilities for ‘high’ culturemarketed to wealthy visitors which em-phasize ‘exclusiveness’, and . . . openingup popular access to them (Bianchini,1993, p. 19).

Flagship schemes, as he continues, enhancea city’s competitiveness while grassrootsculture requires a decentred approach, sothat the former tends to be supported at thecost of the latter. Similarly, Gonzalez writesof Bilbao that its culturally led redevelopmentrelies on

ephemeral spectacles, aimed at attractingand encouraging the development of localcultural industries [so that culture is]expressed in the language of economicsand would serve economic developmentobjectives (Gonzalez, 1993, p. 85).

And Jude Bloomfield writes of Bologna

It has proved easier to solve the problems ofthe new middle-class youth by enablingthem to become cultural entrepreneursthan that of bridging the gap betweenthem and the poorly skilled and alienatedunderclass (Bloomfield, 1993, pp. 111–112).

Zukin argues that the power to create animage of a city has increased in importancewhen social classes and political parties

have become less relevant mechanisms ofexpressing identity. Those who create

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images stamp a collective identity. Whetherthey are media corporations like the DisneyCompany, art museums, or politicians, theyare developing new spaces for public cul-tures (Zukin, 1995, p. 3).

Elsewhere, she concludes that

Far from suggesting a free expression ofdivergent identities, the flourishing of newcultural meanings in the highly competitiveenvironment of urban space makes it moreurgent to understand their material effects(Zukin, 1996, p. 242).

From a similarly critical position, in the UK,artists’ group Hewittþ Jordan—artists AndyHewitt and Mel Jordan, based in Sheffield—write

Cultural policy can be divisive. Culture-ledregeneration is only representative of awider constituency and wider culture ofthe city when it is developed alongside asocial policy that stems from a vigorousand democratic political process. Thisdemands a political system that has the con-fidence to take on and discuss the biggerand longer-term problems affecting thecity (Hewittþ Jordan, 2004, p. 29).

I doubt this system is currently available inthe UK or US. The result is that cultural pro-duction is co-opted by developers and govern-ments alike to provide badges of respectabilityfor practices which may produce social div-ision rather than equity. The use of culturein culturally led urban development tradeson culture’s supposed universal value torender its commissioning beyond contestwhile redevelopment itself may be highly con-testable, as in the construction of what JonBird (1993) has called ‘Dystopia on theThames’ in London’s docklands. Landry andBianchini assert that “Seemingly superficial,‘cosmetic’ interventions can have an import-ant effect on morale” (Landry and Bianchini,1995, p. 31), but is the effect sustainable?Urban regeneration implies a social base andmay not be open to top–down or design sol-utions, or creativity takes resistant forms.Rose Gilmore notes a poster which people

are invited to copy and display in protestagainst increased penalties for flyposting, inthe Rope Walks Quarter of Liverpool: “THISIS CULTURE” (Gilmore, 2004, p. 128).

1.6 The Cultural Industries or the CultureIndustry?

Writing in the 1940s, Teodor W. Adorno andMax Horkheimer (1947/1997) refused theterm ‘mass culture’ because it was agreeable,as Adorno later recalls, to the proprietors ofan industry of mass deception. It may seemodd that I introduce this, having criticisedKelly for reviving Lynch. A historical adjust-ment is required in reading Adorno. After cul-tural studies, from the Birmingham School inthe 1960s onwards, his rejection of intermedi-ate art forms such as film and jazz seemsquaint. For cultural studies, any area of cul-tural production—comics to Racine—isuseful in articulating the received or con-tested values of a period. This has nevermeant that a play by Racine is equal aestheti-cally to graffiti, but recognises the specifics ofaesthetic criteria in context of their social pro-duction; and allows that intervention in theproduction of categories is an interventionin the production of society. Adorno’srefusal of the term mass culture is anexample of such intervention. His critique isconditioned also by the Nazis’ closure ofthe Frankfurt Institute for Social Researchand its reinstitution at Columbia University,New York; and if the spectre which hauntsthe Frankfurt School as a whole is the riseof fascism in industrialised Germany afterthe failure of the German Revolution in1919, the prevailing condition which inflectsAdorno’s work in the 1940s is his exposure,as a European intellectual Jewish Marxist,to the movies, radio and the popular press inthe US. Part of his response was a detailedinterrogation of the horoscope column ofThe Los Angeles Times (Adorno, 1994,pp. 34–127) in which he writes that theadvice given

implies that all problems due to objectivecircumstances such as, above all, economic

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difficulties, can be solved in terms ofprivate individual behaviour or by psycho-logical insight (Adorno, 1994, p. 57).

Perhaps this could inform a reconsiderationof the cultural industries. This is not an argu-ment against psychological, or more specifi-cally psycho-analytic, investigations ofurban cultural experiences (see Sibley, 2001,for such an approach), but draws attention tothe non-deliberative ways in which culture isconsumed. Whether consumers are dupes ofthe market or knowing manipulators of themanipulation it offers them is the subject-matter of a considerable literature in sociology(see Oh and Arditi, 2000, for a summary ofpositions). For Adorno it is the former; butfor Walter Benjamin cinema offers audiencesimaginative opportunities to remake the plotin awareness of the alienating labour ofactors who make a film in multiple takes.But Benjamin did not go to the movies butto Paris, and to Moscow in the 1920s to seeexperimental theatre and film as vehicles ofrevolution. It is more that Adorno andBenjamin are writing about different thingsthan that they disagree; Adorno’s rejectionof mass culture is not undermined by Benja-min’s celebration of a democratic lens.

Benjamin’s work is more often used in cul-tural studies teaching. His essay on ‘The workof art in an age of technical reproducibility’, touse a correct translation of the title (Benjamin,1970, pp. 219–254; see Leslie, 2000, p. 132)is a standard text. Possibly more interestingis his address to a group of anti-fascistwriters in Paris in 1934, published as ‘Theauthor as producer’ (in Benjamin, 1983) inwhich he alludes to the contributions ofreaders as authors in the Soviet press, a caseof mass culture in which the medium isreclaimed by its public. Again, his experiencediffers from Adorno’s, listening uncomforta-bly to the reduction of classical music toeasy listening on the wireless. It is toAdorno that I turn nonetheless because hisrefusal of the term ‘mass culture’, reiteratedin a reconsideration of the 1947 essay in1975 (Adorno, 1991, pp. 85–92), is key tomy critique of today’s cultural policy.

In approaching this material, nonetheless, Ineed to be selective. For example

The culture industry fuses the old and fam-iliar in a new quality. In all its branches,products which are tailored for consump-tion by masses, and which to a greatextent determine the nature of that con-sumption, are manufactured more or lessaccording to plan . . . The culture industryintentionally integrates its consumers fromabove. To the detriment of both it forcestogether the spheres of high and low art,separated for thousands of years (Adorno,1991, p. 85).

This extract links a critique of the cultureindustry as dominating the consumption ofcultural products with a concern that highand low art forms are fused. A limitation ofAdorno’s position is that high art cannot beproduced by, only for, its public by specialistinterpreters. The point I take, however, isthat mass culture is mass deception andbegins in the term mass culture as if it is pro-duced by consumers while the hold overbroadcasting technology by commercialradio stations in the US in the 1940s, Holly-wood over the movies and companies suchas Disney and Time-Warner over globalmedia now, means that cultural consumptionis determined not by listeners and viewersbut by the owners of the means of production.

The market, not social need, drives indus-tries such as film and fashion, and increasinglysubsumes high art (see Leslie’s comment onTate Modern above). Adorno’s argumentseems valid when he writes that “The entirepractice of the culture industry transfers theprofit motive naked onto cultural forms”(Adorno, 1991, p. 86). It is not a surprise:the function of industry, cultural or otherwise,in capitalism is to increase wealth, not makepeople happy. Yet the culture industry givesan illusion of choice in adherence to a confor-mity determined by the market and—bearingin mind the discussion above—a by-productof the culture industry is an image of aconflict-free society which masks divergencesof power and need the negotiation or

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contestation of which are legitimate aspects ofpublic, political and cultural concern.On the former, Adorno writes in ‘The

Schema of Mass Culture’, published inGerman in 1981

The dream industry does not so much fabri-cate the dreams of the customers as intro-duce the dreams of the suppliers amongthe people. This is the thousand-yearempire of an industrial caste system gov-erned by a stream of never ending dynasties(Adorno, 1991, p. 80).

There is a resonance: empire translates asreich. The passage recalls this from the 1940s

The culture industry perpetually cheats itsconsumers of what it perpetually promises.The promissory note which . . . it draws onpleasure is endlessly prolonged; thepromise, which is actually all the spectacleconsists of, is illusory: all it actually con-firms is that the real point will never bereached, that the diner must be satisfiedwith the menu (Adorno and Horkheimer,1947/1997, p. 139).

Adorno recognises the liberating bourgeoischaracteristic of intrigue in drama—a way torenegotiate the conditions of a subject’slife—but remarks that when heroes nolonger make sacrifices or come of age, butachieve a success which affirms conformity,the intriguer is liquidated. He writes thatmass culture “treats conflict but in fact pro-ceeds without conflict . . . reality becomes atechnique for suspending its development”;and that “Mass art registers this fact inasmuchas it repudiates conflict as outmoded”(Adorno, 1991, pp. 62, 66). I put this besideZukin’s argument that when

labour unions and political parties seempowerless to challenge social divisions,culture as ‘collective lifestyle’ appears ameaningful, and often conflictual, sourceof representation [while culture is] oftenreduced to a set of marketable images(Zukin, 1995, p. 263).

And Ian Angus’ comment that mass culturereplaces a divided class-based culture “with

a single self-enclosed world of industriallyproduced cultural goods” so that, as culturaluniformity drives out regional, ethnic and lin-guistic difference, inequalities are “expressednot as different worlds of goods, but as rela-tive degrees of access to uniform goods”(Angus, 2000, pp. 89–90). I would cite, too,remarks by a dissident cultural professionalin Glasgow

The wish locally to bury the facts of apast which had become inconvenient andto superimpose a new, sanitised, market-able image of the city required not acritical social history . . . but a bland, self-congratulatory hype (quoted in Bianchini,1991, p. 37).

Why reintroduce critical theory in urbanstudies? It lacks an empirical base (and Ihave suggested arts advocacy suffers fromthis condition) and offers only a discursive,dialectical approach to material problems.An underpinning theme in Adorno’s writing(1997) is the tension between art’s aestheticand social dimensions, (dis)coloured by aview that in dark times art, too, will be darkin as much as it critically conveys the absurd-ities of the administered world. For Adorno,the plays of Samuel Beckett stand for such aresponse. Yet, if Beckett is as acquired ataste as modern art, the concern is with con-sciousness (and conscience); it is also withdialectics—the insight that while people areshaped by conditions they also intervene inand reshape the conditions which shapethem. Put more simply, Benjamin’s ideaof the author as producer, and citizen asco-author, can be adapted to express an ideaof the dweller as co-producer of urbanspaces. This is compatible with, if differentfrom, Lefebvre’s reflection on lived space.In brief, then, I would argue that the methodof interrogation advanced by Adorno can beapplied to culturally led urban redevelopmentand that part of his critique retains validity inthat context (of mass deception then and theillusions of cultural consumption and the com-modification—as aestheticisation—of urbanspaces now).

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2. Art as Interruption

Despair is easy—the more so after readingAdorno—but observing artists’ groups work-ing against the grain of cultural universalismgives me hope. The work is seldom a resolu-tion of a situation, more often it problematisesone. Matthew Cornford and David Cross, asthe London-based group Cornford and Cross,describe their aim as to

incite individuals to collude in encroach-ments upon their own freedom in theurban environment, and so criticallyengage with the relationship of art to theexercise of power in public space (quotedin Neilson et al., 2004, p. 26).

They do not seek a mass public but toengage specific publics for whom imaginativepossibilities are opened.

To give an example of the kind of project Ihave in mind, Hewittþ Jordan produced a

billboard text for a site at the corner of Corpor-ation Street and Alma Street, Sheffield, inApril, 2004 which states that “The economicfunction of public art is to increase the valueof private property” (Hewittþ Jordan, 2004,p. 53; see Figure 1). The artists see thework as setting out “to question the functionof art in the public realm within the economicregeneration of post industrial cities”(www.jordan-hewitt.demon.co.uk). It is thesecond part of a project which began with theartists presenting themselves to delegates at aconference in London in 2003 as the prize ina raffle. Both works were commissioned byPublic Art Forum, a network of agencies,public authorities and individuals involved inpublic art’s management. Hewittþ Jordan donot make documentary objects out of suchprojects—in the way Andy Goldsworthy, say,relies on gallery-shown colour photographsof works in remote places to bring them to apublic andmake a living as an artist—and state

Figure 1. The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property. By courtesy ofthe artists Hewitt and Jordan.

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We always try to avoid making some-thing—not even a video—not that we canmake video anyway. We know that we aremaking it difficult for ourselves. I thinkthat the reason for this is a desire to focusthe attention on the intervention/processitself rather than on an object—an objectbrings ‘relief’ to the normal spectator ofart (Hewittþ Jordan, 2004, p. 47).

In a more recent project, Futurology,Hewittþ Jordan commissioned a range ofother artists to work in partnership withschools in the West Midlands and arranged aseries of critical discussions of culture at theNew Art Gallery in Walsall. The project wassupported by Creative Partnerships, butJordan and Hewitt saw it as, in itself, a critiqueof the intention for which Creative Partner-ships was established by government: to“encourage creative learning in schools”(Futurology, 2004). Rather than ask what isuncreative learning I quote the project leaflet

Current government believes this form oflearning will help a future citizen adapt tothe changing economic environment. Crea-tive Partnerships is aimed at bringing thislearning initiative to schools in areas thatare the most ‘economically and sociallychallenged’ . . . We want to avoid both thecynical withdrawal of artists from thepublic as well as the naıve surrendering ofthe artist to the agenda of politicians andfunders (Futurology, 2004).

That agenda tends to employ artists as low-budget problem-solvers, sometimes puttingthem in situations in which they have littlechance to contribute—through short-termand peripatetic involvement—to structuralproblems which may in any case result fromother government policies. In a conversation,Hewitt and Jordan mentioned that a by-product of Creative Partnerships and othersocially directed schemes is a worry on thepart of government arts officers that there isa lack of evidence that quantifiable benefitsaccrue (conversation with the author, 11August 2004, Walsall). This seems to be arerun of the problem identified by Selwood

(1995) and could offer a reclamation of theautonomy characteristic of Modernism inthe arts, or imply a deeper questioning ofthe conditions in which social dis-easearises. Hewittþ Jordan look to a reformedautonomy

The fact that our practice attempts to beabout some idea of art’s transformation. . . is also crucial to this idea of the auton-omy of art. But I don’t mean that in thesense of wanting it to be outside everyone’sexperience . . . There are good things aboutbeing autonomous too—like an objectiveview and a dissident voice (HewittþJordan, 2004, p. 44).

Jordan, speaking there in an interview, doesnot adopt an activist position but one ofseeking to change art rather than the world,as a possible means to change part of theway in which the idea of a world (distinctfrom the bio-realm of Earth) is constructed.Patricia Phillips, from a different viewpoint,writes of new modes of practice in northAmerica which have

produced a variety of social, political, andactivist forms—installations, interventions,roundtables, performances, and multipleforms of collaboration that engage urgentsubjects (housing and homelessness, socialjustice, domestic violence, race and class,forgotten histories and untold stories) in apassionate, of eclectic hybridity (Phillips,2003, p. 12).

In the UK, too, a range of eclectic andhybrid practices has begun to emerge. Thework of the London-based group PLAT-FORM (Jane Trowell, James Marriott, DanGretton and Emma Sangster) links art todemocracy and ecology. The group have asmany links to campaigning organisations asto the artworld and refuse to follow theagendas of arts funding bodies regardless ofwhat has at times been a fluctuating financialposition. Their current preoccupation is withthe global impact on human and environ-mental rights of the oil industry and projectshave included production and distribution tocommuters of a spoof newspaper and guided

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walks around the financial district of London(see Miles, 2004a, pp. 195–203).

If PLATFORM politicises the fantasy of anever-expanding global economy which ismaterially destructive of human rights andnatural habitats on a correspondingly globalscale, there is also work which interrupts therhetoric of urban development in a localisedway—such as Camelot, a project by Cornfordand Cross, comprising an industrially madesteel security fence erected around a residualpatch of grass near the bus station in Stoke-on-Trent in 1996. During its installation, theproject caused huge resentment of its form,which obstructed informal paths to the shop-ping centre, and of the use of public moneyto pay for it. It could have been (and was forsome) a public relations disaster. Yet it ledto intensive discussions on the quality andownership of public spaces in the city andtheir neglect by the local authority, discus-sions which were perhaps elements of amore direct democracy than that of local elec-tions. The artists state

Camelot is a literal interpretation of theCity Limits theme; we chose to invitereflection and debate on the physical andsocial boundaries which often determinethe patterns of city life—in this case bydenying people access to some small, neg-lected fragments of public urban land(artists’ statement; in Miles, 2004a, p. 166).

This makes any audit of the work as mightbe required on conventional public art proble-matic and denies the kind of solution-basedevaluation which was required in, forinstance, SRB-funded projects and is nowrequired for Creative Partnerships. Indeed, Ihave only the word of one of the artistsinvolved as to what took place.

An implication, tacit or stated, of such workis that it contributes to conditions in whichradical socioeconomic change is possible.There are at least two ways in which to inter-pret this: either the change is personal—as thepersonal is political—and occurs in more orless intimate exchanges between artists andmicro-scale, participating audiences, inwhich context PLATFORM arrange events

on the parallel worlds of the oil industry andthe management of the Holocaust for groupsof around eight; or intervention is in the cat-egories and conventions of discourse inorder to shift how specific issues are rep-resented or (re)considered. The former mightrely on a latent utopianism which is part ofmodern culture’s heritage, but this needs scru-tiny. Above, I cite Hope and Carrington, thegroup Bþ B, on the reliance of the integrationof art into the current UK government’s policyon social inclusion and regeneration onsuch utopian notions of art as empower-ment (www.welcomebb.org.uk). They alsonote that Joseph Beuys reframed art thera-peutically to empower people to live crea-tively, which I take to include imaginingfutures other than those prescribed by capitalor its out-sourced providers of governmentalservices in a globalised economy. But whatBeuys meant by creativity is not what ismeant in government policy, in what Hopeand Carrington call the art pill. Bþ Bfurther cite Alan Kaprow, who built 30 icewalls in Pasadena and Los Angeles in 1967as dystopian spectacles resembling capitalism.

The approaches sketched here denote astratum of cultural production which crossesthe boundaries of art and social formation,and becomes a form, too, of culturalmediation when artists take responsibility forthe dissemination of their own projects. Itprobably no longer matters whether suchactivity is classified as art, except that artistsneed arts funding (or jobs in arts education)for support even when they set out to critiquesuch support systems. A future project forHewittþ Jordan is to distribute 422 300badges—one for everyone—in Manchestersaying “I will not accept ‘the way thingsare’” (badge in author’s possession). Is itcool or should I note Arundhati Roy’s com-plaint that, as a writer taking sides over theconstruction of highly destructive dams inIndia, “that’s considered a pretty uncool,unsophisticated thing to do . . . uncomfortablyclose to the territory occupied by politicalparty ideologues” (Roy, 2001, p. 11)? Doescultural engagement correspond to theagenda of the World Commission on Culture

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and Development, for whom cultures are“ways of living together” (UNESCO, 1996,p. 14), more than to that of developers and cul-tural institutions? Perhaps we can think of cul-tural work in which production and receptionlink in participatory ways of working as devel-opment in the sense of development in thenon-affluent world, where NGOs have some-times been able to take more empoweringapproaches than those of urban policy in theaffluent world (Guha and Martinez-Alier,1997, for example). But that is anotherenquiry and might begin by looking at cultu-rally led redevelopment via the literatures ofsustainability and development studies. Inote a summary of the World Commission’sreport

One of the most basic freedoms is to be ableto define our own basic needs. This freedomis threatened by a combination of globalpressures and global neglect . . . Awarenessof this has led to resurgent assertions in thepost-Cold War world, as people and theirleaders turn to their own culture as ameans of self-definition and mobilisation.For the poorest among them, their ownvalues are often the only thing that theycan assert . . . The concern is that develop-ment has meant loss of identity, sense ofcommunity and personal meaning(UNESCO, 1996, p. 15).

There are traces of cultural liberalism inUNESCO, yet the report begins to separateculture as way of life, but also as action,from the demands of a globalised economyand the culture it produces, and requires, inorder to glue that economy together andkeep it going. Culture, after all, is arguablymore influential in establishing brand loyaltiesby turning products into iconic representationsof an alluring lifestyle than simple advertis-ing (although that is one channel by whichthe representation is enforced, of course).Looking to the literatures of development inthe non-affluent world, where the term ‘dev-elopment’ is brought into contestation indebates on sustainability, more radical approa-ches are found than in most of the reports,schemes and image-constructions of urban

redevelopment in the affluent world. Theconcept of liberation ecology, to take a par-ticularly interesting case, is a discourse ofNature which is “Marxist in origin, poststruc-tural in recent influence, politically trans-formative in intent, but subject still to thefiercest of debates” (Peet and Watts, 1996,p. 37). I wonder if the concept can be mappedonto the affluent world to subvert its notionsof development, whether culturally or econo-mically led. In the non-affluent world, theaffluent world’s notion of development asmono-crop agriculture is increasingly rejectedby aid agencies for whom handing overmanagement to local groups is imperative ifsolutions to environmental degradation are tobe lasting. Summarising the position, Elliottwrites

Ensuring that individual land users andcommunities have secure rights to re-sources and the benefits from investmentstherein is a further condition of sustainableagricultural development based on recentexperiences of success (Elliott, 1999,p. 126).

Could that be applied to deprivation in aninner-city area? It would perhaps notproduce the solution advanced naively in1995 by Landry and Bianchini for the revitali-sation of urban centres

In Newcastle they have used the HappyHour . . . On various days of the week,some bars and restaurants reduce theirprices substantially in order to encouragepeople to stay in the city centre and useits facilities. The prices are so low that itis hardly worth going home and cookingyour own food (Landry and Bianchini,1995, p. 42).

In Newcastle, too, and in several other citycentres in the UK, police chiefs now seekadditional powers to curb the effects ofexcess alcohol consumption among youngpeople attracted there by, precisely, happyhours. The dream of oblivion may be moreeasy than most to market and has the advan-tage of perpetual non-satisfaction in conse-quent amnesia, but is a degradation of urban

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dwelling equivalent, for the same profitmotive, to, say, logging in Indonesia. My con-clusion—it may be inept to venture a con-clusion in discussion of a process which Ihave said from complexity theory is unpre-dictable—is that the values of the contempor-ary art cited above are more akin to those ofthe work of some NGOs in the non-affluentworld, or of activists resisting globalisedcapital and its environmental destructivenessand human rights abuses, than to those ofurban redevelopment in the affluent world ormodern art.

A key component in this is the handing overto participants of co-production of the work. Asimilar departure is found in radical planningwhen the planner retains her/his expertisebut relinquishes the safety of both statisticsand the office to spend time with mobilisedcommunity groups. Sandercock writes that

Radical practices emerge from experiencewith and a critique of existing unequalrelations and distributions of power, oppor-tunity, and resources (Sandercock, 1988,p. 97).

It is important to note that radical plannersand activist artists do not cease to be plannersand artists but do accord equal value to boththe expertise of professionals in their fieldsand dwellers on dwelling. These practicesinterrupt the flow of city-image rhetoric.Moments of close conversation on the archi-tectures of power, say, during a guided walkthrough London’s financial district are notgiven to city marketing, any more than a citywhich is promoted as having no granddesign to articulate its narrative will attractmainstream investment. Neither are the activi-ties of Cornford and Cross likely to put Stokeon the international culture or tourism maps.Their provocation of reconsiderations of thevalues of the public realm contrast with fanta-sies of a latte-drinking, piazza-sitting society.It could be compared with the work of the YesMen, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonano, ex-media teachers, who construct an ironic cri-tique of global trade by impersonating it viaa spoof World Trade Organisation website—from which they are invited to address

business gatherings. A press report notesthat, impersonating (or identity correcting, asthey put it) a representative of McDonaldsfor a student audience, Bonano

strolls over to his overhead projector andbegins to outline his firm’s latest act of cor-porate responsibility: converting first-worldhuman waste into fast food for developingcountries (Burkeman, 2004).

After two decades of public art, the inte-gration of artists in the design of highwaysand bridges, their complicity in public–private finance initiatives and the view thatculture solves socioeconomic problems whichmay result from other areas of public policy,I find that refreshing.

But I need to ask one more question: is theapproach I cite above another form of culturalexpediency differing only in specifics from itspredecessors, just as much avant-garde artsince the 19th century reproduced the conven-tions (such as the privileged insight of theartist) of the social arrangements it sought tooverthrow? Yudice writes

In our era, representations of and claims tocultural difference are expedient insofar asthey multiply commodities and empowercommunity (Yudice, 2003, p. 25).

Is radical culture, then, a resource? As such,it must let go of the Modernist claim to auton-omy even within radical contemporary artpractice. At the same time, it retains theequally Modernist claim to deal in privilegedinsights. Yudice traces, from Foucault, anevolution of a relation between thought andthe world (episteme) in which the post-Enlightenment phase is characterised by het-erodox enquiry and a redemption of “greathidden forces” (Foucault, 1973, p. 251,quoted in Yudice, 2003, p. 30). Yudicecontinues

Modern knowledge thus consists of unveil-ing the primary processes (the infrastruc-ture, the unconscious) that lurk in thedepths, beneath the surface: manifestationsof ideology, personality, and the social(Yudice, 2003, p. 30).

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and proposes a next phase in which pre-vious modes (resemblance, representationand historicity) are recombined to accountfor “the constitutive force of signs”. Therupture of society predicted in Marxist ana-lyses of capitalism is salved by cultural expe-dients and “the transformation of artists andintellectuals into managers of that expropria-tion under the guise of ‘community-based’work” (Yudice, 2003, p. 35). The prognosisis as gloomy as Adorno’s

That culture as resource is at the heart ofthese processes does not mean that capital’sassault on workers and others . . . [is]merely virtual. It is for this reason that cul-tural politics . . . is unlikely to make adifference. Indeed, I argue . . . that the ‘cul-tural left’ is largely enjoined to performsuch a cultural politics . . . The protectionof the cultural resources that global enter-tainment conglomerates have expropriatedinvolves not only the law but also the useof police and military forces, for example,in the pursuit of piracy . . . From the per-spective of most forms of cultural politics. . . subversion of the assumptions implicitin dominant media as a way of appropriat-ing them is thought to be a viable option. . . [but] it is hardly effective (Yudice,2003, pp. 35–36).

His inclination, as I read it, is that musicpiracy is a more frontal assault on capitalismthan the kinds of intervention I have sketchedabove. Interestingly, music piracy is both anextension and a counter to the entrepreneurialactivities of the cultural intermediariesO’Connor sees as vitalising new urban spaces.In the end, I admit I cling to hope because a

world without it is too awful to contemplate,not from evidence. But then Zukin reports that

the belief that New York is the worldcapital of culture has been used as if itwere a fortune-teller’s benediction to wardoff all evidence of economic decline(Zukin, 1995, p. 110).

Nonetheless, I look to art which takes a dia-lectical approach as a viable alternative toeither complicity in or frontal resistance to

globalised capitalism and its cultural turn.For Jane Trowell this work has “a viralquality, slipping a proposition into the blood-stream under the guise of a safe publication”(Trowell, 2000, p. 107). Perhaps the spoofnewspaper and the spoof website whichmimic in order to refuse the appearances ofan increasingly total neo-liberalism, appear-ances which today have the function of thedeceptions of the culture industry previously,are interventions in the texture of globalisedcommunications, interrupting its gloss andacting, almost imperceptibly, like frost in con-crete. Perhaps that is what is viable now.

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