From Creative Economy to Creative Society
A neighborhood-based strategy to increase urban vitality and
promote social inclusion
Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert
Can a creative economy ameliorate urban poverty? The contemporary U.S.
city is witness to an increasing proportion of its residents being
denied active participation in the local economy, social institutions,
and broader civil society. While many a metropolis has weathered the
transition from an industrial to an information-based economy, most
urban neighborhoods bear the persistent physical and social
manifestations of economic inequality and social exclusion.
Urban policy-makers generally agree that regional economic
development and job growth are the solution to urban poverty and its
associated blight and pathology. Many cities have latched onto Richard
Florida's argument that attracting the “creative class” to the region
will generate jobs and tax revenue, a trickle down of benefits to all
citizens. Unfortunately, it appears that growth of the creative economy
can spark inequality and exclusion. Is the creative economy a bargain
with the devil? Does a city have to accept increased economic inequality
to reap the prosperity of the creative economy?
In this article, we recap current research and policy on culture and
revitalization and propose a new model—a neighborhood-based creative
economy—that has the potential to move the twenty-first century city
toward shared prosperity and social integration.
The Creative Sector And Urban Policy
A focus on the creative economy represents the latest wave of interest
in culture as a post-industrial urban revitalization strategy. Beginning
with the 1983 landmark study by the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey, economic impact studies have quantified the contribution of the
nonprofit cultural sector to a regional economy based on the multiplier
effect of organizational and audience expenditures. In time,
policy-makers realized that economic impact is magnified when bounded
spatially. So the planned cultural district came into vogue, along with
the development of major cultural facilities like museums or performing
arts centers, as catalysts for downtown revival.
The creative economy is more than just nonprofit arts and culture.
Studies by the Rand Corporation of the performing and media arts took
the lead in treating nonprofit and commercial cultural firms as a single
sector. Richard Florida's work—with its claims about the role of the
“creative class” in global competitive advantage—encouraged the trend to
treat nonprofit and for-profit firms as a single sector and expanded
definitions of culture to include design and related fields as part of
the creative economy.
The excitement among public and corporate executives about the
creative class has overshadowed a growing literature on the community
benefits of the arts and culture. Researchers studying
community-building seek to integrate their findings on grassroots
cultural practices and informal arts with their understanding of
contemporary urban community. Economic geographers have developed a
third stream of literature, which explores production-driven “cultural
clusters” and the social networks underpinning productivity. It is this
cultural cluster perspective that has the greatest potential to meet the
dual policy goals of economic growth and social inclusion.
Social Costs of the Creative Economy
Neither the literature on the creative economy nor that on community
building has focused on possible negative effects of culture-based
revitalization. Gentrification remains the most common fear. A less
commonly discussed drawback of culture-based revitalization, but one for
which there is more evidence, is the expansion of inequality. Economic
inequality—attributed to structural changes including globalization, the
decline in unions, and deindustrialization—has exploded in the United
States over the past thirty years.
Of particular relevance to the arts is the emergence of
“winner-take-all” labor markets. Robert Frank and Philip Cook, who
developed the concept, show that changes in the U.S. labor market have
expanded the number of job categories in which the most skilled members
reap a disproportionate share of rewards. Frank and Cook suggest that
what used to be a relatively rare feature is now common in a great
number of occupations and serves to accelerate economic inequality.
Within the creative economy, artists are especially vulnerable to the
winner-take-all dynamic. The handful of opera singers, concert
pianists, dancers, and authors seen as the best in the world garner
incomes that dwarf those of gifted practitioners who are seen as less
extraordinary. Indeed, the Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP),
*
in a 2005 study of artists in six U.S. metropolitan areas between 1980
and 2000, found artists consistently among the occupations with the
highest degree of income inequality.
Empirical research indicates that as culture increases its share of
the metropolitan economy, increased inequality is a much more
significant downside than gentrification. In his 2005 work, Richard
Florida acknowledged that the growth of the creative class has
contributed to the rise in economic inequality and its social and
political repercussions. “Perhaps the most salient of... the
externalities of the creative age,” Florida noted, “has to do with
rising social and economic inequality.”
Still, since its publication in 2002, Florida's
The Rise of the Creative Class
has been used by city officials from New York to Spokane as a how-to
manual for stimulating economic growth. The realization that pursuing
creative class strategies will actually exacerbate the divisions between
rich and poor has been slow to sink in.
The job mix within the creative economy poses concern as well as
promise for its role in promoting economic revitalization. Overall, the
creative industries are dominated by jobs with high educational
requirements. The expansion of both arts occupations specifically and
the creative economy overall will create more opportunities for highly
skilled workers than for urban residents with modest educational
qualifications.
Social Benefits of Community Culture
Research conducted over the past decade across the U.S. has reshaped our
understanding of the role culture plays in urban communities. We now
understand that culture includes nonprofit, public, and commercial
organizations as well as independent artists. In addition, we have
learned that even the “informal arts” play a critical role in building
social networks and connections across communities.
Much work on community culture is concerned with the inclusion of
historically marginalized populations. The Urban Institute has developed
a broad framework for tracking community cultural vitality—which it
defines as “evidence of creating, disseminating, validating, and
supporting arts and culture as a dimension of everyday life in
communities.” The informal arts sector, in particular—characterized by
participatory, hands-on cultural and creative activities in
non-chartered groups and informal settings—is associated with people of
color, immigrants, and other out-of-the-mainstream communities.
Ethnographers in Chicago and the Silicon Valley have documented the
community building potential of the informal arts. A recent study, for
example, found that Mexican immigrants in Chicago “use artistic and
cultural practices to break down social isolation, create new social
networking relationships, strengthen... bonds among group members, and
... create local and transnational ties with [outside] institutions...”
The literature, however, avoids drawing parallels between informal
arts and the informal economy. The informal arts sector is not only an
indicator of community cultural vitality but a symptom of the social
costs of the creative economy. Many artists, particularly those
operating in the informal sector, labor under difficult conditions for
low wages—stringing together several jobs to make ends meet.
The
vitality of informal culture, therefore, derives in part from the
animating force of poverty.
Cultural engagement across the spectrum contributes to the quality of
community life by reflecting and reinforcing social diversity. Urban
neighborhoods that are diverse ethnically, economically, and/or by
household or family structure are more likely than homogeneous
communities to house cultural programs, cultural participants, and
artists. Likewise, culturally active neighborhoods are more likely to
maintain demographic diversity over time.
SIAP's research on Philadelphia neighborhoods has documented links
between cultural engagement, social diversity, and community
capacity-building. Residents who participate in the arts and culture
also tend to engage in other types of community activities. Moreover,
the presence of cultural organizations in a neighborhood stimulates
local community participation overall. This kind of community
cross-participation helps stabilize heterogeneous communities as well as
enhance overall community capacity.
SIAP has documented a connection between community culture and child
welfare: low-income neighborhoods with high cultural participation rates
were more than twice as likely as comparable low-participation
neighborhoods to have very low truancy and delinquency. These child
welfare indicators reflected not the number of kids in arts programs but
rather the relationship of cultural engagement to “collective
efficacy,” a term used by public health researcher Felton Earls to
explain why some poor neighborhoods are safer than others—that is,
“social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to
intervene on behalf of the common good.”
The Regeneration Potential of Cultural Clusters
Urban policy makers, using consumption-driven models, have focused on
using culture to draw tourists, conventioneers, and suburbanites
downtown. However, production-driven “cultural clusters,” which occur at
both neighborhood and regional scales, may be the best fit between the
needs of declining cities and the cultural sector.
Clusters are geographic concentrations of inter-connected companies,
specialized suppliers, service providers, and associated institutions in
a particular field. According to Michael Porter, economic clusters
increase productivity by driving the direction and pace of innovation.
“A cluster allows each member to benefit as if it had greater scale,”
according to Porter, “without requiring it to sacrifice its
flexibility.”
In a study of the craft, fashion, and cultural products industries of
Los Angeles, Allen Scott observed that clustering is a critical feature
for cultural producers to improve the quality of work produced and
benefit economically from the work. L.A.'s small-scale, labor-intensive
crafts firms cluster in dense industrial districts throughout the inner
city and region to reduce costs through “agglomeration economies.”
Moreover, the spatial proximity of individuals and firms facilitates
intense social networks that spur a cross-pollination of ideas and
innovation. Manuel Castells calls this organizational structure a
“network enterprise” and the location where proximity generates synergy a
“milieu of innovation.”
Community arts researchers have found direct connections between
culture and revitalization. In a study of ten Chicago neighborhoods,
Diane Grams and Michael Warr identified social networks as a key
mechanism by which community arts contribute to neighborhood
improvement. By developing social networks, low-budget arts programs
leverage local and non-local assets that result in direct economic
benefits for the neighborhood—new markets, new uses of existing
facilities, new jobs for local artists—as well as broader community
engagement.
SIAP has developed empirical methods to measure the arts' impact on
the broader socio-economic processes of urban neighborhoods. Indeed,
SIAP's research on Philadelphia shows a strong and long-standing
relationship between cultural assets and neighborhood regeneration.
During the 1980s and 1990s, low-income neighborhoods with many cultural
providers or participants were three to four times more likely to
revitalize—that is, to gain population and reduce poverty—than other
at-risk areas. Between 2001 and 2003, distressed neighborhoods rich in
cultural assets were more likely to see a dramatic improvement in their
housing markets.
How might we explain a connection between cultural engagement and the
decline of poverty? SIAP's analyses of metropolitan Philadelphia
demonstrate that cultural production and participation reinforce one
another, both within communities and across the region. Cultural
providers (nonprofit and for-profit), individual artists, and
participants tend to locate in similar communities. Moreover,
communities rich in cultural resources send participants to programs
throughout the city as well as draw outsiders into their own
neighborhoods. Even among small grassroots arts centers, nearly
four-in-five participants come from other neighborhoods. Unlike most
community activities, culture builds bridges across the divides of
geography, ethnicity, and social class. By building social networks
within and between neighborhoods, cultural engagement fosters collective
capacity, especially in low-wealth communities.
SIAP's findings demonstrate a clear correlation between cultural
engagement and community well-being, but several empirical holes remain.
We have yet to:
- measure directly the link between cultural partici-pation and neighborhood change—the “collective efficacy” hypothesis;
- collect comparable data on other forms of community engagement to
assess the relative effectiveness of culture in promoting neighborhood
revitalization; or
- sort out the temporal relationship between cultural engagement, civic vitality, and neighborhood regeneration.
In
addition, it would be useful to do case studies of neighborhood
cultural clusters—what SIAP calls “natural” cultural districts—to look
at the social and spatial dynamics of cultural production and
participation and their implications for neighborhood revitalization.
A New Model: a Neighborhood-Based Creative Economy
Can the creative economy expand economic opportunity and social
inclusion without generating the inequality and displacement that its
critics have noted? The answer, we suggest, lies in linking threads from
the creative economy, community-building, and cultural cluster
literature into an alternative model, which we call a
neighborhood-based creative economy.
The three perspectives share an interest in moving beyond traditional
nonprofit models of the arts and focusing on a community's assets rather
than its deficits. All view cultural organizations not in isolation but
as “network enterprises” in which their connections to wider systems
are more important than their internal organization.
The creative cluster literature highlights that creativity is a
collective process. The productive and revitalization potential of the
creative sector depends upon an infrastructure of social and spatial
networks. A neighborhood-based creative economy would build the social
and spatial networks of creativity from the bottom up.
At the core of the model is a view of the community cultural sector
as an ecosystem. An ecosystem perspective highlights how the capacities
and impacts of the sector as a whole are greater than the sum of its
parts. The community cultural ecosystem includes many agents—nonprofits,
commercial cultural firms, individual artists, and informal groups—that
operate both within communities and across metropolitan areas. An
ecosystem perspective views the connections and flows between agents and
resources—their institutional and social networks—as more important
than individual entities.
An effective revitalization strategy should be both place- and
people-based; that is, it should be grounded in a given locale but have
active connections with other neighborhoods and economies throughout the
city and region. A neighborhood-based ecosystem approach to the
creative economy is a way to integrate urban neighborhood residents with
the regional economy and civil society.
From Creative Economy to Economic Opportunity
The concept of the community cultural ecosystem fits uneasily with
current interest in the creative economy. At least in its American
manifestations, the creative economy is thoroughly market-oriented. The
profit motive is the change agent, and cultural and social arrangements
are expected to respond accordingly.
Creative Class Myopia.
Florida's work is based on a reasonable and important insight—that the
role of creativity has become a central element of a region's
comparative economic advantage. But there is a dark side to the creative
class argument. As Saskia Sassen noted years ago, the global economy
tends to “valorize” particular jobs while it “devalorizes” others that
are equally important to the overall functioning of the economy. In his
enthusiasm for the role of the truly creative in stimulating economic
growth, Florida places a high value on particular workers—typically
high-wage, well-educated workers—which has the effect of devaluing those
who make a less visible contribution. But if we make life better for
the creative class, in a world of limited resources, we make life worse
for the less “gifted.” In his latest book, Florida bemoans that creative
places have high levels of social and economic inequality. Yet, it is
difficult to see how his conceptualization of creativity could have any
other consequence.
The unhappy denouement of the creative class raises a provocative
implication that has been largely unexplored. In his seminal work,
Art Worlds,
sociologist Howard Becker challenged the image of the artist as a
genius existing outside of any social organization. Individual
creativity—even in its most idiosyncratic form—is tied to patterns of
organization of social activity that allow the genius to play that role.
“Works of art,” Becker explains, “are not the products of individual
makers, ‘artists’ who possess a rare and special gift... [They] are,
rather, joint products of all the people who cooperate via an art
world's characteristic conventions to bring works like that into
existence.” Artists are indispensable, but they are not the whole show.
Like Sassen, Becker is as likely to believe that the stagehand, the
printer, or the violin string maker is as critical to art as the famed
actor, author, or singer. Once we see creativity as a collective
process, we need to pay attention to everyone who contributes to the
process, not just the creative class.
Much recent work on the creative economy and creative class turns
Becker's insight on its head. Where Becker showed that art requires the
contribution of many people with different skills and aptitudes who
coordinate their activities, creative class advocates take the classic
idea of the artist—a genius with unique vision and skill—and generalize
it to all creative workers. Where Becker sought to demystify creativity,
many writers on the creative economy seek to generalize the artists'
aura to encompass stockbrokers, lawyers, and even university professors!
A Creative Sector Workforce Development Strategy.
Could the creative economy have implications for an urban workforce
development strategy? What if we turn Howard Becker's insight back on
its feet and give the creative economy new legs? If the sector's success
is based on the social organization of many people with different
skills and aptitudes, the creative economy might provide the foundation
for a variety of new jobs and skills not covered by current definitions
of creative workers. Someone has to lay the fiber optic cable for the
web designer, someone has to sew the costumes for the dancers, and
someone has to create the drawings for the architect. From this
perspective, the creative economy could provide opportunities for young
adults who have not been successful in pursuing traditional academics.
In fact, using a narrow definition in valuing the creative class
flies in the face of a profound reorganization of work life that emerges
at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The organization of work
during the twentieth century followed a trajectory that separated mental
and manual work. During the course of industrialization, the
restructuring of work was devoted to removing knowledge from the “hands”
who did the work and giving it to the engineers and managers who
oversaw and directed the process.
By the end of the century, however, the pendulum had begun to swing
back. In sector after sector, information technologies permitted a
reduction in the division of labor and a reintegration of manual and
mental labor. Indeed, the reintegration of mental and manual work that
is required for creative and cultural production provides a fertile
ground for examining opportunities for an urban workforce.
To do so we
have to identify the range of skills that, while not creative in the
conventional sense, are critical to the social organization of the
creative industries. With the digitization of audio and video
production, for example, it has become almost impossible to distinguish
where the “technical” work stops and the “creative” work starts.
Digital media production presents only the most obvious illustration.
Philadelphia's Charter High School for Architecture and Design has
developed a curriculum that combines traditional academics with design
skills and hands-on training in carpentry, building trades, and
structural systems. Across the creative sector, we need a thorough
inventory of the actual work involved and the paths for entering these
occupations.
From Economic Opportunity to Social Citizenship
Can a neighborhood-based creative economy contribute to both shared
wealth and social inclusion? Can cultural engagement foster an open
society? Can we tie a creative economy to a creative society? Yes, but
not if we avoid the lessons of past experience.
The Limits of Trickle-down Prosperity.
Much of the literature on culture-based revitalization focuses on
large-scale projects and districts as a means of reanimating downtowns.
Significant public investment in culture is directed at high-income
patrons and visitors—tourists, conventioneers, downtown residents, and
suburbanites. The case for benefits to residents of modest means is
typically the creation of service-sector employment and the trickle-down
of economic advantages to the region.
The development potential of a regional creative economy is
characterized more by intriguing possibilities than proven facts. By
comparison, the social benefits of the arts are persuasive and
relatively well-documented. Virtually all social impact studies find a
consistent set of positive neighborhood effects associated with
community arts and culture. They bridge long-term barriers of class and
ethnicity as well as differences in age and gender. They foster social
and institutional connections both within and between neighborhoods.
They animate public spaces. They create value in the form of physical
amenities and the quality of the built environment. SIAP's research
provides evidence that the social benefits are connected to wider trends
in community capacity-building and economic well-being.
Under the right circumstances, large-scale cultural projects can
generate significant economic return, but the bulk of these benefits
accrue to high-wealth populations. By contrast, small-scale projects
entail modest investments and yield modest direct economic return.
However, clusters of even low-budget arts and cultural resources
generate significant spillover effects that contribute to the quality of
community life, which in turn can trigger long-term economic benefits.
Creative Economy as Social Inclusion Strategy.
To succeed on social—and economic—justice grounds, a neighborhood-based
creative economy must integrate economic opportunity and social
inclusion. For the creative economy to become a creative society, we
need to see people as more than cogs in the economy. We need to see them
simultaneously as workers and citizens and to develop an approach that
recognizes both.
The starting point would be a political ideology that acknowledges,
rather than denies, the potential for exclusion. The British experience
might be a guide to reassessing the social and economic value of
culture-based development. The priority given to social inclusion, by
Creative London, for example, is an attempt to combine market principles
with social purposes.
If a successful creative economy is based on social organization, as
Howard Becker suggests, then a strategy of social inclusion should
identify opportunities for social mobility and wealth-creation across
the economy, not just at its top. Such a strategy would have
implications for education and training and would create a virtuous
cycle of orienting urban kids toward jobs that really exist and
re-valuing those jobs within the creative economy.
A social inclusion strategy would support urban neighborhood-based
creative businesses and sole proprietors. For the Los Angeles craft
industries, Scott and Rigby recommended a policy framework that would
“not involve ‘picking winners’ [but rather would be] based on a
bottom-up and industry-wide approach directed toward improving localized
external economies [by] stimulating the entrepreneurial and creative
capacities of all local firms.” We should invest in collaborative
networks of producers and providers to enhance their institutional
infrastructure and social capital. Scott and Rigby “envisage the
creation of communities of firms, workers, and public agencies engaged
together in reconstructing the collective competitive advantages of the
region's craft industries.”
In any case, we need a hardheaded strategy that takes both market
realities and the very real human, social, and cultural impacts of the
arts into consideration. Such a strategy would likely be characterized
by smaller investments, smaller risks, and more gradual change than
what's found in the strategies that drive most cultural facility and
district plans. As importantly, however, a social inclusion strategy
must also have a bigger vision and commitment to the integration of all
local residents with the regional economy and civil society.
“Natural” Cultural Districts as Anchors of Neighborhood-based Creative Economy
The picture of a community cultural ecosystem described above suggests a
neighborhood-based approach to the use of culture to stimulate both
community revitalization and regional economic development. The model
illustrates the interdependencies of cultural producers, providers, and
participants and the way networks are woven between community and
regional entities.
UK cultural planner Chris Murray recognizes neighborhoods as cultural
entities that are both sustained by and sustaining of the contemporary
urban economy. He writes:
Provision for cultural needs
helps to develop and sustain communities, but local communities also
have a function in sustaining and developing the culture of societies as
a whole. It is at the margins that innovation often occurs: the
blending of culture, the expression of individual identity, alternative
lifestyles.
All urban neighborhoods have the potential
to become “cultural hubs,” says Murray, but not without coordinated
action. He advocates an approach that engages both artists and citizens
in planning and design processes and that provides for community
appropriation and ownership of space. “Artists tend toward flexible,
open-minded approaches; innovation; critical and questioning methods;
and people-centered solutions.”
While all urban neighborhoods have the potential to become cultural
hubs, some have the potential to become “natural” cultural districts.
Many low-wealth neighborhoods possess a critical mass of cultural
assets—cultural firms and organizations, workers and participants,
artists and creative entrepreneurs. As an alternative to top-down
planned cultural districts or as a complement to local community
development, planners and developers could identify these grassroots
nodes as leverage points for public, private, and philanthropic
investment. In this model, “natural” cultural districts would be centers
of social and economic development and would serve as neighborhood
anchors for the creative economy.
Artists' centers, in particular, appear to be generative in terms of
stimulating creative work and careers as well as neighborhood and
regional economies. Regional economist Ann Markusen, based in Minnesota,
found that dedicated spaces for artists to work and convene “help to
maximize artistic spillover” within a local community. Artists' centers
enable residents to interact with artists and participate in the
creative process; contribute to the social, cultural and commercial
lives of local neighborhoods; and “pay economic dividends for the
region.”
A neighborhood-based creative economy, anchored by a network of
“natural” cultural districts, provides an inclusive vision of an
expanding urban economy. The concept addresses three types of market
failure that are intrinsic to the creative economy and contribute
directly to inequality and exclusion: one, growth of winner-take-all
artist and creative-class labor markets; two, proliferation of informal
arts (although a source of energy and innovation, they are also a
symptom of a low-wage and insecure economy); and, three, neighborhood
displacement of residents and entrepreneurs who have initiated
revitalization.
Ultimately, we have no choice. If we don't work on economic equality
and social inclusion, the creative economy unabated will accelerate
inequality and exclusion. Florida highlights the pressures “hindering
the rise of a more fully creative society,” including increased
inequality, declines in housing affordability, uneven regional
development, sprawl, and ecological decay. Ironically, policy-makers
cite Florida in promoting the creative economy as a strategy for urban
regeneration and regional competitive advantage. Given their narrow
focus, these policies, if successful, will feed broader social
dislocation.
Economics alone won't get us to inclusion. If we see the creative
sector only as a market, the logical result will be an increase in
inequality and exclusion. We need a vision that possesses a social and
political, as well as an economic, rationale.
Culture can foster social inclusion, but it isn't automatic. With
political will and coordinated action, we can channel the promise and
prosperity of the creative economy toward innovative economies,
remunerative employment, social citizenship, and dynamic
communities—toward a creative society.
Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert are principals in the
Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) at the University of Pennsylvania.
