Handbook on the Geographies of Creativity 1785361635, 9781785361630

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HANDBOOK ON THE GEOGRAPHIES OF CREATIVITY

Handbook on the Geographies of Creativity Edited by

Anjeline de Dios Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

Lily Kong Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, Singapore

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Anjeline de Dios and Lily Kong 2020

Cover image: Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum; Sharon Chin, In the Skin of a Tiger: Monument to What We Want (Tugu Kita), 2019; Collection of the Artist, Singapore Biennale 2019 commission. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942952 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781785361647

ISBN 978 1 78536 163 0 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78536 164 7 (eBook)

Contents

List of figuresviii List of tablesix List of contributorsx 1

Geographies of creativity: inherited concepts, revised vistas Anjeline de Dios and Lily Kong

PART I

1

CREATIVITY AS IMAGINARY

2

The creative imaginary: cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity Justin O’Connor

3

Culture club: creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order37 Jamie Peck

4

From cultural industries to creative industries and back? Towards clarifying theory and rethinking policy Lily Kong

PART II

15

54

CREATIVITY AS LOCALITY

5

Creativity as locality: the role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district 74 Deborah Leslie and Shannon Black

6

Beyond the ‘buzz’: locating critical geographies of creativity Chris Gibson and Chris Brennan-Horley

7

The role of arts and culture in resilient cities: creativity and placemaking  Audrey Yue

94

111

PART III CREATIVITY AS MOBILITY 8

The centripetal and centrifugal forces at work: mobility of the creative workforce June Wang and Luyue Zhang

v

129

vi  Handbook on the geographies of creativity 9

The creative mobilities of cultural identity: transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles Anjeline de Dios

144

10

People, places and processes: crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global Susan Luckman

162

PART IV CREATIVITY AS LABOUR 11

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work Dawn Bennett, Olivia Efthimiou and Scott T. Allison

12

The rise and fall of professional singers: a typology of creative career stages in the performing arts Kathleen Connell, Andrew R. Brown and Sarah Baker

PART V

180

200

CREATIVITY AS CULTURE

13

Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture: Chumvan Sodhachivy’s YouTube page Amanda Rogers

217

14

Whose culture? Spatializing the museum, migration and belonging in Manchester Saskia Warren

234

15

Ambient culture: making sense of everyday participation in open public space  Nikos Papastergiadis, Stephanie Hannon, Scott McQuire, Danielle Wyatt and Paul Carter

249

PART VI CREATIVITY AS INTERVENTION 16

En/acting radical change: theories, practices, places and politics of creativity as intervention Heather McLean and Sarah de Leeuw

266

17

Performing alterity: creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan

282

18

Cultures of creativity and innovation in Greater China Michael Keane

299

Contents  vii 19

From social ‘integration’ to transformation: supporting the emancipatory potential of circus arts creativity Deborah Leslie, Norma Rantisi and Jessie Smith

315

PART VII CREATIVITY AS METHOD 20

Making as geographical method Janet Banfield

333

21

Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises?352 Charlotte Veal and Harriet Hawkins

Index370

Figures

5.1

Art clusters in downtown Toronto

78

5.2

Junction/Junction Triangle art galleries

79

5.3

The Tower Automotive Building

80

5.4

Galleries in the Junction Triangle

82

6.1

Australian creative workplace topologies at two scales (city and state/territory)

100

6.2

Displacement and tactical retreat of creative workers to Carrington Road Precinct, Sydney, 2018

102

10.1

Interview questions for completion by interviewee

164

10.2

Mallee root burl and resin bangle by Jax & Co (left image); The mallee root (right image)

169

10.3

The source material’s latitude and longitude of origin feature on a van Tuil product from Tasmania

172

11.1

Heroic creativity and leadership practice in creative work

183

20.1

Embroidered catkin detail (2011)

337

20.2

Practice-generated artistic spatiality (2014)

338

20.3

Boundary understanding (2012)

340

20.4

Explicating implicit understanding (2017)

342

20.5

Material and Immaterial (2012)

344

20.6

Producing Moments (2013)

346

20.7

Ecstasy of Spaces (2013)

347

viii

Tables

10.1

Top three responses to the above question from the Established Makers

165

11.1

Primary creative role identified by respondents in this chapter’s Australian creative workforce study

187

ix

Contributors

Scott T. Allison has authored numerous books, including Heroes and Heroic Leadership. He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Richmond where he has published extensively on heroism and leadership. He has co-authored articles and chapters with over 30 of his current and former students. His work has appeared in USA Today, National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate Magazine, MSNBC, CBS, Psychology Today and the Christian Science Monitor. He has received Richmond’s Distinguished Educator Award and the Virginia Council of Higher Education’s Outstanding Faculty Award. Sarah Baker is a Professor of Cultural Sociology at Griffith University, Australia. Her books include Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (with David Hesmondhalgh, Routledge, 2011), Teaching Youth Studies Through Popular Culture (with Brady Robards, ACYS, 2014), Community Custodians of Popular Music’s Past: A DIY Approach to Heritage (Routledge, 2017) and Curating Pop: Exhibiting Popular Music in the Museum (with Lauren Istvandity and Raphael Nowak, Bloomsbury, 2019). Janet Banfield is a college lecturer in geography at Oxford University. She is a cultural geographer, whose work spans geography and psychology, with a non-representational emphasis on how material and embodied features of creative practices influence their artistic, spatial and existential outcomes. Methodologically, Janet is interested in developing practice-based methods that allow us to explore and work with the pre-reflective aspects of doing and making things, and in finding creative ways to extend geography’s conceptual toolkit. Dawn Bennett is John Curtin Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Director of the EmployABILITY Initiative with Curtin University, Australia. She is an expert on the development of employability. A National Senior Australian Learning and Teaching Fellow and Principal Fellow with the HEA, Dawn is Adjunct Professor with Griffith and Monash Universities, Visiting Fellow with the Sibelius Academy and Research Fellow with the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education. Publications are recorded at Researchgate. Shannon Black is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. As a cultural geographer, Shannon’s research focuses on the various ways in which visual, material and digital cultures intersect in with creative work and the complex impacts these intersections have on structures and subjectivities. Shannon is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). x

Contributors  xi Chris Brennan-Horley is Lecturer in Human Geography and former Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The common thread running through his research is deploying Qualitative GIS as a lively technique for transformative ends. He regularly contributes his mapping expertise to interdisciplinary research teams. Andrew R. Brown is an educator, researcher, musician, author and digital media artist. He holds a PhD in music and is Professor of Digital Arts at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. His research interests include digital creativity, computational aesthetics, music education and the philosophy of technology. He pursues creative practices in computer-assisted music performance and audio-visual installations, with focus on generative processes and interactions with algorithmic systems. He is the author of over 100 academic articles and book publications include Music Technology and Education: Amplifying Musicality and Sound Musicianship: Understanding the Crafts of Music. Paul Carter is a writer and artist. Recent books include Metabolism: The Exhibition of the Unseen (2015), Places Made After Their Stories: Design and the Art of Cho reotopography (2015), Decolonising Governance: Archipelagic Thinking (2018) and  Amplifications: Poetic Migration, Auditory Memory (2019). Between 1998 and 2001 he realized a major art in landscape project at Federation Square called Nearamnew, a project later published as Mythform (2005). His most recent major public artwork, delivered through his design studio, Material Thinking, is Passenger (Yagan Square, Perth, 2018). He lives in Melbourne, where he is Professor of Design (Urbanism), School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University. Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan is Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He has published internationally on Hong Kong culture, cinema, literature, education and cultural studies. His research interests are cultural politics and identity narratives; martial arts cinema; pedagogy, creativity and performance. Currently Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies, Chan had convened the inaugural Steering Committee of the Consortium for Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Institutions, which runs the IACS Summer School. He serves on the International Editorial Board of Cultural Studies and the Advisory Board for Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies, Communication and Society and Localities. Active in civil society, Chan was elected to Hong Kong Arts Development Council representing Criticism and convened the People’s Panel on West Kowloon Cultural District before its establishment. He now chairs the Board of The House of Hong Kong Literature and is a founding core member of the Scholars’ Alliance for Academic Freedom. Kathleen Connell is a Music Pedagogy professional and holds a Masters in Vocal Pedagogy from Western Sydney University. Her private teaching practice in Sydney, Australia, trains singers across a variety of genres. She is a PhD candidate at Griffith

xii  Handbook on the geographies of creativity University, Brisbane. Her diverse professional performance career, as a singer in both permanent and freelance roles, encompasses a range of styles, events and media. Anjeline de Dios is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her research concerns the cultural geographies of creative labour, mobility/migration and popular music. She explores these and other themes in her artistic practice as a singer and chant performer, collaborating with artists and facilitators in contexts of improvised performance and meditation. Sarah de Leeuw is an award-winning critical feminist researcher and author (poetry and literary non-fiction). Her activism, writing, scholarship and teaching focus on unsettling power and the role of humanities in making biomedical and health sciences socially accountable. A Canada Research Chair in Humanities and Health Inequities, she is an Associate Professor with the University of Northern British Columbia’s Northern Medical Program, the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine. Olivia Efthimiou is an Honorary Research Fellow at Murdoch University, Australia and Affiliate at Murdoch’s Centre for Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability. She has led and published research on wide-ranging fields including heroism studies, leadership, sustainable development, film theory, wellbeing, creative writing, innovative methods and interdisciplinary research cultures. Her recent work includes the 2018 definitive edited collection Heroism and Wellbeing in the 21st Century: Applied and Emerging Perspectives published by Routledge, New York. Chris Gibson is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His books include Creativity in Peripheral Places: Redefining the Creative Industries (Routledge, 2012), Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place (Routledge, 2003) and Following Guitars From Factory to Forest (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Stephanie Hannon is a PhD candidate with the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is also a member of the Research Unit in Public Cultures Graduate Academy at the University of Melbourne. Her research is examining how media infrastructure, specifically large screens and projections, are affecting the perceptions and experience of public space. This involves empirical research at two public spaces in Melbourne, Dandenong’s Harmony Square and Gertrude Street.  Part of this research will also seek to provide recommendations about how media can be better used to facilitate greater civic engagement and public participation. Harriet Hawkins’ research explores geographies of art works and art worlds, including helping shape and advance geography’s creative turn. She is the author of two monographs: For Creative Geographies (2014) and Creativity: Live, Work, Create (2016) and co-editor of three edited collections: Geographical Aesthetics (2014, Ashgate), Making Geographies: Craft and Creativity (2017, Routledge). As well as producing academic publications she has collaborated on a series of performances, artist’s books and pamphlets as well as small-scale installation works and

Contributors  xiii curated exhibitions and events at a range of arts venues, including The Institute for International Visual Arts; Tate Britain; Tate Modern; The Bussy Building, Peckham; David Roberts Art Foundation; and in communities across the UK and Europe. She has also worked alongside creative practitioners and physical geographers developing work in this field that resulted in collaborative publications in Progress in Physical Geography, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms as well as pieces in Science and Nature. Harriet’s work has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, The AHRC, The National Science Foundations of the US, Switzerland and China and the Arts Councils of England and Switzerland. She is currently an editor of the journal cultural geographies and associate editor of GeoHumanities, a journal she helped to found. Michael Keane is Professor of Chinese Digital Media and Communications at Curtin University, Perth. He is Program Leader of the Digital Asia Research Node in the Centre for Culture and Technology. Michael’s key research interests are digital transformation in China, communication policy and the Belt and Road Initiative, creative cities, television in China, and creative industries and cultural export strategies in China and East Asia. Lily Kong is Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Social Sciences at the Singapore Management University. Her research has focused on social and cultural change in cities, and she has studied topics ranging from religion to cultural policy, creative economy, urban heritage and conservation, and smart cities. She has won research and book awards, including those from the Association of American Geographers and the Singapore National Book Development Council. Her recent books include Arts, Culture and the Making of Global Cities: Creating New Urban Landscapes in Asia (with Ching C.-H. and Chou T.-L., 2015), Food, Foodways and Foodscapes: Culture, Community and Consumption in Postcolonial Singapore (with Vineeta Sinha, 2015) and Religion and Space: Competition, Conflict and Violence in the Contemporary World (with Orlando Woods, 2016). Deborah Leslie is Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Most of her work focuses on creativity and urban-economic development. She has done extensive research on restructuring in cultural industries such as art, design, fashion, music and the circus. She has also explored the changing nature of work, and gender and racial inequalities in the labour market. Her most recent SSHRC-funded project examines training and workforce development in the social economy in Ontario and Quebec. Susan Luckman is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, Director of the CP3: Creative People, Products and Places Research Group, and Research Director of the Creative Work Mobilities Research Node, Hawke EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of South Australia. She is the author of Craft and the Creative Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Locating Cultural Work: The Politics and Poetics of Rural, Regional and Remote Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), co-editor of The ‘New Normal’ of Working Lives: Critical Studies in Contemporary

xiv  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Work and Employment (Dynamics of Virtual Work Series, Palgrave, 2018), Craft Economies (Bloomsbury, 2018), Craft Communities (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Sonic Synergies: Music, Identity, Technology and Community (Ashgate, 2008), and of numerous book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles and government reports on cultural work, creative industries and creative micro-entrepreneurialism. Heather McLean is a former Economic and Social Research Council Future Research Leader based at the University of Glasgow. Her research investigates the political potentials and pitfalls of contemporary culture-led planning policies. She is currently an Independent Researcher, University Instructor (Thompson Rivers University), and Artist working in the unceded territories of the Secwepemc people (a place named British Columbia). Her research investigates the pitfalls and possibilities of alternative community planning organizations (such as social enterprise groups, artist-run centres and land trusts) in fostering post-capitalist community economies. She also investigates the political potential of feminist and queer arts interventions in imagining and enacting decolonial futures. Scott McQuire is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne and one of the founders of the Research Unit for Public Cultures which fosters interdisciplinary research at the nexus of digital media, art, urbanism and social theory. He is the author or editor of eight books including Empires Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art (with Nikos Papastergiadis, 2005), The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (2008), Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space (2016) and Art Seen Under Digital Light: Photography, the Image and the Aesthetics of Data (2018). Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia. He is Visiting Professor in the School of Cultural Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University. He was a member of UNESCO’s ‘expert facility’ under the 2005 Convention on Diversity of Cultural Expressions 2012–2018 and has provided policy advice to cities and governments in the UK, Russia, Australia and China. He is co-author, with Xin Gu, of Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China (Intellect, 2020). Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He studied at the University of Melbourne and University of Cambridge. His sole authored publications include Modernity as Exile (1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Metaphor and Tension (2004), Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012), Ambient Perspectives (2013) as well as being the editor of over ten collections, author of numerous essays which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues such as the Biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwanju, Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki and Documenta 13. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and co-chair of the Greek Centre for Contemporary Culture, Chair of the International

Contributors  xv Advisory Board for the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore, and Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Jamie Peck is Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Western Sydney University, Australia.  His recent books include Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues (2018, Agenda, co-edited with Marion Werner, Rebecca Lave and Brett Christophers), Offshore: Exploring the Worlds of Global Outsourcing (2017, Oxford University Press) and Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (2015, University of Minnesota Press, with Nik Theodore). Norma Rantisi is a Professor of Geography and Planning at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her past research interests have centred on the socio-spatial organization of cultural industries, with a focus on fashion, fur and the circus. Rantisi’s contemporary interests are centred on the role of labour market intermediaries in combating the gendered and racialized inequities of work in a context of neoliberalism. Her current project examines training and workforce development in the social economy in Ontario and Quebec. Dr Amanda Rogers is an Associate Professor in Human Geography and the Geohumanities at Swansea University, UK. She researches the geographies of performance and the performing arts, particularly theatre and dance. Her current work focuses on post-conflict performance cultures in South East Asia and their relationship to the re-production of nationality. She is particularly interested in contemporary Cambodian performance and how it expresses, and is embedded in, history, culture and identity. Amanda’s previous research focused on the transnational connections between Asian American, British East Asian and South East Asian theatres, examining how the politics of identity and migration affect creative practice. This work was published as a monograph entitled Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geographies of Performance (Routledge, 2015). Jessie Smith is a cultural and economic geographer, whose research has focused mainly on green economics and the circus arts industry. More recently, she has participated in large-scale ethnographies that seek to showcase the precariousness caused by contemporary urban development projects and policies in the Montreal area. She has worked for ten years in social justice-oriented community development with environmental groups, youth and families. She holds an MSc in Geography, Planning and Environment from Concordia University. Charlotte Veal’s research explores the role of dance, both conceptually and methodologically, in speaking to a number of challenges facing the city and its inhabitants. More specifically, her doctorate research worked alongside professional dance organizations/NGOs in London, Vancouver and Cape Town to critically examine how performance can animate the urban and cultivate strategies of resistance with it. This research has been published in journals including cultural geographies,

xvi  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Geoforum and Area. In more recent years, Charlotte has extended her interest in performance and practice in two key ways. First, she has worked at the interdisciplinary nexus of embodied geopolitics, aeromobilities and dance studies to examine the making of the elite airborne subject at Ringway Aerodrome Manchester, 1940–1946. Second, alongside colleagues at the University of Southampton, she has applied her creative methodological approach to studies of the non-human, examining their role in the fight against antimicrobial-resistance and in fostering public engagement. Charlotte’s research has been funded by the ESRC, Universitas21, The Royal Geographical Society, The Jasmin Leila Award and the EPSRC. June Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include cultural/creative cities and culture-led urban transformation, and recently, territorialization of creative cities through assemblage of land and population, and the consequently precarious geography of cultural workforce. She has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed journals, papers and chapters, in journals such as Geoforum, Territory, Politics, Governance, Urban Geography, Cities and International Journal of Urban and Rural Research. She has edited books with Routledge and Edward Elgar, and special issues of Geoforum and City, Culture and Society. Saskia Warren is a Social and Cultural Geographer and Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at University of Manchester. She currently holds an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship, 2017–2019. The programme of research investigates the interplay of religious faith and gender in the sub-sectors of visual arts, fashion and digital media. Project website: http://​www​.creativemuslimwomen​ .manchester​.ac​.uk/​. Saskia has published widely including in leading international journals in geography and cognate disciplines including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Social and Cultural Geography, cultural geographies and the  European Journal of Cultural Studies. Her research and consultancy has been funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Collections Trust, Arts Connect, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Danielle Wyatt is a cultural researcher in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She writes about and researches the public life of culture, as expressed across cultural institutions, cultural policy, in public spaces, and through everyday practices and forms of participation. Her book, Public Libraries in the Smart City, co-authored with Dale Leorke, was published by Palgrave in 2018. Other research has been published in the journals New Media and Society, City, Culture and Society and International Journal of Cultural Policy. Audrey Yue is Professor of Media, Culture and Critical Theory and Head of the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. She is also Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She has published extensively in the field of arts and cultural policy studies.

Contributors  xvii Luyue Zhang is a masters student in the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong. Her masters thesis works on the mainland-HK co-production of films and her research interests also include creative policies in South Korea.

1. Geographies of creativity: inherited concepts, revised vistas Anjeline de Dios and Lily Kong

MAPPING CREATIVITY’S TURNS Given growing criticism in recent years against what might variously be referred to as the ideology of creativity, the hegemony of creativity, and enforced creativity, it might seem unwise to produce a book, let alone a handbook, about creativity. As far as conceptual fads go, the creative turn has itself taken such a diverse trajectory of ‘turns’, oftentimes in divergent ways that do not interact, that the term may justly be discredited in some quarters. Nevertheless, strategies and policies anchored on the notion of creativity remain enthusiastically adopted and adapted in many policy circles, perhaps particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, and scholars and research students continue to study creativity and its multiple manifestations. Those who look askance at creativity and the ways in which the creativity discourse (McRobbie, 2016) has become intertwined with notions of culture do put forward important critiques. Mould’s (2018) Against Creativity and Brook et al.’s (2020) Culture is Bad For You are part of recent publications which argue for a need to resist the ideology of enforced creativity that has captured the imagination in many parts of the world. Their concern is about the appropriation of creativity by neoliberalized capital, the co-optation of creativity for economic ends, and the hijacking of creativity for profiteering. As Mould (2014) puts it: We are no more creative that [sic] we used to be; it’s just that now, hell really has broken loose because people have become very good at channeling that creativity into creating hegemony, centralised power and injustice. Perhaps that is being creative? I sincerely hope not.

Why then should anyone persist with the belief that creativity might be anything other than an empty signifier all too easily co-opted by neoliberal interests, with oftentimes damaging consequences on both material and imagined realities of development, progress, and flourishing? To phrase the question more constructively, are there other geographies of creativity excluded or even silenced by the dominant ‘creative turn’ that have yet to be acknowledged, let alone mapped?

1

2  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

INTERROGATING CREATIVITY: REVISED VISTAS Adopting a geographically diverse, theoretically rigorous approach, the Elgar Handbook on the Geographies of Creativity answers this question in the affirmative. The selection of 20 chapters offers a critical study of creativity as it has transformed in policy, academic, activist, pedagogical and sociocultural discourse over the last decade. While a handbook connotes a reference work collecting an array of essays offering ready insights into extant knowledge about a subject, we have the privilege of a set of authors who not only provide overviews of major themes relating to creativity, but have also pushed the boundaries and contributed cutting-edge thinking, and/or offered new empirical analyses. Further, the organization of the volume belies our conviction that this should not be an ordinary handbook built on the conventional organizational divides in creativity scholarship (for example, by sector, industry, region and so forth). We have chosen instead to structure the handbook into seven parts, each evidencing the shifting contexts of the creative. In particular, we invited our authors to interrogate creativity as Imaginary, Locality, Mobility, Labour, Culture, Intervention and Method. Through these key themes, we thread through shifting contexts of the creative in the arts, media, technology, education, governance and development. This curation provides a different lens to creativity. We make the case that scholars need to think of and imagine creativity as an essential human activity that has now become a significant site, for better or worse, for decisions that both symbolize and embody the lived realities of regimes of labour, value and capital. Before we introduce the individual chapters below, we set out here the major commonalities across the chapters and parts. First, all the chapters adopt a sceptical stance towards any monolithic or mono-spatial depiction of creativity, favouring instead a complex and relational understanding that enables more contextually rooted and, dare we say, more creative, responses to the conundrum of its persistence. Second, and following from the rejection of the monolithic, the chapters all recognize the dual conditions of creativity – both the material and social. Third, despite differing in essential ways, the chapters together address key logics and tensions: around grassroots community action and state-led urban-economic development; community cohesion and identity politics; transnational connections and local neighbourhoods; and privileged participation and social equity and justice. Through addressing the geographies of creativities in these ways, the volume demonstrates how geographically attuned inquiry into creativity continues to offer a germane avenue for scholars to engage with larger debates that contemplate the politics and possibilities of culture, labour, capital and human flourishing. Perhaps the challenge lies beyond explaining its persistence – to instead explore its many robust afterlives in different elsewheres. To this end, this book proposes an agenda of inquiry to critically recalibrate the geographies of creativity, addressing questions of how, who, where and what. First, how do we make sense of the large and diverse body of literatures on creativity? The volume foregrounds the need to articulate what has been justified and executed in the name of creativity, that should no longer be taken for granted, excused or

Geographies of creativity: inherited concepts, revised vistas  3 ignored. Three key programmatic essays from leading scholars in the field of creative and cultural industries research open the volume with updated and invigorated calls to demystify, deconstruct and decolonize creativity, exposing the significance of the western origins of the creative economy/creative city imaginary (O’Connor, Chapter 2) and critiquing its complicity with late-neoliberal conditions (Peck, Chapter 3 and Kong, Chapter 4). Indeed, the question arises as to how to defend the creativity credo in the face of widening inequality and escalating gentrification (Peck, Chapter 3), the utopianizing of creative labour and the neglect of genuine creativity/culture (Kong, Chapter 4). Second, the book underlines the imperative of investigating who bears the responsibility for creativity in any given context of social, economic, urban and political activity, and indeed of interrogating the notion of ‘responsibility’ itself vis-à-vis creativity as a resource or ideal that is of significant societal, cultural and political import. The typical expectation is that creative workers and professionals possess the skills to be creative, and are thus responsible for their own welfare and development (Bennett et al., Chapter 11; Connell et al., Chapter 12), in addition to bearing the onus of promoting the value of creativity as cultural or economic ‘capital’ (as in the case of artists who represent national-cultural identities, seen in de Dios, Chapter 9; Rogers, Chapter 13) or moral-political value (Chan, Chapter 17). But this perspective alone is inadequate, as they and other authors also demonstrate, for, without the involvement and participation of ‘non-creative’ actors and institutions, the ‘creatives’ will, at best, be stymied in their ability to perform creativity for their own and collective benefit. A more useful approach would thus reflect on ways to distribute and diversify the notion of responsibility in ensuring, promoting or developing, creativity. Papastergiadis et al. (Chapter 15) and Leslie et al. (Chapter 19), for example, show how institutional actors are to be held accountable for some aspect of fostering creativity, by virtue of attuning to creative workers’ and publics’ experiences in various spaces and modalities. Third, the book demonstrates that where creativity takes root (or flight) is a loaded question that must be reflexively addressed. Current theorizations fall short in the task of critiquing the Eurocentric and Anglophone biases of critical human geography in general. In the particular research context of the geographies of creativity, the scalar and contextual complexity with which communities and economies create remains yet to be accurately described and adequately understood. The issue of where is addressed here in two ways. Perhaps most obvious is the fact that the book contains grounded empirical chapters that interrogate the conditions of creativity in the East and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. They lend critical complexity to basic concepts of creativity, putting front and centre the fact of social difference through immigrant communities, visiting artists and new media engagements, and dealing with questions of mobility, identity and locality. But more than the examination of different continents, countries and cities, new spatial metaphors and modes of inquiry are proposed in the task of reframing creativity, as seen in the focus on small/isolated/ remote places (Gibson and Brennan-Horley, Chapter 6), and inter-Asian regional and cross-border dynamics (Wang and Zhang, Chapter 8; Keane, Chapter 18).

4  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Fourth, the book recognizes what activities are commonly associated to be creative modes of practice. Certainly, the chapters evidence in-depth engagement with and understanding of a broad range of sectors and métiers: creativity is manifest in dance, music, craft, contemporary visual art, circus arts, creative writing and theatre, as might be expected. But digital technology and e-commerce (Luckman, Chapter 10; Keane, Chapter 18), cultural entrepreneurship by minority populations (Warren, Chapter 14) and social protest (Chan, Chapter 17) also find space in this book as forms of creativity that can be productively examined in conversation with the usual suspects in the cultural and creative industries. Further, the book also acknowledges the potential of creativity-as-practice to redraw the boundaries of academic, specifically geographical, knowledge production. In universities around the world, attempts have been made to introduce and gain funding for practice-based approaches to scholarly work. This has required scholar-researchers and practitioners to think through ‘creativity’ as constitutive of present and future geographies of knowledge: economic, cultural, social and political; but also symbolic, affective and material.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES As a preliminary guide to the diversity of responses to these questions – the how, who, where and what of the emergent geographies of creativity – the paragraphs below summarize the key insights of each chapter and their respective thematic parts. Creativity as Imaginary The book opens with three chapters that appraise the political-economic horizons against which creativity has been framed, and consequently critiqued, as a globally ubiquitous policy rhetoric over the last two decades. Justin O’Connor (Chapter 2) analyzes the policy migration of creativity from the West to postcolonial Asian economies within a larger political-economic context of a ‘creativity-led modernization’, facilitated by the efforts and failures of Western developmental agencies in the wake of the Cold War, the subsequent dominance of neoliberal capitalism and the economic unravelling of authoritarian regimes in the East Asian region. Beyond that, he attributes the persistence of the creativity imaginary to its usefulness as a ‘creativity bundle’ of policies and projects that appealed to both government and grassroots actors (as the selection of chapters in the Intervention part clearly demonstrates). In certain instances, the collaborative interface between policymakers and the cultural sector emerged as ‘a kind of actionable democracy’. O’Connor contends that the global connotations of the creative city agenda brought with it a ‘deep-seated shift in subject positions’, one wherein a place-specific transformation of the creativity agenda became formative of an emergent cosmopolitan subject. Whether or not this subject position of the cosmopolitan creative simply reinforces the ‘benign modernization’ of global capitalism or develops the genuinely transformative potential of cultural intervention, however, remains to be seen.

Geographies of creativity: inherited concepts, revised vistas  5 In Jamie Peck’s assessment (Chapter 3), there is no mystery behind creativity as a structural and symbolic discourse, only a ‘rather surprising durability’ which he ascribes to its capacity to ‘conform with the underlying insecurity of the urban-managerial id, with late-neoliberal modes of urban governance and with the constraints of flex-labour markets, socio-spatial polarization, endemic interurban competition and gentrified housing markets – all of which the creativity frame endeavours, in effect, to translate into either necessities or virtues’. In its exceptional performativity as a ‘fix’, the creativity credo aligns with a larger shift in neoliberal urbanism towards ‘fast-policy’ development. How must a critical engagement with creativity proceed, once the logic of its banality – its predominance as well as peril – becomes evident? One such avenue is demonstrated by Lily Kong (Chapter 4), who accounts for the multiple shifts between ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’, as they have played out in different arenas of knowledge production and policy legitimation. After tracking the theoretical and institutional influences that have transferred discursive focus from ‘culture industries’ to ‘creative industries’, Kong lists seven key areas of confusion and conflation where a geographical approach to creativity might be helpful in accounting for the plural entanglements of the creative turn. The chapter ends with a concrete proposal, to be enacted in both theoretical and policy circles of discussion, to revisit the designation of ‘cultural industries’. Reanimating the category, Kong suggests, could rectify some of the extant problems attached to the creativity discourse: delineating the scope of relevant sectors, clarifying the terms of interaction between larger businesses and small and medium-sized enterprises, and weighing the balance between ‘plugging into global cultural currency and developing local cultural idioms’. Only by following the currents of these parallel streams – theory and policy – can any discussion of creativity-as-imaginary move forward from the all-too-common rehearsal of its shortcomings. Creativity as Locality Place (and its associated processes of placemaking, co-location, clustering and agglomeration) has long been touted as the primary spatiality of creativity. However, this conceptual emphasis tends to privilege certain notions of the local that both flatten the more complex effects of creativity as policy imaginary (as we have seen in the first part), and ignore the material, everyday and on-the-ground processes which emplace creative activity. The chapters in this part each foreground these limits in specific sectors, and demonstrate the ways in which creativity produces repercussions and possibilities that become evident when approached from the perspective of stakeholders involved in the present and future conditions of their localities. In many respects the urban transformation of Junction and Junction Triangle in Toronto is a paradigmatic case study of the creative clustering model. However, Deborah Leslie and Shannon Black (Chapter 5) reveal important angles to the theoretical import of place that complicate both celebratory and cynical accounts of co-location in creative sectors. First, they show how the materialities of place – from

6  Handbook on the geographies of creativity the historical-industrial environs serving as ‘a reservoir of visual cues and raw materials’ to the infrastructural affordances of large warehouse spaces for various forms of artistic and arts-managerial work – have actively shaped the practice of large-scale contemporary visual art in Toronto. Second, the social dimensions of clustering enable galleries to support rather than simply compete with one another through the strategic sharing of resources and promotion of their district. And yet, impending redevelopment, hastened by the opening of a major cultural institution (the Museum of Contemporary Art), inevitably leads to the contradictory impasse of creativity-led urban regeneration. The authors take urban policymakers to task for seeking to capitalize on the multiplier effects of creative clustering without accounting for the ensuing spatial fragmentation and displacement, nor planning for the sustainability of the district through protecting and supporting the ecosystem of creative workers and smaller arts institutions. In a similar vein, Chris Gibson and Chris Brennan-Horley (Chapter 6) demystify the hallowed notions of locality and buzz with the aim of proposing alternatives to neoliberal spatialities of creativity. Rather than focus on locality-bound buzz, attention is given to the network topologies of creativity – the ‘wider geographies, topologies, and relational geometries of power’ – thus shifting critical attention and epistemological perspective away from urban creative centres in the West to ‘less likely places’ where one expects to find hallmarks of creative activity (aesthetic experimentation, technological innovation, tacit knowledge-sharing, and complex cross-border flows of capital and labour). Deconstructing locality also ‘[inverts] hierarchical geographies of creativity’ by foregrounding the import of peripherality, isolation and remoteness, as evident in centrifugal, networked and relational spatialities of creative activity. Such a strategy, Gibson and Brennan-Horley explain, more accurately accounts for the range of non-Western geographies of creativity outside the axiomatic list of urban (Western) clusters. Moving beyond the buzz, then, is inseparable from the broader task of decolonizing the geographies of creativity – which is itself inseparable from the ongoing challenge of finding broader and sharper imaginaries with which to comparatively understand the uneven connections of the global creative economy. Audrey Yue (Chapter 7) offers a third moment in the shift away from top-down approaches to creativity and locality in her study of REFUGE, a 2016 public art event in Melbourne, commissioned by the Arts House, a key urban centre for community cultural performance. The immersive exhibit addressed multiple concerns around flood preparedness (such as food distribution, evacuation procedures and emergency relief and housing) through interactive art installations that invited participants to explore practices of building, wayfinding and belonging in everyday (rather than exceptional) circumstances of community life. Through this sustained engagement with placemaking, creativity-oriented practices help redefine urban resilience as dividend rather than risk, in two ways. First, the notion of aesthetic resilience harnesses the creative and mutually learned competencies of adaptability, flexibility and sociality to respond to the top-down knowledge structures of emergency management. Second, as artists and communities reimagine the state of emergency in embodied

Geographies of creativity: inherited concepts, revised vistas  7 and exploratory ways, a concomitant social resilience emerges to collectively envision a long-term ‘emergent adaptability’ of the urban system as a whole. Creativity as Mobility As we have seen, mobility is taken for granted as an important feature of geographies of creativity – whether it is in the widespread adoption of creativity as a policy fix, or in the circulation of styles, products, people and capital across varying scales of activity. In this part, the authors complicate this understanding further by analyzing how mobility (and its attendant spatialities of the global) works as an end or goal of creativity. In contemporary contexts of creative production, defined by ever-accelerating mediation and connectivity, mobility is not so much the opposite of locality or emplacement as it is a necessary spatial co-dynamic. June Wang and Luyue Zhang’s chapter on the movie co-production context of mainland China and Hong Kong (Chapter 8) applies the conceptual model of centrifugal and centripetal forces to unpack the mobilities of the Closer Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), a state-sponsored programme initiated in the early 2000s which merges investment capital and creative labour from both sides to create content for the mainland market. CEPA both reflects and deepens the shifts in the partnership in the last 15 years, which inaugurated the northward movement of Hong Kong-based director-producers and their teams for productions in the mainland. Since then, the authors argue, the flows of capital, individual cultural workers, and both independent and corporate production companies have become more complex, circulating within a context of ‘cross-border networking sociality’ where both centripetal and centrifugal dynamics of movement render (im)mobility both ‘state-powered’ and autonomous. This conceptual tension likewise underlies the contemporary Australian craft industry, which Susan Luckman (Chapter 10) characterizes as a sector that ‘simultaneously privilege[s] both the hyper-local and a sense of the cosmopolitan global’. The findings of her research on the online selling platforms of Australian craft entrepreneurs suggest the primacy of place in imbuing craft products with authenticity. This primacy, however, can only be understood in two contexts of mobility. In the first instance, the ubiquity of global supply chains and standardized products increase the value of what Luckman identifies as the ‘niche authenticities’ of Aboriginal and handmade craft products in Australia. Second, the highly mediated nature of promoting products on Instagram and Etsy means that locality is ‘thickened’ by the mediated intimacies afforded by these and other social media apps, putting makers directly in touch with potential buyers and like-minded makers. In this way she underlines the ontological resonance contained within the concept of mobility itself, as ‘a symbolic oscillation between imaginaries of the local and the global, and how such a dynamic spatiality creates particular markets’. The creative economy of performance and concert tours exhibits a comparable tension between cross-border mobility and place-based identity. Anjeline de Dios’s (Chapter 9) research with Aleron Choir and Daloy Dance Company, two elite per-

8  Handbook on the geographies of creativity forming arts ensembles in the Philippines, demonstrates how perceptions of aesthetic and professional value are mediated through their tour mobilities of performing abroad. Choral music and contemporary dance are highly specialized aesthetic practices that fulfil two kinds of performance genres: a contemporary repertoire shared by a transnational community of practitioners from different countries and regions; and a folkloric repertoire where authentic or original representations of ‘evidently Filipino’ culture are expected by foreign audiences. De Dios explains how this stylistic dichotomy is echoed ‘backstage’ in tour-organizational processes (fundraising, securing visas, and liaising with promoters abroad) whereby performers learn to negotiate their status as touring artists marketed via their nationality while abroad, and their domestic stature as performers with international experience. The transnational circuit of performance tours thus imbricates symbolic and material tensions of mobility in distinct ways for creative ensembles doubly tasked with representing a collective cultural identity on the one hand, and financially sustaining their work on the other. Creativity as Labour The conceptualization of creativity as a distinct form of labour and livelihood has been instrumental in critiquing the excesses of creativity credo, thanks to the importance that such a focus places on the lived experiences of creative professionals which are inevitably patterned according to larger socioeconomic schema of privilege, exclusion and exploitation. For instance, although much has been written about the causes and features of precarity as a central feature of creative work, and worker subjectivity as a key site of its negotiation, more remains to be explored in the realm of how creative workers make sense of their own experiences of career uncertainty, and how their perspectives and aspirations might inform theorizations of creativity in a more relevant way. The detailed study of creative workers’ professional identities by Dawn Bennett, Olivia Efthimiou and Scott T. Allison (Chapter 11) illustrates how such a grounded approach might work through their adoption of the mythic framework of the hero’s journey, a popular storytelling device for multiple forms of media and a common narrative structure used by creative professionals themselves. The framing allows scholars to attend to the autobiographical or biopolitical tempos afforded by a lifelong framing of the creative career as a ‘fluid process of growth and transformation’. Neither is this process linear: the authors note how career identities are experienced retrospectively, as underlying motivations emerge through a reflexive reckoning with past career choices. Taking tenuous employability as a given, the chapter proceeds to investigate the interplay of agency and circumstance unique to creative careers, and the dual role that creativity plays as a descriptive category and an underlying professional ethos. Kathleen Connell, Andrew Brown and Sarah Baker (Chapter 12) likewise demonstrate the value of [something omitted] through their typology of stages in careers in performing arts, which together comprise a ‘distinctive arc’ of turning points over

Geographies of creativity: inherited concepts, revised vistas  9 the course of a creative career. The distinctiveness lies, they argue, in the embodied nature of performance work, which accounts for the contradictory and time-bound nature of career transitions. Identifying patterns of career expansion and contraction, as the authors do here, offers a clear agenda for rectifying the generalized misunderstanding of the complex realities of creative careers – realities that are too often are glossed over in the romanticization of risk and talent as the only salient features of creativity. Creativity as Culture Although it is central to basic characterizations of creativity as a distinctive form of activity, culture occupies a peculiar position of invisibility in analyses that focus on the economic dimensions of creative industry and labour, as Kong (Chapter 4) has shown. The three chapters in this part reposition culture front and centre in the spatial politics of cultural representation, community formation and public culture. Amanda Rogers’s (Chapter 13) study of Chumvan Sodhavichy (Belle), a contemporary Cambodian dancer, considers the range of limits and possibilities that emerge for elite performing artists tasked with safeguarding traditional forms of Cambodian culture. Rogers considers how Belle reworks and pursues a ‘plural relationship’ between her career as a classically trained dancer and her pragmatic, experimental approach to dance as a mediated form of aesthetic exploration and economic sustainability. From regularly producing, performing in and uploading YouTube dance films to performing in private and corporate events, Belle’s trajectory mirrors the multiple spaces of performance which define contemporary careers in the performing arts in other regions and cultural economies (see the part on Labour). Moreover, her perspectives reveal the significant interplay between national culture and everyday creativity even in performance contexts presumed to be dominated by the imperatives of the former. A nuanced focus on culture enables researchers to interpret creativity as folded within quotidian contexts of identity and belonging, across different space-times of collectivity. Where Rogers reveals the temporality of Cambodian national culture as plural (that is, intertwining both ‘contemporary’ and ‘traditional’ modes of dance by its designated culture-bearers), Saskia Warren (Chapter 14) similarly brings her analysis of Manchester’s cultural geography to bear on everyday and specialized sites of creativity: in the ‘overlooked, marginalized, and peripheral urban spaces’ to which Mancunian Muslim communities belong, as well as the formal institutional spaces of art galleries. The Muslim Lifestyle Expo, a community-based exhibit, fair and market highlighting the achievements and products of Muslim cultural entrepreneurs, is juxtaposed with the Whitworth Art Gallery’s programme of events designed to foster intercultural understanding in an urban environment increasingly hostile to ethnic minority communities. Warren describes these two case studies as interconnected in spite of their variances in purpose and audience, and in so doing defines culture as an ‘ecosystem through which creativity brings meaning to everyday lived experience’.

10  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Attending geographically to creativity-as-culture foregrounds other socio-spatialities in which culture is designed to take place, apart from enclosed and institutionally demarcated sites such as museums, galleries and theatres. In their chapter, Nikos Papastergiadis, Stephanie Hannon, Scott McQuire, Danielle Wyatt and Paul Carter (Chapter 15) introduce the concept of ‘ambient culture’ to identify creative spaces that are open, mediated and increasingly networked environments of interaction. They present the arts precinct of Federation Square in Melbourne as a case in point. Rather than focus on the buildings which house key cultural institutions, their interest lies in the site’s open space in between the buildings – a spatial quality of ‘deliberate porosity’ which shapes the Square’s programming of free public events. The polyvalent purposes and ambivalent meanings of the Square enable a more complex range of audience engagement than is commonly assumed in demarcated sites of cultural and artistic experience: from attention to indifference to active aversion. As sites of ambient participation become central to urban policymakers’ strategies of global creative competitiveness, the authors stress the importance of protecting ‘the richness of creativity of publics’ against the appropriation of profit-driven commercial interests by acknowledging and studying the diversity of experiences generated by ambient cultures. Creativity as Intervention The chapters in this part give full focus to the significance of creativity as productive of multiple modes of intervention. That variety of scalar contexts as well as political projects – from macroeconomic growth in the global neoliberal economy to postcolonial struggles for social justice – indicates the malleability of creativity discourse already noted above, but also highlights the value of situating this malleability in their respective contexts, to better understand the range of outcomes rendered possible and desirable by creativity. In response to the dominant narrative of mainland Chinese creativity as derivative, Michael Keane (Chapter 18) shifts attention to the limitations of the commonsense (that is, Western-centric) conflation of creativity with the prevailing Romantic ethos of individualism and risk-taking. Nearly two decades since China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), the creative industries have become a key site through which China asserts its place in and approach to the world economy through the pursuit of Xi Jingping’s Chinese Dream, the massive cultural and economic rejuvenation of mainland China. Against this broader socio-spatial regime of value, the digital creative industries emerge as ‘a fertile zone of creative friction’ between the Chinese government’s unparalleled ability to intervene across all scales of creative-economic activity, and the disruptive tendencies of entrepreneurial risk by such quintessentially innovative technology giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Wanda. For Keane, the Sinification of the digital creative industries is more than just a terminological adaptation of a fixed policy formula. Rather, the conceptual and empirical parameters of creativity are themselves re-patterned by the scale, style and intent of the state-led campaign of mass innovation.

Geographies of creativity: inherited concepts, revised vistas  11 Deborah Leslie, Norma Rantisi and Jessie Smith (Chapter 19) also weigh the import of creativity as state-led intervention with contradictory effects. In their chapter, they ascribe the success of the Montréal government’s social circus model to its ‘emancipatory potential’ as a form of arts-based and community intervention specifically meant for the psychological, social and professional empowerment of marginalized and at-risk youth. Yet, the economization of creative practices and the withdrawal of public funding for community development has shifted the responsibility of supporting social circus programmes from the government to shadow state organizations, individual residents and corporate actors. An adequate recognition of social circus’s benefits, they argue, should go beyond the valorization of creative workers’ risk mindset, and shift responsibility back to institutions for following through with the long-term potential of such interventions. The chapters by Heather McLean and Sarah de Leeuw (Chapter 16) and Stephen Chan (Chapter 17) round off the part with discursive analyses and grounded reflections on creative practices that work as sites of postcolonial remembrance and resistance. Drawing from their experience as creative practitioners, feminist geographers and activists, McLean and de Leeuw (Chapter 16) argue for the effectiveness of arts-based methods in supporting LGBTQ+, indigenous, refugee, sex worker and other oppressed communities and artists. In the same breath, they advise against ‘naïve readings and doings of creative work being carefree or somehow beyond the confines of critical social science engagement’. They also note that otherwise well-meaning creativity-oriented interventions in the academe often lack the reflexivity to distinguish, let alone confront, researchers’ own intersectional privilege within the very structures of these interventions. Any serious engagement with creativity as a site for critical knowledge production must therefore acknowledge the pernicious ways in which ‘creative work exists in, and dialogues with, these oppressive spaces and contexts’. Chan’s chapter on the ‘civic-creative process’ of the thwarted 2014 Hong Kong protests (Chapter 17) reflects on this very issue of creativity as a complex site of intervention, insofar as it dialogues with ‘the hybrid logic of capitalist reproduction and semi-authoritarian governance’ characteristic of Hong Kong’s political situation. He offers four notable grassroots interventions spawned by the movement: a ‘mountaineering performance’ by a group of protesters scaling the highly symbolic Lion Rock hill to unfurl a massive protest banner; a campaign video of popular pro-democracy candidate John Tsang by renowned director Johnnie To; a retelling of the contentious 1967 riots by journalist Connie Yan-wai Lo; and ‘creative agent’ Benny Tai, the law university professor credited with initiating the 2013–2014 Occupy Central movement. In Chan’s reading, these social performances are clearly creative in a narrow sense (as aesthetic activity productive of meaning in embodied and affective ways), but even more so as a broad sensibility of counter-hegemonic moral action, involved in ‘the making of alternative subjectivities and the imagination of a new world beyond the vacuum of hope they face’.

12  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Creativity as Method The last part of the handbook engages with creativity as research methodology, as a necessary counterbalance to the predominance of creativity as a discursive object of study. The two chapters draw from the authors’ extensive experience with employing arts-based methods in institutional research projects to lay out the intertwined theoretical and empirical concerns generated by the adoption of creativity in critical scholarship. Drawing from different artistic practices (visual art and dance) and theoretical approaches (ethnography and non-representational theory), the authors arrive at a twofold conclusion: ‘doing’ creativity as a research method can diversify the foundations of knowledge production beyond scholarly preoccupations with expertise; but this recognition must resist the tendency to utopianize (to use Kong’s phrase in Chapter 4) creative work. The recent enthusiasm for the creative ‘(re)turn’ in geographical research, Charlotte Veal and Harriet Hawkins (Chapter 21) argue, has reached such an extent that there is now a troubling ‘fetishized facade of creative methods’. (This is not so different, in fact, from the trajectory of the creativity discourse in policy circles, as discussed in the Imaginary part.) To avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater – that is, eschewing creativity altogether as a rubric for innovative methods of critical knowledge production – the authors emphasize a systematic and reflexive approach to creative methods at specific stages of the research lifecycle: from accounting for the various ‘mundanities of labour’ and skill which precede entry into the field, to the continual self-evaluation about the kinds and levels of creative training that are appropriate for the theoretical aims of such projects. Janet Banfield’s in-depth research (Chapter 20) with her artist-interlocutors speaks to the benefits of co-locating visual-artistic practice on the one hand, and geographical research on non-representation on the other, in three respects. First, fundamental questions of scale are usefully explored through art-making’s material and embodied dimensions: making decisions about and playing with the material and physical aspects of art (such as studio space, canvas size, paint colour and viscosity). Second, thinking geographically through and about art practice offers an anti-essentialist view of creative subjectivity that might otherwise congeal in unquestioned assumptions about skill or proficiency (seen, for instance, in harmful dismissals of ‘inexpert’ or ‘amateur’ artistic practice). Banfield introduces the concept of ‘boundary understanding’ to both describe and engage with her participants’ experiments with their taken-for-granted media and practices, as they deliberately adopt an exploratory and even novice approach to their craft. Finally, creative modalities of informal art-making allow researchers to interrogate, ‘both intentionally and incidentally’, the basic theoretical dichotomy between symbolic representation and the ‘somatic entanglements’ which precede and exceed verbal articulation.

Geographies of creativity: inherited concepts, revised vistas  13

CONCLUSION In proposing a revised vista of geographical questions and framings, we offer the handbook despite (and in dialogue with) recent dissatisfactions with the (over)use of creativity. In their critical engagements with creativity, the chapters delineate shared perspectives that would otherwise remain sequestered in their respective silos of disciplinary or thematic analysis. By this token we hope that the volume will be useful to scholars interested in the ‘creative turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, those researching contemporary debates in the economics of culture, media, design, mobility and cities, policymakers and professionals in creative and cultural industries (CCI) sectors, and cultural workers and activists for equitable creative and cultural industries. More importantly, we are hopeful that readers will use the book as intended – as a companion to their respective projects of dynamically responding to creativity in their particular research contexts, enabling them to connect the dots between fields of investigation and imagination that are not commonly considered in the same frame. Such analyses offer productive and unexpected conjunctions, and our hope is that the adoption of creativity discourse by different contexts of economic and social activity across different scales and locations makes possible an expanded comparative frame of analysis that does the crucial epistemological task of decentring the field’s theoretical and conceptual biases.

REFERENCES Brook, O., D. O’Brien and M. Taylor (2020), Culture is Bad for You: Inequality and the Cultural and Creative Industries, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. McRobbie, A. (2016), ‘Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries’, Cambridge, UK: Polity. Mould, O. (2014), ‘We have always been creative’, Tacity, 30 July, accessed 16 January 2020 at https://​tacity​.co​.uk/​2014/​07/​30/​we​-have​-always​-been​-creative/​. Mould, O. (2018), Against Creativity, London, UK: Verso.

PART I CREATIVITY AS IMAGINARY

2. The creative imaginary: cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity Justin O’Connor

INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I examine the ways in which ‘creativity’, specifically as articulated around the cultural and creative industries, has acted as an ‘imaginary’ in Bob Jessop’s sense of an animating and organizing vision that binds a range of actors around a more or less coherent programme of action and change (Jessop, 2005). I suggest that much of the power of this imaginary is derived from its animating vision of the future – a future – that should not be discounted in the critique of the creative industries. The cultural and, more especially, the creative industries have increasingly been seen as manifestations of neoliberalism as it has hollowed out and reprogrammed cultural policy. Numerous critiques have been well-aired: the reduction of creativity to the addition of novelty within the commercial process; the revaluation of social ties as those that can further one’s career; the insidious injunction to be ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ smuggled in through ‘Be Creative’ (McRobbie, 2016); the systemic integration of everyday social and cultural practices into commodities via digital media; the reduction of creative autonomy through new forms of workplace control and generalized precarity. In this chapter, I would like to explore why creativity has been so embraced as a transformative agenda. How are we to understand the ‘imaginary’ articulated in creativity, the industries and policies attached to it and the range of actors and practices it organized? This imaginary did not emerge fully formed out of the head of a high-level policy think tank, nor was it simply rammed through by a relentless instrumentalization of culture and the fear of losing one’s job. I have frequently encountered a level of animated expectation around the idea of creative industries through my policy work and in my engagement with UNESCO. However, I suggest that the creativity moment has gone, certainly the one that found articulation in the creative industries. One aim of this chapter is to suggest why, and with what consequences. The term ‘creative industries’ always had an ‘excess’ above the instrumentalism with which it was freighted. That creativity was taken seriously by ‘the wealth-creating portfolios, the emergent industry departments and the enterprise support programmes’ (Hartley, 2005: 5) was important, but not everything. John Hartley called this embrace of the creative industries by powerful government agen15

16  Handbook on the geographies of creativity cies, ‘win–win’; but if government was getting growth and innovation, what was culture getting? The unblocking of creativity, its ability to flow more freely through individuals and society, was clearly felt to be transformative in ways that had longer roots than its association with the innovation agenda would suggest. For Hartley, creativity had spilled out of the confines of elitist high culture, and he had no problem with the commercial transactions which were its lifeblood. Popular, everyday culture, was now democratically transformed by Web 2.0, wrong-footing the cultural industry behemoths just as it had the elitist defenders of the state-subsidized canon. In his radical neo-liberal vision of a society of creative individuals coordinated by the blind watchmaker of the market, not only were the historical claims of cultural citizenship to be redeemed but humanity itself be set again on the evolutionary path to a re-invented creative future (Hartley and Potts, 2014). As Seb Olma has pointed out, at a time when the art world had abandoned any pretense to creative autonomy, the creative industries, in however an instrumental fashion, had rediscovered the world-shaping power of Schiller’s spieltrieb (Olma, 2018). Whilst the creative industries began as a response from within ‘post-industrial’ countries to the competitive challenge from those ‘emerging economies’ that seemed to have beaten them at their own game of modernity, creativity had resonance well beyond its Western metropolitan heartlands. I suggest that this creativity was deeply rooted in Western narratives of capitalism and liberal democracy, and this was central to its appeal outside the West. This should not be seen as a paradox, for rather than a rolling-out of neo-liberalism (which it was), we might also see the creative industries as a re-activation of notions of modernity that recalled other historical moments of global ‘transfer’ in colonial and postcolonial contexts. In what follows I will try to unpick this ‘creativity bundle’ and the aspirations it articulated. I will do so primarily in the context of Southeast and East Asia, because of the region’s authoritarian state challenge to the normative script of liberal democratic capitalist development. I will look at how this bundle was not just selectively adopted but met some structural limits. Finally, I will look at what happened to the ‘creative imaginary’ and what this might say about the future of ‘global modernity’.

PROVINCIALIZING ‘THE GLOBAL’? Many of the claims around creative industries and creative cities were driven by a need to find replacement jobs in a post-industrial economy and to re-think the function of the city as a competitive global entity. The UK government launched its rebranding of the cultural sector as creative industries in 1998 with a claim that this would see Britain become the ‘creative workshop of the world’, in an aufhebung of its glorious industrial past (DCMS, 1998). This then was not just a response to domestic de-industrialization but also to the rise of the ‘Asian Tigers’. These had, by the 1990s, achieved a level of advanced industrialization through state-managed programmes of development running directly counter to the IMF script. In response, the comparative advantage of the West was held to be its ability to create ideas and

Cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity  17 innovate rather than simply manufacture things. If the West was being outstripped by state-directed industrial development, the free circulation of ideas and commercial returns to knowledge-led innovation associated with post-Westphalian capitalism would continue to stand it in good stead against a more state-heavy East (Fergusson, 2011; Hutton, 2007). This was because much of the debate around creativity, innovation and the knowledge economy was predicated on older tropes about the West and the East, going back to Hegel’s Lectures on World History in the late 1820s: the dynamic freedom of the West versus the despotic juggernaut of Asia, hobbled by its archaic traditions (Wang, 2011). What is interesting is why this creativity programme so quickly migrated from the post-industrial West to those countries over whom it sought to gain competitive advantage. Equally interesting is that this policy migration was facilitated by Western government-led agencies and Western-dominated international bodies such as the British Council and UNESCO, as well as myriad public and private educational and arts agencies. It is as if the competitive advantage to be gained from creativity was secondary to the normative prescription of a benign modernization that creativity could lay out for the Asian Tigers, the BRICS and the Global South writ large. Creative modernity was too good not to share. This round of creativity-led modernization, even amongst agencies which had long been associated with local and culturally embedded developmental agendas for the Global South, such as UNESCO and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), could be seen as somewhat against the grain (De Beukalaer and O’Connor, 2016; O’Connor, 2016). The rejection of Western-centric models of development has a long history in anticolonial movements, and more recently, since the 1990s, post-colonial cultural studies have questioned the notion of a singular western cultural modernity against which all other developmental trajectories are to be judged. I would accept most of this critique. I want here to take issue with critiques found in much of the ‘policy transfer’ literature, and in accounts of ‘worlding’, which establish a complex, unpredictable encounter between the global and the local (Roy and Ong, 2011). I also accept much in their rejection of a unidirectional western-centric flow, and the recognition that whatever the origin of these flows, their adoption and adaption at local levels are highly provisional and relational. However, I want to suggest first, that, complex and mutable as they might be, there is an ideational component of these flows whose consistency needs to be given more weight; and second, that in challenging western-centric accounts of these global flows we do not thereby jettison the global – or indeed the universal – as such (cf. Chun, 2013). I will speak more of this at the end. Arjun Appadurai famously presented the ‘global cultural economy’ as composed of a series of global cultural flows or ‘scapes’, which combined to create a ‘complex, overlapping, disjunctive order’ (Appadurai, 1990: 296). These scapes are increasingly ‘deterritorialized’, creating and dissolving new identities and communities, straying across borders and undermining the fixed boundaries of the nation-state. The paths through which they flow are increasingly ‘non-isomorphic’ and unpredictable, and these deterritorialized, volatile scapes undermine the colonial scenarios

18  Handbook on the geographies of creativity of centre and periphery, of homogenization, Americanization and commoditization. Appadurai echoes Stuart Hall’s (1980) account of encoding/decoding, in which those who receive semiotic content have a high degree of latitude in how they read and use (‘decode’) that which the sender had ‘encoded’. These non-isomorphic global flows produce highly localized communal identities, erratic and disjunctive configurations productive of a rich global difference. Much work in cultural studies has built on this, aiming to elucidate alternative, parallel or hybrid modernities whose cultural formations cannot be reduced to peripheral imitations of an original Western model. Over the last decade, a ‘policy mobility’ literature has attempted to introduce a similarly volatile disorder into the field of global policy, cultural or otherwise. ‘Once released into the wild, policies will often mutate and hybridize in surprising ways’ write Peck and Theodore, and they sought ‘to explore open ended and politicized processes of networking and mutation across shifting social landscapes’ (Peck and Theodore, 2010: 173). In these, what we might term, global ‘policyscapes’, there is a proliferation of actors – national and local governments, consultants, intermediaries, gurus, academics, travel writers, ‘creative tourists’ as well as associated media (such as city guides, tourism-rating platforms and in-flight magazines) – who constitute the penumbra of an international ‘epistemic community’ (O’Connor, 2016). This can result in ‘fast policy’ (Peck, 2005), where ideas such as the ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative economy’ gain immediate traction in their zone of origin and rapidly circulate through what has become a global circuit of such ‘fast’ cultural policy. In so doing these ideas may not only mutate but also assemble a range of actors who create the specific (and provisional) territory to which the policy idea may be applied. Any core ‘essence’ of the policy is thus cast in doubt (Ward and McCann, 2011). From this perspective, any project to identify the origins of the creative industries in the West may be of historical interest but it is not determinant of its development in a new context nor grounds for judgment as to its adequacy vis-à-vis this origin. I concur with much of this work on multiple modernities and policy mobilities. Both approaches have generated extremely useful studies of local developments in a range of cultural areas as well as detailed the variants and adaptions of creative industry, class and city policy memes. Nonetheless I wish to point to what these approaches tend to underplay, in the areas with which we are concerned. To begin with, these discrete policy ‘technologies’ come with a high degree of ideational or imaginary power. This ideational content has to be actively negotiated in a way that is often missed in Latourian figurations of actor-networks and assemblages (Latour, 2007). This highly influential approach has the benefit of a focus on how policy is put together, and by whom and in which circumstances. But it can easily lead to a ‘bad’ empiricism in which its explanatory power is eroded by an endless accretion of details. We would assert here the mobilizing and organizing power of ideas and imaginaries, and that these are not as arbitrary nor as malleable as often suggested. Appadurai’s final scape was the ‘ideoscape’, which ‘frequently have to do with the ideologies of states’. They are composed of ‘elements of the Enlightenment world-view, which consists of a concatenation of ideas, terms and images, including

Cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity  19 “freedom”, “welfare”, “rights”, “sovereignty”, “representation” and the master-term “democracy”’ (Appadurai, 1990: 299). If the ‘master-narrative of the Enlightenment’ had a certain internal logic in the West, its diasporic spread across the world since the nineteenth century has loosened this internal logic and ‘provided instead a loosely structured synopticon of politics, in which different nation-states . . . have organized their political cultures around different “keywords”’ (p. 300). Appadurai presents a kaleidoscopic semiotic mix, driven by local and pragmatic adaptions, where a word like ‘democracy’ can mean very different things in very different contexts. This underplays the continuing powerful effect of this ‘master-narrative’. What is startlingly absent from Appadurai’s account of non-isomorphic cultural flows is any sense of the non-cultural underpinnings of these flows in an era marked by the end of the Cold War and the subsequent dominance of the ‘Washington consensus’. Flows of technologies and finance, people and things, media and their industries, were organized around ideas that were more than floating keyword signifiers. For example, the ‘cultural turn’ came after the failure of a concerted attempt by the ‘third world’ actors within UNESCO’s MacBride Commission to challenge the dominance of the Global North in media and communications (Carlsson, 2017; Sparks and Roach, 1990). The defeat of the New World Information and Communication Order, and the rapid marginalization of UNESCO in the 1980s – primarily via the withdrawal of funding by the US and UK – was part of a global re-assertion of US-led global hegemony, one that reached an apex with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the USSR in 1991. This period also saw a massive expansion of telecommunications and a global push-back against national broadcasting systems, primarily by US-based corporations backed by their government and global governance agencies (cf. Hesmondhalgh, 2018). That is, underpinning Appadurai’s non-isomorphic cultural flows was a power politics that we ignore at our peril. In particular, Appadurai ignored the strong ideational connection between liberal democracy and capitalism, one that became extremely powerful in the 1990s as socialist and communist alternatives disappeared beneath the horizon. This connection had a very clear and explicit internal logic, though it had been re-booted, so to speak, through the emergent framework of neo-liberalism. It had a high degree of ideational cohesion that led to very real policy initiatives with very real consequences, whether this be the World Bank/IMF’s austerity-driven reforms of indebted developing countries, the expansion of the GATT/WTO, or the Washington Consensus writ large, that soft power flesh around the hard kernel of enforceable compliance. We might also point to the growing influence of the doctrine of democratic regime change that led to the Iraq war, and which could be seen as an act of ‘tough love’ built on the incontrovertible principle that liberal democracy was the sole guarantee of historical progress. The connections between this geo-political conjuncture at the end of history and the rise of the creative imaginary are yet to be fully spelt out – though we make some attempt below.

20  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

UNIVERSALIZING CREATIVITY? The ideoscape is central to the kinds of global policy conjuncture in which creativity’ brought new kinds of industries, new kinds of cities, and new kinds of subjects together in a strongly affective formation. I want to sketch out what such a global conjuncture might look like in general terms, focusing on Asia and the ‘limit case’ of China. In sketching such a global conjuncture, I do not mean to marginalize or flatten, yet again, local differences. I want to suggest how creativity was able to become a global norm, and also why this conjuncture broke apart. At the end I want to retrieve this global conjuncture in the light of previous moments of radical globalization over the last 250 years. The manner in which the creative industries agenda captured the zeitgeist, and moved quite rapidly through circuits of ‘fast policy’, has been well noted. Agencies such as the British Council, followed by a number of Northern European (Dutch and Scandinavian especially) government and educational entities, as well as the new ‘epistemic’ community of consultants, artists, developers, travel journalists and ‘cultural tourists’, mark the soft infrastructure of such a transfer. Underlying such ‘fast policy’ agents have been slower moving initiatives stemming from the UNESCO 2005 Convention, and related global agencies such as UNDP, UNCTAD, WIPO and the World Bank. These increasingly promoted the cultural and creative industries, terms that were often used interchangeably, but with ‘creative’ making a bridge between the cultural industries and a wider, usually undefined, ‘creative economy’ (cf. De Beukelaer and O’Connor, 2016; Garner, 2016; O’Connor, 2016). As I outline in detail elsewhere, the term ‘creative’ was used to both mobilize that strand of creativity associated with art and culture, but without the baggage that could be associated with ‘culture’ (O’Connor, 2013). That baggage could mean elitism, or narrow traditionalism, or a risk-averse dependence on state funding; but it could also mean the practice of a form of value not directly dependent on the fields of political and economic power. ‘Culture’ had baggage that could work as an obstacle to the effective mobilization of creativity as a new source of economic growth, just as the adoption of creativity could be a hostage to fortune for those cultural practitioners who welcomed the new agenda as a democratic opening up to new social possibilities. Creative industries arrived in 1998, seven years after the collapse of the USSR, and following a decade of debt-restructuring, austerity and neo-liberal reform, positioning the BRICS as new global growth engines entirely within the ambit of the Washington Consensus. At the same time the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis was a blow to the self-confidence of the ‘Asian Tigers’, whose authoritarian development model now lost confidence and seemed outdated and ill-adapted to the new wave of innovation coming out of a US-led decade of growth (Bolesta, 2015). It was widely assumed that China – along with the Asian Tigers and the other BRICS – would inevitably head towards some kind of accommodation with liberal democratic forms. All of these primed important sections of governments and elites, who had already bought into discourses of innovation and the knowledge economy, to accept that such an economy required new kinds of creative subjects – subjects who might thrive

Cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity  21 best in those ‘open’ economies that had seen off the challenge of State-directed socialism in the USSR and, indeed, within their own domestic political arenas. It is here that we must take Appadurai’s ‘enlightenment world-view’ seriously. More than a set of convenient keywords it was also an affective imaginary which had been set around a neo-liberal, globalized capitalism in which ‘open economies’ and ‘transparent’ governance would provide the best guarantee of economic growth (cf. Bolesta, 2015). Creativity was part of a strong re-assertion, after a period of anti- and post-colonial contestation, that Western modernity was exemplary. The rapid adoption of the term creative industries across Asia from 2005 onwards has been well-documented (Kong et al., 2006). Since that time, it has become more embedded in policy and increasingly (if patchily) adopted by countries – such as India, Japan – which missed it first time around. International agencies such as the World Bank and WIPO joined traditional ‘culture and development’ advocates UNESCO and UNCTAD in proselytizing for the creative industries as new development pathways for the Global South.1 The creative industries were now sold as industries depending solely on human creative talent and thus available to the capital-poor developing countries, with some help from the Global North (UNCTAD and UNDP 2008, 2010; UNESCO, 2005; UNESCO and UNDP, 2013). The two UNCTAD reports argued that developing countries (which included China) now represented the majority of global trade in cultural goods and services, and their share was rising (however, cf. De Beukelaer, 2014). For all these reasons governments were now keen on promoting creativity in general and the creative industries in particular, the latter being positioned as the trail-blazer for the rest of the economy. ‘Creativity’ thus announced a new ‘long wave’ of modernization, a new industrial revolution, with which developing or recently developed countries needed to catch up. As in previous eras, there was a high degree of affective identification – amongst certain groups – with the metropolitan heartlands from whence this future wave flowed, a desire stimulated by the fact that it seemed always just out of reach. I could note here the concomitant rise of Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’, which despite its various local adaptations was a global ‘fast policy’ phenomenon but also a highly desirable subject position (Florida, 2002). The creative class and those who identified with it personified the rise and rise of the ‘knowledge economy’ in the form of (mostly) US-based media technology companies, and the increasing reach of IP generation and exploitation after WTO. It articulated with powerfully affective images of young entrepreneurs emerging in the seemingly autonomous new space of the internet, soon to be channeled through shiny new devices, and increasingly using the kind of MBA-speak now thoroughly adapted to the neo-bohemian ‘start-up’ sector. Yet we need to dig further into this creativity moment rather than simply dismissing it as a global elite-driven, fast-policy fad. How did it move beyond ‘elite dreaming’ (Ong, 2011: 17)? I suggest this policy agenda could build around it not just a local policy coalition – relatively well-connected interested parties – but a wider affective buy-in from cultural institutions and practitioners, often young and edu-

22  Handbook on the geographies of creativity cated, cultural/creative businesses, creative spaces and clusters, and a wider artistic and cultural milieu.

THE CREATIVITY BUNDLE In summary, the creative industries came as a ‘bundle’ that could appeal as a workable agenda for both governmental and more ‘grassroots’ cultural actors. First, the origin of ‘creative’ linked the autonomous artist which animates the imaginary around the new creative subject and the kind of entrepreneurship to which this (ideally) gives rise. Second, the ‘creative milieu’ captured a semi-autonomous network embedded in particular urban places and through which new ideas emerge, circulate, mutate and accelerate. Third, the SME economy is that which operates in a zone between the firm (internal, hierarchy) and the social (external, network), between competition and collaboration, between the market and ‘civil society’, and which is held to operate as a kind of ‘ecosystem’ not amenable to top-down state planning nor corporate control. Creativity demanded new kinds of cities (or at least, zones therein) which encouraged creative milieus, new kinds of industrial organization (SME ecosystems) and new kinds of subjects able to autonomously create and innovate (cf. Banks and O’Connor, 2017). John Hartley and Lucy Montgomery, writing specifically about China, suggest ‘the internationalization of the creative industries would prove transformative in China, encouraging the growth of individual talent, “content” innovation, and a shift from centrally planned command-and-control industries to a complex dynamic system growing via the self-organized interactions of myriad creative agents’ (Hartley and Montgomery, 2009: 10). Will Hutton makes the connection explicit. The recent acceleration of the West through the knowledge economy, he argued, is due to its ‘enlightenment’: So here is the mechanism, plural public institutions; and here is a consequence, human happiness. Enlightenment institutions need Enlightenment people to breathe life into them; modernity has to be won by real people who are prepared to imagine a life that they themselves want to make and are prepared to act on that concept, leaving behind the universe in which preferences are inherited and fixed . . . [T]his involves a mental shift from the traditional to the modern. (Hutton, 2007: 171)

The modern in this case is recast as a post-1968 ‘creative capitalism’, in the mould of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005), where the central element is ‘soft knowledge’: the bundle of less tangible production inputs involving leadership, communication, emotional intelligence, the disposition to innovate, and the creation of social capital that harnesses hard knowledge and permits its effective embodiment in goods and services and – crucially – its customisation. Their interaction and combination are at the heart of the knowledge economy. (Hutton, 2007: 311)

Cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity  23 The ‘creativity bundle’ of liberated artistic creativity, the creative milieu and a new kind of SME economy provided the basis of a more grassroots imaginary. Leaving aside for now Will Hutton’s claims for democracy, capitalism and enlightenment, it seems clear that the creativity bundle suggested a new role for artists and cultural practitioners, who might find a space in which the role of culture as heritage in the service of nation-building now seemed to give way to the force of the contemporary. This seemed also, given the close relationship between heritage culture and state building, to be an opening up beyond cultural-political elites towards new kinds of cultural practitioners and intermediaries. To this extent, both through the validation of artist-derived creativity and its centrality to a new modernization project, cultural practitioners embraced the creative agenda as one of empowerment. The focus on creative entrepreneurship and SMEs seemed to validate a proliferation of cultural and economic activities outside the purview of the state, a kind of cultural-economic civil society engaged in commercial and not-for-profit activities (Banks and O’Connor, 2017). One of the boons of the creative industries agenda (building in turn on the movement leading to the UNESCO 2005 convention) was that the implacable opposition between culture and commerce no longer stood and that it was possible to do both. Culture had a ‘dual value’ (cf. Garner, 2016). Those outside the heavily subsidized cultural sectors could also have their cultural legitimacy, just as they acquired an economic rationale previously associated with the rampantly commercial cultural industries. The new policy agenda brought in, however fleetingly, new zones of contact between policy elites and this small-scale, non-subsidized and minimally commercialized cultural sector. The creative industries were shiny and new, but also unknown. The British Council rolled out the ‘mapping’ methodologies with which they had launched the idea in 1998, but even with imported experts this required consultation with willing intermediaries from a sector previously unknown to statistics or the governmental agencies that collected these. I personally have been in many meetings trying to second guess the dynamics and consequences of ministerial officials having to defer in knowledge to cultural practitioners whose habitus was clearly at odds with those more familiar with the corridors of power. New forms of collaboration and consultation flourished as this new agenda felt its way to some kind of more formal institutional configuration. In effect, what we might see around this new creativity agenda was a kind of actionable democracy – less the grand narrative of Hutton’s enlightenment but more an everyday opening up of policy to input from cultural grassroots networks in a way that could feel genuinely empowering. This opening up to new intermediaries (cf. O’Connor, 2015) frequently intersected with a recognition of particular urban areas, or particular cities within a wider region, associated with these new resources of creativity – not so much the older museum, monument and gallery quarters nor the traditional or classical cultural cities, but the new urban spaces, the ones sought out by an international epistemic community in the know. In these place-based milieus, unorthodox lifestyles, marginalized and sometimes suppressed, received a certain degree of acceptance. New gender roles, expressions of sexuality, or counter-cultural views associated with the residents of

24  Handbook on the geographies of creativity these areas now acquired the validity of useful resource. Similar things happened with ‘gay villages’ throughout the Global North, or indeed with the Chinatowns of previous eras, parlayed into tourism sites. These milieus had a particular relationship to the global, in which a certain cosmopolitan sensibility was fostered through flows of people and ideas, images and sounds, creating links between similar sites elsewhere. They helped structure, and were structured by, a certain habitus oriented both to the local and to the horizon of the global. We might see it as a form of global modernity that was certainly not a slavish copy of some imagined metropolitan origin, but was more than the random mutation of ‘indigenization’. It was an ideational response to a vision of modernity experienced as an affective identification with the promise of a global creativity. It represented more than simply ‘culture as resource’ in Yudice’s (2003) sense, where arguments for cultural funding could utilize its various social benefits. It was culture as a resource for a different kind of future, both local and global at once. Perhaps this was exemplified in the new global visibility of contemporary art, whose galleries rapidly shouldered out venues for classical music – concert halls and opera houses – from their emblematic position in the global cultural city. The example of Bilbao played a part, its success in attracting tourists and global media attention representing the old industrial city’s re-invention of itself (Plaza, 2008). But it is easy to miss the ways in which contemporary art had become more articulated to forms of popular culture and lifestyle, becoming an important marker of a contemporary global subject. The ability to interpellate such subject-positions became increasingly important for global cultural cities, the latest example being the spate of contemporary art museums in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, not to mention Shanghai and Singapore. The art gallery, increasingly associated with urban gentrification, was also a portal into a cosmopolitan modernity (for practising artists and visitors alike) as well as providing its local flagship presence (cf. Jones, 2017). I want to give two very brief Asian examples by way of illustration. I re-emphasize that the ways in which creativity was received as a policy agenda were very place specific (be it region, country, city) but they were negotiating an ideational flow, an imaginary in which the ‘global’ is at stake not just as a policy or marketing slogan but as part of a deep-seated shift in subject positions. The Hongdae district, Seoul, in the 1990s became a centre for youth-oriented fashion, music and contemporary art (Cho, 2019). It represented a shift from the social movements around anti-dictatorship towards both individual autonomy and inclusive civic activism – very much in line with post-1968 movements in the West. The post-1997 political leadership in Korea, drawn from the democracy movement, identified the state’s authoritarian polity as a main cause of the financial crisis and identified a new accommodation with civil society and individual autonomy as key to moving forward (ibid.; Ryoo and Jin, 2018). One aspect of this step back from excessive state direction was a familiar round of neo-liberalization – free trade, ‘de-regulation’, reduction of welfare spending and so on (Lee and Kim, 2010). But the government’s putative allies in cultural civil society saw in this process a validation of their new autonomy in partnership with government. Only by working

Cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity  25 with creative subjects and extending civic involvement could a new kind of Korean democratic modernity be developed. In the new democratic Korea, culture was now promoted as a key aspect of national identity and self-confidence, and new source of exports (Cho, 2019). The 2005 UNESCO convention set the seal on this valuation and commodification of culture: culture as both exempt from WTO rules (as cultural expression) and a source of competitive advantage (as trade in cultural goods and services) (Garner, 2016). Creativity ran through this conjuncture like a lightning bolt. It is in this context that Hongdae emerged as prime target of the Seoul city government’s attempt to mobilize culture and creativity in its new world city vision (Cho, 2019). Hongdae had become a place where a certain ‘Gen X’ habitus could be formed and negotiated, as has been described in many ‘neo-bohemian’ enclaves such as Wicker Park, Chicago (Lloyd, 2006) or Northern Quarter, Manchester (O’Connor and Gu, 2013). Here the negotiation of a cultural persona, linked to small-scale entrepreneurial activity, especially cafés, clubs, and various shops and market stalls, was made possible and in fact began to inflect a wider policy. The arrival of a creativity agenda – world city, creative city, creative industries – saw an increased attention to the area, including attempts to formalize it as an official cultural district. Residents of Hongdae were asked to be ‘place-marketing agents’, not just to sell the area but act as exemplary subjects of a new kind of Korean modernity, achieved through an accommodation of culture and economy, and a new kind of ‘entrepreneurial self’ able to manage this. Through the process of formalization, a new surface of negotiations between cultural actors and the local (and to some extent national) state emerged (Cho, 2019). Bandung2 came to occupy a similar position, slightly later, in an Indonesia that had also seen the collapse of an authoritarian regime – that of Suharto in 1998 – and an accelerating adoption of the creative industries agenda under president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004–14), and later during Mari Elka Pangestu’s tenure as Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy (2011–14). Bandung as a city played an important role in this process, having represented Indonesia in the British Council’s creative city event in Yokohama in 2007, and eventually being named as UNESCO’s City of Design in 2015. Bandung was primarily represented by the Bandung Creative City Forum (BCCF), founded in 2008 by a group of civil society activists, and Ridwan Kamil, Bandung’s then Mayor and first director of BCCF. The BCCF was a founding member of the South-East Asian Creative Cities Network (2013), an outcome both of the work of that organization and the political clout of the mayor (Cohen, 2015; Jurriëns, 2014; Rosi, 2014). This leadership role was predicated on Bandung’s history as a centre of youth culture and civic activism. In the 1990s it had been a place of music and fashion, taking place in small-scale shops known as distrus, this in itself connecting back to 1960s Bandung as a centre of the non-aligned movement. The presence of one of Indonesia’s leading universities, Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB), facilitated the emergence of a number of arts and cultural groups, biennials, bookshops and new media workshops (Jurriëns, 2014). The university also bridged the connections with the British Council, and allowed early adoption. The British Council thus piloted its

26  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Young Creative Entrepreneur of the Year Award and its creative city programmes in Bandung. The BCCF emerged out of this milieu, and specifically from its Helarfest annual festival set up in 2008, but also out of related initiatives such as the creative village (Kampung Kreatif). The following description by a member of BCCF describes very well the alignments of culture and economy, place and civic activism that had become possible: When Emil [Ridwan Kamil] was the leader [of BCCF], there were three main programs…; creativity (public creativity); after allocating its creativity, they have to be prosperous, there was creative economy. After achieving prosperity, the city has to show that they have to be creative in infrastructure development – by using creative urbanism. (Interview: Elizabet, 2017)

Similar cases could be found in Singapore and Hong Kong – and indeed globally, as the creative city agenda spread.

A NEW SPIRIT? How are we to think about this archipelago of creative milieu and habitus across which the multiple global policy transfer took place? Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) situate these ‘creative’ developments as part of a new spirit of capitalism, in which entrepreneurial subjects work within a ‘connexionist’ or ‘networked’ socio-economic field. The way this has transformed social networks into sites for the advancement of careers rather than a source of solidarity or collective identity has been well charted by Angela McRobbie (2016) and other critics of the creative industries (Wittel, 2001). For Boltanski and Chiapello the roots lie in the revolts of 1968, with young white-collar workers pursuing the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism at first in alliance with, and then apart from (‘divide et imperium’), the ‘social critique’ of capitalism. This characterization is open to contestation. Whilst there is little doubt that some key aspects of this ‘new spirit’ are to be found in 1968 and the counter-culture, this by no means exhausts the possibilities represented by those transformational moments. For example, it ignores the close relationship of 1968 to subsequent urban social movements, in which community arts movements and grassroots civic activism played important roles. Charles Landry’s own version of the creative cities agenda emerged from this context (Landry, 2000). What in a later policy narrative was presented as entrepreneurs and SMEs could also be seen as cultural activists and not-for-profits working through small-scale projects in the interstices of public funding and informal cultural economies.3 The events of 1968 were not, of course, purely European or Western. We need to know more about how the artistic critique, implicated in the unifying imaginary of ‘cultural revolution’, played out in different parts of the globe. We would also need to understand what kind of subject position the artistic persona made possible – in Confucian societies for example – and how the ‘creative’ subject reintroduced in the early twenty-first century articulated with this (O’Connor and Gu, 2020). In this way, we might look less to the unpredictable

Cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity  27 complexities of a non-isomorphic ‘repatriation’ and more to the elements of a global history of the artistic critique of capitalism. Such a critique holds capitalist modernity to account not only as unequal, exploitative and destructive of social bonds, but also as profoundly destructive of life itself. The manner in which Rimbaud’s Il faut changer la vie threaded through 1968 might be seen more as a truth-event in Badiou’s (2005) sense – the eruption of a new possibility into history – than a postmodern meme to be decoded comme il faut. I am not trying to introduce a version of Florida’s creative class. The broad sweep of his statistical net includes professional groups like lawyers, engineers and doctors in a way that recalls the older managerial or knowledge class proposed in the 1970s, and swept aside by the rise of neo-liberalism (Duménil and Lévy, 2011). Artists and cultural workers, though they donate the name to this class are, in income terms, its poor relations. The creative class remains ‘in-itself’, a lifestyle referent for urban developers. To identify a clear social basis to the creative imaginary, we would have cast the net wider to those amorphous groups associated with various ‘orange’ and ‘twitter’ revolutions (Georgia, Ukraine, the Arab Spring) but also demonstrations in Russia, Turkey and Brazil from 2012 to 2014. Many of these were welcomed in the western media. Young people plus education plus western lifestyles plus iPhones: a youthful version of the ‘rising middle classes’ in Asia and beyond who were due to bring authoritarianism to its knees. This narrative, as articulated around the transformative power of youth and creativity, is now in abeyance. This is not just because of the seeming inability of these movements to achieve much beyond opening up space for even more authoritarian governments, but also because the creative ‘win– win’ they represented no longer works. The creativity moment was held together at the level of the milieu, around a shared ethics derived from a commitment to cultural production as transformative of individuals and communities. It was an actionable democracy that could deliver empowerment, economic growth and new forms of community solidarity. The creativity moment had a utopian dimension, a sense it was on the ‘right side of history’. This sense of a revived modernity was provided by the coming together of cultural creativity with a new wave of economic and social development, an agenda that linked them to governments who also looked to the creative sector for a new path to the modern. This moment has passed. I pointed above to critics of the creative industries discourse, who raise issues around the continued decline in public funding for culture; the disruption of public media (including journalism and information more generally); the fragmentation and diminution of audiences into market niches and data sources; the erosion of wages and working conditions for cultural workers; a deepening lack of diversity within the sector; and the ongoing exclusion of small-scale cultural activities from inner cities to name just some. I have previously characterized the trajectory of the creative industries agenda as one that starts with the ‘culturalization of the economy’ and ends with the ‘economization of culture’ (Oakley and O’Connor, 2015). What began as an arbitrary word ‘substitution’ ended as a performative language act serving to reduce culture to a calculable economic input. This undermined the transformative moment.

28  Handbook on the geographies of creativity We would also have to look at the trajectories of the cultural/creative industries themselves over this period straddling 1998’s New Labour and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Large-scale cultural industries, seemingly wrong-footed by the rise of the SME economy and Internet 2.0, learned to adapt, through mergers, new logistics and value-chain management, financial management, going harder for intellectual property and learning to exploit the inherent weakness of increasingly de-unionized creative labour (Hesmondhalgh, 2018). The rise of the digital disrupters to become incumbents of globally networked platform domination needs no re-telling here. The power of these new or revamped cultural industries has accelerated the erosion of culture as a public good, by undermining public media corporations and by shifting the logic of state media and cultural policy towards the efficient satisfaction of individual consumer choice. The more open moment described above, where traditional policy structures were forced to engage with new actors, also became normalized. In part this was inevitable, as state and city policy actors gained knowledge and competence and adapted existing structures. However, we can also see how the above developments would help shift the focus of policy makers to more directly measurable and manageable economic outcomes and actors. Thus, for example, accountancy firms that in the 1990s barely touched the cultural industries outside the big media and entertainment sector, quickly moved into a new market niche as governments adopted creative industries strategies. In Australia at least, creative industries and creative city policies are increasingly being written by the large accountancy firms and this seems set to roll out across Asia – and Africa – as the consultancy market grows. For policy makers it is easier all round to deal with the big players – Disney, Google, Hollywood Studios, the big animation and games companies. We can see some of this in the ways ‘Smart City’ has edged out ‘creative’, with vendor-driven solutions to urban problems requiring large-scale infrastructural projects rather than herding creative cats. This last can be left to the ‘start-up’ spaces which have proliferated in the last decade as the private sector has learned the appropriate language. Art museums, of the sort that now proliferate in China, the Emirates, Russia and elsewhere, no longer feel obliged to interface with the creativity bundle. In this process, milieus such as Hongdae and Bandung have changed. The first is more or less a victim of globalization and development, with little of that edgy spirit of the 1990s. Korea’s instrumentalization of the creativity agenda has worked alongside its reduction of the public media sector and its promotion of national identity through its creative industries (Choi, 2018). Seoul’s transformation into a ‘global city’ with rapid gentrification of the central areas is also well documented, as is the ‘precarity’ of its creative workers (Kim, 2017). Bandung has been absorbed into a national creative industries agenda focused on trade and development, and especially tourism, with a much more suspicious attitude from the local cultural milieu. Other initiatives, such as Bandung creative village, have been increasingly subject to tourism logics. But it is above all in China that we can see a limit case. China’s policy shift from cultural industries (wenhua chanye) – a term it had adopted in a positive manner in 1998 – to creative industries (chuangyi chanye) can

Cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity  29 be understood in the context of that deepening and acceleration of China’s post-1978 reforms – from gaige kaifang (reform and opening) to gaige chuangxin (reform and innovation) – in which new kinds of producing and consuming subjects would be required (O’Connor and Gu, 2019; Pang, 2012). Creativity is seen to provide a key element necessary for a next stage of economic development in which a certain kind of innovation and new forms of symbolic consumption would be central. The Chinese government did so with a high degree of caution as to what this creativity bundle might bring with it. We can see this in the early encounter with artist run spaces across China, in those proto-creative clusters such as Beijing’s 798, Shanghai’s M50 and Guangzhou’s Redtory. This engagement was both shallow and short-lived. The resultant transformation of most of these spaces into engines of property development, retail and hospitality has been noted (O’Connor and Gu, 2014, 2016). This seemed to confirm the prognosis of those – such as Will Hutton – who suggested only increased liberalization would allow the necessary free circulation of ideas and the flourishing of those soft skills required by creative innovation. Others saw either the frustrations of creative producers or the demands of creative consumers as leading eventually to such changes. Instead something else happened. China has accelerated its investment into what it calls the cultural creative industries at the same time as increasing its control over both the public media space, including the internet, and the private creative sector. It has side-stepped the creativity bundle – innovation as the output of creative subjects working in a relatively autonomous creative milieu – and taken lessons instead from the big cultural industries themselves (Rong and O’Connor, 2018). China has developed its own proprietary digital platforms behind the Great Firewall and has invested in supply chains and distribution systems at a level that positions a few very large companies to act as organizing agents for these (Hong, 2017; Jia and Winseck, 2018). It is through these large-scale cultural industries, backed by the power of the state, rather than the thriving ecosystem of small-scale creatives, that its ambitious strategy of soft power and one-belt–one-road is to be implemented (Su, 2010, 2016; Sun, 2015; Vlassis, 2016). What the ever-inventive Chinese state system has worked out is how to integrate creativity within a flexible and complex state-organized structure. There is no doubt that a combination of government control and rampant commercialization has given rise to a coarse and often slap-dash approach to cultural content. This often means that their huge cultural industries behemoth have little appeal outside of China, which will be problematic for global exports and for its soft power ambitions. This will remain a challenge for some time, but one that it is prepared to countenance. On the other hand, China has seen off the shibboleth that a wealthy Asian middle class will inevitably challenge an authoritarian state. Consumption has been encouraged and facilitated by the Chinese state, leap-frogging to the forefront of the digital economy in the process. The problem for China is not how to thwart a middle-class revolution but rather how to negotiate a purely commercial vision of cultural consumption – one underpinned by efficiency and maximization of choice – and its concern to promote the cultural values of a Chinese socialism, as well as project these onto the world stage as an arriving hegemon. The particular nature of the Chinese

30  Handbook on the geographies of creativity regime, its immediate Communist provenance but also a long-established Confucian political grammar, suggest that, though other regimes are concerned with both encouraging cultural consumption and keeping it within the bounds of a sanctioned state ideology, this contradiction will be most pointed within China. In this context, the transformative promise of autonomous creativity is not required; how these Western notions of creativity are intertwined with indigenous forms of ‘obedient autonomy’ (Evasdottir, 2005) is yet to be seen.

CONCLUSION There is a darker version of the creative class to be found in literature on the precariat, in which the gig economy so prevalent in the creative industries is held to unite creative workers with others. I think this is far-fetched (Hardt and Negri, 2004; cf. Neilson and Rossiter, 2005). Paul Mason, following on from the operatismo school, sees the knowledge class as one that is certainly exploited but, as the actual creator of most contemporary value in the knowledge economy, is the only one that has the potential to challenge capital, and to move beyond it into socialized and non-commodified production of the commons. I think this, too, is far-fetched (Mason, 2015; cf. Pitts, 2017), though I am more sympathetic to his basic contention that we are living at a time where the forces of production – creativity, knowledge, computing – are trapped and restricted by current relations of production – in the form of elitist capitalist ‘rentism’ or by authoritarian hierarchy (Frase, 2016). Goran Therborn (2014) gives a more realistic assessment of the global situation, placing both the new and the older middle classes alongside pre-capitalist groups fighting to maintain their means of subsistence; surplus populations no longer required in production and with few sources of income; and the declining industrial working class in the Global South and in the rust-belts of the North. The older middle classes, with traditional values of hard work and savings, are contrasted with the newer, younger middle class whose values are drawn from post-1968 identity politics around race, gender and sexuality, but also the ‘artistic critique of capitalism’ – quality of life, meaningful social cohesion, ecological protection and anti-consumerism. Perhaps we could argue that the creativity moment held together the new and the old middle classes under a banner of a benign modernization: where global capitalism could accommodate the local, and a rising, educated middle class could effect real change within the system of development. This in turn depended on that combination of culture and commerce (‘making money and making meaning’), technology and creative imagination, democracy and innovation. Win–win. However, the shifts within policy language and industry dynamics we outlined above meant that the leverage of such a knowledge class was severely limited. On the one hand, local elites could link with global creative and financial corporations without the local creatives; on the other hand, there was only a limited chance that governments would allow such a knowledge class – or as Bourdieu would have it, ‘the dominated fraction of the dominant class’ – a position of control over such

Cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity  31 a potentially powerful creativity agenda. Such a knowledge or managerial class had been effectively marginalized by neo-liberalism in the 1980s USA (Duménil and Lévy, 2011). I would suggest that what is also at work in this marginalization of the actionable democracy of transformative creativity is what we might call the ‘revenge of culture’. Appadurai spoke negatively about nation-states attempting to freeze the process of hybridization, fixing difference and sameness around its borders. Yet must it be seen as necessarily regressive? Global cultural flows frequently became identified with ‘Western lifestyles’ and the political, religious, cultural challenges that these could bring – Trojan Horse-like – to regimes whose legitimacy came from other sources. These cultural flows were underpinned by a number of very real geo-political economic flows, backed by military and legal power, reorganizing local agriculture, manufacture, telecommunications, retail and logistics, water conservation, education, health as well as media systems. They could alter the very forms and rhythms of everyday life (especially in cities). Appadurai’s regressive ‘sameness’ might also speak of a necessary sense of local identity and solidarity not just against some global ‘difference’ but as a response to the real disruption of local lives. The non-cultural power behind these global flows of capital is mostly not amenable to hybridization or indigenization without some concerted action from the nation-state, action that can often mobilize local political actors and coalitions taking a calculated stand with that nation state against ‘globalization’. Which is to say, the nation-state remains a touchstone for forms of local solidarity and control, and this can have – does have – powerful cultural dimensions. Wolfgang Streek has made the point, against some vociferous opposition from a globalizing left, that global capitalism’s ‘deterritorialization’ positions the nation-state as a looked-for source of local control (Streeck, 2014). The problem is, however, that this source of local control can be as anti-democratic as the globalizing forces it seeks to resist. Or worse, authoritarian states can operate in the register of strong local cultural autonomy even whilst in practice accommodating forces of global (and local) capital (Turoma et al., 2018). The ‘revenge of culture’ concerns those elements that creativity did not include – traditions, rituals, collective sense making (aesthesis) – in its evocation of poiesis as innovation (Banks and O’Connor, 2017). In the face of the multiple challenges that such modernization brings, many conservative groups and states can easily present creativity – and the people, lifestyles and political agendas that go with it – as the personification of global forces anathema to local cultures. These groups and states use culture to interpellate those other populations that Therborn identifies as losers in the process of capitalist globalization, and indeed the older, anxious middle classes themselves, around a deeply authoritarian and nativist agenda. The ‘liberal’ ‘westernized’ creative class are stigmatized as the carrier of global discourses of human rights, individual freedoms and other cultural intrusions which find their way into indigenous culture only to undermine it. Economic development driven by new forms of ‘creative content’ production and consumption but without wider social or political change seems the order of

32  Handbook on the geographies of creativity the day. Culture as a bulwark of continuity and identity. Yet it is often the case that the ‘western lifestyles’ often have less to do with the kinds of creative milieus we have spoken of and more with the consumer cultures that states themselves have promoted. This is particularly the case with the erosion of public sector media, the relentless commercialization of everyday life and the reduction of cultural policy to the facilitation of individualized consumption at point of sale. Conservative or authoritarian states rarely blame the erosion of cultural cohesion and values on those systems of commercial culture that they themselves did so much to bring into being and on which they often rely for legitimacy. This is the kind of conundrum China, as we saw, is struggling with. In the wake of all this, creativity has ceased to be an affective imaginary. Where it used to have a frisson of the new it now has the dead hand of marketing copy; where it built bridges it now evokes cynicism and resentment. Different imaginaries are emerging, building different alliances. The rise of ‘buen vivir’, good living, in Latin American countries points to a set of urgent concerns with ecological preservation, anti-growth and indigenous knowledge (Gudynas, 2011; Seone, 2017). In Western countries ‘good living’ has combined this sense with a more Aristotelian sense of Eudaimonia, ‘doing and living well’, as a response to happiness as consumption (Hesmondhalgh, 2017). Of course, this reconnects with some of the strands within the ‘culture and development’ tradition of the 1990s and the ‘capabilities’ approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, now uncoupled from a creative economy. The question of the uses or social function of culture, edged aside by postmodern cultural studies, Bourdieusian distinction strategies, and Foucauldian governmentality, has begun to re-emerge, on both ends of the political spectrum. In seeking out the proper role of culture in organizing and articulating our life in common we might find new sites in which a global collective ethical subjectivity can be founded. We might want to hold on to the creativity moment not (just) as some high-water mark of western-driven neo-liberalism but also the kind of universal history event that might be identified in the latter part of the eighteenth century, with the discourse of equality and liberty, in the ways described by Susan Buck-Morss (2009) in Hegel, Haiti and Universal History; or, perhaps, the response of those educated colonial elites at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who took up the promise of European modernity only for it to be constantly withheld. We can see the transformation of this promise into the ‘awakening of Asia’ from the 1905 Russian Revolution and Port Arthur defeat, through the Young Turks in 1908, the Chinese revolution of 1911, the anti-imperialist struggles in India, 1917 May Fourth and subsequent civil war and revolution in China, and so on through the decolonization period (Mishra, 2012). The rise and fall of the creativity moment might be seen as the first intimation of a new cosmopolitan subject position, uncoupled from the naïveties of win–win, and concerned with a global ethical position in which the world might be saved from itself.

Cultural and creative industries and the future of modernity  33

NOTES 1. ‘Culture and Development’ represented a concerted effort by these two agencies in the 1990s to challenge the dominant development paradigm in which economic growth stood as both the means and the end of development. Asserting that local cultural context was crucial for any development project and that culture provided an essential meaning system and source of identity for the resultant developed society, ‘culture and development’ challenged the dominance of economic logic. With the creative industries, ‘culture and development’ could have that logic too: creativity was good for individuals, societies and the economy. Win–win. As far as UNESCO is concerned this shift could be seen already in the negotiations around the 2005 Convention on the Promotion and Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Here the concerns of cultural industries producers in the Global North around the cultural exception – exempting cultural goods and services from WTO rules because of their dual economic and cultural value – combined with Global South concerns about persistent inequalities in global cultural flows and fears for ‘cultural diversity’ that had only been exacerbated since Appadurai’s essay. 2. This section on Bandung, including interviews, is taken from an unpublished Monash University Masters thesis by Maryana Elizabet (2017). Interviews conducted by Maryana Elizabet. 3. This can be seen in the bi-focal narratives of UNESCO and others: on the one hand civil society organizations and individual freedoms, on the other cultural and creative industry sectors, drawing on human creative talent as part of economic development.

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36  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Rong, Y. and J. O’Connor (eds) (2018), Cultural Industries in Shanghai: Policy and Planning inside a Global City, Bristol, UK: Intellect. Rosi, M. (2014), ‘Branding or Sharing? The Dialectics of Labeling and Cooperation in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network’, City, Culture and Society, 5 (2), 107–10. Roy, A. and A. Ong (eds) (2011), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Ryoo, W. and D.Y. Jin (2018), ‘Cultural Politics in the South Korean Cultural Industries: Confrontations Between State-Developmentalism and Neoliberalism’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, DOI: 10.1080/10286632.2018.1429422. Seone, M.V. (2017), ‘Cultura Viva, a Challenge to the Creative Economy Policy Discourse in Brazil’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 36 (4), 424–39. Sparks, C. and C. Roach (1990), ‘Farewell to the NWICO?’, Media, Culture and Society, 12 (3), 275–81. Streeck, W. (2014), Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London, UK: Verso. Su, W. (2010), ‘New Strategies of China’s Film Industry as Soft Power’, Global Media and Communication, 6 (3), 317–22. Su, W. (2016), China’s Encounter with Global Hollywood, Lexington, KY, USA: University Press of Kentucky. Sun, W. (2015), ‘Slow Boat from China: Public Discourses Behind the “Going Global” Media Policy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21 (4), 400–418. Therborn, G. (2014), ‘The New Masses? Social Bases of Resistance’, New Left Review, 85, 7–16. Turoma, S., S. Ratilainen and E. Trubina (2018), ‘At the Intersection of Globalization and “Civilizational Originality”: Cultural Production in Putin’s Russia’, Cultural Studies, 32 (5), 651–75. UNCTAD and UNDP (2008), Creative Economy Report 2008: The Challenge of Assessing the Creative Economy: Towards Informed Policy-Making, UNCTAD/DITC/2008/2, Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations. UNCTAD and UNDP (2010), Creative Economy Report 2010: Creative Economy: A Feasible Development Option, UNCTAD/DITC/TAB/2010/3, Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations. UNESCO (2005), Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, Paris, France: UNESCO. UNESCO and UNDP (2013), Creative Economy Report, Paris, France and New York, NY, USA: UNESCO and UNDP. Vlassis, A. (2015), ‘Culture in the Post-2015 Development Agenda: The Anatomy of an International Mobilisation’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (9), 1649–62. Vlassis, A. (2016), ‘Soft Power, Global Governance of Cultural Industries and Rising Powers: The Case of China’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22 (4), 481–96. Wang, H. (2011), The Politics of Imagining Asia, Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press. Wittel, A. (2001), ‘Towards a Network Sociality’, Theory, Culture & Society, 18 (6), 51–76. Yudice, G. (2003), The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press.

3. Culture club: creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order Jamie Peck

INTRODUCTION: FAST-POLICY CULTURE This chapter reflects on what Allen Scott (2006) once aptly called the creative-cities ‘syndrome’, a phrase that captures the essence of what has become a pan-urban policymaking paradigm, culture or ‘order’, in which both the means and ends of local economic development have been ‘culturalized’. This process of policymaking contagion was initially animated by Richard Florida’s (2002a) bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class, although it is not entirely reducible to the after-effects of that much-discussed book, or to the extensive and long-running marketing campaign with which it was associated. Rather, the argument in this chapter is that Florida’s zeitgeist-catching intervention articulated, and then helped to realize and reproduce, a particular kind of ‘late entrepreneurial’ or ‘soft neoliberal’ moment across evolving regimes of urban governance, in a context in which the scope for effective manoeuvre (not to say innovation) in local economic policy has been significantly narrowed, in ideological, practical and financial terms. That is to say, while Florida’s book did not unilaterally make this policymaking environment, in which cultural assets have been mobilized in a competitive war of all against all to attract (and retain) a footloose class of lifestyle-sensitive ‘creatives’, both his diagnosis and his policy prescriptions were crafted in such a way as to exploit and indeed capitalize upon these circumstances. In this respect, the creativity model can be seen as an exemplar of fast-policy development, as a bearer and condensate of an urban policymaking rationality, technique and indeed culture (cf. Peck and Theodore, 2015). If The Rise of the Creative Class rode a wave of sorts, lionizing a class of creative winners that were held to be reaping the just desserts of their talents, while arguing for a realignment of public policies (and public subsidies) in their favour, Florida’s most recent book, The New Urban Crisis (Florida, 2017), has been widely read as something between a climb down, a recalibration and a confession (Brook, 2017; Bures, 2017; DePillis, 2016; Dorling, 2017; Renn, 2017; Wetherell, 2017). Who could possibly have known, the author now asks, that the celebrated ‘return to the city’ of tech-era professionals, taste makers and talent workers would have been associated with a tangle of negative externalities, like spiralling socioeconomic divides, over-inflated housing markets and unchecked gentrification? Setting aside for the moment the fact that these entirely predictable (side?) effects were actually predicted, and quite widely, there is some truth in the defence that ‘to tar Florida with the ills of the knowledge economy is like blaming Thomas Friedman for the 37

38  Handbook on the geographies of creativity problems of globalization just because he wrote The World Is Flat’ (Renn, 2017: 1). Again, the Florida phenomenon did not unilaterally create the late-neoliberal policy environment that it would cleverly exploit and then comprehensively inhabit. It went from an edgy idea to an everyday artefact, if not a policymaking cliché, not by being revolutionary or earth-changing (of course), but by conforming, having been expressly designed, purposefully circulated and proactively consumed as a travelling technology and seductive script for cultural-economic governance. ‘Traveling policy, like globalization [itself], is nothing new,’ Catherine Kingfisher (2013: 11) has written, ‘nevertheless, it has been accelerating in recent decades to such an extent that it is now ubiquitous, almost mundane.’ Made in a different context, this argument very much applies to creativity policies, which have become almost trivially commonplace – retrofitted, adapted and translated as they have been to a bewilderingly wide range of urban contexts, from small towns to global cities. What once seemed like a cutting-edge, culturally edgy development model has since become almost numbingly ordinary; its traces all over the place, it has become normalized. Rather like that of Thomas Friedman, one might say, Florida’s achievement was to produce an urtext for this late-neoliberal urban moment, exploiting the format of social-scientific disclosure to present what could otherwise be read as something between a lifestyle guide and a policymaking manual. The policymaking fix, it has to be said, was an alluringly simple one. Relatively modest, locally targeted and ‘eventized’ interventions, consistent with a climate of accelerating gentrification, social inequality and competitive insecurities, were not only sanctioned but sanctified in the creative-cities script, which has since been instrumental in legitimizing, sanitizing and reproducing these conditions, even if they were not of the project’s own making. In this sense, the impact of The Rise of the Creative Class can be read as a banal affirmation of the performativity thesis, since the world of urban policymaking has been at least partly remade in its reflected, affirmative image. With requisite irony, Florida’s book was knowingly, if artfully, positioned as a critique of what had become a deeply entrenched orthodoxy in the field of urban economic development, 1990s style, based on smokestack-chasing, corporate subsidization and the mobilization of urban spectacles, subsequently to inherit this very mantle, as a near-hegemonic and common-sense mode of culturally inflected urban competition (Harvey, 1989; Peck, 2014). Florida himself would be duly anointed as urban policy’s most ‘charismatic economic-development troubadour’ (MacGillis, 2010: 13), a role in which he has revelled, even after changing his tune on culture, creativity and ‘crisis’ (Brook, 2017; Bures, 2017; Florida, 2017). The creative-cities syndrome reveals something quite telling about the fast-policy market that has emerged in recent years around the urban-solutions industry. Policies that travel far and wide do not necessarily do so because they are ‘functional’ – because they do just what it says on the can – although of course they must sustain that appearance. Instead, some of the features that fast policies, pervasive fixes and winning formulas will frequently share, in this context, include the following: they will often travel farthest and fastest when they affirm, or only marginally recalibrate, prevailing values. (And all the better if they can work within existing

Creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order  39 political, resource and institutional constraints.) They will be especially appealing if they facilitate some kind of renewal, or makeover, of extant rationales, rubrics and repertoires for intervention, preferably in the form of self-contained solutions or best-practice arrangements, complete with an accompanying package of tools, targets and ready-made discourses. Their prospects for rapid-fire diffusion will also be enhanced if they are successful in hailing, enrolling and then equipping a network of downstream advocates, intermediaries and functionaries – maybe even some true believers. And fast policies will really fly if they can do some or all of these things while at the same time doing nothing to perturb or otherwise upset powerful, incumbent interests. In a context in which conventional urban-policy remedies, based on the well-worn methods and motifs of ‘entrepreneurialism’, have been displaying diminishing returns for decades now, the creative-cities fix has provided a low-cost but high-visibility means for refreshing and renewing mandates for local economic development – pretty much in the absence of politically viable, financially feasible, mainstream alternatives. This is the vacuum into which the creative-cities model was launched and within which, to all intents and purposes, it continues to live. It hardly matters that there is little or no evidence that creativity policies actually deliver. In a broader and more nebulous sense, they work as fixes because they fit. And this one-size-fits-all but at the same time highly ‘elasticated’ policy really does seem to be suitable for practically all sizes and shapes. Of course, there are subtle differences in the operationalization of Floridaesque policies between one city and another, but these details should not detract from the wider pattern, which overwhelmingly is one of casual, almost friction-free recycling and regurgitation. So it is that not only wannabe creative hubs but even ostensibly ‘winning’ cities, like Amsterdam or Seattle, still find it somehow expedient to embrace the ethos of creative growth (see Bréville, 2017; Peck, 2012). As a policymaker at the City of Amsterdam put it, ‘As a label, it just works’. Asking how it is that the creative-city model ‘works’, not in the sense of intrinsic functionality but how it exists in a world of late-neoliberal urban governance, the chapter proceeds in two steps. It begins by summarizing the policymaking rationale-cum-formula that accompanied (and indeed facilitated) the rise of the creative-cities craze. Since a policymaking model can only become a model if it recruits followers, admirers and emulators, the chapter then turns to the audience and the field of reception for this culturally packaged solution. Finally, the conclusion asks why it is, how it is, that the creative-cities fad has lasted so long, and why indeed it endures in the face of critique, scepticism, fatigue and chronic underperformance – now that even its principal architect has taken to voicing public doubts. For it is that, after ‘a period of rethinking and introspection, of personal and intellectual transformation’, Florida (2017: xvii) has since come around to seeing ‘the back-to-the-city movement as something that conferred its benefits on a small group of places and people’, a condition that critics all along saw as a defining feature of this self-serving and elitist formulation: ‘I [find] myself confronting the dark side of the urban revival that I had once championed and celebrated.’ Florida’s disposition may be rather less

40  Handbook on the geographies of creativity sunny now, but the continuing appeal of his millennial policy prescriptions – priming the creative pump by subsidizing professional-class lifestyles and amenities – tells a rather different, but also sobering, story.

THE FIX Sold as a portable formula for urban success, apparently everywhere, the creative-cities policy fix was sufficiently succinct that it could easily have fitted on a three-by-five-inch index card. As Florida (2017: xiv) himself recently summarized his pitch: The key to urban success, I argued in my 2002 book . . . was to attract and retain talent, not just to draw in companies. The knowledge workers, techies, and artists and other cultural creatives who made up the creative class were locating in places that had lots of high-paying jobs – or a thick labor market; lots of other people to meet and date – what I called a thick mating market; a vibrant quality of place, with great restaurants and cafés, a music scene, and lots of other things to do.

This, in turn, was connected to an alliterating policy imperative, the now-famous three Ts of technology, talent, and tolerance. In order to advance in the creative economy, even to defend existing positions, cities would need to be on top of all three Ts: (1) technology, in the form of a high-performing cluster of tech companies and research universities, the latter serving as willing partners, as factories for talent and as markers of the right kinds of neighbourhood milieux; (2) talent, the essential ingredient for high-quality economic development, as borne (individually) by a uniquely mobile and demanding creative class, bent on exercising their lifestyle and workstyle preferences to the full; and (3) tolerance, defining the preferred social operating environment and the hearth of creative growth, places with a culturally rich, open-minded and welcoming ‘people climate’ being told to expect an economic dividend from this atmosphere of hipster liberalism. If cities worked on the third T, tolerance, they could anticipate – on the basis of Florida’s speculative theory that jobs now follow (talented) people – that the first two Ts would soon be looking after themselves. This charge was addressed, quite explicitly, to civic leaders and urban managers who were called upon urgently to act lest their cities consign themselves to the creative, cultural and economic backwaters. This evidently compelling formulation encapsulated existential threats (the old economy is going, a new one is coming) and boundless opportunities (for those cities that can catch the creative wave; easy if you try, and everywhere can win), suturing these both to a can-do policy posture and to a readily available and lightweight programme of local-scale intervention: defer to the new economy of tech, embrace (the idealized values of) its workforce, and provide for its needs by ensuring that the right kind of lifestyle ecosystem is in place. The policy vision and the package of interventions were both nominally tailored to the particularities of place, but at the same time they resembled, in a practical sense, a prefabricated and generic formula for

Creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order  41 ‘urban success’. The impact and staying power of this formula has been remarkable. In light of the feebleness of the formula itself (in causal terms, it is bunk science), this perverse staying power demands (another) explanation. When French journalist Benoît Bréville went on a mission for Le Monde Diplomatique to Seattle, ‘capital of the hipster boom’, in the fall of 2017, he discovered a city that had ‘monetised creativity, tolerance and diversity to create wealth for a few, and employment for young graduates [but] may have lost itself in the process’ (2017: 8). Nevertheless, local policymakers were still enthralled by the creative-cities vision, still validating their strategies in relation to Florida’s putative ‘theory’. As Bréville (2017: 8) retold the now-familiar story: Florida . . . is widely criticised by his peers, but he has had a big impact on municipal decision-makers for 15 years. He first set out his theory in [the] bestselling book, The Rise of the Creative Class. It is fairly simple: the old economy (industrial, manufacturing, extractive) will disappear and be replaced by a ‘creative’ economy. Rather than trying to attract businesses by building motorways and conference centres, offering tax breaks and financial incentives, cities should entice talent. That means people who innovate, invent or otherwise use their intellectual capital to create wealth: artists, engineers, journalists, architects, gifted administrators, financiers, lawyers, researchers, IT specialists, medics.

Seen as an ingeniously crafted economic imaginary, the attendant creativity script mashed together cultural libertarianism, contemporary urban-design motifs and neoliberal policy imperatives. Critics hardly needed to work hard on reading between the lines, however, to detect that this was a familiar story retold, ‘the old deregulatory gospel repackaged in the shiny new wineskin of lifestyle liberalism’ (Brook, 2017: 111; see also Lehmann, 2003; Peck, 2005). There were socially-liberal and even faintly radical themes running through the creativity script – including an explicit embrace of social diversity, human-scale urban design, the arts and (public) culture, together with a positive economic vision for (central) cities.1 But these pinkish and progressive elements were folded into a development project that was, in a constitutive sense, both market-orientated (creative cities, assets and actors, always in competition) and individualistic (creative subjects as hedonistic free agents). In Florida’s account, the creatives essentially presented as neoliberals, dressed in black. We were told that creative-class types yearned, above all, to ‘validate their identities’, seeking out neighbourhoods amply endowed with the kind of amenities that would permit them to maintain an experientially intensive work–life balance. These were the so-called ‘plug-and-play’ communities, with low social-entry barriers and a pattern of loose ties, but plenty of scope for creative commingling, where creatives could (re)locate ‘and put together a life – or at least a facsimile of a life – in a week’ (Florida, 2002b: 20). Thriving on weak attachments and noncommittal relationships, homo creativus was an atomized actor, with quite particular cultural tastes although rarely held back by social ties and obligations, thriving on long hours of work and unrelenting competition. As a member of the creative class, an identity that he would go on publicly to live, Florida understood that ‘there is no corporation or other large institution that will take care of us . . . we are truly on our own’ (Florida, 2002a: 115).

42  Handbook on the geographies of creativity One of the ways in which the creativity thesis garnered attention, and controversy in some conservative circles, was by highlighting the positive contribution of gays and lesbians to the life of cities. This was coarsely captured by way of a ‘gay index’, built around various proxy measures and then correlated with a series of economic ‘goods’ and nice-to-haves. Under the veneer of progressive inclusiveness, gays and lesbians were quite literally being valued, in this account, for their (supposed) economic functionality, but they also stood in as diagnostic indicators of the favoured kind of ‘tolerant’ climate. So it was that gays and lesbians were portrayed not only as the ‘canaries of the creative economy’, but also as ‘harbingers of redevelopment and gentrification in distressed urban neighbourhoods’ (Florida, 2005: 131). Similarly, other typical features of these gentrifying, mixed-use neighbourhoods, such as ‘authentic’ historical buildings, converted lofts, walkable streets, plenty of coffee shops, live-music spaces, street art, maybe a little graffiti and a connecting bike path, were likewise interpreted as indicators of creative potential, and newly productive assets ripe for exploitation in the interurban war for talent. For all its social-liberal compensations and new-urbanist planning motifs, the creativity fix has worked with grain of the contemporary Realpolitik. It offered a feelgood but fiscally undemanding development vision, congruent with a post-entitlement, intensively competitive urban realm. It facilitated revamped forms of civic boosterism (flogging cultural assets), alongside the elevation of elite consumption norms and the lubrication both of flexible labour markets and gentrifying housing markets. More implicitly, the script also provided a smokescreen for – if not a brazen legitimation of – the continuing rise of socioeconomic inequality, both within and between cities: the designated overclass of creatives was held to have earned its superior position in the creative city, in the world of global flows, and in the socioeconomic hierarchy (for a hierarchy most certainly it is) by virtue of raw talent and creative capital, validated through the market and by Florida’s ‘theory’ as well. The lumpen classes of service and manual workers, on the other hand, were so positioned on the wrong end of the new socioeconomic structure by virtue of their creative deficits, and as such played little or no positive role in Florida’s original account of the creative economy. Back then, they had to be content with lectures on creative bootstrapping and – in lieu of their own creative awakening – the benefit of downward-trickling morsels like the opportunity to wait tables for the creative bohemians. This said, socioeconomic inequalities, and the plight of the ‘bottom’ 66 per cent of the class structure, play a much more prominent role in Florida’s recent repositioning (Florida, 2017), but his account of why this ‘dark side’ of the creativity boom, with its winner-take-all rationality favouring hipster hubs and their elite inhabitants, was initially overlooked in The Rise does not really pass the sniff test. ‘As he tells it,’ a business reporter at the Houston Chronicle has disclosed, Florida ‘had wanted to include a chapter on inequality in his first book, but it was cut for length [and then after] the book came out, the problem kept getting worse’ (DePillis, 2016). The chapters that were included in The Rise of the Creative Class, on the other hand, were much more concerned with elaborating an indulgent and self-regarding account of life ‘inside’ the creative class, documenting its lifestyles, its wants and needs, in a manner intended to resonate with

Creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order  43 first-person authority. Creative subjects were celebrated for their hypermobility and for their strictly circumscribed, individualistic commitments to place. It follows that anything short of public pandering to the needs and desires of the restless creatives was practically guaranteed to secure their automatic ‘flight’ (Florida, 2005). The creativity discourse amounts to a paean to the international talent market and its favoured agents, to which cities and regions can only but defer. In this retread of the orthodox globalization script, the argument for decisive local action – priming, subsidizing and featherbedding the creative supply side – is presented as nothing short of a new urban imperative, the new cargo cult. Paradoxically, Florida sought to celebrate certain ‘qualities of place’, like buzz and cosmopolitanism, while at the same time recirculating pernicious neoliberal narratives concerning existential competitive threats and the need for constant vigilance in the face of risks not only of capital flight but (now) talent flight. ‘The core of the challenge is what I’ve come to see as the new global competition for talent,’ Florida (2005: 3–4) has explained, ‘a phenomenon that promises to radically reshape the world in the coming decades.’ It follows that no one, and nowhere, is safe from this new competitive threat. Help was at hand, however, since Florida sought not simply to disclose the new economic order, but also to offer his services as a purveyor of winning urban strategies – as a consultant for hire, as a high-price public speaker and as a roving public-policy advocate (see Bures, 2012; MacGillis, 2010). Right along with the identification of policy imperatives came a suite of new policy solutions, all designed to give the creatives what they want and city leaders something to do, while securing the position of cities in the competitive scramble for talent. Creatives were the primary movers and decision-makers in Florida’s account, and it was their choices – writ large – that would shape the spatial divisions of creative labour, the creative urban hierarchy and the outcomes of the interurban talent war. And, ‘when it comes down to it, creative people choose regions,’ Florida explained. ‘They think of Silicon Valley versus Cambridge, Stockholm versus Vancouver, or Sydney versus Copenhagen. The fact that many regions around the world are cultivating the attributes necessary to become creative centres makes this competition even fiercer’ (Florida, 2005: 10). Just like the wave of entrepreneurial urban strategies that preceded it, this form of creative interurban competition was both self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating: developing open, plug-and-play communities that are welcoming to the always-restive members of the creative class becomes tantamount to both enabling and subsidizing the very forms of mobility that were a source of competitive anxiety in the first place. But since there was (again) only one game in town, cities had to make sure that they were ready to play, to do what is necessary, or ‘they will wither and die’ (Florida, 2002a: 13). The (circumscribed) role for government, in this context, was loudly to cheerlead while investing in the creative supply side, Florida’s chameleon-like position being to sanction modest and discretionary interventions at the local scale (such as delivering events, amenities and marketing campaigns), while joining the chorus that big government had better get out of the way. ‘Where I share common ground with some Republicans and libertarians [is] that old-style government programs have become a huge impediment’, Florida (quoted in Steigerwald, 2004: 2) once

44  Handbook on the geographies of creativity explained, the more limited function of the state being to ‘set up the parameters in which market-based actions take place’. Urban leaders must do what it takes to transform their cities into ‘creative hubs’ or ‘talent magnets’, having been made acutely aware of the risk – if they do not adequately tend to the needs of the ‘young and restless’ – that they will be demoted to the rust belt of the new economy. Discursively downloading both risk and responsibility, the creative-city concept was predicated on the dominant market order, the unforgiving logic of which it transplants into soft-focus, cultural tones. The resulting policy posture – since its attendant interventions are hardly, if ever, guarantees of actual economic success – is therefore for the most part a symbolic one. In one sense, this is a matter of incorporating culture ‘into’ economic-development policy; in a more fundamental sense, it speaks to a new culture of economic-development policy. In a world in which cities are (found) responsible for their own economic development, both failure and success being deemed to have been ‘home grown’, there is an obligation on city leaders to act, and to be seen to act, on and for the local economy, even if their aspirations repeatedly exceed their effective grasp. Creative-cities policies were fashioned for, and proliferated in, this ideological environment. They provide a means for urban economic development to be performed, ‘eventized’ and ‘festivalized’. So was revealed the funky face of neoliberal urban-development politics.

THE FOLLOWERS At some risk of understatement, Florida (2017: xv) has recently reflected that ‘my work generated a considerable following among mayors, arts and cultural leaders, urbanists and even some enlightened real estate developers who were looking for a better way to spur economic development in their communities’. Nominally bespoke creativity strategies can be purchased from consultants in practically any mid-sized city these days, or they can be lifted off the shelf from countless websites and urban regeneration conferences. These are almost ideal products for the fast-policy distribution systems that have evolved in the past two decades: both the rationale and the design parameters of the policy are essentially portable – just ensure that each plan contains at least a dash of local cultural ‘authenticity’, while nodding to the right ‘grassroots’ constituencies in each city. While the peddling of urban solutions is hardly a new activity, and while all manner of consultancy bromides are readily available on every street corner, it has been observed that ‘Florida has taken the art to a new level, wielding his “creativity index” and making each city feel that, whatever its shortcomings, it has the potential to move up the ladder’ (MacGillis, 2010: 13). This is a motivational discourse. The presentation felt new, even if the formula was familiar: construct new urban governance networks around growth-oriented goals, compete aggressively for mobile economic resources and government funds, respond in formulaic ways to external threats, talk up the prospects of success and do not buck the market. The emphasis on the mobilization of elite policy communities around growth-first urban

Creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order  45 policy objectives is nothing new, but whereas the entrepreneurial cities chased jobs, the creative cities pursue talent workers; the entrepreneurial cities craved investment, now the creative cities yearn for buzz; while entrepreneurial cities boasted of their postfordist flexibility, the creative cities trade on the cultural distinction of cool. Urban leaders are duly nudged to contemplate new forms of fiscally modest investments in local events, happenings and amenities, mostly targeted at economically secure residents and local businesses in parts of town where there are already signs of ‘buzz’ and where property prices are already climbing. After all, this is much less of a lift – politically, financially, institutionally – than, say, developing a new science park, establishing a citywide living wage, implementing a green-economy strategy, or most other things on the local economic policy menu. Across what is now a thoroughly neoliberalized urban terrain, a receptive and wide audience has effectively been pre-constituted for the kinds of market-reinforcing, property- and promotion-based, growth-oriented and gentrification-friendly policies that have been repackaged under the rubric of creativity. The creative-cities policy fix can be deployed to accessorize extant urban-growth agendas, with the minimum of disruption to established interests and constituencies. In its minimalist form it adds a livability/lifestyle component to a conventional urban competitiveness stance, which can now be spiced up with cultural accoutrements. Furthermore, local growth coalitions can be enlarged (and enlivened) by adding artists, musicians and cultural entrepreneurs to the mix, alongside the suits from the chamber of commerce and the local development agency. The typical mayor is likely to see few downsides to making the city safe for the creative class; there is little to fear from conspicuous urban consumption, gen-x marketing campaigns, key-worker attraction strategies and gentrification with publicly subsidized art.2 A creativity strategy is therefore easily bolted on to business-as-usual urban-development policies, while providing additional ideological cover for market-driven or state-assisted programmes of gentrification. It resonates with business development, real estate and local media interests; it calls upon, but rarely threatens to exceed, what are normally quite limited capacities for supply-side intervention at the city-government scale; and it connects by way of positive messaging with established portfolios in arts and cultural policy, city marketing and promotion and small-business support. And on top of all this, such is the elasticity of the creative-cities policy package, it can be adapted for use up and down the urban hierarchy, as well as across a wide range of local and national contexts. The promise made to lagging cities, most of which had probably worked their way through much of the conventional repertoire for economic regeneration with little to show for it, was that creativity might just be the silver bullet. As Daniel Brook (2017: 110) puts it, ‘If innovation-minded leaders of the nation’s slumping metropolitan economies would just chase college-educated workers by tolerating gays and liberals and upping their indie rock scenes and food-truck menu prices, even Scranton could become the next Austin’. That these promises turned out to be empty ones, for Scranton and countless other struggling cities that took a chance on the Florida tonic, is now widely acknowledged (MacGillis, 2010; Tochterman, 2012; Wetherell, 2017).

46  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Or as DePillis (2016) chose rather generously to read it, the Florida thesis proved to be ‘half true’: it is very difficult indeed, if not impossible, to find verified examples of policy-led creative recovery in mid-sized cities facing the challenges of structural economic decline, but then there are the San Franciscos and New Yorks and Seattles of this world where ‘the theory work[ed] entirely too well, as creative and techy types revitalized downtown neighbourhoods to the point where only bankers and software developers can afford to live in them comfortably’. Whether the theory was really ‘applied’ in San Francisco, New York or Seattle is quite another matter, as is the question of whether it was creativity policies per se that secured these outcomes. More plausible is the claim that the Florida thesis itself merely redescribed extant conditions in these and other high-growth cities, presenting this image of new-age success as a tutelary example for others to follow. In one such ‘model’ city, Amsterdam, which was hardly languishing in the creative doldrums before The Rise of the Creative Class came along, a Florida-style makeover did indeed occur, in some respects, albeit more in the service of political validation than economic salvation.3 The trigger for Amsterdam’s policymaking renovation was a book-tour appearance by Richard Florida at a high-profile event out at the city’s Westergasfabriek, a former gas works regenerated as a culture park. One of the organizers recalled that this was the ‘beginning of the hype . . . Florida’s story was wonderful . . . And now it’s over here in the Netherlands!’ A delegate from the City Council present at the event likewise recalled that it had ‘really helped to get creativity, as an issue, on the political agenda. The mayor [was] very convinced about what he calls the creative knowledge economy . . . Then people were talking about the three Ts and making it seem all very easy: just make your city attractive and miracles will occur! [And who could oppose] making our city attractive?’ The following comments from two well-placed local policymakers convey a sense of the way in which creativity was mobilized as a policy narrative in the city: Richard Florida has been influential here. He has been here two or three times, and he has met our mayor several times. I’m sure his books have had an impact. But at the same time, I believe that the reason this is so is that people feel that it really fits in [with] what Amsterdam’s position has always been. So people saw the reasoning of Florida as supporting the power . . . that Amsterdam has always had [with its] history of being an open, creative, internationally orientated city. For us, therefore, it’s much easier. Florida’s huge contribution . . . was that he stressed, he redefined in effect, values and qualities of the city that were already [here in Amsterdam]. So we were already facilitating the three Ts, we were already a place where you could find wild places, rough places, cheap places, next to very expensive and sophisticated places. I think that these are the essential characteristics of Amsterdam . . . But then we got the wind on our back . . . Because everybody was discussing the Florida thing. What’s a creative industry, are we a creative city, do we want to become a creative city? Politicians could say, well, we are working on that already!

After it touched down in Amsterdam, the new credo of creative growth seemed to bring with it the prospect of governing in new ways, with the support of new stake-

Creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order  47 holders and new strategic objectives, while at the same time changing very little. It would facilitate the discursive repackaging of a loose cluster of urban-development policies (with a social-inclusion accent), without necessitating any substantial reorganization of the policies themselves, or funding any major new programmes. At their most candid, some local officials conceded that the effort was tantamount to a ‘do nothing’ policy, but one that happened to resonate with the pre-existing bundle of competitive strengths, programming lines, cultural traditions and received images on which Amsterdam could credibly trade. In private, many officials distanced themselves from the Florida thesis; some evidently took pleasure in ridiculing it. Few were taken in by ‘the hype’, as they routinely called it, and many were slightly embarrassed at its flashy presentation. Savvy and worldly, these were by no means credulous consumers of the Florida tonic. They knew that the ‘theory’ was questionable and overstated, if not fundamentally flawed. But they also knew that the model’s very elasticity provided an expedient means of achieving a range of other goals, while productively repackaging local policies under an alluring urban-development metanarrative that at least appeared to ‘fit’. The nebulous language and soft-interventionist impulses of the creative-cities model could be utilized in the service of a wide range of local objectives, including: the embrace of more light-touch messaging in economic development policy, in contrast to more heavily resourced programmes demanding larger institutional commitments and some kind of ‘business case’; the subsidization of a programme of low-rent ‘breeding places’ for artists and cultural entrepreneurs; the validation of existing promotional assets and positive images in city marketing campaigns; and the opportunistic yoking of at least a portion of the public-spending commitment on culture, heritage and the arts to what could be (re)presented as economic development objectives. These are just some of the Realpolitik projects that have travelled under the flag of convenience that is the creativity meta-policy in Amsterdam; the hyperbole of creative-age growth is but a means of legitimating them. This appears to be a more general condition, however. Surveys of creativity policies find them to be both bewilderingly widespread but remarkably repetitive in form and presentation; and as characteristically ‘soft interventions’ they tend to be reminiscent of ‘familiar types of economic development [policy and] generic business support initiatives’ (Foord, 2008: 98). In this sense, as long as policymakers go through the motions, the creativity narrative serves a legitimation (or fig-leaf) function for urban administrations, enabling politically legible actions in the name of economic growth, cultural diversity and inclusive urban development, even in the radical absence of real leverage over structural competitiveness, or indeed the necessary fiscal capacities. Creativity policies are thriving in the vacuum generated by neoliberal scale politics – cities having assumed (downloaded) responsibilities in the areas of economic development and social welfare, while at the same time being stripped of the powers meaningfully to dispense these roles. In this ‘responsibilized’ context, talking about (and up) growth potential has become a necessary (though hardly sufficient) means for securing investment. The language of creativity provides a means of freshening up

48  Handbook on the geographies of creativity this jaded discourse, albeit mostly in the realm of symbolic gestures, eye-catching events and cultural proxies for what otherwise have to be a much more heavy-lifting economic-development effort. And just as before, the most tangible prize is very often not economic growth itself, since many of the so-called growth coalitions were, all along, ‘grant coalitions’, lobbying for discretionary public investment in the priority projects of the business community and local developers (cf. Peck and Tickell, 1994). Increasingly, governmental funds are allocated on a competitive (or ‘challenge’) basis to those cities best positioned to articulate a vision for creative (or ‘smart’) economic development. One of the many ironies here, in light of the rhetoric of creativity as a driver, and leading edge, of economic development, is that creativity policies (and the institutions that promote them) tend to be anything but self-propelling or self-financing. These too are usually grant coalitions. A review of the European experience, for example, pointedly noted the sector’s ‘entrenched public sector dependency’ (Foord, 2008: 98). Nevertheless, the discourse of creativity provides a convenient and expedient ‘umbrella’ function, a bigger story within which to (re)locate what might otherwise look like a somewhat incoherent array of existing programmes, small initiatives and opportunist manoeuvres. In cities like Amsterdam, the creativity script provided a sort of ‘cover’, and a more uplifting rationale, for a bundle of instrumental, short-term and business-as-usual policy actions. As the director of a local think-tank put it: It’s nice for [local politicians] to be connected with a rock-star architect, or a nom fashion designer, or to be on the red carpet. It’s great. It’s fun. It creates great PR. As a politician that’s what you want. But that’s it . . . It’s quite opportunistic . . . It is a very short-term perspective: the next festival, the next dinner, opening a new building, and most of the money [goes] to those kinds of opportunities.

Consequently, when local policymakers describe creative-cities policy as an ‘enabling technology’, they do so in a double sense. Concretely, it enables further rounds of policy development focused on the (newly constituted) object, and subjects, of creative urban growth. As a flexible discursive frame – closely aligned with, but to some degree mystifying, already-existing ideologies, imperatives and practices – it facilitates the consolidation and repackaging of extant lines of policy, with a favourable investment/payoff ratio. In this vein, tired policies can be cheaply refurbished, in the à la mode language of creativity; high-profile events and pet projects can be justified anew; marketing and promotion efforts can resound with some new tunes; and a host of (potentially controversial) initiatives involving unseemly doses of property speculation, gentrification, or regressive sociospatial redistribution can be legitimized or sanitized through disarming, soft-focus evocations of creativity, culture and inclusivity. The serial, adaptive recycling of creative-cities policies, and their accelerated, relational reproduction across urban networks, reflects the structural and symbolic conformity of this policy package. It conforms with the underlying insecurity of the urban-managerial id, with late-neoliberal modes of urban governance and with the

Creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order  49 constraints of flex-labour markets, sociospatial polarization, endemic interurban competition and gentrified housing markets – all of which the creativity frame endeavours, in effect, to translate into either necessities or virtues. Even if the utopian abstractions of the creative-cities thesis have proven easy to parody, both in theory and in practice, and not least by artists themselves, they have nevertheless found a ready market across urban policymaking communities in search of governing strategies capable of marrying a positive and inclusive development message with post-hoc rationalizations of incremental change. Hence the role of the creative-cities frame as an ‘enabling technology’, one that facilitates a purposeful re-narration of urban visions, along with the adaptive reuse of available policy instruments (‘As a label, it just works’). The creativity fix is emblematic of a new generation of fast-moving urban policy models, which are hardly revolutionary in form or effect, but which have come to define especially intensive zones of emulation and mutation, enrolling networks of followers, borrowers and adapters. It typifies a new generation of urban ‘models’ that are purposefully disembedded and unmoored from their local conditions of existence and possibility, after which they can be prescriptively abstracted as ostensibly pan-urban solutions. As such, the models themselves are effectively constructed within an interurban space of policy circulation, across which they continue to mutate. Although they may be tagged to certain sites of authenticity or ‘truth spots’, like San Francisco or Austin, Texas, it may be more accurate to say that these models ‘come from nowhere’; they are creatures of the circulatory networks of ‘fast’ urban policy, mobile manifestations of its symbolic order. It is in this respect that the creative-cities phenomenon and its widespread policymaking reverberations are best understood as a ‘syndrome’ (cf. Scott, 2006), rather than some straight-line outcome of Florida’s bestselling intervention. There are many members of the culture club, and surely hardly any joined against their will. But there were certainly many that did so in circumstances hardly of their own choosing. In doing so, they were making a calculation, as well as considering what the (viable) local alternatives looked like. Maybe it is the case, pragmatic policymakers will privately concede, that a Florida-style intervention could never really be expected to transform the ‘real’ economy, but if given that it tends to travel with other ‘good’ things (subsidies for the arts, a message of social tolerance, some upgrading of streetscapes), then where is the harm? The appeal of creativity fixes lies in the work that they do. This does not mean that they ‘work’ as policy interventions, in the strict terms of cost–benefit analysis or impact evaluations, although it is worth noting that the library of such studies is practically bare, despite the thousands of creativity initiatives that have been launched in cities around the world. Rather, they ‘work’ in the sense that they serve a purpose, especially in the humdrum world of local economic development, where the cupboard is also pretty bare when it comes to needle-moving, genuinely effective, yet fiscally affordable and organizationally feasible interventions. In the space of mainstream urban economic-development policymaking, at least in North America, the spectrum of ‘viable’ interventions at the local scale is hardly wide. Florida-style cre-

50  Handbook on the geographies of creativity ative makeovers sit somewhere between the soft centre and its somewhat-progressive flank, with the basic-to-basics deregulation redux favoured by orthodox economists like Edward Glaeser dominating its more no-nonsense, no-frills wing, with the latter making the case for tall buildings and loose zoning, and the former licensing softer, ‘cultural’ interventions (see Peck, 2014, 2016). Neither of these approaches – Glaeser on the centre right and Florida on the centre left – come close to realizing the promises of their advocates, but in truth most local policymakers are savvy enough to know this already. What they also know is that low-impact, minimally-disruptive and market-friendly interventions of the creative kind are politically expedient; they ‘fit’.

CONCLUSION: A FADING FAD? Taking as its focus the ‘cultural turn’ in urban economic development, in the wake of Richard Florida’s signal intervention, this chapter has explored the rise and reception of this all but ubiquitous policymaking fix. Hailed as a transformative moment by some, but passed off as little more than a sideshow by others, the rise and rather surprising durability of creative-cities policymaking can be seen as significant for at least two reasons. First, the conspicuous speed and spread of its accompanying bundle of frames and formulas, its techniques and its texts, speak to the operations of an ascendant regime of fast-policy development, or urban-policy mobility (see McCann, 2011; Peck, 2011), the reciprocating circuits of which have connected cities near and far in shared programmes of experimentation and emulation. In this context, creative-cities policies have come to represent not so much the leading edge of innovation but a cheap-and-cheerful version of the lowest common denominator, a set of normalized routines valued more for their political-economic congruence and feelgood atmospherics than as any sort of trigger, realistically speaking, of transformative change. Second, urban-creativity policies have come to occupy a strategic position in a reconstructed symbolic order, where as a proxy form of economic policymaking they reflect distinctively late-neoliberal tendencies for the simultaneous responsibilization and incapacitation of municipal government (see Hackworth, 2007; Peck, 2014). They have become stubbornly recurring features on the policymaking landscape not so much because they ‘work’, but because of the work that they do. The argument in this chapter has been that the discourses and practices of creative-cities policymaking are barely disruptive of the prevailing order of neoliberal urbanism, for which they furnish cultural legitimation. The creative-cities model represents a ‘soft’ policy fix for this neoliberal urban conjuncture, working mostly at the level of signs and symbols, rather than as an impetus for deeper economic or institutional change, being framed in such a way as to coexist with polarizing housing and job markets, market-friendly development, retrenched social programming, public-sector austerity and always-intensifying competition for jobs, investment and assets (see Peck et al., 2009, 2013). In this context, it makes a (mostly quite disarming) case for modest and discretionary public spending in favour of cultural

Creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order  51 asset-building and the exploitation of creative potential, while elevating a bundle of elite lifestyle preferences to the status of urban-development desiderata. As such, beyond its substantive effects on the content and goals of urban policy, the diffusion of the creativity credo reflects a shift in the policymaking culture itself. For more than 15 years now, Richard Florida has epitomized, indeed embodied, this transformation, even though it was not entirely of his own making of course. It is probably more accurate to say that he too rode, rather than made, the wave. This said, the fact that Florida has recently changed his tune and to some extent his tone begs the question of whether this act of repositioning will make much of a difference. The author of The New Urban Crisis has described as ‘deeply disturbing’ the revelation, theatrically presented as a traumatic personal discovery, that the spatial clustering of talent, ‘[t]he greatest driver of innovation, economic growth, and urban prosperity . . . conferred the lion’s share of its benefits on the already privileged, leaving a staggering 66 per cent of the population behind’ (Florida, 2017: xviii). Whether this ‘discovery’ really did require extensive retooling in the methodological techniques of urban sociology, followed by fearless dives into mysterious datasets, as Florida (2017: xvii, 241) has claimed, is perhaps beside the point, in light of the fact that ‘[t]o sense that American cities were becoming more unequal only took a pair of walking shoes and eyes unshielded by rose-tinted hipster glasses’ (Brook, 2017: 114), or for that matter, passing familiarity with a raft of socioeconomic trends that have been extensively documented and debated since at least the time of Reagan (see Harrison and Bluestone, 1988). For his part, Florida evidently relishes the give and take with his fellow urban gurus, like Joel Kotkin or Edward Glaeser, although his real critics apparently drive him ‘nuts’. He has said that he has no time for ‘the people who run around in geography departments and who’ve just given up reality’ (quoted in DePillis, 2016), taking critiques from the right and the left in his stride, as if to affirm his secure position in the depoliticized centre, or somehow above the fray. In a strange way, though, this may in fact be where the creative-cities thesis really lives today, not on the edgy frontier of urban innovation, but snugly embedded in a culturally realigned policymaking orthodoxy.

NOTES This section of the chapter draws selectively on my article ‘The creativity fix’, Eurozine, 28 June 2007, accessed 4 February 2018 at http://​www​.eurozine​.com/​the​-creativity​-fix/​. See also Peck (2005). 2. That is unless a federal lawsuit filed by civil-rights activists in the District of Columbia is successful: it alleges that urban policies targeting members of the creative class discriminate against poor and working-class African Americans (see Schwartzman, 2018). 3. This section of the chapter draws selectively on Peck (2012).

1.

52  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

REFERENCES Bréville, B. (2017), ‘Seattle, capital of the hipster boom’, Le Monde Diplomatique, November, 8–9. Brook, D. (2017), ‘Creative alibis’, The Baffler, 35, 108–16. Bures, F. (2012), ‘The fall of the creative class’, Belt Magazine, 15 June, accessed 6 January 2018 at http://​beltmag​.com/​fall​-of​-the​-creative​-class. Bures, F. (2017), ‘Richard Florida can’t let go of his creative class theory. His reputation depends on it’, Belt Magazine, 13 December, accessed 6 January 2018 at http://​beltmag​ .com/​richard​-florida​-cant​-let​-go/​. DePillis, L. (2016), ‘The re-education of Richard Florida’, Houston Chronicle, 24 October. Dorling, D. (2017), ‘The New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida review – “flawed and elitist ideas”’, The Guardian, 26 September, accessed 1 October 2017 at https://​www​.theguardian​ .com/​books/​2017/​sep/​26/​richard​-florida​-new​-urban​-crisis​-review​-flawed​-elitist​-ideas. Florida, R. (2002a), The Rise of the Creative Class, New York, NY, USA: Basic Books. Florida, R. (2002b), ‘The rise of the creative class’, Washington Monthly, May, 15–25. Florida, R. (2005), The Flight of the Creative Class, New York, NY, USA: Harper Business. Florida, R. (2017), The New Urban Crisis, New York, NY, USA: Basic Books. Foord, J. (2008), ‘Strategies for creative industries: an international review’, Creative Industries Journal, 1 (2), 91–113. Hackworth, J. (2007), The Neoliberal City, Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University Press. Harrison, B. and B. Bluestone (1988), The Great U‑Turn, New York, NY, USA: Basic Books. Harvey, D. (1989), ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler B, 71 (1), 3−17. Kingfisher, C. (2013), A Policy Travelogue, New York, NY, USA: Berghahn. Lehmann, C. (2003), ‘Class acts’, Raritan, 22, 147–67. MacGillis, A. (2010), ‘The ruse of the creative class’, American Prospect, 21 (1), 12–16. McCann, E. (2011), ‘Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: toward a research agenda’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101 (1), 107–30. Peck, J. (2005), ‘Struggling with the creative class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (4), 740−70. Peck, J. (2011), ‘Geographies of policy: from transfer-diffusion to mobility-mutation’, Progress in Human Geography, 35 (6), 773–97. Peck, J. (2012), ‘Recreative city: Amsterdam, vehicular ideas, and the adaptive spaces of creativity policy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36 (3), 462–85. Peck, J. (2014), ‘Entrepreneurial urbanism: between uncommon sense and dull compulsion’, Geografiska Annaler B, 96 (4), 396–401. Peck, J. (2016), ‘Economic rationality meets celebrity urbanology: exploring Edward Glaeser’s city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40 (1), 1–30. Peck, J. and N. Theodore (2015), Fast Policy, Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press. Peck, J. and A. Tickell (1994), ‘Too many partners … the future for regeneration partnerships’, Local Economy, 9 (3), 251–65. Peck, J., N. Theodore and N. Brenner (2009), ‘Neoliberal urbanism: models, moments, and mutations’, SAIS Review of International Affairs, 29 (1), 49–66. Peck, J., N. Theodore and N. Brenner (2013), ‘Neoliberal urbanism redux?’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (3), 1091–9. Renn, A. (2017), ‘The redemption of Richard Florida’, The American Conservative, July/ August, accessed 10 February 2018 at http://​www​.theamericanconservative​.com/​urbs/​the​ -redemption​-of​-richard​-florida/​. Schwartzman, P. (2018) ‘Lawsuit: D.C.’s effort to attract millennials discriminated against blacks’, Washington Post, 25 May, C1.

Creative cities, fast policy and the new symbolic order  53 Scott, A.J. (2006), ‘Creative cities: conceptual issues and policy questions’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 28 (1), 1–17. Steigerwald, B. (2004), ‘Q&A: Florida sees a “different role” for government’, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 11 April. Tochterman, B. (2012), ‘Theorizing neoliberal urban development: a genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs’, Radical History Review, 112, 65–87. Wetherell, S. (2017), ‘Richard Florida is sorry’, Jacobin, 19 August, accessed 8 February 2018 at https://​jacobinmag​.com/​2017/​08/​new​-urban​-crisis​-review​-richard​-florida.

4. From cultural industries to creative industries and back? Towards clarifying theory and rethinking policy Lily Kong1

INTRODUCTION The creative industries have been hailed as a key driver of the new economy, with their promise of being a source of growth and wealth creation. Over the past two decades, creative industries discourse has dominated academic and policy discourse in many arenas, replacing earlier references to the cultural industries. Many governments have turned to the creative industries in their planning of economic strategy, while scholarly interest in this area has also intensified. Yet, amidst the rush to embrace the creative industries, critics have pointed to a host of complexities and problems associated with the concept that need first to be addressed – urgently – before policymakers hasten to implement creative industries policies. In the absence of conceptual clarity and careful research, a more cautious approach is warranted in policy arenas. In this paper, I trace the shift in discourse and praxis from ‘culture industry’ to ‘cultural industries’ and then ‘creative industries’. In the second section of this paper, I remind readers of the genesis of scholarly interpretations of ‘culture industry’, how this then became understood in the plural as ‘cultural industries’, and then shifted quite precipitously to ‘creative industries’ following the discursive change in policy circles. In the third section of the paper, I examine how this ‘creative turn’ is fraught with challenges, highlighting seven issues in particular: (i) the difficulties in defining and scoping the creative industries; (ii) the challenges in measuring the economic benefits creative industries bring; (iii) the risk that creative industries neglect genuine creativity/culture; (iv) the utopianization of ‘creative labour’; (v) the risk of valorizing and promoting external expertise over local small- and medium-scale enterprises in the building of creative industries; (vi) the danger of overblown expectations for creative industries to serve innovation and the economy, as well as culture and social equity; and (vii) the fallacy that ‘creative cities’ can be designed. Following this analysis of the challenges associated with the creative turn, I suggest in the fourth section of the paper that the move towards creative industries discourse represents a theoretical backslide, and raise the possibility that a return to cultural industries would be more beneficial for clarifying our theoretical understanding of the cultural sectors and the creative work that they do, as well as enabling better policymaking (fifth section). 54

From cultural industries to creative industries and back?  55

FROM ‘CULTURE INDUSTRY’ TO ‘CULTURAL INDUSTRIES’ TO ‘CREATIVE INDUSTRIES’ The term ‘culture industry’ has its foundations in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory with its background in Marxist ideology and critical social theory (Barker, 2004a: 46). As is well known, the term is attributed to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose essay ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944) established the understanding of the culture industry as one in which the cultural commodities produced are standardized and exist for the benefit of achieving monetary gains for those in power (ibid.: 120–21). In fact, they claim that ‘culture now impresses the same stamp on everything’ (ibid.: 120). Specific industries that Adorno and Horkheimer identify as being perpetrators of a standardized cultural commodity include the film, music and magazine sectors. In the face of public regulation, dependence on corporate funding/sponsorship and competition, these industries are engaged in a race to find the lowest common denominator of public appeal and, in the process, sacrifice talent, individuality and creativity (ibid.: 121). Aiming particularly at the commodification of popular culture, Adorno and Horkheimer attacked the products of the culture industry as artificial products fuelled by market demand and capitalistic aims (Witkin, 2003: 2). Further, Adorno felt that the easy consumption of the standardized and uniform products of the culture industry created a public that was in turn unquestioning, uncritical and, similarly, standardized and uniform (ibid.). In other words, by the commodification of culture (which causes a standardization of its production and consumption) and by institutionalizing cultural production as an ‘industry’, culture becomes less of an individualized and unique form of representation, but rather a mass-produced commodity that perpetuates the status quo (Barker, 2004b: 3). Thus, the culture industry, rather than freeing oppression, serves to reinforce current ideologies, and may even stifle genuine creativity from flourishing. Adorno and Horkheimer’s negative conception of the culture industry stemmed from their association of culture with art and human creativity, which is meant to reflect life, to critique social circumstances and to provide a means for society to aspire to a utopian way of life (Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 24). With the commodification of culture, especially with the mass nature of popular culture, culture and art have failed to play a role in guiding society towards a utopian state. Later understandings of the culture industry similarly adopted Adorno’s conceptions of what sectors made up the culture industry. In addition, there was recognition that the culture industry is also made up of institutions that are concerned with ‘the production of social meaning’ (including for-profit, not-for-profit and government organizations). They aim to communicate a message to their audiences. Thus, the culture industry as understood from the late 1960s onwards, was viewed less pessimistically. Led by later thinkers such as Walter Benjamin (1969) and Bernard Miège (1989), the incorporation of culture within a capitalistic framework is viewed as a site of struggle and contestation (as opposed to Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimistic view of culture as being lost to capitalism). In fact, capitalism, with its injection of

56  Handbook on the geographies of creativity resources and technologies, may aid the further development and innovation of the creative process (Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 25). At the same time, the singular term (culture industry) was converted to its plural form (cultural industries), in a bid to acknowledge the complexity and interconnectivity of the different sectors of cultural production, along with the uniqueness of each specific field (ibid.: 24). The shift from culture industry to ‘cultural industries’ was followed by the emergence of the concept of ‘creative industries’, which was led by a policy shift from cultural to creative industries. A key moment that heralded the age of the creative industries occurred in 1997 when the UK government coined the term ‘creative industries’ as a classifier for one of its main policy sectors, replacing the previously used notion of cultural industries (Mommaas, 2009: 51; O’Connor, 2011: 38). This change reflected the broadening scope of cultural industries policies and allowed room for a new creative industries agenda to differ from existing cultural industries policies. For example, the creative industries were defined to include the entertainment and leisure business, a segment not previously considered part of the cultural industries. The 1990s and 2000s witnessed heightened interest in the creative industries as an urban regeneration strategy, with creativity more purposefully integrated into economic and social policies, and the intensified commodification of artistic and creative activity. The creative industries were strongly promoted for their benefits to the economy, as supported by growing revenue and employment figures in the case of the UK (Banks and O’Connor, 2009: 365). Given their apparent success, UK policymakers were able to promote the idea of the creative industries to other nations (Cunningham, 2003). Across the Asia Pacific, the creative industries began to feature in national and city policy agendas, as evident in places such as Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan (Banks and O’Connor, 2009: 365; Kong and O’Connor, 2009: 1; Tschang, 2009: 30). The policy shift from the cultural industries to the creative industries was accompanied by a corresponding discursive shift in academic writings – from ‘cultural economy’ to ‘creative economy’, from ‘cultural clusters’ to ‘creative clusters’, from ‘cultural worker’ to ‘creative worker’. For example, ‘cultural economy’, referring to the investment in and production, distribution and consumption of cultural goods and services, was overtaken by ‘creative economy’, with research focused on those industrial components of the economy in which creativity is an input and content or intellectual property is the output (Potts and Cunningham, 2008: 233). This explains the interest in four particular sectors, as identified by Howkins (2001) – the copyright, patent, trademark and design industries. Such a shift was accompanied by popularity gaining around the idea of the ‘creative city’: the annual number of citations of the term ‘creative cities’ as recorded by Google Scholar rose significantly from 1990 to 2012, reflecting the growing amount of attention dedicated to the emerging concept (Scott, 2013). A creative city offers an environment that enables people to think, plan and act with imagination in harnessing opportunities or addressing urban problems. It possesses the hardware of supporting infrastructure (high-grade amenities such as museums, art galleries, concert halls, green spaces and other facilities that would attract creative talent to the city) and the software of a skilled, flexible and dynamic

From cultural industries to creative industries and back?  57 labour force (Landry, 2008). Creative cities are typically characterized by aestheticized land-use intensification, including the recycling of old building stock, and city branding that emphasizes the lifestyle, culture, heritage and other offerings by the city (Scott, 2013). The promise of the creative city is so compelling that there are now more than 60 self-professed ‘creative cities’ in the world, such as Bilbao, Darwin, Dubai, Hualien, Huddersfield, Milwaukee, Seattle, Sudbury, Taitung, Wuhan and Yokohoma (Scott, 2013). Overall, the shift in emphasis towards the creative industries, creative economy and creative cities that has occurred over the last few decades reflects the overriding emphasis on creativity and its role in driving the economy. The centrality of ‘creativity’ in the 2000s was noted by the geographer Jamie Peck who, in summarizing Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, observed that ‘[W]e have entered an age of creativity, comprehended as a new and distinctive phase of capitalist development, in which the driving forces of economic development are not simply technological and organizational, but human’ (Peck, 2005: 742–43).

PROBLEMS WITH THE ‘CREATIVE TURN’ The ‘creative turn’, with its shift in focus to the creative industries, creative economy, creative labour and developing creative cities, has been welcomed with enthusiasm by policymakers at municipal and national levels in many countries. Yet, there are serious and fundamental issues that need to be acknowledged and clarified. These are addressed below. Defining and Scoping the ‘Creative Industries’: Ambiguities and Opacities Agreeing on a universally accepted definition of the ‘creative industries’ is difficult due to the lack of consensus over which subsectors should be considered part of the creative industries. No international classification system exists for the creative industries. The term ‘creative industries’ is therefore understood differently in various international contexts, and these definitions can vary widely due to the influence of local politics, histories and geographies (Banks and O’Connor, 2009: 366). For example, in Europe, arts-related activities are considered to be the ‘core’ creative industries, whereas fields such as advertising, design, architecture and the media industries are viewed as peripherally important parts of the creative industries (European Commission, 2006; Throsby, 2001; Work Foundation, 2007). In contrast, definitions of the creative industries in Asia and Australia tend to be wider and may include industries such as online gaming and even the wedding industry (Creative Asia, 2013). The ongoing debate over how to define, measure and classify the creative industries remains (Banks and O’Connor, 2009: 366); a debate that began even when the notion of creative industries was first broached (Cunningham, 2009: 18). In particular, the classification of the creative industries by the United Kingdom’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)2 has been questioned for its exclusion of sectors like entertainment, heritage and tourism (Hesmondhalgh, 2007).

58  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Others have also argued that, based on the creative industries concept, additional sectors currently left out should, in fact, be included. The creative industries rely on creativity to produce creative products that can be used to generate intellectual property and economic benefits. Following this line of reasoning, there is little reason why the creative industries should include cultural activities, while excluding sectors in science, research and development (Howkins, 2001; Jürisson, 2007: 1). It is apparent that in much of the discourse and analysis of creative industries and creativity, the focus is on the purely cultural and aesthetic, but not scientific and technological (Scott, 2013). Another issue is that creativity is not limited to those working in the so-called creative professions as every industry is thought to require creativity to thrive (Morgan and Ren, 2012). Furthermore, creativity itself is an ambiguous concept with different conceptions of what constitutes creativity. This again contributes to the complexities of determining which industries should be included as part of the creative industries. Contending categorizations and definitions make it hard to gather accurate data about the creative industries (Cunningham, 2009: 18), and leads us to the next problem of how to precisely measure the economic contribution of the creative industries. Estimating Economic Benefits: Challenges and Uncertainties Much of the enthusiasm for the creative industries in policy circles is fuelled by the belief that developing the creative industries will generate significant economic benefits and thus constitute a key driver of economic growth. At first glance, the data is impressive with the contribution of the creative industries to the economy reportedly high in many cases. A DCMS publication, for example, highlighted the impressive performance of the creative industries, in which economic output, employment and exports of the creative industries within Europe apparently exceeded that of car manufacturing and the chemical industries combined (Pratt, 2008). Similarly, data collected by agencies in various countries indicate that the creative industries greatly boost revenue and jobs (European Commission, 2006). In one report, the annual growth of the creative economy in OECD countries was cited as being several times more than that of the service industries as well as manufacturing (Howkins, 2001: xvi). However, the data supporting the supposed economic benefits of the creative industries must be carefully interrogated. Statistics such as those reported above may be misleading due to definitions of the creative industries (Banks and O’Connor, 2009). Because there is no consistent definition and classification of the creative industries, and confusion or disagreement over which subsectors should be included or excluded in the creative industries, it is difficult to gather accurate and comparable statistical data on the performance of creative industries over time and across economies. In fact, it has been suggested that policymakers, who were already interested in implementing creative industries policy, were in a hurry to establish evidence to back up claims about the economic benefits of the creative industries (ibid.: 365) and contributed to the selective inclusion of data in the reporting process, thus making the performance of the creative industries appear more positive than necessarily the case.

From cultural industries to creative industries and back?  59 For instance, critics have argued that including the software, computer gaming and electronic publishing industries in the DCMS’s list of creative industries was done to inflate the size of the sector and make it appear more economically significant than it really was (Flew and Cunningham, 2010: 114). In addition, some domains considered part of the creative industries are undergoing changes, such as the merging of computer, cultural and content industries, in a continuing dynamic that presents further challenges to measuring the exact value of the creative industries to the economy. Another complication arises when new industry sectors that qualify as creative industries emerge, but are not added to the existing creative industries classification in time. This means data on the creative industries may not be up to date and completely accurate. Attempting to measure the output of the creative industries is also complex due to the nature and form of creative output. Creative output is more likely to take the form of creative services than physical products. Because services are more intangible than physical products, collecting accurate data on the number and value of the delivery of creative industries services, such as digital media, is thus difficult (Cunningham, 2009: 18). Given the potential for numerous inaccuracies and incompatibilities, there is no conclusive answer as to whether the value of the creative industries is overstated or understated. The fact remains that statistics indicating the economic contribution of the creative industries may not be reliable, and gathering accurate data on the size, growth and output of the creative industries continues to be a challenge (ibid.: 19). Nurturing Culture and Creativity: Inattention and Neglect The important nexus between art/culture and economy is longstanding, and by no means a recent development nor a novel inclusion on the social science agenda. As Harvey pointed out in his foreword to Zukin’s (1988) Loft Living, the artist, as one ‘representative’ of the cultural class, has always shared a position in the market system, whether as artisans or as ‘cultural producers working to the command of hegemonic class interest’. Recognizing for the moment that cultural industries are part of or synonymous with the creative industries, the question arises as to why there should be any objection to the notion of the creative industries and its harnessing of creativity for economic benefits. Resistance to the idea of the creative industries stems from concern over the purely economic rationale behind development of this sector. It is not so much uneasiness over the introduction of economic motivations in the production and consumption of arts and culture, for that has existed for a long time. Rather, it is how creative industries discourse tends to neglect culture and shift the focus to an exclusively economic agenda (Kong and O’Connor, 2009). What is unacceptable to critics is that the framework, policy aims and measures of success are all based on economic analysis and economic terms. Culture and the arts are valued only because they are seen as drivers of economic growth. The shift from cultural to economic priorities consequently encourages the development of those kinds of cultural production that generate the largest economic benefits, rather than cultural returns (Banks and O’Connor, 2009: 367–8). Culture therefore loses its importance

60  Handbook on the geographies of creativity because of the prevailing emphasis on economic goals. The intensified commodification of culture is another detrimental outcome of creative industries policy as governments attempt to mine the cultural sector for more profit-making opportunities (Hesmondhalgh, 2007: 1). The commodification of culture involves turning cultural activities and goods into commodities to be ‘sold’ or marketed for commercial benefits. For example, arts and cultural spaces may be built solely for the purpose of urban regeneration and the hope of encouraging economic growth. In effect, cultural goods are produced and designed for the consumption of local, national and international markets (Krätke, 2011: 130) to fulfil the goal of wealth creation. Concern over the commodification of culture for economic gains has arisen for good reason. The value of cultural activities and products lies in their originality, but their commercialization and mass distribution causes them to lose the very qualities that make them unique and distinct. Once products of artistic creativity, they are now reduced to mass reproductions. The economic agenda therefore runs counter to creative endeavour, and puts pressure on the creative industries to develop products with the overriding intention of responding to commercial demand (Krätke, 2011: 134). This economic impetus is detected in the original definition of the creative industries set by the United Kingdom’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), which clearly takes a commercial orientation by prioritizing creativity and creative industries that can generate intellectual property for economic profit. Specifically, the definition states that creative industries are ‘those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’ (DCMS, 1998; Flew and Cunningham, 2010: 114). The emphasis on creativity and the creativity industries purely because of their role in generating intellectual property for economic benefits is worrying (Flew and Cunningham, 2010: 114; Hesmondhalgh, 2008), as focusing on intellectual property for economic benefits encourages a narrow focus on producing what is ‘new’ and has commercial value. The danger is that culture is recognized not for its intrinsic value, but solely for its ability to generate economic benefits. This is a familiar critique that returns full circle to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of ‘culture industry’ and represents a theoretical backslide. Later conceptions of ‘cultural industries’ by Benjamin and Miège had already moved beyond the notion of ‘culture industry’. As previously mentioned, these conceptions positioned culture within a capitalistic framework as a site of struggle and contestation. Capitalism was viewed more positively due to recognition of its ability to provide the necessary resources and technologies to drive development and innovation of the creative process. A more nuanced notion of the creative industries and its potential for cultural development is needed than a simple return to Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimistic belief that culture has been neglected in the face of capitalism (Hesmondhalgh, 2013: 25).

From cultural industries to creative industries and back?  61 Utopianization of ‘Creative Labour’: Over-Valorization, Under-Provision The development of a workforce of ‘free’ and creative workers is a key part of creative economy discourse, with the belief being that the creative economy enables a more flexible, multi-skilled and mobile workforce. Characteristics of creative labour point towards a workforce made up of largely self-employed individuals, typically freelancing for multiple employers simultaneously or working in semi-permanent work groups (Gollmitzer and Murray, 2008: 3). They have been labelled ‘entreployees’ (Pongratz and Voß, 2003), or people with ‘portfolio careers’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2013). The cultivation of a free and creative workforce in line with the development of the creative industries is portrayed positively, with the associated flexibility perceived as aiding creativity (Gollmitzer and Murray, 2008: 18). Critics recognize that the development of the concept of ‘creative labour’ or ‘creative class’ with its positive attributes has over-valorized and utopianized the work and life of creative workers. In reality, there are many difficult challenges that creative workers on flexible working arrangements encounter (Banks and O’Connor 2009; Cunningham, 2009; Deuze, 2006). Precarity of labour has become a key issue, with a significant portion of creative workers experiencing job insecurity, uncertainty and anxiety over the contingent nature of their work, and feelings of isolation (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010). As temporary employment becomes the norm, the relationship between employer and employee weakens, as do the bonds between fellow employees. Fellow employees may not even have had the opportunity to meet one other because the nature of their work means they could be freelancers working from home (McKercher and Mosco, 2007; McRobbie 2005; Rossiter, 2003). The lack of a common workplace means such forms of creative labour do not have the opportunity to come together to interact and socialize. Greater autonomy and flexibility in the work of creative labourers also affects income stability. For instance, working on projects with different employers at the same time may make it difficult for creative workers to access job benefits like corporate pension plans (Gollmitzer and Murray, 2008: 18–19). Hence, the very freedom and autonomy that creative labour promises is a double-edged sword that can contribute to negative working conditions experienced by creative labour. Given the working conditions for creative labour, there is need for careful consideration of the needs of this group of workers before wholly embracing the idea of the creative industries. Policies to improve the working conditions of creative workers are lacking, in part because of the utopian discourse about creative labour. To enable a better chance at policy intervention, there is value in reminding ourselves of the notion of ‘cultural workers’, a term which predated the celebrated ‘creative class’, and which more commonly connotes a ‘poor struggling artist’. In some ways, the theoretical middle-ground has to be formulated, recalibrating the utopian concept of ‘creative workers’ from one of celebration to problematization, while reshaping the concept of ‘cultural workers’ from one of dejection to one of possibilities. Only with greater conceptual clarity of what this group of workers experience can there be more effective policy to harness their potential while improving their working conditions.

62  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Attracting Big International Players or Developing Local SMEs? While many city and/or national governments have formulated and administered policies to support the development of the creative industries, critics have justly asked if these creative industry policies serve big companies (and external expertise) or support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (and local cultures). Detractors are critical of policies that favour the attraction of foreign established companies, particularly in what may be considered a misplaced effort to boost the creative industry locally. They argue that local SMEs then find it difficult to compete with the large foreign companies, at the expense of developing local cultures and idioms. They also argue that such large foreign companies also tend to be led and dominated by foreign expertise, leaving local creative workers contributing at lower levels of appointment, with no opportunity for leadership. Critics also argue that this dampens the wage levels of local creative workers. These criticisms find expression in the context of Singapore, and a closer look offers further insights into the issues. Creative industry polices in Singapore have been criticized as tending to favour external enterprise. In recent years, the Singapore government has welcomed the presence of more and more companies from abroad in the country – such as LucasFilm, Tecmo Koei, the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers, MEC (a media agency), Electronic Arts and United International Pictures – which has put SMEs in a more vulnerable position. Such policies include assisting external media companies with their infrastructural set-up and manpower pool, as well as a reduced corporate tax rate on incremental income for foreign companies (EDB, 2014). The inflow of international companies has brought about anxieties for SMEs that cannot compete on the same terms. Local workers are also worried about losing out on jobs as international companies bring their own at the senior level, while at the lower levels, Singapore’s ‘pro-business’ strategy has allowed businesses access to cheaper foreign workers. This has forced Singaporeans to compete by raising their skill levels or lowering wage levels, most commonly the latter. (Parenthetically, this easy access to cheaper foreign workers has changed in the last year or so since major pushback from the local population.) Another example where the international and local interests intersect in potentially negative ways is borne out in the case of Australia. O’Connor and Xin (2010: 125) argue that policymakers in Australia have neglected to take into account local histories and cultural nuances in their designing of creative industry policies, choosing instead to import (successful) policies designed elsewhere. When developing a creative urban policy, foreign ‘experts’ were brought in for consultation who paid little attention to the colonial, indigenous and migrant history of the state, and failed to recognize the significance of the mining industry in Western Australia (Brabazon, 2012: 182). The celebrated speakers and consultants (some from academia) who work the circuits, visiting cities and giving advice as highly paid consultants, sometimes after visiting the said city for a day or two, contribute to the inappropriate travel of policy.

From cultural industries to creative industries and back?  63 Creativity for Innovation and Economy, or Culture and Social (E)Quality? Whereas creative class/industry strategies have been lauded for their contribution to innovation and economic growth, they have also been criticized for their potential to worsen social and cultural inequalities. Peck (2007: 10) believes creative class strategies are not appropriate for reviving declining cities because they promote rather than challenge the existing neoliberal urban agenda, and are designed to ‘co-exist’ with urban socio-economic or socio-spatial problems rather than solve them. He argues that creativity strategies are not designed to address ‘entrenched problems like structural unemployment, residential inequality, working poverty, and racialized exclusion’ (Peck, 2007: 10). Instead, they contribute to widening the income gap and the emergence of a low-wage service underclass. They contribute to dispossession through gentrification. The result is a class of workers who struggle to find stable employment, affordable housing, and social support (Leslie and Rantisi, 2012: 466). Further, Parker (2008: 202) argues that there are implicit gendered and racialized assumptions packed into Florida’s ‘progressive’ creative class thesis that reproduce socioeconomic inequalities and valorize ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Women, minorities and households are largely obscured in the creative class dialogue as they are not considered the chief ‘sites of creativity’ (ibid.: 210). Low-income individuals and families are even less visible. The ideal creative worker is rarely portrayed as a woman or mother, but rather an overworked individual, whose labour is not split between home and work (Parker, 2008: 211). The cumulative effect of all these criticisms is a view that creativity-based strategies are problematic because they ‘ignore social problems of segregation and poverty, and instead try to transform the image rather than the reality of the central city’ (Peck, 2007: 10). On the other hand, it may be argued that there are misplaced expectations and excessive pressures on the creative industries to address a host of economic issues, and deliver on social equality as well. Multiple goals beyond economic development have been heaped on urban policy to develop the creative industries, including social inclusion, development of social capital and community cultural programming (Foord, 2008). The multiple expectations may be unrealistic. Further, there is, in fact, currently little evidence to support the claims that the creative industries can play a role in fostering social inclusion or enabling greater community participation (Oakley, 2004: 71). What this could suggest is that creative industries need/should not be seen as the panacea of all ills. Rather, there is a need to rethink theory and policy, so that a separation is made between creativity for innovation and economy, and creativity for culture and social (e)quality. While it would be ideal for different goals to be achieved through one policy, there is a need to recognize that this need not always be the case, nor is it realistically achievable. Creating ‘Creative Cities’: A Fallacy? The desire to nurture creativity and benefit from its potential in industry has led to the use of ‘creative cities’ as an urban planning concept, its fundamental goal being

64  Handbook on the geographies of creativity the construction of an environment where creativity would thrive and serve as an economic stimulus. While the concept of ‘creative cities’ first emerged in the 1980s, it gained real momentum and popularity in the 2000s in part due to Richard Florida’s writings, and has since become a global movement. Creative cities are understood as urban areas where creativity, knowledge and innovation flourish; aided by the presence of a critical mass of diverse peoples who, through sharing and interaction, spark creativity (Hospers and Pen, 2008: 259–64). Debate centres on the question of whether creative cities can be deliberately constructed. Florida believes that with the right formula, a creative city can indeed be constructed, and offers strategies that governments can implement to attract creative professionals (Long, 2009: 212). Cities aspiring to become creative cities are advised to invest in developing an environment rich in cultural facilities and the kinds of amenities that will attract creative talent, such as green spaces, arts and music scenes and farmers’ markets (Peck, 2005: 745; Scott, 2006: 11). They must also be welcoming of diversity and offer enhanced tolerance, for example, towards alternative lifestyles, in order to encourage creative individuals to congregate there (Scott, 2006: 11). Others, however, believe that creative cities cannot be designed and constructed through deliberate action. They argue that putting in place conditions such as those described above will not guarantee that creative individuals will be attracted, nor induce them to settle for the long term. More importantly, creative cities do not result simply from the congregation of ‘creative’ individuals, and certainly, a concentration of creative people alone is not enough to sustain creativity (Scott, 2006). Furthermore, the spontaneous and unpredictable nature of creativity means that devising strategies to produce creativity to increase the competitiveness of a city is not practical. Local governments may be able to increase the probability of creative output by creating certain conditions and making investments, but even then, the outcome is not guaranteed (Hospers, 2009: 373). In addition, as creativity is ‘relative and situational, not universal or independent’, policymakers must be aware that creative city policies have to be tailored to suit local conditions, instead of following a standard formula (Pratt, 2011: 129). Doubts also persist over whether creative cities can stimulate economic growth as claimed. Creative cities are believed to be more competitive and instrumental in revitalizing socio-economic growth. Yet not all empirical evidence supports the touted benefits that creative cities are supposed to bring. Steven Malanga from the Manhattan Institute pointed out that cities in the United States with the best economic performance, based on statistics such as employment and rate of formation of high-growth companies, were not creative cities like San Francisco or New York, but places like Memphis and Las Vegas which had low tax and policies conducive for business (Malanga, 2004; Peck, 2005: 744). Likewise, Kotkin and Siegel point out that economic growth has been shifting to suburban areas that do not match Florida’s idea of trendy, liberal cities, such as Riverside, California and Rockland County, New York (Peck, 2005: 756). Krätke also calls for a more critical look at the idea of ‘creative cities’ and contends that economic development is not dependent on urban devel-

From cultural industries to creative industries and back?  65 opment projects that attempt to increase a city’s attractiveness (Krätke, 2010: 850). Rather, what truly matters and serves as a determining factor in attracting people to cities is that people will ultimately go to where the jobs are, irrespective of the kinds of amenities cities hold. Cities should therefore focus on supplying high-quality career opportunities rather than becoming a ‘cool’ city, which means ‘growing the economic base; sharpening skills, connectivity and access to markets; ensuring local people can access new opportunities and improving key public services’ (Nathan, 2007: 446). Education and skills development are other areas that should be supported as well (Glaeser et al., 2001 quoted in Sands and Reese, 2008: 10).

TOWARDS CLARIFYING THEORY The early shift in focus from cultural industries to creative industries in policy circles led to academic interest being directed in the same way. In turn, such academic attention further intensified and contributed to the spread of policy interest in the creative industries. Governments – sometimes municipal, other times, national – have embraced the concept with enthusiasm and actively implemented policies to support the creative industries, but many have overlooked the ‘dark side’ of the creative industries and failed to discern the problems associated with them. A fundamental issue underlying these problems is that ‘creative industries’ is in itself an insufficiently robust category. This has not been sufficiently acknowledged, intellectually or practically, and the implications of this lack of clarity and consistency have not been sufficiently addressed. As discussed earlier, there are many practical implications of this lack of clarity. Existing definitions of the creative industries often do not recognize creative work in industries beyond the cultural, aesthetic and affective, thereby excluding from consideration important sectors that generate creative output. Furthermore, the category ‘creative industries’ is so broad as to confound analysis, covering a vast array of sectors and industries ranging from advertising, design, architecture, film, television, music, fashion, electronic publishing, software, online-gaming, arts and crafts, to the entertainment and leisure business. With such a diverse selection of sectors and industries under the creative industries, designing and implementing effective economic and social policy across all these sectors becomes either too non-targeted and too fragmented, or too blunted through using the same policy and instrument for diverse sectors. Another problem with the lack of clarity surrounding the category ‘creative industries’ is that it leads to the serious danger of misleading policy or at least impeding appropriate policy. Misleading growth data that exaggerates the economic value of the creative industries may prompt governments to design policies that divert resources and funds to initiatives that do not translate into the desired benefits. Policymakers may blindly implement policies to encourage the attraction and cultivation of ‘creative workers’ without simultaneously addressing the problems associated with creative labour discussed earlier, resulting in negative consequences. At the same time, policy efforts may be directed towards developing

66  Handbook on the geographies of creativity ‘creative clusters’ without sufficient evidence that these initiatives will result in significant economic advantages. Intellectually, a challenge to the continuing usefulness of the concept of ‘creative industry’ is that its evolution, usage and, especially, critiques of it represent a theoretical backslide from the advances made by Benjamin and Miège. In particular, those who criticize its usage return to an old argument used on the culture industry, suggesting that, through the creative industries, culture and creativity are lost to capitalism. Yet, Benjamin and Miège had already gone beyond this argument, recognizing that the injection of capitalism may bring resources and technologies that enhance the creative process. It would appear that, theoretically, working with the category of ‘creative industry’ has not helped to advance a more useful formulation. At this juncture, I propose a return to ‘cultural industries’, and four ways in which more productive theorizing might be pursued. First, I urge a return to ‘cultural industries’ for the following reasons. It places attention squarely on the cultural, aesthetic and affective industries that the concept actually deals with. It obviates questions about why scientific, research and development activities are not included, thus keeping the range of activities (already large) within a more coherent scope. Second, without the burden of reformulating a less problematic concept of ‘creative industries’, we might turn attention to more productive theorizing. I offer four directions in this regard: concerning people, place, economy and creativity. With regards to people, relieved of the burden of unpicking what the ‘creative class’, ‘creative worker’ or ‘creative labour’ stands for, a deeper analysis might proceed in terms of understanding the dynamics of precarity, enabling a better understanding of the challenges that a flexible and mobile workforce would encounter. Comprehending the balance between freedom and precarity, and certainty and risk in the context of working arrangements has the potential to lead to a breakthrough in understanding how, despite precarity and risk, cultural workers continue the work they do. What is the place of factors such as the lure of freedom and expression, and other pragmatic factors such as flexible work regimes and dire economic conditions? With regards to place, such re-theorization has gained ground in more recent years, interrogating the logics of clusters and recognizing the distinctiveness of industrial, business and cultural clusters (see Kong, 2009). Cultural work differs in many ways from industry and business, and the logics of externalities and trust, cooperation and tacit knowledge, are far less relevant than the logics of reputation, cost and environment. With regards to economy, a closer understanding of the dynamics between big business and small local enterprise is much needed. Beyond the complaints about big business – particularly multinational presences – snuffing out local practice or exploiting local workers, are there evidences of fostering local expertise and mutually beneficial collaborative activity? Closer analysis of business relationships and in-depth research on the place of local cultural workers in different types of cultural industry organizations will yield clearer insights into different business environments, the relationships that lead to success and those that do not, and the experience of the individual worker in the larger scheme of things. Finally, an opportunity for

From cultural industries to creative industries and back?  67 improved theorization of creativity presents itself in the study of ‘cultural industries’. Creativity is constantly advocated for its ability to produce new ideas and drive innovation, yet the nature of the creative process is not fully understood. To effectively harness creativity, more must therefore be done to explore the concept, including the sociality, neurology and psychology of creativity. In this regard, interdisciplinary work promises to be productive, involving sociologists, psychologists, neuroscientists and others.

TOWARDS RETHINKING POLICY Just as theory urgently needs clarification and (re)formulation, careful rethinking and redesigning of policy is needed. I offer three interventions in rethinking cultural industry policy. First, to avoid simplistic and ineffective policy design, clarifying the focus is a major first step (Watson and Taylor, 2013). A rethink of policy needs to take into account the complex dimensions of creative production, and sharpen the focus. If we accept that cultural industries rather than creative industries constitutes a better, sharper focus theoretically, it follows that policies will have greater clarity and efficacy if directed at the former rather than the latter. This does not mean that there cannot be policies to pursue biomedical industries or infocomm industries, to name just two examples of other types of creative industries. Rather, they are better served when addressed separately, recognizing difference, and avoiding conflation through the categories we use. Even more fundamentally, it would be necessary to recognize the differences of individual sectors within the cultural industries, such as the arts, media and design sectors, and to understand the specific challenges they face, in order to tailor policies appropriate for these industries. Evaluating each industrial sector individually, instead of collectively under the category ‘creative industries’ or even ‘cultural industries’, will enable policymakers to avoid the pitfall of conflating data and policy instruments. Second, there is a need for governments to be clear about policy intent, so that instruments and interventions serve with clearly specified intents. It is critical to recognize that it is difficult for the same policy and instrument to be a cultural and arts policy, and a social and economic policy all at the same time. There is no magic bullet. Too often, urban policies group multiple goals together, resulting in unfocused objectives and unrealized goals. Third, good policy needs to be clear whether they set out to achieve balance, or to accord privilege or protection to particular groups or goals. A lack of clarity and certainty often results in policies that seem (work) at odds with one another. I cite three examples. In the area of support for appropriate business models, clarity in policy objectives is critical: is a balanced approach of simultaneous support for large multinational/international companies and local, small and medium-sized enterprises preferred, or is the former to be privileged, or the latter to be protected? Is one approach adopted purposefully, or is there simply a blind spot that explains the absence or relative lack of attention to another? In the area of hardware (cultural infrastructures)

68  Handbook on the geographies of creativity and software (talent development, both cultural workers and local authorities that administer the arts and cultural sector), is the objective to finance the development of cultural hardware in the hope that the software will develop and evolve organically, or should there be efforts to evolve software before hardware investment is pursued? Can they be pursued simultaneously? Equally important in the approach to rethinking policy is the need to hold to a clear position about whether policies are to contribute to the protection of local history and culture, or whether policies treat cultural industries as a global currency that can be replicated wholesale across different locales. In recent years, policy enacted in one location is often borrowed and subsequently implemented in numerous other locations, with little hindsight or deference to local nuances, histories and circumstances. Such ‘Xerox’ policies (Pratt, 2009) result in policies that are forced into the local context in a damaging or unrealistic manner (Kong, 2000). Clarity about this from the start, and through the policy implementation chain, is an important condition for successful policy formulation and implementation, although unfortunately, it is not often apparent.

CONCLUSION Over some 70 years, from the 1940s to the early 2010s, academic interest has shifted from ‘culture industry’ to ‘cultural industries’ to ‘creative industries’. Whereas the notion of ‘culture industry’ evolved into the concept of the ‘cultural industries’ in acknowledgement of the complexity and uniqueness of different sectors of cultural production, the notion of ‘creative industries’ emerged following policy rhetoric, with the same lack of clarity plaguing both academic and policy discourse. Associated with this ‘creative turn’ is the emergence of related concepts such as the creative economy, creative clusters and creative city. This creative turn has proven problematic. In this paper, I have sought to highlight the diverse theoretical and practical challenges that the creative turn has wrought. I have also begun to suggest ways in which theory urgently needs to be clarified and attention paid to theoretical questions other than the challenges related to using the concept of creative industries. I believe that more productive theoretical insight can be gained once the intellectual community is relieved from the burden of defining creative industries, distinguishing them from cultural industries, and straining over why certain industries which rely on creative endeavour are not embraced within the fold of creative industries. To free ourselves from this imbroglio, I propose that we return, fundamentally, to the concept of cultural industries as the appropriate category, and expend our intellectual energies interrogating, instead, the nature of cultural industries in these four dimensions – people (cultural workers), place (cultural spaces and places), economy (business models and relations), and creativity in cultural activities (mental, social, psychological activity). Apart from reformulation of theory and redirection of theorizing activity, I urge a rethinking of policy, informed by greater conceptual clarity and theoretical depth. To achieve effective policy formulation entails a fundamental unpacking of the cat-

From cultural industries to creative industries and back?  69 egory of cultural industries. It requires that policymakers address individual sectors within the broader category as distinct sectors with unique characteristics and needs, while recognizing commonality alongside distinction appropriately, and addressing such commonality and distinction through suitable policy instruments. Further, clarity of policies follows from clarity about policy objectives – weighing up the relative urgency of economic, social, and community objectives, and acknowledging with clarity that there is no ‘magic bullet’. Clarity about the relative balance of specific objectives will also go a long way in more effective policies – the balance between big international business and small local enterprise; the balance between hardware provision and software development; and the balance between plugging into global cultural currency and developing local cultural idioms, to name just three axes of tensions. Theory and policy are not usual bedfellows. Yet, it is with conceptual and theoretical clarity that better policy can be formulated. If this paper serves as an intervention that leads eventually to both these ends, it will have been worth the words.

NOTES Paper submitted to Inter-Asia Cultural Studies March 2014, published in December 2014, 15 (4). 2. Various industry subsectors are included, such as film, television, software, electronic publishing, arts and crafts, and music (Flew and Cunningham, 2010: 114) but they appear to be a diverse mix with no clear connection between them. 1.

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From cultural industries to creative industries and back?  71 Leslie, D. and N.M. Rantisi (2012), ‘The rise of a new knowledge/creative economy: Prospects and challenges for economic development, class inequality and work’, in T.J. Barnes, J. Peck and E. Sheppard (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography, Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 458–71. Long, J. (2009), ‘Sustaining creativity in the creative archetype: The case of Austin, Texas’, Cities, 26 (4), 210–19. Malanga, S. (2004), ‘The curse of the creative class’, City Journal, Winter, 36–45. McKercher, C. and V. Mosco (2007), ‘Introduction. Theorizing knowledge labour and the information society’, in M. Catherine and M. Vincent (eds), Knowledge Workers in the Information Society, Toronto, Canada: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. vii–xxiv. McRobbie, A. (2005), ‘Clubs to companies’, in J. Hartley (ed.), Creative Industries, Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell, pp. 375–91. Miège, B. (1989), The Capitalization of Cultural  Production, New York, NY, USA: International General. Mommaas, H. (2009), ‘Spaces of culture and economy: Mapping the cultural-creative cluster landscape’, in L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspective, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, pp. 45–59. Morgan, G. and X. Ren (2012), ‘The creative underclass: Culture, subculture, and urban renewal’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 34 (2), 127–30. Nathan, M. (2007), ‘The wrong stuff? Creative class theory and economic performance in UK cities’, Canadian Journal of Regional Science, 30 (3), 433–50. Oakley, K. (2004), ‘Not so cool Britannia: The role of the creative industries in economic development’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (1), 67–77. O’Connor, J. (2011), ‘The cultural and creative industries: A critical history’, Ekonomiaz, 78 (3), 24–47. O’Connor, J. and G. Xin (2010), ‘Developing a creative cluster in a postindustrial city: CIDS and Manchester’, The Information Society: An International Journal, 26 (2), 124–36. Parker, B. (2008) ‘Beyond the class act: Gender and race in the “creative city” discourse’, in J.N. DeSena (ed.), Gender in an Urban World (Research in Urban Sociology, Volume 9), Bradford, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, pp. 201–32. Peck, J. (2005), ‘Struggling with the creative class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (4), 740–70. Peck, J. (2007), ‘The creativity fix’, Eurozine, accessed 4 September 2012 at http://​www​ .eurozine​.com/​pdf/​2007​-06​-28​-peck​-en​.pdf. Pongratz, H.G. and G. Voß (2003), ‘From employee to “entreployee”: Towards a “self-entrepreneurial” work force?’, Concepts and Transformation, 8, 239–54. Potts, J. and S. Cunningham (2008), ‘Four models of the creative industries’, International Journal of Culture Policy, 14 (3), 233–47. Pratt, A.C. (2008), ‘Creative cities’, Urban Design, 106, 35, accessed 28 March 2013 at http://​ eprints​.lse​.ac​.uk/​20730/​1/​Creative​_cities​_(LSERO)​.pdf. Pratt, A.C. (2009), ‘Policy transfer and the field of cultural and creative industries: What can be learned from Europe?’, in L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, pp. 9–24. Pratt, A.C. (2011), ‘The cultural contradictions of the creative city’, City, Culture and Society, 2 (3), 123–30. Rossiter, N. (2003), ‘Creative labour and the role of intellectual property’, Fibreculture, Internet Theory & Criticism & Research, 1, accessed 20 February 2008 at http://​journal​ .fibreculture​.org/​issue1/​issue1​_rossiter​.html. Sands, G. and Reese, L.A. (2008), ‘Cultivating the creative class: And what about Nanaimo?’, Economic Development Quarterly, 22 (1), 8–23. Scott, A.J. (2006), ‘Creative cities: Conceptual issues and policy questions’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 28 (1), 1–17.

72  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Scott, A.J. (2013), ‘Regional Studies Association Annual Lecture’, paper presented at the American Association of Geographers 2013, ‘Beyond the creative city: Cognitive-cultural capitalism and the new urbanism’, Los Angeles, April 9–13. Throsby, D. (2001), Economics and Culture, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tschang, T. (2009), ‘Creative industries across cultural borders: The case of video games in Asia’, in L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspective, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, pp. 25–42. Watson, A. and C. Taylor (2013), ‘Invisible agents and hidden protagonists: Rethinking creative cities policy’, European Planning Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2013.790586. Witkin, R.W. (2003), Adorno on Popular Culture, London, UK: Routledge. Work Foundation (2007), Staying Ahead: The Economic Performance of the UK’s Creative Industries, London, UK: Department for Culture Media and Sport. Zukin, S. (1988), Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, London, UK: Radius.

PART II CREATIVITY AS LOCALITY

5. Creativity as locality: the role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district Deborah Leslie and Shannon Black

INTRODUCTION In recent years, there has been a great deal of attention to the linkages between creativity and place. Geographers examine how creative industries tend to cluster in particular neighbourhoods, often within the inner city (Hutton, 2006). Specialized districts facilitate the development of social networks, providing access to an array of creative influences and job opportunities. As such, it is important for creative firms to cluster in dense neighbourhoods (Florida, 2002). It is not only the social aspects of place that are important to creativity, but also the material dimensions. Elements of the built environment – such as low rents and the design and architecture of buildings – are important for artist studios, galleries and workshops (Connell and Gibson, 2003; Gibson, 2005, 2015; Hutton, 2006; Rantisi and Leslie, 2010). The material dimensions of the landscape also provide inspiration (Drake, 2003). In the following chapter, we examine the shift of artists and arts institutions to the Junction/Junction Triangle – an emerging arts district in Toronto. This area has become known for innovative contemporary art. Drawing on interviews with artists, galleries, non-profit artist centres and art museums, we examine how actors are locating in the Junction because of the area’s vibrant cultural scene, low rents and the industrial architecture. Exploring aspects of the social and material environment that draw artists and arts institutions, we analyze how their tenure in the area is precarious. Interviews were semi-structured and ranged between one and two hours in length. Questions focused on the characteristics that attract artists and related institutions to the Junction. Difficulties that artists and galleries confront and tactics they use to address precarity were also discussed. Interviewees were identified from arts directories and media coverage, and through snowball sampling. Interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed and coded according to theme. Interview data was triangulated with articles from newspaper, magazine and internet sources, as well as government planning documents. The chapter is organized as follows. First, we provide an overview of theories of creativity and locality, highlighting the importance of social and material factors. Second, we present a history and geography of the Junction/Junction Triangle, sketching its recent transformation. Third, we explore the specific characteristics of the neighbourhood that attract artists, galleries and arts institutions. Fourth, we illuminate some of the ways in which the localization of artists and galleries in the 74

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  75 Junction is precarious. In the final section, we highlight responses to this growing precarity.

CREATIVITY AS LOCALITY In The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida (2002) argues that creativity has become more important than efficiency in the contemporary economy. He defines creativity as the development of ‘new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content’ (ibid.: 5). While creativity exists across the economy, it is particularly prominent in a range of cultural industries, including art, design, film, music, advertising, theatre and architecture. These industries are based on symbolic knowledge, or ‘know who’ (Asheim and Gertler, 2005). Symbolic knowledge involves aesthetic judgements and tends to be context-specific (ibid.). Rather than flowing from an individual genius, creativity is an inherently social and geographical process (Becker, 1982; Bourdieu, 1993). Scott (1999: 808) for example suggests that what comes to be seen as a viable subject for art is determined by the conditions of social and political life. Art is shaped by the context in which it arises. It depends on interpersonal norms and languages, and is influenced by the market (ibid.). A range of intermediaries help develop and refine the final product. Creativity comes into being through networks within and between firms ‘in which many different hands are brought to bear on products as they go through the process of conception, fabrication and final embellishment’ (ibid.). In the case of visual art, this includes gallery owners, museums and critics (ibid.). It is therefore important to examine the way in which specialized and complementary workers come together in artistic production (ibid.). Owing to its socialized nature, studies of creative industries foreground the many benefits to be derived from firms and individuals co-locating in one place. Despite the rise of new technologies, place and locality continue to be important in creative production (Clare, 2013; Thomas et al., 2010). Here, a locality can refer to a city, region or neighbourhood (Drake, 2003). Differences between localities play a role in establishing competitive advantage for cultural products (Molotch, 2003; Scott, 1999). A locality’s unique attributes may also attract and retain talent to the region (Florida, 2002). Spatial proximity builds shared norms, conventions and trust (Storper and Venables, 2004). Proximity enables traded and untraded dependencies, including an ability to collaborate, support and learn from one another (Thomas et al., 2010: 15). Geographic agglomeration also enables firms to draw upon a concentrated pool of skilled workers (Scott, 1999). The ‘buzz’ associated with creative clusters offers a multitude of job opportunities, mitigating some of the risks associated with the short-term, freelance and project-based work (Grabher, 2001). Over time, specialized institutions emerge to support the cluster, such as training institutes, unions and trade associations (Scott, 1999). Firms and individuals benefit from access to shared infrastructure and services

76  Handbook on the geographies of creativity (Kong, 2005). In this way, a place incubates creative talent (Connell and Gibson, 2003; Gibson, 2005). Clusters also serve as important nodes in a global network of cultural production (Watson et al., 2009: 861). Leading centres of cultural production channel creativity from different places, packaging it for consumers in other cities (Watson et al., 2009: 861). These sites play an important role in curation, according value to cultural products (Callon et al., 2002). As Lloyd (2004: 357) points out, very few artists enjoy commercial success, but when a large number of artists are concentrated in one area, it makes it easier for industry gatekeepers (such as galleries) to evaluate which artists are likely to succeed. Localized creative clusters are connected to each other across a range of scales (Kong, 2005; Thomas et al., 2010). Many of these ties extend through temporary clusters, including trade shows, fairs and festivals and, more recently, through new internet technologies, which enable the sharing of information at wider scales (Bathelt and Schuldt, 2008; Power and Jansson, 2008; Watson et al., 2009: 857; Weller, 2008). Without outside sources of innovation, clusters would be subject to ‘lock in’ (Thomas et al., 2010). This draws attention to the co-constitutive nature of clusters, networks and relations (Harvey et al., 2012: 530). In this sense, a creative locality is not bounded, but rather open to influences from different times and places (Latour, 2005). While creative practices are ‘localized’ in place, they are simultaneously non-local, characterized by a topological configuration (Amin and Cohendet, 2004; Thomas et al., 2010). While the social advantages of clustering are of crucial significance, place also matters in a material sense. Here, the material is not pre-given or determinant, but is socially constructed and constantly evolving (Bakker and Bridge, 2006: 18). Non-human actors – including urban design, buildings, objects, technologies, and land rent – all play a critical role in creative networks (Gibson 2005; Jackson 2000; Latham and McCormack, 2004; Rantisi and Leslie, 2010). Artists, for example, value neighbourhoods with mixed land uses, live–work studios and accessible public spaces (Amin, 2008). Inner city neighbourhoods are particularly attractive to creative workers because they tend to be dense; their compact nature facilitates a bounded territorial identity (Hutton, 2006). Older industrial spaces are valued because they contain high ceilings and natural light (Helbrecht, 2003; Hutton 2006). Such spaces are often open and flexible, and can be adapted to a variety of uses, including production, distribution and consumption (Rantisi and Leslie, 2010). The design and layout of buildings also influences art. Gibson (2005: 197) for example examines how the material and affective characteristics of recording studios (including configuration and construction materials) affect music. The material also matters in terms of the presence of local infrastructure – including artist centres, studios, schools, museums and galleries – all of which can help consolidate the strength of a local cultural scene (Watson et al., 2009: 862). Local bars and cafes provide a site for planned and random encounters. Many of these spaces also display the work of local artists, facilitating distribution. Within the visual art scene, galleries constitute a particularly important component of the local

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  77 infrastructure. Not only do they frame art, putting it into context, but gallery openings provide opportunities for networking and knowledge exchange. Many people attend these events, including clients, but also other artists, who may not be able to afford to buy art, but attend shows to gather inspiration. All of these actors come together in gallery spaces, which makes these material landscapes important sites in a cultural feedback loop (Watson et al., 2009: 873). The material landscape provides a reservoir of raw materials and visual cues (Drake, 2003). Localities provide symbolic resources (Watson et al., 2009: 871). Buildings and icons – including signs and streetscapes – influence the work of artists and designers (Molotch, 2003: 187). Elements of local landscapes may be incorporated into their art, which may in turn contribute to constructing the ‘locality as brand’ (Drake, 2003: 518). As Watson et al. (2009: 873) suggest, localities are fundamental to ‘creative processes that do not reside exclusively within isolated individuals, but find newness through the mixing, encounters and contacts between people and cultures within and across particular spaces and places’. Engaging with these insights, we explore how social and material attributes of the Junction/Junction Triangle contribute to the creation process. We begin by tracing a history of the neighbourhood.

THE JUNCTION/ JUNCTION TRIANGLE: A NEIGHBOURHOOD IN TRANSITION Situated in the west end of Toronto (Figure 5.1), the Junction takes its name from the fact that it lies at the crossroads of four different rail lines. The area was once a separate city, but was amalgamated with the City of Toronto in 1909. It is bounded by Runnymede Road in the west, Annette Street in the south, Keele Street in the east and the railway tracks in the north. The Junction Triangle is situated on the eastern edge of the Junction and is bounded by rail lines on three sides (Figure 5.2). Historically, the area did not have a coherent identity, but in 2010, local residents came together to select a new name for the community. Residents opted for the ‘Junction Triangle’, a name that the City had been using since the 1970s in government reports. While separate neighbourhoods, the two areas share many similarities. Both areas have become a site for the art community, and will be considered as one locality. The Junction and Junction Triangle have long been working-class neighbourhoods, dominated by industry (Conway-Smith, 2004). The Junction was known for its foundries, mills, wire companies, furniture-making and meatpacking operations, while the Junction Triangle had paint, ceramics, food and chemical factories (ibid.). Both areas attracted a variety of immigrants, including Polish, Italian, Ukrainian, Maltese, Macedonian and Portuguese populations (Lorinc, 2015). Working-class housing surrounded the factories, and a multitude of taverns and bars served the local population. Drinking was so heavy that the Junction neighbourhood decided to ban alcohol in 1904, after a local man was killed on his way home from a bar. The area remained dry until 1998 (Kern, 2015: 70).

78  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

Source:

Celia Braves.

Figure 5.1

Art clusters in downtown Toronto

Both neighbourhoods were impacted by a process of deindustrialization beginning in the late 1960s. Many plants closed or moved to the suburbs. As a consequence, there were a lot of abandoned buildings in the district. Poverty levels were high and both neighbourhoods were seen as undesirable due to a number of shelters and rooming houses (Kern, 2015: 71). Drugs and prostitution were an issue, and the high-profile murder of a young girl in the Junction Triangle in 2003 gave the impression that the area was unsafe (Lorinc, 2015). The effects of this industrial legacy continue to have a material impact in the present. The area is one of the most polluted neighbourhoods in the city (Bain, 2006). There are strong smells from the meatpacking industry and problems related

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  79

Source:

Celia Braves.

Figure 5.2

Junction/Junction Triangle art galleries

to ground contamination from a paint factory and air pollution from a rubber factory (Kern, 2015: 71). These qualities contribute to lower land rents. They also create an impression of ‘grittiness’ and industrial ‘authenticity’. As a result of these material inheritances (Gibson, 2015), artists began moving to the district in the 1980s, although the majority moved after 2000. Attracted by the low rents and industrial architecture, their move represented the latest in a series of shifts west in the Toronto art world, from Yorkville in the 1960s to West Queen West and Liberty Village in the 1980s, to Dundas West in the 1990s, and finally to the Junction in the current era (Bain, 2006; Catungal et al., 2009; Mathews, 2010). While artists were the first to relocate to the Junction, they were followed by galleries and related arts organizations, which

80  Handbook on the geographies of creativity were particularly attracted to the Junction Triangle. A series of institutions emerged to support the local arts scene. The Junction is a key site in the Contact Photography festival, where local businesses dedicate space to exhibiting contemporary photography (Interviews). In 2012, the Junction Flea Market was also created to sell local arts and crafts, as well as vintage objects. The move of artists, galleries and other arts institutions to the neighbourhood was accompanied by state-led revitalization initiatives. In the early 2000s, the City of Toronto invested $6 million dollars in new street lamps, trees, sidewalks and façade improvements (TREB Commercial, 2001). Toronto Hydro initiated a project to bury hydro lines in the area, and the federal government also invested in urban renewal (Conway-Smith, 2004). The Junction Gardens Business Improvement Area formed, with the aim of enhancing the attractiveness of the district (Bain, 2006).

Source:

Photograph by Shannon Black.

Figure 5.3

The Tower Automotive Building

Today, the Junction has a burgeoning cultural scene, including craft breweries and artisanal food producers. The area is home to a variety of fashion boutiques, home

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  81 furnishing stores, cafés, restaurants and bars. The area has also seen a rapid expansion in loft and condominium development. New forms of housing attract a different demographic, and the occupational profile of the neighbourhood has transformed. By 2006, 87 per cent of the workforce was employed in management, business, finance, sciences, education, art, culture, sales and service, compared to only 13 per cent in manufacturing, primary sectors or trades (Statistics Canada in Kern, 2013). Corporate creative industries have also moved into the district, attracted by the local arts scene. In 2016, the gaming company, Ubisoft Entertainment, moved into an older industrial building, and in 2014, the software design company, FreshBooks, made the area its home. Recently, there has been a large development on Sterling Road in the Junction Triangle. The street was once home to Toronto hip-hop star Drake’s recording studio, as well as a circus school and numerous factories (Whyte, 2015). The old Tower Automotive Building at 158 Sterling Avenue housed many artists, but was purchased by Castlepoint Numa in 2007 and is currently being redeveloped (Flack, 2016; McNamara, 2016; Whyte, 2012) (Figure 5.3). It will contain the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) (MOCA, 2017). What attributes attract artists, galleries, museums and other arts institutions to this locality? In the next section, we explore social and material characteristics that draw these actors.

SOCIAL AND MATERIAL DIMENSIONS OF THE JUNCTION THAT ATTRACT ART As described, there is a growing concentration of artists and arts institutions in the area. This concentration attracts those relocating or thinking of establishing themselves in the neighbourhood (Interviews, 2018). The Junction provides an environment for the exchange of ideas and information, and helps to mitigate risk. As the representative of an artist-run centre points out: what drew us here was that there were already other galleries on the block [that] had quite decent reputations within the community . . . They had long term leases . . . If there was not a concentration of galleries here, foot traffic would be very difficult, and it is something that is important to us. (Interview, 2018)

When galleries cluster together, they promote one another, share resources, and draw in audiences who want to ‘make a day’ of visiting galleries in a particular neighbourhood (Interviews, 2018). Gallerists often work together, coordinating openings and developing resources such as neighbourhood maps (Interviews, 2018). Gallery owners also talk about sharing equipment, such as ladders and exchanging business advice about shippers, clients and other matters (Interviews, 2018). The fact that both artists and galleries are locating in the Junction illustrates how creativity stems from a broader ecosystem, comprising not only artists, but also

82  Handbook on the geographies of creativity galleries, art centres, museums and clients. All of these actors play a role in shaping contemporary art. Being able to live and work in the same neighbourhood is an advantage. For artists, being represented by a gallery in the same neighbourhood allows for easier delivery and pick up of art works and impromptu gallery and studio visits (Interviews, 2018). It also enables one to keep one’s finger on the ‘pulse’ of what is happening in the local art scene (Artist interview, 2018). Gallery owners can monitor what other gallerists and artists are doing (Interviews, 2018). The material characteristics of the area also attract artists and galleries. Many of the galleries in the Junction Triangle occupy industrial or warehouse spaces (Figure 5.4). Specializing in contemporary art, including painting, sculpture, installation art and photography, many gallerists describe the luxury of finding these types of spaces: it’s a very unique site because it [the neighbourhood] has . . . these 3000 square foot warehouses which are great footprints for a gallery. The one we took had 22 foot ceilings. The building is 30 feet wide. The space was raw. [It] . . . was perfect. (Interview, representative for artist-run centre, 2018)

Source:

Photograph by Shannon Black.

Figure 5.4

Galleries in the Junction Triangle

Such spaces attract artists who work in larger-scale formats, such as sculpture and installation art (Interviews, 2018). Large unobstructed spaces give artists the space in which to experiment and show art works which, because of their scale, smaller

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  83 gallery spaces may not be able to accommodate. Having a space that encourages artistic exploration was something that drew this commercial gallerist to the Junction Triangle: I wanted a warehouse space so artists could be more ambitious than they usually can be in a storefront space. I was willing to forgo a main street location for bigger space on a side street, so artists can practice and flex their muscles. (Interview, 2018)

Industrial and warehouse spaces are also attractive to gallerists because such spaces can accommodate multiple exhibitions, offices and storage. Large spaces can be subdivided into smaller gallery spaces, so that shows can run simultaneously (Interviews, 2018). Multiple exhibition spaces within the larger gallery allow gallerists to set up and take down shows with greater ease, to keep their galleries open when shows are in transition, and to share their space with other art and non-art community members (ibid.). Loading areas, service facilities and the availability of street parking for clients are also features that gallerists value (ibid.). While the majority of galleries occupy industrial and warehouse spaces, a few are in storefront spaces. While narrow, these spaces are deep and can accommodate exhibition spaces, offices and storage. Many of these spaces are multi-level and include apartments and artist studio space. Although none of the gallerists interviewed rely on walk-in traffic as a main source of income, a storefront space allows for a connection to the street in a way that those located in an industrial/warehouse building may not (Interviews, 2018). Connecting with a community is a priority for this commercial gallerist, who wants her gallery to be welcoming, rather than intimidating: it was important to me to have a storefront. I have always been a storefront gallery. I like that aspect of non-art people feeling comfortable to come in and interacting with the community. (Interview, 2018)

For another gallerist, setting up in a semi-retail space is less about connecting with the neighbourhood, and more a strategic tactic to safeguard against the risk of displacement: typically, a gallery would find itself maybe more drawn to industrial space, but those are first on the chopping block for development. For me when I moved here, part of it was like I'm going to move into . . . this building . . . because it is an extra level of insurance. (Interview, commercial gallerist, 2018)

The affordability of space is another material aspect attracting artists and gallerists to the locality. Galleries that set up their businesses in spaces that are located on side streets, in mixed use buildings, or in areas that are less developed, experience the greatest financial savings (Interviews, 2018). The existence of appropriate spaces for galleries and arts centres, combined with affordable rents, facilitates a ‘snowball’ or clustering effect. Unlike the more commercial galleries based in Yorkville, which

84  Handbook on the geographies of creativity have to sell a lot of art to afford the spaces they are in, low rents enable galleries in the Junction/Junction Triangle to specialize in less commercial work (Interviews, 2018). The material aspects of the area also facilitate creativity in a number of ways. As this gallery owner notes: the rough-edged character of the neighbourhood and the fact that it is still in transition, give the sense to people who want to be creative here, that they are a little bit out of the spot light, out of view of the forces that might want to police the kinds of things they want to do . . . People can experiment and do things that if they were in a glass walled office downtown, they may not be inspired to try . . . This is more untamed. (Interview, artist-run centre, 2018)

The industrial heritage of the neighbourhood serves as a source of inspiration. Material inheritances, place associations and techniques endure over time, becoming a part of the local mythologies that resonate in the present (Gibson, 2015: 64). Visual art, particularly sculpture and installation art, involves the production of physical objects. This requires an assemblage of materials: I know some artists that have studios within walking distance of this gallery who make sculpture and art work out of the objects that they find in the street, or while they are walking along those tracks or just picking up little bits of metal and springs. (Interview, 2018)

The provenance of these materials is significant, and being able to utilize remnants of the area’s industrial history lends an authenticity to art produced in the area (Gibson, 2015).

THE PRECARIOUS SITING OF THE JUNCTION AS AN ARTS HUB Although the existence of large spaces, affordable rents and presence of other galleries and artists are identified as key motivations for why artists and gallerists have established themselves in the area, the availability of space has changed in the past five to seven years (Interviews, 2018). As one commercial gallerist explains, by 2013 it was already too expensive to live and operate a business in the area (Interview, 2018). The rise in prices and the scarcity of space can be attributed to commercial and residential development and ‘clever rebranding’, which has made the once depressed area ‘attractive to new residents and investors’ (Kern, 2015: 72). As a representative of an artist-run centre notes: we have witnessed firsthand how difficult it is to find these light industrial warehouse spaces that are good for arts-related purposes. Often these buildings are converted into condos or lofts. Many of them have been knocked down for new development. It’s a challenge to find these kinds of spaces. And being able to only pay what a non-profit can pay, or an artist . . . [It is hard]. (Interview, 2018)

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  85 Rents have jumped so quickly that some artists who moved into the Junction/Junction Triangle only a couple of years ago are already moving north in search of cheaper rent (Interviews, 2018). Some galleries are also starting to relocate; others have shuttered their businesses entirely. The pending arrival of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) has also impacted rents. As in earlier phases of redevelopment, the City has been involved in negotiating the redevelopment of Sterling Road. In order to proceed, the Zoning by-law had to be amended to shift 158, 164, 181 and 200 Sterling Road from an Employment Area to Mixed-Use zoning (City of Toronto, 2012). The City initially refused to amend the by-law, but the decision was appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) and the properties were converted to mixed-use in 2014 (City of Toronto, 2014). When the by-law was amended to develop the properties, the consultant’s report noted, ‘sustaining Toronto’s competitive advantage and prosperity will require continued preservation of the industrial land base for its wealth generation capacity’ (City of Toronto, 2012). As a result of this development, many artists received eviction notices: landlords doubled and tripled the rent because they knew MOCA was coming in and they wanted to see the financial returns of that . . . When institutions move into industrial spaces, they are often already moving into spaces that are inhabited by artists . . . Artists and others from marginalized communities are usually the first to feel the effects. (Interview, gallery owner, 2018; see also Whyte, 2016)

To help mitigate these effects, the museum has designated space in its new building for 20 below-market artist studios (Interview, representative public art museum, 2018; see also Guiliano, 2012). Yet, even as efforts are made, the impact of the institution’s arrival reverberates (Interviews, 2018). A cycling path now follows the rail line (City of Toronto, 2011; Novakovic, 2016) and a new brewery and upscale restaurant have also gone in on Sterling Road (City of Toronto 2015, 2016). Many gallerists in the area, while supportive of MOCA, and eagerly awaiting its opening in May 2018, are also cautious. As one commercial gallerist puts it, the arrival of MOCA ‘is propitious and vexing . . . everything is more expensive now’ (Interview, 2018). As development intensifies, professional creative businesses (for example, advertising agencies) have moved into the area (Interviews, 2018). A gallerist explains how a creative business is paying double in rent what the gallerist is paying for a comparable space (Interview, 2018). This pattern of gentrification exists in many other neighbourhoods and cities. Yet, many commentators believe that processes of arts-led gentrification have accelerated in the current era, heightening vulnerability to risk (Interviews, 2018; Whyte, 2017). As Zukin and Braslow (2011: 136) point out, art districts lasted longer in a pre-internet era, where their reputation was established largely through word-of-mouth and print media. Today, the reputation of an art district is built through websites and blogs, contributing to an accelerated pace of displacement (ibid.).

86  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Because commercial galleries are businesses, they do not have access to government funding that may be available to public art institutions, artist centres and artists. A lack of patronage is also an issue for small galleries and artists, and for those specializing in non-commercial work: there is a long history of supporting artist-run centres in Toronto, and in Canada as a whole. But artists need to sell artwork on a regular basis in order to pay for rent and get by. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a huge amount of support from private collectors in this city. (Interview, commercial gallerist, 2018)

High rent and a lack of funding contribute to the precariousness of small galleries and the artists they promote, affecting the viability of galleries, and compromising the type of work they are able to show and which artists they are able to support: galleries, even though it’s a business, it’s not that lucrative of a business. You need cheap space to continue doing exhibitions. Some of those installation base and more avant-garde exhibitions don’t really sell . . . Higher prices . . . dampen experimentation and creativity. (Interview, commercial gallerist, 2018)

There is a sense of betrayal that the city has not done enough to halt redevelopment: many politicians give lip service to the value of culture, that it is such a vital part of the city, but when it comes down to it, it is a very precarious thing. (Interview, gallery owner, 2018)

It is clear that precarity is taking a toll: it has an adverse effect on the psychology of an artist, being surrounded . . . a sense of ‘foreclosure’, seeing what attracted you to the space, seeing what made the space possible for you to work in, literally changing before your eyes, might be . . . disheartening or harmful to creative practice. (Interview, commercial gallerist, 2018)

In response to increased financial pressures, gallerists and artists have to make difficult decisions about where to go next should they be forced to relocate. The Stockyards, Westin, Mount Denis, Castlefield and Scarborough, as well as communities outside of Toronto (such as Hamilton, Kitchener and Prince Edward County), are areas that artists and gallerists are considering (Interviews, 2018). To avoid having to constantly move, one gallerist states that some artists now: plan ahead and overshoot areas, and go out further than they would have gone in years past, just so they can stay in those studio spaces longer. (Interview, commercial gallerist, 2018)

Continual relocation requires physical and emotional labour. As one commercial gallerist puts it: to have to find another space that would be raw and a mess and to have to come up with money again, to just do the whole thing again, which takes a mental and financial toll, plus then you are closed and you can’t sell the work . . . Plus you are gifting the landlord

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  87 an incredible space. Galleries are quite versatile spaces afterwards. They are white and clean…Something has to change. (Interview, 2018)

For those who move further away from areas where artists and gallerists have historically clustered, and particularly for those who have moved out of the city, access to work, community and professional relationships can be compromised. With increased commute times, the time available for artistic work is adversely impacted. This makes the decision to move to a smaller, more affordable community difficult: all of the work that I do on the side, installing stuff, is in the downtown core . . . If we have to make a big move, then all of that is going to change pretty dramatically . . . A lot of people we know have moved to Hamilton . . . It’s not the same as being in Toronto downtown and having access to galleries and museums . . . Having to commute, adding another couple of hours to your day, when I’m already working here right now then going to the studio for a bit – if I’m spending more time commuting, that . . . would leave me less time to make art. (Interview, artist, 2018)

Leaving the city may also mean less exposure to the clients and, in turn, less income: I know artists who are moving to Hamilton. I hear that story pretty regularly. . . People say, ‘oh Hamilton is the Brooklyn of Toronto.’ . . . How are they going to get clients . . . to Hamilton, especially if they don’t have a gallery representing them here already? . . . Artists can’t be too far away from the action. (Interview, representative for public art institution, 2018)

Gentrification is tied to the production of precarity; it both facilitates and necessitates the development of strategies to mitigate precarity (Kern, 2013), a theme which we explore in the next section.

NEGOTIATING PRECARITY For those artists and gallerists who have remained in the Junction, there are a variety of strategies for mitigating precarity. Many are making do with less space and sharing spaces. Others are adapting the type of work they produce. In these circumstances, the lack of space has material implications: artists are carving up what they already have. They are turning what would have been one artist studio into four . . . Or they are just changing the nature of their work. It’s the same with art galleries. It used to be that to do an art fair, you had to have a bricks and mortar space. But now the concept of a gallery is more fluid . . . You can do projects and pop ups. (Interview, commercial gallerist, 2018)

An increasing number of galleries are using temporary spaces and pop-up shops to sell their work. For some gallerists, the internet has also become a viable site for the sale of art and the development of creative networks. The internet enables gallerists to move beyond a local art scene and connect with a global community of clients and colleagues. Drawing in business internationally helps gallerists support their bricks

88  Handbook on the geographies of creativity and mortar establishments. Online spaces provide access to audiences, communities and income beyond Toronto, but: on the flip side . . . there are so many art fairs and emails . . . When collectors are getting inundated with .pdfs of available art every day, it starts to lose its aura or specialness . . . It is kind of taking away from the uniqueness of what people think of as art. (Interview, commercial gallerist, 2018)

Building networks through international travel expands a commercial gallerist’s reputation, network and clients, which helps to grapple with the precariousness of operating in Toronto. Through international travel there are also opportunities for knowledge sharing: when we travel internationally it’s different. We make a point of going to galleries to see what they are showing, how they are showing it, displaying . . . And then with colleagues internationally, I share notes and tips . . . When I travel internationally, it's bigger picture thinking. Here [in Toronto], it is more nuts and bolts. (Interview, commercial gallerist, 2018)

More of the learning process is being extended to the transnational scale. Yet, as this gallerist points out: going overseas to art fairs . . . there are costs associated with that and you can’t afford these unless you are selling enough art. It’s a double-edged sword in a lot of ways and hedging bets. (Interview, commercial gallerist, 2018)

Purchasing real estate has been another response. Two of our respondents have been able to purchase the spaces that house their galleries. Being able to buy real estate gives gallerists and artists a sense of control and buffers them against the rising cost of rent. As one commercial gallerist who leases their space explains, ‘in a dream world, I would have a building, because there are no pensions in this business’ (Interview, 2018). While the majority of our respondents do not have the capacity to purchase real estate, some could imagine joining together with other small galleries to buy a building. However, the cost of real estate remains prohibitive, and without government and/or private sector support, it is difficult. As artists and gallerists try to manage the pressures they face, there has been little collective action against the intensification of gentrification. The reasons for this are four-fold. First, the speed in which gentrification is happening leaves little time for groups to form a cohesive response. For instance, following the announcement that the Museum of Contemporary Art would be relocating to Sterling Road, a number of artists received notices that they were being evicted from their studios on Sterling. They were given 30 days’ notice to leave (Interviews, 2018). With such short notice, one commercial gallerist laments, ‘The most that the artists on Sterling could do is that they got vocal on social media and because of that the Toronto Star article got generated and conversations did happen’ (Interview, 2018). A group of artists produced a publication that explores the transition of the neighourhood (Maltese

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  89 et al., 2016). Despite these efforts, one gallerist concludes, ‘it was already too late’ (Interviews, 2018). Second, the artists that occupied studios along Sterling Road, like galleries who occupy commercial spaces, have no legal recourse when it comes to rising rental costs or to short eviction notices. ‘Commercial leases,’ Whyte (2016) explains, ‘are not under the same provincial rent-controlled legislation as residential units are.’ Third, for commercial gallerists in particular, there are concerns that collectively speaking out against rising rents and other adverse impacts of gentrification may harm their businesses. Speaking out publicly may alienate clients (some of whom are developers) and jeopardize relationships that commercial gallerists rely on for their livelihood (Interviews, 2018). Fourth, reflecting on the efforts of Active 18, a community group that formed in resistance to the redevelopment of Queen Street West, this gallerist explains how the precarious nature of working in the arts impacts individual and collective interventions: with Active 18, that was a group of artists and a group of people who work in the not-for-profit sector and some of them had families. I mean, not only do you work 60 hours a week at either a low paying job or trying to develop your own artistic practice which pays you nothing anyway, and now you are involved in this? What if you have to look after a kid? What kind of opposition is that? (Interview, public art institution, 2018)

While artists and gallerists make efforts to remain proactive, given the lack of time and resources, frustration and a sense of inevitability are palpable in many of the responses. Without financial means or legal recourse, one commercial gallerist suggests there is no collective action, only a ‘collective griping’ (Interview, 2018).

CONCLUSION Social and material aspects combine to enhance the attractiveness of the Junction as a site for artistic production, distribution and consumption in the current period. The combination of these forces illustrates the role of past waves of investment in the evolution of creative industries (Gibson, 2015). Social ties and low rents, along with large, open industrial spaces and local industrial materials provide a suitable environment for producing and selling larger scale contemporary installation art. They provide the social and material conditions for producing work that is less commercial. However, a key problem in the contemporary period is that the process of gentrification and displacement has accelerated, partly in response to the growing role of the internet. Under these conditions, almost as soon as an emerging art district is developed, it is immediately undermined. The heightened precarity experienced by artists, galleries and other arts institutions threatens the sustainability of innovative arts clusters.

90  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Artists and galleries employ a number of strategies to mitigate precarity, including doubling up, sharing spaces, and moving into smaller spaces. Some are forced to adapt the scale of the work they do. Galleries adapt by selling more work on-line and through temporary or pop-up spaces. Others are forced to abandon the district. These tactics lead to greater spatial fragmentation, eroding the value of co-location. A key problem is that although policy makers clearly benefit from the multiplier effects associated with culture and creativity, they do little to explicitly support the sector (Whyte, 2016). The City of Toronto has attempted to protect employment lands and to negotiate a limited number of spaces for artists at below market values. However, these efforts fall short of what is needed to preserve the vitality of art districts like the Junction. The ability to make and sell art also hinges upon a larger ecosystem, including galleries. There are a number of things that could be done to protect artists and the institutions that support them. While non-profit institutions like museums benefit from government support, there can sometimes be conflicts with smaller for-profit institutions that find themselves displaced by wider dynamics set in motion through state-funded redevelopment. Galleries are commercial enterprises, but smaller, more innovative ones do not make much money and are vulnerable to displacement. As one gallery owner puts it, ‘there are certain benefits for non-profits, but for the barely profits [there is no support]’ (Interview, 2018). A number of policies could assist the sector. Commercial rent control is one option. City Council is also requesting that the provincial government look into altering the tax code to provide incentives to landlords to convert buildings to cultural incubators (Whyte, 2017). Another idea is to provide shared studio space to artists and galleries by renting out large facilities and then subletting small spaces and shared work zones at less expensive rates. Akin Collective is one such space in the city. It offers workshops, internet and insurance to all sublet tenants (ibid.). The founders have recently been invited by the City to participate in an advisory group to explore ways to expand the model (ibid.). Further initiatives are needed, however, to ensure that art – and the institutions that support it – still have a place in the city.

REFERENCES Amin, A. (2008), ‘Collective culture and urban public space’, City, 12 (1), 5–24. Amin, A. and P. Cohendet (2004), Architectures of Knowledge: Firms, Capabilities, and Communities, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Asheim, B.T. and M. Gertler (2005), ‘The geography of innovation: regional innovation systems’, in J. Fagerberg, D.C. Mowery and R.R. Nelson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Innovation, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 291–317. Bain, A. (2006), ‘Resisting the creation of forgotten places: artistic production in Toronto neighbourhoods’, The Canadian Geographer, 50 (4), 417–31. Bakker, K. and G. Bridge (2006), ‘Material worlds? Resource geographies and the “matter of nature”’, Progress in Human Geography, 30 (1), 5–27. Bathelt, H. and N. Schuldt (2008), ‘Beyond luminaries and meat grinders: international trade fairs as temporary clusters?’, Regional Studies, 42 (6), 853–68.

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  91 Becker, H. (1982), Art Worlds, Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993), The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York, NY, USA: Columbia University Press. Callon, M., C. Méadel and V. Rabeharisoa (2002), ‘The economy of qualities’, Economy and Society, 31 (2), 194–217. Catungal, J.P., D. Leslie and Y. Hii (2009), ‘Geographies of displacement in the creative city: the case of Liberty Village’, Urban Studies, 46 (5&6), 1095–114. Christopherson, S. (2008), ‘Beyond the self-expressive creative worker: an industry perspective on entertainment media’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25 (7–8), 73–95. City of Toronto (2011), ‘Local area study for lands abutting the rail corridor Ward 18’, Motion moved by Councillor Ana Bailao, 22 March, accessed 16 August 2017 at http://​www​ .junctiontriangle​.ca/​node/​1061. City of Toronto (2012), ‘158, 164, 181, and 200 Sterling Road. Official plan amendment and zoning amendment applications refusal report’, City Staff Report to the Planning and Growth Management Committee, 11 October, accessed 18 August 2017 at http://​ app​.toronto​.ca/​tmmis/​viewAgendaItemDetails​.do​?function​=​getMinutesItemPreview​&​ agendaItemId​=​39235. City of Toronto (2014), ‘158, 164, 181, and 200 Sterling Road. Official plan amendment and zoning by-law amendment. Result of OMB mediation’, City Staff Report, 28 April, accessed 17 August 2017 at https://​www​.toronto​.ca/​legdocs/​mmis/​2014/​cc/​bgrd/​ backgroundfile​-69316​.pdf. City of Toronto (2015), ‘Manufacturer’s limited liquor sales license – Henderson Brewing Co. by the glass limited license’, City Council Decision, 15 September, accessed 17 August 2017 at http://​app​.toronto​.ca/​tmmis/​viewAgendaItemHistory​.do​?item​=​2015​.TE10​.119. City of Toronto (2016), ‘Alterations to a designated heritage property and authority to amend a heritage easement agreement – 158 Sterling Road’, City Council Decision, 7 June, accessed 17 August 2017 at https://​www​.toronto​.ca/​legdocs/​mmis/​2016/​te/​bgrd/​ backgroundfile​-91919​.pdf. Clare, K. (2013), ‘The essential role of place within creative industries: Boundaries, networks and play’, Cities, 34, 52–57. Connell, J. and C. Gibson (2003), Soundtracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London, UK: Routledge. Conway-Smith, E. (2004), ‘Junction crosses into bohemia’, Globe and Mail, 13 November, accessed 14 August 2017 at https://​www​.theglobeandmail​.com/​news/​national/​junction​ -crossesintobohemia/​article1006917/​. Drake, G. (2003), ‘“This place gives me space”: place and creativity in the creative industries’, Geoforum, 34, 511–24. Flack, D. (2016), ‘Is the Lower Junction, Toronto’s newest neighbourhood?’, BlogTO, 30 March, accessed 16 April 2017 at https://​www​.blogto​.com/​city/​2016/​03/​is​_the​_lower​ _junction​_torontos​_newest​_neighbourhood/​. Florida, R. (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York, NY, USA: Basic Books. Gibson, C. (2015), ‘Material inheritances: how place, materiality, and the labour process underpin the path-dependent evolution of contemporary craft production’, Economic Geography, 92 (1), 61–86. Grabher, G. (2001), ‘Ecologies of creativity: the Village, the Group, and the heterarchic organisation of the British advertising industry’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 33 (2), 351–74. Gibson, C. (2005), ‘Recording studios: relational spaces of creativity in the city’, Built Environment, 31 (3), 192–207.

92  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Guiliano, D. (2012), ‘Artscape carves out space for art in Junction’, Urban Toronto, 7 November, accessed 16 August 2017 at http://​urbantoronto​.ca/​news/​2012/​11/​artscape​ -carvesout​-space​-art​-junction. Harvey, D.C., H. Hawkins and N. Thomas (2012), ‘Thinking creative clusters beyond the city: people, places and networks’, Geoforum, 43, 529–39. Helbrecht, I. (2003), ‘Bare geographies in knowledge societies – creative cities as text and piece of art: two eyes, one vision’, Built Environment, 30 (3), 191–200. Hutton, T.A. (2006), ‘Spatiality, built form, and creative industry development in the inner city’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (10), 1819–41. Jackson, P. (2000), ‘Rematerializing social and cultural geography’, Social and Cultural Geography, 1 (1), 9–14. Kern, L. (2013), ‘All abroad? Women working the spaces of gentrification in Toronto’s Junction’, Gender, Place and Culture, 20 (4), 510–27. Kern, L. (2015), ‘From toxic wreck to crunchy chic: environmental gentrification through the body’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33, 67–83. Kong, L. (2005), ‘The sociality of cultural industries: Hong Kong’s cultural policy and film industry’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11 (1), 61–76. Latham, A. and D.P. McCormack (2004), ‘Moving cities: rethinking the materialities of urban geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 28 (6), 701–24. Latour, B. (2005), Reassembling the Social, New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press. Lloyd, R. (2004), ‘The neighbourhood in cultural production: material and symbolic resources in the new bohemia’, City and Community, 3 (4), 343–72. Lorinc, J. (2015), ‘What up and coming looks like: the Junction Triangle at 5’, Globe and Mail, 27 March, accessed 14 August 2017 at https://​www​.theglobeandmail​.com/​news/​toronto/​ what​-up​-and​-coming​-looks​-like​-the​-junction​-triangle​-at​-5/​article23675767/​. Maltese, V., A. McGuane and L. Huston-Herterich (2016), Sterling Road, Toronto, Canada: Swimmers Group. Mathews, V. (2010), ‘Aestheticizing space: art, gentrification and the city’, Geography Compass, 4 (6), 660–75. McNamara, R. (2016), ‘An interview with the displaced artists of Sterling Road: new book, new perspectives’, Artcity, 26 February, accessed 14 August 2017 at http://​artmuseum​ .utoronto​.ca/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2016/​11/​1​-artfcity​-An​-Interview​-with​-the​-Displaced​ -Artists​-of​-Sterling​-Road​%EF​%80​%A2​-New​-Book​-New​-Perspectives​.pdf. MOCA (2017), ‘The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada awarded $5.1 million from the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund’, 8 February, accessed 16 August 2017 at http://​ museumofcontemporaryart​.ca/​wp​-content/​uploads/​The​-Museum​-of​-Contemporary​-Art​ -Toronto​-Canada​-Awarded​-5​.1​-Million​-from​-the​-Canada​-Cultural​-Spaces​-Fund​.pdf. Molotch, H. (2003), Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers, and Many Other Things Come To Be As They Are, New York, NY, USA: Routledge. Novakovic. S. (2016), ‘Every economy has its geography: Richard Florida and the creative class theory’, Skyrise Cities, 25 April, accessed 14 August 2017 at https://​skyrisecities​ .com/​news/​2016/​04/​every​-economy​-has​-its​-geography​-richard​-florida​-and​-creative​-class​ -theory. Power, D. and J. Jansson (2008), ‘Cyclical clusters in global circuits: overlapping spaces in furniture trade fairs’, Economic Geography, 84 (4), 423–48. Rantisi, N. and D. Leslie (2010), ‘Materiality and creative production: the case of the Mile End neighbourhood in Montreal’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42, 2824–41. Scott, A.J. (1999), ‘The cultural economy: geography and the creative field’, Media, Culture and Society, 21, 807–17. Storper, M. and A. Venables (2004), ‘Buzz: face-to-face contact and the urban economy’, Journal of Economic Geography, 4 (4), 351–70.

The role of artists and galleries in a Toronto creative district  93 Thomas, N.J., H. Hawkins and D.C. Harvey (2010), ‘The geographies of the creative industries: scale, clusters and connectivity’, Geography, 95 (1), 14–21. TREB Commercial. (2001), ‘Old meets new as historic Junction comes of age’, Toronto Real Estate Board Website, June 14, accessed 17 August 2017. Watson, A., M. Hoyler and C. Mager (2009), ‘Spaces and networks of musical creativity in the city’, Geography Compass, 3 (2), 856–78. Weller, S. (2008), ‘Beyond “global production networks”: Australian fashion week’s trans-secotral synergies’, Growth and Change, 39 (1), 104–22. Whyte, M. (2012), ‘Sterling Road: artistic hotbed but with development plans looking, for how long?’, Toronto Star, 12 August 2012, accessed 14 August 2017 at https://​www​ .thestar​.com/​entertainment/​visualarts/​2012/​08/​12/​sterling​_rd​_artistic​_hotbed​_but​_with​ _development​_plans​_looming​_for​_how​_long​.html. Whyte, M. (2015), ‘Sterling Road gets artistic polish’, Toronto Star, 29 September, accessed 14 August 2017 at https://​www​.thestar​.com/​entertainment/​2015/​09/​29/​sterling​-rd​-gets​-an​ -artistic​-polish​.html. Whyte, M. (2016), ‘Soaring rent threatens Sterling Road’s creative vibe’, Toronto Star, 13 January, accessed 15 August 2017 at https://​www​.thestar​.com/​entertainment/​visualarts/​ 2016/​01/​31/​some​-sterling​-road​-artists​-facing​-steeper​-rents​-plan​-to​-move​-on​.html. Whyte, M. (2017), ‘Akin Collective buys artists space, time’, Toronto Star, 4 February, accessed 16 August 2017 at https://​www​.thestar​.com/​entertainment/​visualarts/​2017/​02/​03/​ akin​-collective​-buys​-artists​-space​-and​-time​.html. Zukin, S. and L. Braslow (2011), ‘The life cycle of New York’s creative districts: reflections on the unanticipated consequences of unplanned cultural zones’, City, Culture and Society, 2, 131–40.

6. Beyond the ‘buzz’: locating critical geographies of creativity Chris Gibson and Chris Brennan-Horley

INTRODUCTION Since the early 2000s an enormous corpus of academic and policy work has sought to explain and foster creative industries. A distinct spatial flavour infuses a great deal of this. Locational terminology including clusters, precincts and quarters dominates the literature. Creativity is said to be the salient feature of contemporary post-industrial capitalism, fuelling innovation and investment and therefore responsible for urban economic fortunes. Accordingly, municipal and state authorities around the world have rushed to develop strategies aimed at designing city quarters and branding places as creative, enhancing creative industry growth and generating the right kinds of built environments to support them (see Peck, Chapter 3 this volume). Overwhelmingly, the focus has been on agglomerations or clusters of activity in districts of major western cities (for example, Davis et al., 2009), and the mercurial, but much desired, ‘buzz’ in urban milieu said to be unleashed in such precincts (Storper and Venables, 2004). Urban ‘buzz’ is a quality of place said to typify successful creative precincts: it encompasses hip neighbourhoods, happenstance encounters and everyday interactions among creative industry workers, as well as ‘edgy’ built environments, ‘place quality’ and an intangible sense of being at the centre of evolving fashion and trends (Esmaeilpoorarabi et al., 2018). Such a ‘buzz’, the argument follows, is necessary for the creative industries, a source of tacit knowledge and continuous learning of new fashions and trends, while generating lifestyle-led in-migration of ‘creatives’. Places that ‘buzz’ sustain creative enterprises, while attracting key workers in design, tech and knowledge industries who search and identify ‘hip’ places to both live and work. A distinct conceptual and policy orthodoxy has emerged around such ideas, positioning a few signature global cities, and inner urban areas within them, as those benchmark places displaying the supposed correct mix of attributes – proximity, density, grit, buzz – necessary for creative success. This chapter revisits such ideas with the aim to expand and critically deepen the repertoire of geographical concepts infusing theories of creativity. While as geographers the spatial flavour of much theorizing about creativity is acknowledged (and indeed to an extent welcomed), our goal is to push beyond axioms of urban clusters and ‘buzz’, motivated by concern for the latter’s empirical shortcomings, and largely apolitical nature. Simplistic geographical metaphors of hip urban ‘hotspot’ districts miss extant diverse forms of creativity, while underpinning ‘policy-light’ thinking 94

Beyond the ‘buzz’: locating critical geographies of creativity  95 that in turn reproduces uneven development and gentrification processes in cities, and masking deeper contradictions and tensions. As we illustrate in our first substantive section below, even in archetypal creative clusters featuring the much-vaunted qualities of ‘buzz’, there are other economic geographies of creativity at play. Relational thinking helps unlock how conceptions of the geography of creativity must move beyond the notion of the singular workplace, towards topological frameworks that appreciate the multiple ties, networks and everyday concrete spaces of work, present in functioning creative places. Meanwhile, political-economic processes of urban land rent, property and real estate speculations shape agglomeration tendencies. The focus on buzz and clustering dynamics overlooks other dynamics, hidden in plain sight, that entangle creativity within fraught processes that de- and revalue urban precincts. Shaping the conditions of possibility for creative pursuits are both centripetal (clustering) and centrifugal (dispersal) geographic forces. Beyond axiomatic hubs, creative work is variegated, contested and relationally embedded in both iconic and ordinary spaces of cities and regions. Our second substantial section below then proceeds to build upon such a political-economic critique of urban buzz/clusters. It surveys research on creativity in much less likely places. Inspired by feminist and post-colonial calls to decolonize urban theory, we explore what may be possible when efforts are made to purposefully invert assumed hierarchical geographies of creativity that position commercially lucrative creative industries as benchmarks, and key North American and European capitals as centres from which innovations diffuse radially. Critical geographers working outside the neoliberal rendition of creative industries, especially beyond major northern hemisphere cities, have sought to trouble the many assumptions about what constitutes creativity, where it is found, and to what effect it is put amidst struggles for livelihoods, expressions and enduring relationships. For while the dominant frame locates creativity in ‘buzzy’ clusters of a limited number of hip cities, creative activities are, via empirical research, found everywhere: in remote places, in seemingly nondescript suburbs, in cities typified by small populations or low urban density, in industries and communities not conventionally associated with creative city discourse. In such contexts, there may not be the visible established infrastructure of metropolitan creative industries, and what creative work does exist may well include a high incidence of unpaid, part-time or intermittent work – hardly the stuff of boosterish policy discourse. Nevertheless, creativity in such challenging circumstances takes different forms and generates meanings beyond market values. Other kinds of research questions and possibilities for policy emerge, including the challenges and pleasures of smallness, isolation and remoteness (both physical, and perceived); how creativity might reverse neocolonial subjectivities of core and periphery; and how conceptions of creativity need to extend from a political-economic basis to encompass a fuller range of human needs and desires, the emotions, and norms of endurance. Deepening and broadening questions of the geographical in research on creativity is, in this manner, the focus of our contribution here.

96  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

BEYOND ‘BUZZ’ Extensive research across urban studies, geography, planning and economics has documented the potential benefits to creative enterprises from locating within urban industrial districts subject to inward, clustering dynamics. Studies of urban clusters across a range of creative, design and digital industries have demonstrated the flow-on positive externalities that arise from co-location (Scott and Storper, 2015). Benefits include the capacity to foster untraded interdependencies between firms (Storper, 1995), tacit knowledge exchanges among key actors (O’Connor, 2004), opportunities for learning and local knowledge building (Bathelt and Cohendet, 2014) and to tap into urban ‘buzz’ (Storper and Venables, 2004). A special priority is placed on proximity and face-to-face interactions. Proximity is important because it underpins the emergence of what Bourdieu (1993) describes as a ‘creative field’ – a complex of innovation dynamics dependent on an ‘industrial atmosphere’ (in the sense originally invoked by economic theorist Alfred Marshall) present in specific urban milieux. An implicit assumption across this now vast body of work is that firms and creative workers freely relocate into key locations primarily to take advantage of such proximity benefits. Countless studies have since elaborated such claims empirically. There are, however, profound limitations in focusing on only one set of spatial metaphors and observed trends – those concerning inward, centripetal forces. Conceptualizations of creative geographies must at the very least situate clustering dynamics within broader forces and inheritances, many of which are centrifugal, that are invisible or frequently overlooked in the rush to embrace simplistic urban development policy solutions (cf. Shearmur, 2015). When the more neoliberalized policy fashion for clusters gained momentum in the early 2000s, theories of urban and regional agglomeration offered an explanation for the growth dynamics underpinning ostensibly new, higher-value sectors. Via a loose and decentralized knowledge–policy–advocacy assemblage (that included celebrity experts such as Michael Porter and Richard Florida, who themselves circulated and profited from the popularity of innovation/ creativity clusters), economic imaginaries about clustering tendencies promulgated, and were shorn of much of their political-economic grounding (Gibson and Klocker, 2004). Theorization of dialectical relations between agglomeration and dispersal (for example in the work of Allen Scott on the film industry – Scott and Pope, 2007) was frequently overlooked in favour of unidirectional metaphors of concentration within precincts that ‘buzz’. In consequence, spatial metaphors of clusters and hubs were welded more firmly to an agenda of looking to market forces and the urban development sector to generate economic activity in spatially contained precincts. Such precincts were often named and branded as Innovation Hubs or Creative Quarters in new greenfield developments or in redeveloped dilapidated ex-industrial neighbourhoods of warehouses (Bell and Jayne, 2004). In many cases, the naming and marketing of urban clusters was less an outcome of strong evidence-based policy-making than a part of ‘transition fantasies’ (Lovering, 1995: 109) entertained by city boosters and developers,

Beyond the ‘buzz’: locating critical geographies of creativity  97 operating within an increasingly entrepreneurial mode of urban governance to solve problems of disinvestment through creativity-led real estate speculation. Cluster dynamics, it seemed, could be cultivated: name or build a funky precinct, and the creatives will come. Except of course, they often do not. For every orchestrated urban cluster that has met stated goals of enterprise and jobs growth are a litany of urban spatial policy failures: creative clusters in service of real estate developers; creative precincts filled with retail tenants focused on elite consumption rather than material production; innovation hubs that attract IT or telemarketing tenants rather than artists or artisans (Grodach et al., 2017; Kong et al., 2016; O’Connor and Gu, 2014). Jo Foord’s (2013) analysis of a much-trumpeted attempt to generate creative cluster dynamics in east London, for example, illustrated how a growing digital cluster encompassing advertising and software – ‘silicon roundabout’ – usurped the arts and craft-based creative industries, as policy-making weakened, shifting from intervention to arms-length support. Even in the heart of the pre-eminent global creative city, are grand policy failures. Beyond much-hyped attempts to construct visible, trendy creative precincts, other far more mundane factors than ‘buzz’ underpin actual cluster formation. In their analysis of Canadian cities, Duvivier et al. (2018: 756) found that ‘creative districts’ attributes, although significant, are not the strongest predictors of location’. Rather, built environment, infrastructure and the potential for localization prove pivotal. Access to low-cost space, housing affordability and industrial zoning that allows use of paints, power tools and noisy amplification, are all prosaic prerequisites to cluster formation – yet are conditions structurally constrained by urban planning edicts (Gibson et al., 2017). Urban creative clusters are tempting to fantasize over within regeneration strategies, but not so easy to invent into being. Towards Network Topologies of Creativity The overriding emphasis on urban creative clusters neglects wider geographies, topologies and relational geometries of power. The very idea of cities as the wellsprings of creativity and innovation itself warrants sustained empirical verification (Shearmur, 2012). Counterforces shaping urban clusters include global production networks, the ‘organizational arrangement comprising interconnected economic and non-economic actors coordinated by a global lead firm and producing goods and services across multiple geographic locations for worldwide markets’ (Yeung and Coe, 2015: 32). Agglomerations of firms in urban regions interact with wider forces that simultaneously disperse mobile capital and divisions of labour (Scott and Pope, 2007). Indeed, in the context of digital technologies, global finance and unprecedented mobilities, the notion of the singular creative industries workplace, let alone cluster, is outdated. Sebastien Darchen’s (2016) analysis of the video game industry revealed that, even within celebrated global clusters of activity, the existence of a global ‘industry commons’ sustained creative production among dispersed actors. The growing trends towards telecommuting, use of flexible coworking spaces, life-

98  Handbook on the geographies of creativity style relocations, and ‘flashpacking’ among ‘digital nomads’ who take contract work with them while travelling and residing temporarily in eclectic cities (see Luckman, 2012; Richards, 2015; Richardson, 2017), all challenge the pre-eminence of the singular job, the singular urban cluster and the singular creative industry workplace. Among the implications for research on geographies of creativity are methodological limits and possibilities. The concept of networking is regularly espoused in the clusters literature, with the driving force behind successful creative work said to be reliance on interpersonal relations bound up in degrees of geographic proximity (Aage and Belussi, 2008). Yet in creative industry activity mapping exercises premised on concentrations of creative workers or firms, networks and connections between actors in inner-city clusters are inferred rather than evidentially revealed (Kong, 2009). Employment statistics sourced from census data are the most often used data sources for such creative industry mapping, but they remain an inadequate means for understanding the multiple ways in which creative work is enacted across space (Brennan-Horley and Gibson, 2009). Employment locational data may prove beneficial for understanding patterns for creative occupations and sectors with higher rates of spatial fixity, such as advertising and marketing, but they cannot encapsulate working patterns for creative practitioners whose workdays (and nights) are predicated on fluidity. The day-to-day movements of a musician are a case in point: managing affairs from a home office, rehearsing with various groups in different studios, recording or performing in different spaces again. Each space remains important to that musician’s creative work. Yet if musicians appear in census data (and there is much evidence to suggest that census and firm statistics miss musicians altogether – see Gibson, 2002), only one site can be accommodated: whichever site they indicate as their major place of employment during census administration. In a policy sense, then, statistical reliance on census and other formal data sources biases towards certain, more lucrative and clearly identifiable sectors and professions (advertising, marketing, IT) and de-emphasizes sectors that operate at the fringes of the formal economy, and across multiple sites. Chosen methods for economic geographical research on creativity, in other words, often reinforce inner-city clusters as the key metaphor, while masking informal networks, mobilities and the role of other locations in the day-to-day operation of creative activities. Creative industry mapping methods and concepts thus need to incorporate techniques for linking multiple sites of individual creative activity if they are to better represent how aggregate creative work patterns unfurl across the city. Other methods have accordingly emerged as alternatives. A topological approach to mapping creative work, for example, uses the connections between people and places for inferring how creative work is situated in the city, rather than relying on topographical comparisons between contiguous spatial units (the cluster being the ultimate, bounded expression of this). Qualitative mapping techniques enable visualization of creative geographies enacted through relational networks within and beyond the city, alongside territorial constructs borne out of participants’ everyday understandings of the places in which they live and work.

Beyond the ‘buzz’: locating critical geographies of creativity  99 One illustration is Brennan-Horley’s (2010) analysis of Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory – a city that perhaps could not be further, spatially or metaphorically, from those often-cited ‘creative cities’ of the northern hemisphere: Darwin has no densely populated inner city or abandoned warehouses ripe for creative reinvention; it struggles with problems of Indigenous homelessness and addiction; battles intense tropical seasons and extreme remoteness from major population centres, and has scant main street café culture or ‘hipster’ enclaves of the sort associated in the literature with urban ‘buzz’. Nevertheless, in Darwin, creative workers constructed complex networks across their city and beyond, working in multiple locations, making use of suburban places as much as spaces of the inner city, as well as travelling and maintaining collaborations between remote indigenous communities and (relatively) proximate capitals in Southeast Asia (Figure 6.1). By documenting auxiliary workplaces and linkages, conceptions can extend from individual clusters to a more fluid, collective typology, positioning parts of the city as well as distant places and international collaborations within a relational network of creative activity. Property Market Displacements and ‘Clusters of Last Resort’ Meanwhile, the urban creative clusters literature has not accounted adequately for pressures associated with financialized, global real estate investment processes and accompanying reconfigurations in metropolitan governance. Beneath positive accounts of cluster effects are more fraught experiences of declining affordable space in cities experiencing population growth and inward flows of global property market investment (Curran, 2010). The increasingly common outcome is displacement of micro-enterprises and evaporating policy support for older and/or subsidized space, in the face of large, lucrative and speculative high-rise residential apartment developments (Catungal et al., 2009; Curran, 2007; Ferm, 2016; Gibson et al., 2017). Operating at scales beyond the urban cluster itself, global real estate investment processes, with their voracious appetite for land and rent accumulation possibilities, introduce volatility to the urban landscape (Anderson, 2014). Following waves of subsequent large-scale residential redevelopment, new combinations of clustering and displacement tendencies are unleashed that affect cluster formation and durability. Disruptive tendencies have been especially common within high-status cities that are frequently luxury consumption-orientated tourist destinations, but also key targets for globally-circulating capital seeking reliable returns from major real estate investments, such as Auckland, Chicago, London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and Vancouver (see Curran, 2007; Ferm, 2016; Gibson et al., 2017). These are cities in which locational alternatives for small firms seeking low-cost space are also fast evaporating. Our recent experience documenting enterprise activity in a key inner-city precinct of Sydney, Australia (Gibson et al., 2017) illustrates the critical importance of acknowledging the underlying spatial dynamics of urban land, rent and property speculation, and their impact on cluster formation and durability. Qualitative

Figure 6.1

Australian creative workplace topologies at two scales (city and state/territory)

Note: Sourced from interviews with Darwin creative industry workers who discussed multiple workplaces within the city, the suburbs and beyond into the sparsely-populated Northern Territory. Source: Brennan-Horley (2010).

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Beyond the ‘buzz’: locating critical geographies of creativity  101 mapping, interviewing and site visits in the Carrington Road precinct, in Marrickville (a gentrifying district with an ethnic mix, industrial history and more recent hipster reinvention, akin to Brooklyn in New York City), revealed benefits from co-location, supporting many of the findings of the extant literature on urban clustering. A single streetscape precinct of early-to-mid twentieth century factories hosts over 150 enterprises and more than a thousand jobs, plus observed interdependencies among design, photography, theatre, set design, film and TV sectors. This is, on the surface at least, the archetypal creative cluster. Yet, as empirical work ensued, it became clear that there was another layer to the story of this precinct: as enterprises revealed locational biographies of displacement and eviction from other suitably zoned precincts elsewhere in the city – precincts that had been rezoned, upscaled and/or converted for commercial, retail and/or residential land uses (Figure 6.2). Carrington Road has now become one of the last, and arguably most significant, creative industry clusters remaining in Sydney. In a tragic irony, as empirical work in this precinct unfurled, details emerged that this ‘cluster of last resort’ was itself now subject to a rezoning proposal for extensive high-rise apartment development. Theorization of the locational dynamics underpinning urban clusters must therefore seek to contextualize agglomeration dynamics materially within not just the plural, relational networks of work and mobility, but also the ‘messy’ material politics of urban land rent, city zoning, real estate development and global speculative investment capital.

INVERTING HIERARCHIES: VIEWS FROM THE SOUTH If, as just established, geographical conceptions of creativity must move beyond metaphors of the singular cluster and its much-vaunted ‘buzz’, to acknowledge wider forces of political economy, mobility and connection, what happens if matters are taken a step further: to invert hierarchies of creative geographies that position northern hemisphere urban clusters as the universal exemplar against which all others are measured? A parallel exists here with recent debates in urban studies regarding theories of global cities. Postcolonial and feminist scholars have critiqued how dominant understandings of urban processes have been scripted from the North Atlantic (Robinson and Roy, 2016). A select cadre of highly cited authors – with rare exception older, white males – have dominated urban theory, assuming a universality of insights drawn from cities such as Los Angeles, London or New York. The net effect is a corpus of urban theory blind to Eurocentrism and the implicit hierarchy of innovation that posits such places as centres from which innovations filter to elsewhere. The growing postcolonial critique in urban studies invites scholars to follow Chakrabarty’s (2000) call to ‘provincialize Europe’ – revealing purportedly ‘global’ theory as contingent and emanating from coordinates of place and culture. In the spirit of such critique, moving beyond the assumed universality of metaphors of creative clusters within major (western) cities thence opens possibilities to invert hierarchies, to unveil colonial power, to theorize creativity from the South.

Displacement and tactical retreat of creative workers to Carrington Road Precinct, Sydney, 2018

Adapted from interviews in Gibson et al. (2017).

Figure 6.2

Source:

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Beyond the ‘buzz’: locating critical geographies of creativity  103 Most immediately, the focus shifts to developing countries (De Beukelaer and Spence, 2019), while also drawing on ‘fourth world’ contexts – indigenous communities within settler-colonial countries, which are frequently places of extreme socio-economic disadvantage. Challenges to dominant, neoliberal conceptions of creativity emerge from countries, cities and regions of varying size, and from some of the most remote parts of the world, including locations where colonial legacies are strong and which deeply influence cultural activities, including those in the creative industries. Geographies of creativity in such contexts ‘cannot be understood as simply a postscript to the urban transformations of the North Atlantic’ (Robinson and Roy, 2016: 181). Policy framings, and meanings of ‘success’ for creative industries in the developing world, ought not be a mere mirror image of those in the West (De Beukelaer and Spence, 2019). International benchmarks and comparisons (creativity indexes and so forth) typically overlook or downcast the developing world. Issues commonly discussed as afflicting creative industries development in majority world contexts include obstacles to development, lack of capital, entrepreneurial skills or infrastructure (Barrowclough and Kozul-Wright, 2008). But in light of postcolonial critique, care must be taken in assuming that poor international competitive performance in the developing world is due to problems within the developing world. The danger is in always assuming that developing countries are behind the West or are lacking in key cultural or governmental qualities that deliver success. Such discussions run the risk of masking the operation of power and the centripetal forces at work in the private sector, which are among the root causes of disparity in the creative economy, as in the wider economy. Emphasizing problems with the structure and character of developing world creative economies also produces sets of ideas that cast them as underdeveloped or backward – inflaming the deep sense of colonial injustice felt already in such countries (De Beukelaer, 2012). Such a view mistakes creativity within the West as a starting point for analysis, rather than as a necessarily provincial perspective. It is all too easy then to frame creativity outside the West as a poor facsimile of Western forms of expression. Contingent Creativities A more pluralistic, decentred view considers the contours of the creative economy outside the limited number of concentrated world centres, open to contingency and path-dependency (Bontje and Musterd, 2009). The formation and character of industries varies considerably, structurally and geographically, in ways that are not always predictable or commensurable. Chinese clusters, for example, bear some resemblance to western counterparts, but only to a point (He and Huang, 2018; O’Connor and Gu, 2014). The gigantic Indian film industry provides another prominent comparison. Mukherjee (2008: 176) argues that: ‘Unlike the global film industry which has an oligopolistic structure, the Indian film industry is informal, highly fragmented and characterized by investment forms of proprietorship and partnership’. That it does not mirror the Western film industry reflects contingent structural, cultural and geographic conditions. Kong et al. (2006: 174) argued that the Asian creative economy

104  Handbook on the geographies of creativity was characterized by a mosaic of urban and national scenes, the ‘rise in production and consumption of Asian cultural products, evidenced in the emergence and size of creative industries such as Bollywood, the Hong Kong and Korean film industries, Cantopop and Mandarin pop, Japanese manga and anime productions, the animation and digital media industry’. Far from homogenous or unified, ‘rivalries between states, linguistic connections and differences and the geopolitical relationships forged with and between powerhouses like China and Japan all inflect flows of investments and ideas’. In China, the question of how to promote cultural and creative industries is fraught by a long-held concern between cherishing traditional culture and the modernization agenda, including the Chinese relationship with the West – overlain with problems of rural–urban inequalities and tensions between strong central-state control of the economy and the idea, implicit in the cultural sectors, of individual artistic and political expression (O’Connor and Gu, 2006). As a consequence, opportunities emerge to ‘write back’ theories of creative geographies to the West, learning from contexts such as India and China (Kong and Qian, 2017). Critical policy studies of creative industries across Asian cities is revealing how urban spaces ‘become carefully rearranged settings through certain procedural, institutional, and technical mechanisms implemented by various discursive and material practices of policy actors’ (Kim, 2017: 312). Conceptions of creative economy are circulated via academic and policy-making ‘scenes’ made up of people, ideas, technologies and events, and are mediated by national, urban and regional conditions, languages and cultures, and extant political landscapes (Kong et al., 2006; Taylor, 2015). Examining pathways, conduits and intermediaries enables identification of cracks and inconsistencies in the policy landscape – all prerequisite to reconfiguring renderings of creativity and their links to geographical context. Related to this is the importance of understanding the creative economy not as a western product subsequently exported to the developing world, but as an amalgam of enterprise activities, policies and actors endogenously generated (and contested) in diverse ways in diverse contexts, thence hybridizing local and global cultural forms and expressions (De Beukelaer and Spence, 2019). The kind of thinking that assumes that the creative economy is an export product of the Western world similarly falls prey to casting the developing world as ‘behind’ or ‘less than’ an imagined centre. Leadbeater and Oakley’s (1999: 14) argument is that with local know-how and skill, places can negotiate their marginal position in relation to global cultural and economic flows, and ‘sell into much larger markets but rely upon a distinctive and defensible local base’. Earlier experiences in the music industry demonstrated how this might be possible: the example of world music demonstrates how remoteness can be woven into claims for the exotic – hence distinctiveness and quirkiness (said to be a product of isolation) are potent signifiers marketed globally (Connell and Gibson, 2004). Alongside Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the City of London and Le Sentier in Paris, Allen Scott (2006: 14) cites ‘the burgeoning craft industries of South China, the advanced electronics and software complexes of Beijing and Bangalore, or the telenovela production clusters in Bogotá, Caracas, Mexico City, and São Paulo’. Dynamics generative of creative milieu are not exclusive to key world centres and,

Beyond the ‘buzz’: locating critical geographies of creativity  105 indeed, the history of creative industries is littered with examples of global flows of new material, products or expressions from diverse global places – in music alone, for instance, flamenco, bhangra, fado, gamelan, juju, qawwali, reggae, rai, salsa, samba, tango and zouk (Connell and Gibson, 2003). It is simply wrong to think of the creative economy as a singular entity that concentrates in a select list of ‘hip’ cities, that dictate fashions, to flow outwards in some kind of predictable manner everywhere else. Negotiating Creativity on the Periphery In other contexts, the means to negotiate marginality are not nearly so simple. While remoteness can indeed be considered a delight, bringing solitude and freedom from metropolitan whims and fashions (Andersen, 2010; Gibson et al., 2010), people living and working in remote, rural and small places manage and contest their geographical position or perceived marginality on a daily basis. The pleasures of isolation do not always reconcile with the limitations of distance. Warren and Evitt (2010) explored how, for indigenous hip-hop musicians in the Torres Strait Islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea, new telecommunications and recording technologies have helped counteract difficulties of being remote from key creative centres. Music is recorded using free software, often on communally provided computer equipment, and tracks are uploaded onto Soundcloud and YouTube for distribution. Hundreds of thousands of ‘hits’ online attest to the ability of hip-hop musicians from remote islands to find wider audiences. And yet, distance in combination with cultural norms about what constitutes ‘authentic’ indigenous creative expression continues to circumscribe paid performance opportunities. Indigenous hip-hop musicians rely on gigs at national indigenous festivals and at events celebrating indigenous culture – but fail to secure slots on ‘mainstream’ festival line-ups. For one hip-hop group, the only paid gigs were those where raps and rhymes were replaced by loin cloths, didjeridus and ‘traditional’ Aboriginal dancing. In a sense, then, remoteness can be less a physical geographical – and more an imaginary or discursive – condition. Within and beyond the west, postcolonial, feminist and poststructuralist analyses reveal other forms and expressions, notably shaped by non-market values and norms. Neoliberal creativity discourse is, in short, a ‘now highly problematic agenda for the contemporary city’ (O’Connor and Shaw, 2014: 165). From alternative perspectives, creativity is a field of choices and responsibilities, rather than a structural vision of economic determination. Creativity is more than a growth terrain of the urban economy, but a wider set of ideas and actions – an outcome of a particular knowledge practice that is social, performative, and political. In this vein, Waitt and Gibson (2013) conducted a detailed ethnography of a feminist cooperative arts space in rural Australia, established by a group of five women in the 1990s. That arts space was inserted in both the formal market economy, through paying rent, and in alternative economic formations, through promoting activities outside capitalist market transactions. Examples of non-market values included the voluntary labour of ‘sitters’ who opened the space six days a week; participation in a Local Exchange Trading System

106  Handbook on the geographies of creativity that fostered degrees of interdependency locally; and ‘openings’ that foster engagement with artistic creativity rather than profit maximization. In such contexts an arts space does much more than showcase creativity in the hope of generating commercial opportunities – it operates as a space to facilitate and legitimize the subjectivities of women and men as artists, to socialize, to form new community networks, and to generate a sense of ‘belonging’ based on reciprocal relationships of care. Community music provides another often-overlooked example. In rural and remote locations with small, dispersed populations, music may struggle to be a commercially viable industry. In a vernacular sense, it nevertheless takes different forms: in diverse community music enterprises, including non-profit clubs, orchestras, ensembles, choirs and festivals. In another rural Australian study (Gibson and Gordon, 2018), community music enterprises sustained engaged music participation despite challenges of isolation and lack of critical mass, and enabled people to adjust to change and develop social networks. In so doing, community music contributed to an evolving, prosaic sense of rural cultural resourcefulness. Geographic and socio-economic limitations triggered those with an insatiable desire to make and perform music to create their own opportunities through grassroots initiatives. Rural musicians negotiate isolation, distance, and new circumstances, and foster alternative spaces for creativity. Resourceful creativities – focused on process and everyday rewards rather than commercial successes – illustrate how rural people sustain cultural life amidst hardship, isolation and change. Such examples invite broader conceptions of creativity in future geographical work, beyond an overly narrow neoliberal economic frame.

CONCLUSIONS Geographical metaphors abound in writing and thinking about creativity, yet all too often they are limited and partial. While prominent ‘creative’ (western) cities, urban clusters and associated ‘buzz’ have hogged the limelight, there are other geographies at work. These geographies connect clusters to centrifugal forces of trade, colonialism, geopolitics and mobile capital that in turn shape the broader landscape of uneven development upon which putative urban clusters emerge. Clusters cannot be easily invented or lured into existence in the face of longer-run inheritances. Meanwhile more complex geographies that evade linear explanations underpin the contemporary experience of creative work. As well as agglomerative tendencies, historical path-dependent and centrifugal geographic factors shape the conditions of possibility for hopeful policy moves. Understanding both the deeper histories and extralocal geographies that situate creative industries is therefore necessary to avoid aggrandizing the true significance of the urban innovation cluster. Acknowledging such complexities does not mean disavowing dominant political economic structures, processes and power relations. Forces of concentration undoubtedly continue. Moreover, geographical theories of creativity need to incorporate questions of urban land, zoning and displacement dynamics unleashed by property and real estate speculation. Urban cluster theory and accompanying planning

Beyond the ‘buzz’: locating critical geographies of creativity  107 policies must now confront the impacts of gentrification, financialized real estate development on available creative spaces and the evolving cluster formations that depend upon it. Rather, our goal here has been to encourage diversified, and more critical, spatial metaphors for creativity: looking beyond the quick policy fix to develop a more iterative, dialectical view of geographical space as constituted through centripetal and centrifugal forces; to view production as co-constituted with social reproduction (encompassing creativity’s social and cultural values); acknowledging that creativity is a means to surplus value but also a deeply personal, emotional state of becoming. Limiting creative industries discourse to its potential to promote economic development through local cluster effects waters down the original intent among cultural policy advocates of embracing creativity. The fixation with ‘buzz’ has, arguably, evolved to this point, where it loses cultural meaning and merely becomes ‘old wine in a new bottle’, as Graeme Evans (2009: 1010) has put it: a business-as-usual co-option of culture for existing interests, while missing opportunities to enhance dialogue, debate and, ultimately, new forms of development for marginalized people. The key is to understand creative geographies not as a singular or unified logic, to be imported wholesale across the world, but rather as an invitation to rethink what creativity might mean, tangibly, in the everyday lives of people in diverse circumstances. As Allen Scott (2006: 14) argued: ‘any push to achieve urban creativity in the absence of a wider concern for the conviviality and camaraderie . . . in the urban community as a whole is doomed to remain radically unfinished . . . It also involves basic issues of citizenship and democracy, and the full incorporation of all social strata into the active life of the city’. Inverting hierarchies of creativity that position centres of innovation in major North Atlantic cities, radiating outwards, thus extends and diversifies political-economic theories of clusters, towards expanded interpretations. In diverse contexts, creativity equates with youth culture, radical protest, indigenous expression and seldom-acknowledged cultural capacities to adapt to and cope with vulnerability and challenging circumstances. Conditions of isolation, risk of commercial failure and economic hardship are catalysts for bringing people together to experiment with different ways to sustain cultural participation, in turn inspiring personal and community growth. The cultural sphere here remains key: creativity is more than mere means to an income, but a source of human flourishing, emotional sustenance, pleasure and release that people find ways to support in all kinds of places, even those least likely to grab the attention of urban researchers and economic policy-makers.

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110  Handbook on the geographies of creativity O’Connor, J. and X. Gu (2014), ‘Creative industry clusters in Shanghai: a success story?’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 20 (1), 1–20. O’Connor, J. and K. Shaw (2014), ‘What next for the creative city?’, City, Culture and Society, 5 (3), 165–70. Richards, G. (2015), ‘The new global nomads: youth travel in a globalizing world’, Tourism Recreation Research, 40 (3), 340–52. Richardson, L. (2017), ‘Sharing as a postmark style: digital work and the co-working office’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 10 (2), 297–310. Robinson, J. and A. Roy (2016), ‘Debate on global urbanisms and the nature of urban theory’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40 (1), 181–6. Scott, A.J. (2006), ‘Creative cities: conceptual issues and policy questions’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 28 (1), 1–17. Scott, A.J. and N. Pope (2007), ‘Hollywood, Vancouver, and the world: employment relocation and the emergence of satellite production centers in the motion-picture industry’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 39 (6), 1364–81. Scott, A.J. and M. Storper (2015), ‘The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (1), 1–15. Shearmur, R. (2012), ‘Are cities the font of innovation? A critical review of the literature on cities and innovation’, Cities, 29, S9–18. Shearmur, R. (2015), ‘Far from the madding crowd: slow innovators, information value, and the geography of innovation’, Growth and Change, 46 (3), 424–42. Storper, M. (1995), ‘The resurgence of regional economies, ten years later: the region as a nexus of untraded interdependencies’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 2 (3), 191–221. Storper, M. and A. Venables (2004), ‘Buzz: face-to-face contact and the urban economy’, Journal of Economic Geography, 4 (4), 351–70. Taylor, C. (2015), ‘Between culture, policy and industry: modalities of intermediation in the creative economy’, Regional Studies, 49 (3), 362–73. Waitt, G. and C. Gibson (2013), ‘The Spiral Gallery: nonmarket creativity and belonging in an Australian country town’, Journal of Rural Studies, 30, 75–85. Warren, A. and R. Evitt (2010), ‘Indigenous hip-hop: overcoming marginality, encountering constraints’, Australian Geographer, 41 (1), 141–58. Yeung, H.W.C. and N. Coe (2015), ‘Toward a dynamic theory of global production networks’, Economic Geography, 91 (1), 29–58.

7. The role of arts and culture in resilient cities: creativity and placemaking Audrey Yue

INTRODUCTION In recent years, the discourse of sustainability has started to be replaced by the discourse of resilience, a shift prompted by the impact of the Anthropocene. The resilience discourse has also received support in global smart and creative city initiatives, with the City of Melbourne (2016) nominated as Australia’s exemplary Resilient City in 2016 as part of the 100 Resilient Cities project pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation. The City of Melbourne inaugurated this award by initiating an arts event, REFUGE, which was promoted as Australia’s first collaborative interdisciplinary investigation into the arts and culture in preparedness, specifically looking at the role of an urban cultural centre as a physical place of refuge. Developed by a local arts agency, Arts House, based in the inner-city suburb of North Melbourne, the REFUGE event saw its curatorial space transformed into an Emergency Relief Centre through a disaster simulation model, over a 24-hour period – led by artists and open to the public. The event enabled artists and disaster management professionals to work with local, regional and international communities to devise responses to climactic disaster scenarios through commissioning and developing work that is contemporary, experimental and participatory. Using the REFUGE event as a case study, and through short-term focused ethnography and stakeholder interviews, this paper critically examines the role of the arts and culture in communicating urban resilience, and how arts participation can foster placemaking. Placemaking, as a process of enhancing place-based belonging through arts and cultural activities, is an important indicator of urban resilience. Where urban resilience is the ability of a city to adapt to environmental, social, economic and cultural changes while retaining its identity, structure and key processes (Leichenko, 2011), placemaking activities such as arts programming and cultural participation respond to these changes by increasing a city’s capacity for mitigation and strengthening its communities. While urban resilience is arguably the most important outcome of contemporary placemaking, there are currently no studies that have critically connected this interlocking relationship between the arts, placemaking and urban resilience. The arts and culture are rarely addressed in the policy and programming contexts of urban resilience. When included, resilience is usually framed through negative and defensive connotations. This resilience-as-deficient positioning is reflective of the literature on resilience at large, which is predominantly reactionary and associated with normative notions of vulnerability. Similarly, 111

112  Handbook on the geographies of creativity the role of social or cultural resilience tends to be discussed in the literature context of an after- or end-point; that is post-shock recovery stages. This paper departs from this resilience-as-deficient model by proposing a resilience-as-dividend model to examine resilience as creative, and evident in the aesthetic and social dimensions of urban resilience, which remains under-explored in studies on cultural policy and creative industries.

FRAMING RESILIENCE-AS-DIVIDEND IN THE CITY Urban resilience situates resilience within the city or the urban system. It is defined as ‘the ability of an urban system [sic] to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems [for] future adaptive capacity’ (Meerow et al., 2016: 45). Normative definitions of resilience promote the trait-orientation of ‘vulnerability’ (resilient-as-deficient) and adopt a hegemonic discourse of emergency preparedness. This understanding has genealogies in engineering resilience (Folke, 2006; Holling, 1996) and social resilience studies (Adger, 2000; Adger et al., 2005; Keck and Sakdapolrak, 2013; Welsh 2014). This chapter departs from these approaches that discuss resilience through vulnerability by drawing on social-ecological-evolutionary studies to develop resilience as a dividend. A dividend is a yield or bonus derived from an existing action or policy and distributed across its constituency. Resilience-as-dividend refers to qualities of benefit that arise from the flexible and creative ability to persist and adapt through change. It updates common ‘emergency’ understandings of resilience (vulnerability and lack), to focus on ‘emergent’ qualities of advantage that arise from the flexible and creative ability of individuals, groups, communities and systems to persist and transform through change (Caputo et al., 2015; Walker and Salt, 2006). Where emergency adaptation is short-term focused, and refers to highly specialized and specific skills, emergent adaptability is long-term focused, and refers to general flexibility and inherent capacities created through the continuing relationship between individuals and the environment. Rather than fetishizing vulnerability, resilience-as-dividend draws on the change mechanism in the ecological resilient system that incorporates adaptation and learning (Folke, 2006). These capacities underpin two central themes to frame the city as a complex adaptive system. The first is the threshold as the point where, if the system changes too much and begins to behave in a different way with different feedback that changes the component part and structure, it is said to have undergone a regime shift; the second is how the adaptive cycle – the different phases of growth, conservation, release and reorganization where the system moves through – is also structured across many temporalities and scales (Walker and Salt, 2006). These themes highlight the complexity of systems that are continually adapting through cycles of change. Resilience-as-dividend builds on these themes to demonstrate resilient capacities as creative (rather than reactive) in ways they open up new practices and spaces of change.

The role of arts and culture in resilient cities  113 These theorizations inform the concept of the resilient city which is defined as ‘a sustainable network of physical systems and human communities’, ‘capable of withstanding severe shock without either immediate chaos or permanent harm’ (Godschalk, 2003: 136–7). This concept introduces a ‘place-based perspective to resilience [that] helps understand the capacity of communities to withstand and adapt with change’ (Mehmood, 2016: 407). Implicit here is the robustness of the city and its communities, its capacity for mitigation and adaptation, and the timescale of change. This agenda arose prominently around 2010 when the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction initiated the ‘Making Cities Resilient Campaign’ (UNISDR, 2012) and has since inspired governments over the world to also initiate their own resilient strategic plans. Significant here is an understanding of the city as a contested and multi-scalar set of systems and networks. Given that the city is complex and dynamic, it also necessarily operates in a non-equilibrium state. While a critical feature of the resilient city is the speed of its action and recovery, speed too must also include not just the rapidity of its return but also its long-term adaptation to a new operational state. Rather than reactionary or conventional emergency planning, resilience-as-dividend draws from this ecological approach that adopts a long-term view of urban development where adaptation is better understood in evolutionary terms (Caputo et al., 2015) and expressed through creative capacities such as learning (preparedness), robustness (persistence), innovation (transformability) and flexibility (adaptability) (Davoudi et al., 2013). These competencies are evident in how the benefits of arts and culture support the resilient city.

THE RESILIENT CITY: ARTS, CULTURE AND PLACEMAKING Culture, as ‘the poster child of resilience’ (Pratt, 2017: 127), plays a significant role in further unravelling the politics and practice of resilience-as-dividend. Discussing how the arts in the UK have thrived and survived under economic austerity and neoliberalism’s new public management, Pratt (2017) highlights resilience as a socially engaged and change-focused relational strategy located in composition of the cultural sector, the context of its change economy, and the character of its new connections forged. He shows the continued proliferation of arts and culture not through the presence of normative large agencies or corporations, but a large and dispersed network of small-scale enterprises and the self-employed. Stressing how these organizations and individuals have always been adaptive and transformative in ways they continually reorganize their practices and the sector due to the serial nature of their project contracts, and their innovative ways of seeking funding, he argues that the cultural sector is ‘born resilient’ rather than has embraced the governance of resilience (ibid.: 136). He proposes that as a relational strategy, resilience is better understood as a network rather than hierarchy, and operates horizontally rather than vertically. Significant here is the de-coupling of resilience from neoliberalism and austerity, and

114  Handbook on the geographies of creativity the governance of culture from the state, where new connections are forged by actors across decentralized and rhizomatic informal circuits. His resilience-as-strategy demonstrates how benefits derived from resilience can be used to re-position the state’s role from patronage (for example, arts subsidy and grant allocation) to facilitator (for example, long-term training and capacity building). Central to his thesis is how the resilience of the cultural economy is anchored in the locale of place. As Pratt (2015) has earlier identified, the most meaningful approach to the resilience strategy is one that acknowledges the situated nature of social, economic and cultural activities and the way they are inscribed in local embedding. Against this treatise, it is not surprising that place and placemaking have emerged as key analytical sites in current emerging scholarship on the practice of resilience in the arts and culture. The first and most dominant cluster comes from studies on artistic practice and falls under the social transformation of the arts theoretical rubric. They examine arts-based initiatives from the framework of participatory arts and community development, especially as post-disaster art therapy and its impact on postcolonial community building (Hjorth et al., 2016; LeBaron and Cohen, 2013; Philips et al., 2016; Puleo, 2014; Siapno, 2012). These studies demonstrate two ways resilience-as-dividend is practiced through place and placemaking: first, engaging the geographical specificity of location; and second, producing place through local embeddedness such as creating belonging via increased social capital and empowering communities via postcolonial embodiments. The second cluster focuses on cultural venues as geographical sites of cultural emplacement and identity formation (Rhodes and Schechter, 2014; Sarra and Berman, 2014), and highlights the resilience-dividend through the situated flexibility of small-scale and community-driven arts in introducing new modes of organizing culture and nurturing community engagement. The third cluster focuses on the career development of artists and their spatial strategies of resilience (Ibert and Schmidt, 2014; Kong, 2012; Pasquinelli and Sjöholm, 2015), and highlights the spatial dimension of adaptation and adaptability by showing how artists create relational spaces throughout their careers by relying on official and unofficial structures of social networks and institutions that challenge the normative connotations of career preservation and valuation. Overall, these studies on the practice of resilience in arts and culture depart from the discourse of vulnerability and the neoliberal hegemony of preparedness. They demonstrate resilience-as-dividend through creating new urban practices that support place and placemaking, such as enhancing identity, social capital and belonging through local embedding and postcolonial embodiment, and extending spatial relations and networks that are often decentralized, informal and unofficial. They challenge norms of systems equilibrium with disjunctive temporalities (combining present, past and future) and multiple spatialities (micro, macro and relational). These practices are further situated in the specificity of the city as an urban locale that is open, interconnected, trans-local and material. However, while they inform the social impact of the arts including formations of social and community resilience, they do not focus on the representational (artistic) aesthetics of resilience. This feature is important to further understand how representation is also central to new

The role of arts and culture in resilient cities  115 imaginations that can further anchor place and placemaking through their consequent embodiments and materialities. The following critically addresses this gap and also examines these features of urban resilience using an arts event initiated by the Rockfeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities programme.

THE 100 RC PROGRAMME AND REFUGE EVENT In 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation introduced the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) programme aimed at assisting cities around the world become more resilient (Rockefeller Foundation, 2018). It introduced a City Resilience Framework to evaluate a city’s resilient qualities under its four categories of the health and wellbeing of individuals (people); urban systems and services (place); economy and society (organization); and leadership and strategy (knowledge) (Arup International Development, 2015). Currently, there has been only one short study that has discussed this extensive programme. It compares Rotterdam’s resilience planning before and after the implementation of the 100RC (Spaans and Waterhout, 2017). Surveying the city’s infrastructure, governance and institutions, and without considering the arts and culture, it observes that the city’s planning strategies tend to follow the dominant discourses of preparedness and engineering resilience, and proposes a more sustainable strategy that allows for a more organic and evolutionary change. The case study below extends this by focusing on how the City of Melbourne in Australia has responded to this initiative with a seminal arts event, REFUGE.1 To initiate the 100RC, the City of Melbourne (2016) released its first Resilience Strategy in May 2016. While the Strategy foregrounds the role of systems and communities in fostering resilience, there is little focus on culture and the arts. The arts is not present in any of the city’s emergency services preparation guidelines but briefly mentioned in documents about post-emergency community rebuilding. Where culture is mentioned, it is linked to at-risk populations. The REFUGE event (hereafter REFUGE) attempts to respond to this lack. As earlier discussed, arts has the potential to communicate preparedness and risk recovery in new ways that are open-ended and enable mutual learning and creativity, for example, by allowing people to visualize the post-disaster environment; introducing them to options available to them in a disaster; and creating a space for them to reflect on their own attitudes and behaviours. Held on 8–9 July 2016, REFUGE was commissioned by Arts House, a core programme in the City of Melbourne and a centre for contemporary arts and community cultural performance, located just outside the central business district in North Melbourne. Curated by director Angharad Wynne-Jones, it focuses on the role of the urban cultural centre as a physical place of refuge by simulating a flood disaster and turning the North Melbourne Town Hall (where Arts House is located) into an Emergency Relief Centre for 24 hours. The event includes the participation of emergency relief agencies, such as State Emergency Services, Red Cross, St John’s Ambulance Services and others beyond ‘the usual stakeholders’, for example, SEED

116  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Mob (the country’s first indigenous youth climate change network), indigenous leaders, scouts and the local migrant Chinese association. Six artists were commissioned, and each given a particular theme or aspect of the event to develop and manage: Hannah Donnelly (sleep); Latai Taumoepeau (energy); Kate Sulan (wellbeing); Shan Lung Lee (wayfaring); Jen Rae (food), and Dawn Weleski (food). About 30 stakeholder, community and business organizations participated and 700 people attended the event, with two-thirds coming from nearby neighbourhoods (such as Kensington, Flemington and Brunswick). REFUGE challenges the hegemonic discourse of preparedness by first developing the event using a ‘playing in the dark’ action-based conceptual model. Rather than simulating a standardized service-oriented exercise, it incorporates experimental arts into the built environment to create an anti-disciplinary method that resists the urge to tell a singular resilience narrative. This is evident in its development that began with a series of laboratory sessions over six months prior to the event with stakeholder groups, artists, production staff, volunteers and researchers, during which each learnt from the other about creative practice, climate change and disaster management. This method led to collaborative learning, in particular, for the artists who first drafted and continually revised their creative ideas during the process, which enable them to shape their artistic designs thus: the arts is not simply illustrative, but needs to also transmit culture and embed place; the practice and method also need to embody calmness; the process has to be transformative in terms of aesthetic representation and social impact. As artist Donnelly (2016) notes: My favourite thing about the project was actually learning more about the reality of … emergency relief centres and being able to do that in an artistic context which I never thought would be possible. My favourite … is the word preparedness and how I understand that differently now.

Other key stakeholders, notably emergency services and government planners, also learnt new modes of communicating with their constituents about resilience and disaster management by working with artists. As Emergency Management Victoria (2016) concurs, ‘REFUGE has pushed the norm of what we call emergency management preparedness and I think it’s amazing to do that and to start thinking about it in a different way’. Neighbourhood business groups such as Baker’s Delight also became acquainted with the role of Arts House in servicing the suburb. On the day of the event itself, the production team first begins to transform the urban art gallery into an emergency relief centre by placing props outside the building to simulate the spectacle of emergency management and draw people into the venue. Ambulance and other emergency vehicles are parked along the footpath at the entrance and bright signage is used that reads ‘EXERCISE IN PROGRESS’. This spectacle includes a performative element with front-of-house volunteers greeting participants at the door in hi-viz vests, holding clipboards, similar to the Red Cross staff and paramedics who are also mingling around in uniform. To mimic the range of emotions experienced during a disaster (for example, confusion, shock, calm, con-

The role of arts and culture in resilient cities  117 templation), the production staff organize the gallery, which consists of various-sized rooms over two floors, with different spatial flows. For example, the ground floor is always abuzz with activity for most of the day: people are seen queueing in the Red Cross registration line, collecting information packs from emergency services desks, chatting in groups, participating in the interactive artworks, or standing back and watching everything take place. The atmosphere allows one to experience what it feels like to be in a real emergency relief centre. This affective experience is particularly stark at the entrance foyer which is always in the process of being ‘set up’. Chaos and confusion confront people entering the building for the first time. Contrasting spatial flows of activity throughout the venue continue to elicit different moods. For example, the ground floor’s pandemonium is counter-balanced with serenity on the first-floor outdoor terrace where the fire circle is located. Conversations, stories and even songs surround the fire circle during the 24 hours to create a space for respite. Where on the ground floor people can listen to a montage of ‘news’ about flooding in North Melbourne and gain information from emergency management staff, on the terrace they can take the time to reflect on the information received. These spaces allow participants to imagine a disaster response in highly active and quiet deliberative ways. Rather than just confront the singular option of risk, participants are given more open-ended narrative pathways to reflect and embody. Across this planning and production process, resilience-as-dividend is evident through such spatialized creative aesthetics where arts is mixed with pedagogy to enhance individual empowerment through local knowledge. Social and cultural capitals are also accrued with the collaboration between the artists and normative emergency management stakeholders. This spectacle of emergency management foregrounds the performativity of the resilient threshold (Walker and Salt, 2006) as the tipping point where new regimes are formed as a result of how feedback has altered the structure and state of the original. As simulation relies on repetition and transformation, the event serves to deconstruct the hegemonic and singular discourse of emergency relief and demonstrates how resilience is also a creative process of opening up new pathways of transformation. Rather than repeat the norms of systems equilibrium, the following analyses how its iteration exposes horizontal vectors of the everyday, mundane and vernacular that support alternative understandings of preparedness. It first critically summarizes the artworks, and then discusses them through aesthetic and social resilience. Aesthetic resilience refers to how the artwork’s form and style communicate urban resilience; social resilience refers to how arts participation creates sociality through interactivity that embeds place through urban knowledge. As exemplary features of resilience-as-dividend, these modes challenge normative connotations of resilience that attend place, people and systems as closed, vulnerable and at-risk, by opening flexible pathways of creativity and empowerment derived from new stylistic and social forms.

118  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Artists and Artworks Shan Lung Lee’s contribution, entitled Wayfinding and Communications, consists of four installations scattered throughout the hall. The first, Information Flood, is an interactive audio installation set up above the back entrance of the hall. It is activated by people moving through it. Sensing movement, it sets off a sound or series of sounds, which in turn encourages people to stop, walk back and further explore the installation. The second, Exodus, is a digital board game repurposed for REFUGE. People play three rounds at a time, and adapt their play strategy each time in an effort to win or solve the game. The third, Air, is constructed in the tower of the building. Lee installs a string from wall-to-wall of the room, starting a little over head-height and going up towards the ceiling. Participants are encouraged to think of someone special to them from their community and write a message to them on a piece of red or yellow ribbon. The ribbons are then tied to a piece of string in an area of one’s own choosing. The final work, Fire, is an iPad placed on top of a small mound of sticks, designed to resemble a small fire hearth. Approximately 100 interactions are recorded on Information Flood and 30 installations are hung from Air. Latai Taumoepeau’s Human Generator 57 is installed in the main hall and relies on active participation from audience members. It consists of a ‘track’ with lanes, similar to a running track, in the shape of a spiral. Directions and instructions for completing the track are set up at different stages – the first at the top of the spiral, where participants first enter or begin the track. Prior to starting the track, people register their names and times of entry at a sign-up desk by the track, and are given hi-viz vests. Over the course of the track, people are instructed to do a range of tasks designed to produce energy, for example, walk five laps while holding two calico shopping bags full of potatoes or run ten laps. A full cycle of the track takes up to an hour or more to complete and Taumoepeau calculates approximately how much energy in kilowatts will be expended at full completion. This is then recorded by the registration desks volunteers upon exit. About 90 human generators are recorded. Dawn Weleski and Jen Rae’s Fair Share Fare draws attention to food distribution and regulation during crisis and conflicts. It consists of two segments. The first segment is a cooking demonstration of a rabbit stew. The artist performs as the chef, assisted by a volunteer who also performs as the wait staff. Simulated like a cooking show, this segment begins with the artist-chef introducing the rabbit as a food source, cooking the stew and then inviting audiences to share in the lunch. The second segment enacts a food distribution and rationing system. Participants are asked to collect food for the flood simulation ‘refugees’ spending the night at mock-up Relief Centre. Participants are given a shopping list and asked to forage for food. They contribute by donating produce (from their bags or backpacks) or purchasing items from the supermarket nearby, for which they will then be reimbursed. The food collected is then stored and distributed to the sleepover participants (who enact the role of flood refugees) for dinner and breakfast the next day. Before dinner, the refugee-participants collect a ration box each, containing ration cards reflecting the items from the day’s food drive.

The role of arts and culture in resilient cities  119 The sleepover segment is conducted in collaboration with artist and writer Hannah Donnelly who curated Dungin consisting of the indigenous country check-in, writing reflection, the fire circle, Fair Share Fare’s food distribution and accommodation. Donnelly facilitates this exercise by sharing her Aboriginal experience of sovereignty and what it means to sleep on unceded land even in a time of crisis, and its connection to country and history of dispossession. Nest, curated by Kate Sulan, invites children to build cubby houses using cardboard boxes, blankets and clips, or make themselves ‘at home’ in prebuilt cubby houses. In the prebuilt cubby houses, Sulan programmes music to inspire a sense of safety, calm and hope, by working with neighbourhood community groups such as the North Melbourne Primary School, The Huddle (the neighbourhood ethnic youth football group) and local scouts to create playlists that participants listen to through headphones. During the 24-hour period, the cubbies post and collect ‘messages and stories of hope’ through a mail system set up so messages can be sent between cubby houses. Fourteen messages are written, posted and shared between cubby house participants. These artworks draw on the artists’ diverse cultural and professional backgrounds to foster locality as an interconnected feature of urban resilience. Some are established practitioners (Sulan and Donnelly) while others are emerging artists (Taumoepeau and Lee) or practice-based academics (Rae) and activists (Weleski). Despite the range of experiences, placemaking remains central to their artworks. For Donnelly, who belongs to the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, and Taumoepeau, who is Sydney-born of Tongan background, place is explored through the loss of territory via themes of colonization and environmental degradation. For Chinese Australian Lee, place is examined through connection and disconnection of communication. For Anglo-Australian dramaturgist Sulan, who specializes in the theatre of human movement, place is explored through the materiality of rebuilding. For North American academic activists Weleski and Rae, place is explored through the settler history and global futurity of food ecologies. In these artworks, locality is open, multi-scalar and multi-temporal, and is also affective in their embodied and virtual spatial relations. These are further evident through their practices of aesthetic and social resilience. Aesthetic and Social Resilience Lee makes aesthetic use of communication devices such as radio, digital gaming, tablet and ribbon to embody alternative knowledge and engender affective ethics that extend conventional modes of problem-solving and sociality. This is evident through haptic and social learning. In Information Flood, haptic learning through touch and gaming encourages participants to explore patterns of sound through movement. In Exodus, touch is also mobilized to test different strategies for completing or comprehending the game. These installations prompt participants to learn new embodied ways to decode information and patterns by departing from their own thinking convention. Alternative knowledge and solutions are produced through embodied pathways that are creative, open and multiple. In Air, social learning through affective

120  Handbook on the geographies of creativity ethics inspires participants to curate a highly personal and individualized experience while also leading them to be more self-aware of the presence of others. Having to choose someone to send a message to is a simple but powerful exercise (taking time to appreciate someone else who is not present), but equally powerful is also the time to read the messages from one anonymous person to another. Through reflecting on one’s emotions and ethical consideration of others, participants become moved by the ‘others’ represented in the space, imagining how they all may or may not be connected. Affective ethics breaks down conventional social connectedness formed through similarity and difference by engaging the alterity of otherness, and evinces how resilience is also a form of creativity in locality. Taumoepeau makes aesthetic use of domestic objects, acoustics and media to connect everyday life and urban resilience, and build local knowledge that empowers subjects and embeds place. Domestic objects such as duct tape, potatoes, shopping bags and bottled water containers act as bridges between local and global, in particular the ways small, seemingly mundane actions and behaviours impact the world and the climate more broadly. Their familiarity also makes participation more accessible for people who are unaccustomed to or feel intimidated by the experimental and experiential nature of the artwork. This aesthetics prompts participants to think practically about their individual role in mitigating climate change. It is further enhanced by the audio playing in the hall: a loop of sound effects that resemble the foreboding of thunder and heavy rain. On one wall, a large screen projecting a video reel containing edited news footage of previous Melbourne floods adds verisimilitude to the event’s imaginary flooding scenario. Most of the edited footage includes familiar scenes from the local North Melbourne neighbourhoods and its surrounding CBD. This footage also includes re-created announcements (specifically filmed for this event) from the City’s Lord Mayor and Emergency Management Victoria staff imparting the importance of community resilience in emergency prevention. This footage functions as mediated pedagogies of place that encourage understanding about neighbourhood areas likely to flood and how best to prepare for such emergencies, and in doing so, empowers and emplaces participants through local knowledge. This is further enhanced by the set up in the hall. On its left are information desks filled with brochures and staffed by State Emergency Services (SES) volunteers to provide more community information. This spatial organization directs participants to approach the SES desks either before or after taking part in the artwork to further obtain knowledge by talking to the volunteers about neighbourhood preparedness. Resilience as creativity in locality is evident in how urban knowledge is acquired through the initial mediation and subsequent materiality of spatial pedagogies. Embodied learning manifests in the theme of movement central to the installation which requires participants to walk, run, carry objects, step over things, or stand still. For example, a mother is seen completing the track while carrying her baby, while others are seen talking and laughing as they shuffle forward. On the track, participants share strategies for completing the final leg of the track, which is to move one millimetre per second, with shout-outs such as ‘I am moving approximately six centimetres every minute’. This labour encourages participants to think about resilience

The role of arts and culture in resilient cities  121 through an embodied experience of energy production, connecting an intangible notion to something sensory and highly personalized. Research suggests that people often feel stuck or even frozen during emergencies and, indeed, often feel helpless or too overwhelmed by the concept of climate change in general. The installation’s motif of active participation encourages people to recognize their agency in building resilience, and consider how they might take action to prevent further environmental degradation. It invites sociality through interactivity and moving together, such as for the participants on the track who are seen to be chatting about all manner of topics: weather, flooding, other possible environmental scenarios, mindfulness, weekend plans, and many other things. They introduce themselves to one another, and laugh and joke together, indicating new connections and a sense of conviviality. Having to slow down at the end of the track also prompts deliberation and reflective conversations between participants. Through domestic technologies, mediated and material pedagogies of place are anchored. Place is an interconnected locality of here and there, far and near, local and global, virtual and real. Place is also embodied in spatialized relations created through the mobility of movement. Place is further anchored through multiple temporalities: fast (running), slow (standing still), linear (the relationship of the movement between direct cause and effect will generate a specific amount of energy), and non-linear (the hybrid fact/fiction, past/present/ future time-scales of the newsreel footage). These productions of place also evince resilience as a creative process of locality. Weleski and Rae’s installation engages domestic aesthetics through everyday practices of cooking and eating; everyday food such as cheap cuts of meat, butter and bread; and everyday television such as the reality television format of the celebrity cooking show. The cooking segment encourages urban resilience through food adaptation fostered via postcolonial food innovation. Explicit in the first segment is the cooking of a rabbit stew. However, implicit in this spectacle is the cultural history of rabbits in Australia, their presence in the North Melbourne vicinity and subsequent eradication, which furnishes a glimpse into colonial settler history and its contemporary urban transformation. Introduced by white men to tame the outback, the rabbit pervaded the rural and urban landscape of Australia. Farmers considered them as pests while the working class saw them as a form of cheap meat. Recent healthy eating practices and gentrification have seen rabbit meat become a popular ingredient; with its lean meat, it is widely promoted as a healthy food source and especially suited to the low food mile, slow food and gastro-pub trends. This segment demonstrates this transformation in two ways. First, the artist-chef (Rae) provides the factual information through her role and voice as the expert chef. Second, Rae performs its new cultural value through enacting the ritual of skinning the rabbit, cutting up its carcass and cooking it up. Rae also provides a quick guide to making butter and cooking damper (Australian unleavened bread). This segment prompts postcolonial food pedagogies, evident in learning from expert knowledge about the history of rabbits in Australia as deterrent, pest and food, and learning from the cooking show healthy, sustainable and fashionable eating trends. Rae also provides an accompanying monologue about other local ingredients that are carefully selected and used

122  Handbook on the geographies of creativity to flavour the stew, and this is done often in conversations with Indigenous Elders present, about what kinds of native bush foods are used in times of austerity. Through the simulated television cooking show – a genre characterized by self-improvement and reflexive consumption – a new lifestyle pedagogy is supported by the cultural hybridity of postcolonial food adaptability. Rather than adapting to white-centred gentrified norms, postcolonial adaptability draws on the resilience-resource of indigenous and settler traditions. This segment also invites interactivity and creates sociality by presenting its cooked food products (rabbit stew, damper and butter) as lunch for the show’s participants and staff. Eating together becomes an exercise for participants to further discuss food sustainability and get to know each other. It also engenders empowerment through local urban knowledge by historicizing the presence of the rabbit in North Melbourne and its eradication through health regulation and gentrification. The food foraging segment further embeds urban knowledge by making participants hunt for food in the neighbourhood, and through the activity, learn about the area and map the place in a different way. It invites participants to learn about food scarcity and food choice. The night-time food rationing experience encourages sociality through negotiating and trading rations. Notably, during trading, a large proportion of the refugee-participants combine their rations rather than trade them, so as to create a more substantial dinner for everyone through merging ingredients. Refugee-participants display resilience by being inventive about how individual food rations can be collectively shared. Sharing increases choice and the social capital of refugee-participants in an unfamiliar environment. Through these activities – cooking, lunching, neighbourhood food foraging, food sharing and conversing – placemaking is anchored in corporeal, embodied and material ways. Central to the key motifs of food and eating is the transformation of identities. While situated in the contemporary present and locale of North Melbourne, these practices are also sedimented in colonial and indigenous histories. While the food adaptability trend is distinctly local, its mediated fashionability is also cosmopolitan and global. Like Taumoepeau’s installation, placemaking has also created new identities of place and people that are at once multi-scalar and multi-temporal. Dungin mobilizes intangible Aboriginal heritage as its action-based aesthetics to further encourage indigenous place-based embedding through building social capital and enhancing community belonging. When the refugee-participants first arrive, they identify the area they nominate as their ‘home’ and check-in under the Aboriginal country of that area. If they have come without their own sleeping bags, they are asked to trade a personal item for blankets and pillows, labelled ‘treaty blankets’. After checking-in, they are directed to a ‘female’, ‘male’, or ‘non-binary’ sleep area, and are then invited to reflect and write on their past and future while feeling connected to Aboriginal culture and country. Once the check-in process is completed, they are further directed to the fire circle. The fire circle, with its comfort, warmth and calm, allows participants to share their own and collective experiences. This further engenders sociality, personal reflexivity and community empowerment. As one participant comments, ‘I found the country check-in to be a very effective way

The role of arts and culture in resilient cities  123 to introduce the notion of Indigenous sovereignty to the participants and the exercise. I think the emphasis on Aboriginal unceded land came through most clearly with the country check-in’ (Di Biase, 2016). In Nest, everyday aesthetics, such as the cardboard boxes, kitchen strings, blankets, bean bags, tarpaulin and supermarket shopping bags, are repurposed by the children-participants to construct their cubby houses. They then spend more time carefully putting up a frame and roof, and decorating it with artwork. These cubby houses resemble a motley array of den-like structures scattered across the building, located in cupboards, in the basement or perched by the stairs. Children-participants become aware of emergency housing through the activity of building; they learn to organize and reorganize themselves and their environment to accommodate the shifting spatial constraints in building. They acquire creativity through flexible problem-solving skills, which in turn allow them to further activate inner and extend outer social connections with peer-participants. Adaptability is evident in their initiatives to ‘make do’ and undertake unconventional (and often unexpected) ways to construct their cubby houses. Rather than adaptation strategies which tend towards a pre-conceived path (that is, the correct way to erect the cubby house), adaptability activates alternative forms of non-institutionalized skills and attitudes. When writing messages for other cubby house occupants and realizing that for their messages to be soundly received, each cubby house should have its own letterbox, they further repurpose other materials to personalize their mailboxes which are attached to the cubby structures in inventive ways. This activity instantiates an opening for connectedness, such as in the letters ‘mailed’ between cubby houses, with conversations between strangers through messages like: ‘We hope you enjoy your new home, stay warm and listen to PRINCE!’; ‘Just want to tell you I love your cubbyhouse and wish I could sleep in there!’; ‘Please don’t [k]nock it down; Just make it bigger and better’. Children-participants engage in social learning by writing these messages to each other as a guide or inspiration. Local neighbourhood scouts, invited to participate as mail delivery persons, also acquire youth leadership skills as big brothers and sisters to these participants. Urban resilience is generated through the materiality of house-building as placemaking. Placemaking is also enhanced through new spatial relations produced by adaptability and social connectedness, which in turn embed and empower children-participants and scout leaders individually and collectively.

CONCLUSION This chapter has critically developed an approach to resilience-as-dividend drawing on ecological, social and evolutionary theories of resilience. Rather than reproducing hegemonic discourses of emergency preparedness and their negative associations with vulnerability, this approach has identified the productive benefits of resilience as emergent, creative and generative. Key here is the change mechanism of the resilient system as a complex and adaptive network of open systems, and one that

124  Handbook on the geographies of creativity adopts a long-term view of adaptation through supporting new capacities such as learning, innovation and flexibility. This chapter has further framed these qualities in the situatedness of the resilient city, where attention is paid to urban resilience as a place-based perspective to understand how communities respond and adapt to change. Additionally, this chapter has also contextualized the practice of urban resilience in arts and culture to demonstrate the centrality of placemaking. Evident in socially transformative arts that respond to environmental management, the geography of cultural agencies as spaces of cultural emplacement and the spatial strategies of artists’ career developments, these projects anchor local embedding through new social networks, organizational forms and material embodiments. Finally, this chapter has critically extended the placemaking agenda of urban resilience using the case study of Australia’s REFUGE to further develop the practices of aesthetic and social resilience. Aesthetic resilience is evident in the way REFUGE performs the resilient threshold as the fold of the intersection to create non-normative practices of preparedness characterized by mixing official and unofficial discourses, such as: simulating the spectacle of emergency relief; the creative re-organization of space that mimics the full range of emotions experienced (including not just the immediate shock of disaster but also long-term reflective healing); the re-purposing of domestic technologies and material objects; and the quotidian practices of walking, sleeping, shopping, cooking and eating. Framed by the genre of experimental, experiential and participatory arts, this formal style departs from the top-down and singular grand narrative of emergency management, to focus on the bottom-up, perfunctory, routinized and minute practices of daily life. These practices enhance placemaking by generating social resilience through the innovations of haptic, social and embodied learning, mediated and material spatial pedagogies, affective ethics, postcolonial hybridity and youth adaptability, thereby increasing alternative urban knowledges, embedding spatialized social networks and transforming individual and collective capacities. In performing the resilient threshold, REFUGE’s motifs of sleep, energy, wellbeing, wayfaring and food reveal the city’s physical, infrastructural and human networks as an interconnected urban assemblage of these sociotechnical systems. By emphasizing how it is also these systems’ vernacularism – expressed through horizontal vectors of the everyday and the mundane – that keeps the city robust and replenished, REFUGE’s practices of urban resilience draw attention to the hinterland of slack that are often overlooked in hegemonic programmes of preparedness that privilege alert subjects and institutions (Amin, 2013). Amin’s concept of urban automaticity is a timely reminder of how these parts – ‘the qualities of machinery of measurement, distribution, connection and amplification’ – are articulated and sutured to keep the city, its people and things on the move (Amin and Thrift 2017, location 1757/3394). REFUGE demonstrates that a politics of urban resilience must engage the technicality, political economy and cultural power of system automaticity (Amin, 2016). Urban automaticity exposes how vulnerability and vernacularism – qualities that do not fit the hegemony of preparedness – also require a politics of common ground and distributional fairness. While REFUGE’s high footfall and

The role of arts and culture in resilient cities  125 active arts participation rates succeed in establishing Arts House as a cultural and artistic hub of North Melbourne, it is crucially important to note its unequal community participation. The event attracted mostly middle-class Anglo-Australian participants despite the venue being situated directly opposite a few public housing blocks populated by mostly Asian and African migrants, and in spite of the generous culturally sensitive budgets provided for Chinese, Vietnamese and Somalian interpreters. These migrants, who are the most in need and the most at risk, are yet again left out of place, even at its most local. A cultural politics of placemaking must also confront these failures of urban resilience.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Daniella Trimboli and Tia Di Biase for their research assistant work during the REFUGE event, and the Arts House team for facilitating its evaluation. Any mistakes in this chapter are solely my own.

NOTE 1.

For an industry-oriented evaluation report of this event, see Yue et al. (2017).

REFERENCES Adger, W.N. (2000), ‘Social and ecological resilience: Are they related?’, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (3), 347–64. Adger, W.N., T.P. Hughes, C. Folke, S. Carpenter and J. Rockström (2005), ‘Social-ecological resilience to coastal disasters’, Science, 309 (5737), 1036–9. Amin, A. (2013), ‘Surviving the turbulent future’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31 (1), 140–56. Amin, A. (2016), ‘On urban failure’, Social Research, 83 (3), 777–98. Amin, A. and N. Thrift (2017), Seeing Like a City, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Arup International Development (2015), City Resilience Framework, accessed 2 July 2017 at https://​assets​.rockefellerfoundation​.org/​app/​uploads/​20140410162455/​City​-Resilience​ -Framework​-2015​.pdf. Caputo, S., M. Caserio, R. Coles, L. Jankovic and M.R. Gaterell (2015), ‘Urban resilience: Two diverging interpretations’, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 8 (3), 222–40. City of Melbourne (2016). Resilient Cities, accessed 30 June 2016 at https://​www​.melbourne​ .vic​.gov​.au/​SiteCollectionDocuments/​resilient​-melbourne​-strategy​.pdf. Davoudi, S., E. Brooks and A. Mehmood (2013), ‘Evolutionary resilience and strategies for climate adaptation’, Planning Practice and Research, 28 (3), 307–22. Di Biase, T. (2016), Personal Communication, 26 November. Donnelly, H. (2016), Interview for Refuge evaluation, 15 June, Melbourne, Australia. Emergency Management Victoria (2016), Interview for Refuge evaluation, 16 June, Melbourne, Australia.

126  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Folke C. (2006), ‘Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analyses’, Global Environmental Change, 16 (3), 253–67. Godschalk, D.R. (2003), ‘Urban hazard mitigation: Creating resilient cities’, Natural Hazards Review, 4 (3), 136–43. Hjorth, L., S. Pink, K. Sharp and L. Williams (2016), ‘Screen cultures in the Asia-Pacific’, Screen Ecologies: Arts, Media, and the Environment, Massachussetts: MIT Press, pp. 57–87. Holling, C.S. (1996), ‘Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience’, in P. Schulze (ed.), Engineering within Ecological Constraints, Washington, DC, USA: The National Academies Press, pp. 31–43. Ibert, O. and S. Schmidt (2014), ‘Once you are in you might need to get out: Adaptation and adaptability in volatile labor markets – The case of musical actors’, Social Sciences, 3 (1), 1–23. Keck, M. and P. Sakdapolrak (2013), ‘What is social resilience? Lessons learned and ways forward’, Erdkunde, 67 (1), 5–19. Kong, L. (2012), ‘Improbable art: The creative economy and sustainable cluster development in a Hong Kong industrial district’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 53 (2), 182–96. LeBaron, M. and C. Cohen (2013), ‘Breathing life into the ashes: Resilience, arts and social transformation’, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Inaugural Roundtable Final Report, accessed 2 January 2018 at https://​papers​.ssrn​.com/​sol3/​papers​.cfm​?abstract, pp. 1–48. Leichenko, R. (2011), ‘Climate change and urban resilience’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 3 (3), 164–8. Meerow, S., J.P. Newell and M. Stults (2016), ‘Defining urban resilience: A review’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 147, 38–49. Mehmood, A. (2016), ‘Of resilient places: Planning for urban resilience’, European Planning Studies, 24 (2), 407–19. Pasquinelli, C. and J. Sjöholm (2015), ‘Art and resilience: The spatial practices of making a resilient artistic career in London’, City, Culture and Society, 6 (3), 75–81. Phillips, R., A. Cook, H. Schauble and W. Walker (2016), ‘Can agencies promote bush resilience using art-based community engagement?’, Australian Journal of Emergency Management, 31 (4), 51–5. Pratt, A. (2015), ‘Resilience, locality and the cultural economy’, City, Culture and Society, 6 (3), 61–7. Pratt, A. (2017), ‘Beyond resilience: Learning from the cultural economy’, European Planning Studies, 25 (1), 127–39. Puleo, T. (2014), ‘Art-making as place-making following disaster’, Progress in Human Geography, 38 (4), 568–80. Rhodes, A.M. and R. Schechter (2014), ‘Fostering resilience among youth in inner city community arts centers: The case of the artists collective’, Education and Urban Society, 46 (7), 826–48. Rockfeller Foundation (2018), 100 Resilient Cities, accessed 2 July 2017 at http://​www​ .100resilientcities​.org/​. Sarra, J. and K. Berman (2014), ‘Ubuntu as a tool for resilience: Arts, microbusiness, and social justice in South Africa’, Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 34 (4), 455–90. Siapno, J. (2012), ‘Dance and martial arts in Timor Leste: The performance of resilience in a post-conflict environment’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33 (4), 427–43. Spaans, M. and B. Waterhout (2017), ‘Building up resilience in cities worldwide – Rotterdam as participant in the 100 Resilient Cities Programme’, Cities, 61, 109–16. UNISDR (2012), How to Make Cities More Resilient: A Handbook for Local Government Leaders, Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations. Walker, B. and D. Salt (2006), Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, Washington, DC, USA: Island Press.

The role of arts and culture in resilient cities  127 Welsh, M. (2014), ‘Resilience and responsibility: Governing uncertainty in a complex world’, The Geographical Journal, 180 (1), 15–26. Yue, A., D. Trimboli and T. Di Biase (2017), Refuge 2016: Evaluation Report, Melbourne: University of Melbourne and Arts House.

PART III CREATIVITY AS MOBILITY

8. The centripetal and centrifugal forces at work: mobility of the creative workforce June Wang and Luyue Zhang

INTRODUCTION A worldwide passion for creative and cultural city production has witnessed the ceaseless mobility of ideas, capital, products, and population. As such, in her overview on the transnational making of creative cities, Lily Kong (2014) identifies five strands: mobility of ideas, mobility of population, mobility of technology, and mobility of artistic image. Although the flux of these strands is always entangled, such entanglement has yet to be reflected in the literature. In this chapter, we draw on the concept of governmobility (Bærenholdt, 2013) to move beyond the traditional wisdom that reads the centrifugal and centripetal logics as two disparate and perhaps even contradictory logics in state space governance; that is, centrifugal for circulation, whereas centripetal for subject discipline – in particular socio-spatial orders. Instead, we aim to demonstrate that a centrifugal force for circulation can serve the disciplinary purpose of subject-making, when mobility becomes the new mentality for subjects. In the words of Zygmunt Bauman (2002: 83), ‘mobility becomes a most precious and sought-after resource. If chances cannot be “fixed to a place” and made to last, one needs to go where the chances appear and when they appear’. In this sense, mobility is no longer a noun to describe the state of ideas, workforces and capital, but a verb to chart the agency to make ideas, the workforce and capital movable, and further, in particular directions. Mobility hence helps to map out power relations of various actors (Cresswell, 2010, 2012). The chapter is made up of two parts. The first part surveys the literature on creativity and mobility. Questions we ask are: who are mobile and why do they move? In response, we will start with the so-called mobile creative class, and further, the geography of knowledge assemblages that construct topographical difference among cities, which enables and affects the complex flows of capital. The second part probes into the transnational production of motion picture. Using the case of HK–mainland China trans-border production of motion picture, we will pay special attention to the agency of statist and non-statist actors that channel and condition the flow of creative workforce, in its relations to capital and ideology. Mobility in this sense has a wide spectrum, ranging from short-term trips to long-term migration on multiple scales (Cresswell, 2010).

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MOBILITIES OF THE CREATIVE WORKFORCE Mobility of the Creative Workforce and Creative Ideas The creative class might be the footloose group that has caught most attention. First coined in the book The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2000), this special social group was advocated to be the strategic population segment that a city must attract, as they will, in return, attract companies and transnational capitals in knowledge economy. In his own words, Florida (2000: xiii) defines a ‘super creative core’, who are ‘people who are paid principally to do creative work for a living’, including scientists and engineers, academics, poets, actors, novelists, entertainers, artists, architects and designers, ‘cultural worthies’, think-tank researchers, analysts and opinion formers. Empirical studies, more often than not, question the ambiguity surrounding the terminology, and further, the accuracy and validity of the indicators proposed to measure the presence and significance of creatives, and mis-interpretation resulted from selective reading of interview scripts and biased sampling method (Hansen et al., 2009; Markusen, 2006; Wang, 2009). What are equally mobile are a number of magic repertoires on creative city making that have been disseminated by the creative credos (Peck, 2005). In the eyes of mayors and policy makers, one of the most influential creativity experts is Richard Florida. From Singapore to London, Dublin to Auckland, Amsterdam to Shanghai, cities compete to be part of his creative index. From his initial studies on Anglo-American core, now Richard Florida has expanded his research scope to encompass cities in Central and Eastern Europe and Asia (Florida, 2000, 2003). Florida is certainly not the only academic celebrity who has materialized their mobility through expertise construction. In fact, the introduction of the Creative Industries by the New Labour Party of the United Kingdom is reckoned as the first occasion when the concept of the creative replaced that of culture on the official agenda of developmental strategies (Kong, 2014; Pratt, 2007). Following that, Charles Landry (Landry, 2000) and Cultural Consultants Incorporated (CCI) (Prince, 2010) are the counterparts on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. In response to this phenomenon, numerous scholars have voiced their concerns on the mobility of particular policies (Clarke, 2012; Cochrane and Ward, 2012; Peck, 2005; Pratt, 2016; Prince, 2010). Calling it a fast policy in an era without real and solid economic strategies, Jamie Peck (2005) maintains that the creative class thesis merely hastily mixes cosmopolitan elitism and pop universalism, cultural radicalism and economic conservatism, casual and causal inference, and social libertarianism and business realism. Its popularity among civic leaders rests in its ambiguity that challenges no vested interests of politicians, business elites and others, thus actually advocating for the maintenance of the status quo. Moreover, studies exploring the assemblage of expertise on creativity demonstrate that those footloose fields of expertise are never new, nor context-responsive, and therefore must be assembled through hard labour (Prince, 2010, 2014). The process of expertise construction is a making of assemblage: quantifying culture and cre-

Mobility of the creative workforce  131 ativity that is initially historically and geographically specific, into cross-context benchmarking that throws all cities into a casual collection of indices. This has the effect of assembling actually existing ideas, best practices, experiences from somewhere else so as to form a centralized expertise, and eventually branding and selling this expertise through networking. As effect, the epistemic community of experts is able to develop consultant–client relations which frequently lead to trips to field sites, conferences, forums and exchange programmes (Pratt, 2009). Universities are not completely innocent in this process, which has given birth to a bulky troop of entrepreneurial academics, who serve as creative policy intermediaries (Borén and Young, 2013, 2016). Indulged in the so-called neoliberalization of the university and ‘academic capitalism’ (Castree and Sparke, 2000; Paasi, 2005), academics largely facilitate the spreads of creative discourse when they ‘respond to their institutional and national frameworks of what constitutes appropriate academic performance and success’ (Borén and Young, 2016: 599). The snowball effect functions to extend the networks of the creative credos to people from afar, linking them to China, South Africa, Europe, and Latin America (Clarke, 2012; Wang et al., 2016). Mobility of the Creative Workforce and Capital For economic geographers such as Richard Sheamur (2007) and Allen Scott (2014), Florida’s thesis of creative class is merely a deviated version of human capital, one factor that has been long explored in economic geography on the role of endogenous and exogenous factors in the labour market. Florida’s prediction of ‘people follow amenities’ is an apparently alogical mistake, as it mixes up correlation and causation (Crane and Manville, 2008). In the words of Scott (2014: 571), ‘even today it is jobs, not amenities, that attract highly qualified workers to particular cities and that keep them durably in place’. In contrast, both economic geographers (Scott, 1997, 2014) and urban planners (Jacobs, 1969) have revisited studies on the innovative small-scale craft industries in the nineteenth century; as for instance, Alfred Marshall’s (1920) studies on the Italian industrial districts, for location choice of firms in the late capitalism, or what Scott (2012) among others called cognitive-cultural capitalism. Crucial is the beneficial effects of atmosphere of these clusters, which is ‘more than anything else to a conglomeration of cultural synergies and semiotic fields rooted in the life, work, and institutional infrastructures of particular cities’ (Scott, 1997: 329). Transnational networks not only serve as the imperative channels for the mobility of creative workers, but also ‘information and mutually cross-fertilizing creative signals’ (ibid.: 334) that move through dense transactional networks at the global level. For scholars on creative clusters, explaining the mechanism that holds together geographic clusters and translocal networks becomes the main effort (Coe, 2000; Harrison, 1994). Instead of a dichotomized reading of free-floating capital and place-specific effort to grab things from the global flux, the concept of embeddedness, first introduced by Granovetter (1985), has received ever-growing attention. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s (1984) notions of embodiment and the field, studies on the

132  Handbook on the geographies of creativity labour market of ‘flexible specialization’ show that economic networks are always constructed socially and in cultural forms by actors at multiple scales, whose actions in return are embedded in networks and institutions (Smelser and Swedberg, 1994). Mobility and the New Technology of Governance: The Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces Given the mobility of human and non-human things and, moreover, the agency taken by a wide variety of these actors in becoming mobile, a serious revisit to state space governance is worth undertaking. For a long time, studies on the Foucauldian conception of state space as disposition frame it in the Westphalian sense of modern state and its territory. In his own words, ‘government is the right disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end’ (Foucault, 1991: 93). He clarifies further that ‘things to be concerned are men in their relations with other things’ such as wealth, resources, means of resistance, while territory is one of these things. That said, ‘all modern states divide their territories into complex and overlapping political and economic zones, rearrange people and resources within these units, and create regulations delineating how and by whom these areas can be used’ (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995: 387). In this sense, state territorialization is envisaged as a deliberate strategy to arrange and transform both subjectivity and the landscape, according to particular socio-spatial fixity and the order of space (Wang and M. Li, online; Wang and S.M. Li, 2017). This kind of reading is placed upon the static boundary of a national state, hence it hardly provides space for studies on mobility that frequently cut across administrative territories and, in the case of transnational cultural productions, national boundaries of a sovereign state. Instead of leaving the concept of territory at bay, scholars argue for post-Westphalian reading of territory and state space, which is flexible enough to address a porous territory and disaggregated, variegated or graduated sovereignty (Ong, 1999) as covered by recent scholarship in political geography and international relations (Agnew, 2005; Wang, online). Revisiting Foucault on the questions of security, territory, population, Elden (2007) reminds us the calculative strategies of territoriality enact two interwoven and sometimes contradictory logics: the centrifugal logic that operates for circulation and the centripetal logic that seeks to discipline things. In a procedural reading, ‘governmentalization implies a process, a mode of transition and becoming rather than a state of being’ (Elden, 2007: 568). In this account, both power for economic and security reasons are spatially implemented, but the spatial order evolves over time and transcends borders. The two logics of centrifugal and centripetal forces are not necessarily mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they are intermeshed in the dynamic experiments of governance. The significance of territory cannot simply be wished away, just like networks that transcend boundaries cannot be ignored (Wang, online). Forces that try to hold down the fluid elements of global life and generate fixity are usually territorially anchored, whereas projecting elements to the networks requires place-specific institutional support. Indeed, a state is produced through mobilizing and immobilizing human and non-human things, participating in the transnational

Mobility of the creative workforce  133 system of rulemaking and extracting power from the transnational circulation of things (Emel et al., 2011). Situated in this concern, Bærenholdt (2013) coined the new term of governmobility, wherein mobility is now the new mentality for subjects. In his words, ‘if circulation has become a producer of, rather than an obstacle to, societies, then governmobility is a meaningful concept relating to how societies are ruled through connections’. Borrowing from John Urry (2007), governmobility works through bodily, technological and institutional forms of self-government, which are now dominated by the principle of mobility that views ‘mobility as a most precious and sought-after resource’. Instead of settling down, or assimilation to a particular place, subjects are now put into ceaseless movement, as ‘chances cannot be “fixed to a place” and made to last, one needs to go where the chances appear and when they appear’ (Bauman, 2002: 83). In this sense, mobility is no longer a noun to describe a static shot of the state of ideas, workforces and capital, but a verb to chart the agency to make ideas (Wang and Chen, online), the workforce (Wang and M. Li, online; Wang and S.M. Li, 2017), and capital movable, and further, in particular directions. Governmobility does not only deal and cope with mobility; it works through mobility. Methodologically, we will trace mobility itself on the journey, and in particular, we will pay attention to the agency for social networking. ‘We must trace continuities from the local to the global, or, more strictly speaking, from one locale to the next and to the next and so on’, as maintained by Murdoch (1995: 750), given that the construction of networks, and the ability they give certain participants to act at a distance, is what ties the local to the global’.

TRANSNATIONAL PRODUCTION OF MOTION PICTURES As we argued in the beginning of the chapter, various flows of ideas, population and capital are very much entangled. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident in the transnational co-production of culture in the new media industries. What gets mobilized through the horizontal network of transnational practices entails various things, from capital and skilled labour, to ideas enabled by a wide range of forces (such as firms, state apparatus and labour) functioning at multiple scales (Kong, 2014). For economic geographers, the scholarly question for runaway production is the labour question brought about by the spatial flexibility of production (Christopherson, 2003, 2008). In the industry of motion pictures, the shift from Fordist to Post-Fordist production is featured with a process of vertical disintegration; that is, different phases of production, such as shooting and post-production, are now commissioned to different, small and specialized establishments, frequently on the basis of cost reduction. The flexibility makes it possible to move different phases to different cities (Christopherson, 2008). Under these circumstances, one critical consequence is a new form of intra-occupational labour market segmentation (Miller, 2016). As pointed out by Miller (2016), the international division of labour thesis is equally valid in the creative and cultural industries. This brings with the scholarship attention

134  Handbook on the geographies of creativity to fragmentation of the cultural workforce, among which some are mobile whilst others remain immobile in this transnational production. The changing politics in production, namely the power relations between the employer and the employees, result in a widening split between core workers and peripheral workers. Critical cultural studies set up their research agenda by drawing upon the distinction made by Anna Tsing (2000), who envisions globalization as ideology whilst transnationalism as practices. That said, globalization is pictured as a fantasy of total globalized capitalism enacted by neoliberal advocates, wherein international barriers should be removed for smoother transnational flow of capital, and subsequently channelled by institutional reforms as have been urged by membership requirement for the WTO. Transnational cultural co-production, as argued by Berry (2010: 122), focuses on real activities and forces on the ground, ‘that are unleashed by globalization, that do not subscribe to the logic of capitalist accumulation driving it’. It cannot be simply reduced to a version of the international order shaped by neoliberal globalization, nor a romantic fantasy that ‘what Hardt and Negri (2001) have written about as the smooth space of Empire . . . either had been or inevitably will be realized’ (Berry, 2010: 121). This entanglement has been further complicated by state intervention through co-production treaties. The concept of co-production, which was first introduced in the EU for the regional collaboration of EU members, is a strategic measure to establish a bilateral reciprocal relationship by offering ‘national treatment’ to industries in two or more national governments, to share financial costs and creative labour in the growing globalizing world. Therefore, the co-production scheme is expected to proactively channel the flow of motion picture products between the two countries, and subsequently, a regional collaboration endeavour in a fierce competition of rivals. Such a networking model between designated countries, as argued, has the potential to maintain national cultural expression and, further, sustain cultural sovereignty in each country. Nevertheless, these policies have in the past created ‘a preservationist cultural nationalism that devalued below-the-line workers and privileged drama over other genres’ (McMurria, 2009: 237).

CENTRIFUGAL AND CENTRIPETAL FORCES AT WORK: THE HONG KONG MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY History of Hong Kong and its Motion Picture Industry Before the case of HK–mainland co-production, it is necessary to briefly introduce the political context of Hong Kong in history. By Article III of the Treaty of Nanking signed in June 1843, the Chinese Emperor ceded to Queen Victoria ‘the island of Hong Kong . . . to be governed by such laws and regulations as Her Majesty the Queen . . . shall see fit to direct’. It is nevertheless worth mentioning that Hong Kong was not picked by the government in London, but accepted for diplomatic, commercial and military purposes (Polachek, 1992). That said, Hong Kong was appropriated

Mobility of the creative workforce  135 as ‘a territorial base along the coast of China to support trading relations it wished to establish with the Chinese Empire’ (Tsang, 2004: 20). This somehow explained the relaxed governance on the matter of identity shaping. The meeting between Thatcher and Deng in 1982 was centred around three issues: sovereignty, the prosperity of Hong Kong and an undisturbed transition. While Deng was absolutely rigid about the first issue, he was open to negotiations on the latter two. Under the Sino-British Declaration, both sides agreed that sovereignty over the whole of Hong Kong would be transferred from Britain to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which would establish a ‘Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR)’ upon resuming the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong (ibid.). The capitalist system in Hong Kong would remain for the following 50 years, as promised by Deng; horse racing and dancing, the symbols for prosperity, would go on as usual. Born and bred in such circumstances, the identity of Hong Kongers emerged as a collective of practical, entrepreneurial but politically anonymous individuals (Abbas, 1997). The motion picture industry of Hong Kong grew quickly, along with the massive migration of Chinese to Southeast Asia. Situated on an island-city with a limited market, the Hong Kong motion picture industry has been more proactive in the search for new regional strategies throughout its Fordist and Post-Fordist times (Yeh, 2014). The expansion towards the Southeast Asian markets of Singapore and Malaysia started in the 1960s and 1970s, when the sector of motion picture production was monopolized by the two giant studios, Shaw Brothers and Motion Picture and General Investments Limited (MP&GI). The horizontal flow of Hong Kong pictures to Southeast Asian countries was channelled through ‘selling picture trailers’ in the 1960s, which then shifted to the construction and/or confiscation of cinema screens by the two studios in the 1960s and 1970s. As such, transnational flows of capital and products had been active, while production was still bounded in the four walls of studios in Hong Kong. Such a regional expansion of the dissemination sector forced the production sector in Hong Kong to run along the clock, resulting in a high rate of duplication with similar stories, similar casts and others (Davis and Yeh, 2008). The second round of influx of overseas capital lasted from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, evidenced by investment by Taiwanese enterprises. Entering the new millennium, the regional strategy of ‘Pan-Asia’ basically telescoped the transformation of Hollywood (Davis and Yeh, 2008). Production was divided into different stages and distributed to various cities, through broader horizontal networking that involved screen labour in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand (Davis and Yeh, 2008). Various strategies were adopted to reform flexible specialization, such as the sharing of the pool of creative staffs and transnational investments. As a regional strategy to counter the global expansion of Hollywood, the Pan-Asia strategy attempted to assemble and consolidate markets in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand by a fusion of ‘truly Asia’. Nevertheless, the Pan-Asia assemblage was quickly dethroned by mainland China strategy after the promulgation of the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA), which offers ‘national treatment’ to a series of industrial sectors chosen to

136  Handbook on the geographies of creativity be exceptions. A new category of co-production was introduced to enact the mobility of capital, labour and enterprises to cross the mainland–HK border. CEPA as the Centrifugal Force Starting from the year 2004, formal co-production between mainland China and Hong Kong was officially launched after the promulgation of the CEPA. Co-production, as specified in CEPA, refers to motion picture products that are invested in and produced by both mainland Chinese and Hong Kong companies. There were a series of bilateral conditions to define co-production, such as the proportion of creative staff and the stock shares, the latter of which has been relaxed gradually over time. After the final alteration made to relevant clauses, co-production films are now defined as (Trade and Industry Department at the Government of Hong Kong SAR, 2004: 206–10): 1. Invested jointly by studios registered in mainland and Hong Kong in forms of capital, labour, or assets; 2. For motion pictures jointly produced by Hong Kong and the mainland, there is no restriction on the percentage of principal creative personnel (director, screenwriter, cinematographer and leading artistes – the latter being leading actor and actress, and leading supporting actor and actress) from Hong Kong, but at least one-third of the leading artistes must be from the mainland; there is no restriction on where the story takes place, but the plots or the leading characters must be related to the mainland. 3. To allow contractual service providers employed by Hong Kong service suppliers, in the mode of movement of natural persons, to provide services under the specific liberalization commitments of this sector or sub-sector in the mainland. As specified, motion pictures under the co-production scheme will be treated as mainland motion pictures for the purpose of distribution in the mainland. This is a state-initiated strategy to enable the liberalization of trade and mobility of capital and products along pre-designed routes. Mobility of capital Although CEPA did not bring with it an immediate boom of co-production between Hong Kong and the mainland, its effect became evident in the explosive growth of co-produced movies after 2006. It is then not a surprise to witness the more instantly enacted mobility of capital, usually through investment, distribution and exhibition to the mainland market, given the loss of the Southeast Asian market to Hollywood and Korean films. It is thus economically viable for Hong Kong filmmakers to orient themselves to the ‘interior’, where the annual box office, 10 billion yuan on average, breaks the records of the preceding years on a routine basis. The breakdown of assembly production to different stages opens space for a geographically dispersed manner of operation to different places. The Survey conducted by Hong Kong

Mobility of the creative workforce  137 Motion Picture Industry Association (2016) reveals the polarization of Hong Kong companies in the industry, where 6.25 per cent of them are big agglomerations that span different stages from investment, production, to distribution and exhibition, 69.4 per cent of them are small businesses with less than ten employees in specialized sectors like directing, camera, artistic design and so on. In fact, the post-Fordist production in Hong Kong features a hybrid sector of director-producers, who have their own movie production companies and have taken up a considerable proportion of producers’ duties, in comparison with their counterparts in Hollywood. Those traditional big movie production companies, usually appearing as producers in motion pictures, are merely investors. In this state-initiated campaign of co-production, the mobility of capital was first observed in geographical expansion of big companies to broaden their income stream through financial networking, ahead of runaway production. Emperor Entertainment Group (EEG),1 established in 1999 by Albert Yeung Sau Shing, embarked on its journey northward in 2006. Built upon a partnership with Shanghai Film Group Corporation, the company set up the joint venture of S.F.G. Emperor Culture Development Company, holding 50 per cent of the share. In 2011, EEG moved further northwards to Beijing, where it set up an independent company in the hope of opening for the mainland film market with famous artists such as Nicholas Tse, Joey Yung, Twins, Hacken Lee and Leo Ku on board. Golden Harvest,2 the world’s largest Chinese film company in the 1980s, officially entered the mainland market with the first flagship independent cinema in Shenzhen in 2006. Focusing on distribution and exhibition, the company expands through construction of new cinemas and acquisition of existing screens. To date, the Group operates 107 multiplexes with collectively 781 screens across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Mobility of screen labour Vertical disintegration and cross-border collaboration exacerbate the mobility of Hong Kong’s capital and creative workers, and with them, their values, ideologies and worldviews. Encouraged by favourable policies and a lucrative market, Hong Kong director-producers choose to set up self-owned firm-workshops in the mainland so as to cooperate better with movie production companies there. For example, Peter Chan, the pioneer director-producer in the pan-Asia movement, set up his firm WE Pictures in Beijing; other famous figures include Tsui Hark, Jeffrey Lau, Wong Kar-wai, Dante Lam and Wilson Yip. Nevertheless, when mobility is envisioned as resources or network capital, things at issue are who are mobile whilst who are left immobile. At the early stage of co-production, the regulatory reform seems to be of a significant role, given the fact that a considerable proportion of creative staff members, from cinematographer to make-up artists, are from Hong Kong. Ten years after the inauguration of CEPA, a growing body of skilled labour from the mainland is gradually taking up posts from film editing, cinematography, art, sound direction and choreographer, given the availability of a large pool of skilled labour in the mainland and their relative low cost. Taking into account the cost and efficiency in collaboration, co-production films

138  Handbook on the geographies of creativity appreciate new blood, and mainland labour is young and cheap. As a result, creative workers from the Hong Kong movie industry have been thrown into growing uncertainty and precariousness. In the words of director and scriptwriter Herman Yau: some staff lose their job. In the past, Hong Kong producers would like to bring staff together to mainland . . . even electricians. While these years, mainland staff is not only young but also capable . . . [they] can do their jobs well. Moreover, the number of craft workers in some sectors is shrinking, (because) they are old and few of them still work. (Kang, 2013)

Producer Cheung Chi-Kwong reckoned with the global division of labour thesis, which is more apparent in the post-production stages such as audio recording, photo shooting and computer-generated effects (Hong Kong Motion Picture Industry Association, 2016). On the other hand, elites from both sides have been enjoying prestige, and are busy travelling between different shooting sets within and across the border. Cast analyses of co-production films reveal an apparent pattern of ‘in-house’ collaboration, which frequently involves so-called ‘Queen’s’ actors, choreographers, cinematographers, art designers and so on favoured by particular director-producers, or even relational fixed partnerships between particular directors and actors. In the motion picture industry of Hong Kong, the director-producer system features a semi-Fordist production mode, in which director-run production companies commonly sign job contracts with star actors. These one-level vertically integrated companies, evidently motivated by commercial considerations, make use of celebrities who are broadly appealing to diverse audiences, or who are pegged with the label of appealing index by box-office. For example, Jet Tone Film Production by globally acclaimed director Kar-Wai Wong holds employment relationships with elite actors such as Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung from Hong Kong; Gong Li and Dong Jie from the mainland; and Chang Chen from Taiwan. That said, while there is the potential of a multitude of experiments that might reshape the politics of production in this international division of labour, one must also be aware of the uneven power relations of various actors in the process of enabling and exercising respective ‘network capitals’ (Bærenholdt, 2013). CEPA as the Centripetal Force The inauguration of CEPA has stimulated a variety of connection–construction activities by movie production companies, individual directors and other creative staff, many of whom set up offices in the mainland to further enhance and consolidate their network sociality. As argued by Bærenholdt (2013: 31), this new chapter is hyper-social, ‘since people travel, connect and relate in order to sustain their crucial social relations’. Indeed, the northwards movement of Hong Kong directors is lured by the mainland market. However, the activity of movement itself does not guarantee a stunning box-office figure. Many investors, producers and directors appreciate collaboration

Mobility of the creative workforce  139 in many different stages, who take it as more than simply a means of fulfilling the conditions of co-production. In the stage of preparation, director Wong Yat Ping Roddy (interview, 2016) explains the frequent deployment of mainland scriptwriters: ‘to understand the mainland audiences’ appetite, it was a challenge for Hong Kong writers to write stories involving local culture without the rich experience in mainland. There were still some gaps in script-writing ability and quality between Hong Kong and the mainland.’ Another commonly deployed strategy by investors and producers is to seek partnerships with mainland counterparts with red/official linkages. The Sil-Metropole Organization in Hong Kong is such an example entrusted with franchise to integrate production, distribution and exhibition without the cooperation with counterparts in mainland China. The company was established in 1982 after the merger of three left-wing movie production companies: Great Wall Movie Enterprise, Feng Huang (Phoenix) Motion Picture and Sun Luen Film. Given its long connection with mainland authorities tracing back to the early 1970s, the firm has been designated as the only state-owned enterprise outside the territory of mainland. The evidently red background makes it a favourite partner in co-production, especially for producers who are not familiar with the censorship system in mainland’s motion picture industry. More often than not, director-producers hold a clear and proactive attitude about movement from Hong Kong to the mainland, especially in the time of depression of the Hong Kong film market. As such, state-empowered mobility works in a way that appropriates the law of capital circulation, through which individual actors learn the self-government of connections. As their social partnership can only be constructed and sustained through the technologies of circulation, this in turn encourages the ceaseless mobility of actors, materials and ideas. In this process, creative ideas, the creative workforce, creative products and capital are always interdependent, to build up the infrastructural network that links two destinations, to construct the topographic differences between the two ends so as to enable the movement, and to render themselves with appropriable value at the destination.

CONCLUSION This chapter reviews mobility of capital, ideas and population in the making of creative cities and, in particular, how intertwined these flows are. In the first half of the chapter, we reviewed the mobility of creative credos and aristocracies, who are made mobile by assembling expertise. The second part explored the new phenomenon of transnational production of motion pictures between Hong Kong and mainland China, in which a multitude of trans-border projects and/or micro-level endeavours driven by alternatives logics take place. As pointed out by Bærenholdt (2013: 31), it is time to ‘think of a genealogy in which the sovereignty of the territorial state changes into the governmentality of the population, which again slides into the governmobility of connections’. In this circumstance, we draw upon the thesis of governmobility, which rejects a binary

140  Handbook on the geographies of creativity reading of centripetal and centrifugal forces – centripetal for discipline whilst centrifugal for capital circulation. Instead, we argue that the new mentality of ‘being mobile’ practised by the creative subjects effectuates the state in a time of mobility. In this chapter, attention to agency allows us treat mobility as a verb, that is, to see how actions were taken to make human and non-human things mobile, from the expertise construction that makes particular experts and/or knowledge bodies movable, to regulatory reforms that channel cross-border flows, to the ceaseless networking of creative subjects. In these transnational practices, state, the individual cultural workforce, and corporations all participate in cross-border networking sociality for new social relations that can only be established through mobility. Operating on the same network, there are various production modes – transnational production by corporations (where a production company operates across borders), as well as a growing body of co-productions (between two or more nationally separated companies and/or individuals, NGOs in two or more nation states). In the case of motion pictures in Hong Kong, what has been operating along the same transnational network are not only forces driven by capitalist logic, but also alternative forces with alternative visions. The mobility of independent filmmakers with relational autonomy in reshaping the network and ideas deserves further examination.

NOTES 1. Data were collected from multiple webpages of the company; please see https://​www​ .emperorgroup​.com/​en/​front/​accessed on January 12–30, 2016. 2. Data were collected from multiple webpages of the company; please see: https://​www​ .goldenharvest​.com/​, accessed January 12–30, 2016.

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Mobility of the creative workforce  141 Castree, N. and M. Sparke (2000), ‘Introduction: Professional geography and the corporatization of the university: Experiences, evaluations, and engagements’, Antipode, 32 (3), 222–9. Christopherson, S. (2003), ‘The limits to “New Regionalism”’, Geoforum, 34 (4), 413–15. Christopherson, S. (2008), ‘Beyond the self-expressive creative worker: An industry perspective on entertainment media’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25 (7–8), 73–95. Clarke, N. (2012), ‘Urban policy mobility, anti-politics, and histories of the transnational municipal movement’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (1), 25–43. Cochrane, A. and K. Ward (2012), ‘Researching the geographies of policy mobility: Confronting the methodological challenges’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 44 (1), 5–12. Coe, N.M. (2000), ‘The view from out West: Embeddedness, inter-personal relations and the development of an indigenous film industry in Vancouver’, Geoforum, 31 (4), 391–407. Crane, R. and M. Manville (2008), ‘People or place? Revisiting the who versus the where of urban development’, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: Land Lines, 20 (3), 2–7. Cresswell, T. (2010), ‘Mobilities I: Catching up’, Progress in Human Geography, 35 (4), 550–58. Cresswell, T. (2012), ‘Mobilities II: Still’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (5), 645–53. Davis, D.W. and E.Y.-Y. Yeh (2008), East Asian Screen Industries, London, UK: British Film Institute. Elden, S. (2007), ‘Governmentality, calculation, territory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (3), 562–80. Emel, J., M.T. Huber and M.H. Makene (2011), ‘Extracting sovereignty: Capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania’, Political Geography, 30 (2), 70–79. Florida, R. (2000), The Rise of the Creative Class: and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York, NY, USA: Basic Books. Florida, R. (2003), ‘Cities and the creative class’, City and Community, 2 (1), 3–19. Foucault, M. (1991), ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govermentality, Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press, pp. 87–104. Granovetter, M. (1985), ‘Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness’, American Journal of Sociology, 49, 323–34. Hansen, H.K., B. Asheim and J. Vang (2009), ‘The European creative class and regional development: How relevant is Florida’s theory for Europe?’, in L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, London, UK and New York, NY, USA: Springer, pp. 99–120. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2001), Empire, Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press. Harrison, B. (1994), Lean and Mean: Why Large Corporations Will Continue to Dominate the Global Economy, New York, NY, USA: Guilford. Hong Kong Motion Picture Industry Association (2016), Hong Kong Film Industry 2016. Retrieved from CREATEHK (https://​www​.createhk​.gov​.hk/​en/​publication​.php, December 12, 2017). Jacobs, J. (1969), The Economy of Cities, New York, NY, USA: Random House. Kong, L. (2014), ‘Transnational mobilities and the making of creative cities’, Theory, Culture & Society, 31 (7–8), 273–89. Landry, C. (2000), The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators, London, UK: Earthscan Publications. Markusen, A. (2006), ‘Urban development and the politics of a creative class: Evidence from a study of artists’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (10), 1921–40. Marshall, A. (1920), Principles of Economics, London, UK: MacMillan and Co. McMurria, J. (2009), ‘Moby Dick, cultural policy and the geographies and geopolitics of cultural labor’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12 (3), 237–56.

142  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Miller, T. (2016), ‘The new international division of cultural labor revisited, Revista ICONO14’, Revista científica de Comunicación y Tecnologías emergentes, 14 (2), 97–121. Murdoch, J. (1995), ‘Actor-networks and the evolution of economic forms: Combining description and explanation in theories of regulation, exible specialisation, and networks’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 27 (5), 731–57. Ong, A. (1999), Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC, USA and London, UK: Duke University Press. Paasi, A. (2005), ‘Globalisation, academic capitalism, and the uneven geographies of international journal publishing spaces’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 37 (5), 769–89. Peck, J. (2005), ‘Struggling with the creative class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (4), 740–70. Polachek, J. (1992), The Inner Opium War, Boston, MA, USA: Harvard University Press. Pratt, A.C. (2007), ‘An economic geography of the cultural industries’, in A. Leyshon, L. McDowell and R. Lee (eds), An Economic Geography Reader, London, UK: SAGE Publications. Pratt, A.C. (2009), ‘Policy transfer and the field of the cultural and creative industries: What can be learned from Europe?’, in L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds), Creative Economies, Creative Cities, London, UK and New York, NY, USA: Springer, pp. 9–23. Pratt, A.C. (2016), ‘Creative cities: The cultural industries and the creative class’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 90 (2), 107–17. Prince, R. (2010), ‘Fleshing out expertise: The making of creative industries experts in the United Kingdom’, Geoforum, 41 (6), 875–84. Prince, R. (2014), ‘Consultants and the global assemblage of culture and creativity’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39 (1), 90–101. Scott, A.J. (1997), ‘The cultural economy of cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 21 (2), 323–39. Scott, A.J. (2014), ‘Beyond the creative city: Cognitive–cultural capitalism and the new urbanism’, Regional Studies, 48 (4), 565–78. Shearmur, R. (2007), ‘The new knowledge aristocracy: The creative class, mobility and urban growth’, Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 1 (1), 31–47. Smelser, N.J. and R. Swedberg (1994), The Handbook of Economic Sociology, Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press. Trade and Industry Department, the Government of Hong Kong SAR (2004), Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA). Retrieved from http://​ www​.tid​.gov​.hk/​english/​cepa/​index​.html (July 11, 2014). Tsang, S. (2004), The Modern History of Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Tsing, A. (2000), ‘The global situation’, Cultural Anthropology, 15 (3), 327–60. Urry, J. (2007), Mobilities, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Vandergeest, P. and N. Peluso (1995), ‘Territorialization and state power in Thailand’, Theory and Society, 24 (3), 385–426. Wang, J. (2009), ‘“Art in capital”: Shaping distinctiveness in a culture-led urban regeneration project in Red Town, Shanghai’, Cities, 26 (6), 318–30. Wang, J. (online), ‘Relational heritage sovereignty: Authorization, territorialization and the making of the Silk Roads’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 1–18. Wang, J. and L. Chen (online), ‘Guerrilla warfare, flagship project: The spatial politics of Chinese rock in Shenzhen’s post-political making of a musical city’, Geoforum, 1–10. Wang, J. and M. Li (online), ‘Mobilising welfare machine: Questioning the resurgent socialist concern in China’s public rental housing scheme’, International Journal of Social Welfare, 1–15.

Mobility of the creative workforce  143 Wang, J. and S.M. Li (2017), ‘State territorialization, neoliberal governmentality: The remaking of Dafen oil painting village, Shenzhen, China’, Urban Geography, 38 (5), 708–28. Wang, J., T. Oakes and Y. Yang (eds) (2016), Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism, London, UK: Routledge. Yeh, E.Y.-Y. (2014), ‘Home is where Hollywood isn’t: Re-casting East Asian film industries’, Media Industries, 1 (2), 59–6.

9. The creative mobilities of cultural identity: transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles Anjeline de Dios

WHAT’S CULTURAL ABOUT CREATIVITY? Since the terminological entry of creativity in policy and academic discourse some two decades ago, numerous critiques have emerged to counter its initially celebratory depiction as a panacea for various economic and social crises. Perhaps most glaring among the limitations of dominant creative and cultural industries (CCI) research is its narrow focus on major urban centres in Western Europe and North America, and the consequent discourses that presume an unproblematic transferability of creative policy-thinking from those areas to anywhere and everywhere else (Gibson and Kong, 2005). Beyond the problem of a too-narrow empirical base from which to generate objective ‘data’ about the nature and potential of creativity as industry driver and livelihood, the lacuna prevents a more contextually attuned and theoretically sensitive account of the concrete conditions of creative production, as well as the more abstract value systems of value which define creativity in terms of economic ‘success’, ‘innovation’ and ‘growth’ (Banks, 2018; Gibson, 2012; McRobbie, 2016; Peck, 2005). Ana Alacovska and Rosalind Gill (2019: 200) identify this as CCI studies’ ‘epistemological ethnocentrism, which casts Western metropolis-based workers as the natural and logical representatives of “global” creative work’, thereby flattening out the local conditions of creative labour sectors, jobs, products and perspectives from (and in) Western centres of economic activity and cultural production. The engulfment of creativity by the language and neoliberal logic of profit, development and growth leads us to wonder whether ‘cultural’ still holds any relevant value in our current moment of global creativity, apart from that which has been calculated as a return on monetary investment in ‘artistic’ products, places and people (see Gibson, 2003, 2012; Kong, Chapter 4 this volume). In recent years, an emergent body of CCI research addresses this concern on two fronts. The first investigates the inequitable conditions of labour and urban development ignored by dominant economistic paradigms of creativity, which disproportionately exploit communities marginalized on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity and other indices of cultural difference (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; McRobbie, 2016; Mould, 2018). The second proposes a deliberately inclusive research agenda that foregrounds extant creative spaces and communities that already work outside and against the grain of economistic logics of profit- and growth-oriented creativity – those that exhibit other, 144

Transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles  145 equally salient moral economies governed by ‘the non-monetary logic of community, morality, reciprocity, and mutuality’ (Alacovska, 2018a, 2018b; Alacovska and Gill, 2019: 201; Gibson, 2010, 2012; Kiwan and Meinhof, 2011). This larger initiative of combating widespread epistemological and empirical ethnocentrism leads to a necessary, and promising, repositioning of culture as a central concept in the geographies of creativity. Such a repositioning leads us to ask: how does cultural difference make a material and economic difference to creativity, on multiple and interlocking scales? Whether embodied in the differential identities and experiences of creative workers; articulated in the social politics of creative communities; or enshrined in aesthetic conventions of what counts as good/bad or high/low art, how does the cultural engender complex effects which deeply intertwine with the enduring structural, economic, technical and institutional practices of creativity? In this chapter, I make the case that negotiating the contradictory reality of cultural identity forms a major part of creative labour, understood here as creative workers’ myriad tasks of building connections, managing reputations, and performing across different sites of belonging. One such site is the community of practice, a concept proposed by Étienne Wenger (1998: 1) to denote ‘groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’. In what follows, I explore how the mobility required of artists to participate in transnational communities of practice – which, for specialized genres such as contemporary dance and choral music, form periodically in competitions, festivals and fora in Europe, America and parts of Asia – is generated by a restrictive regulatory logic of managing labour via race and nationality, seen most clearly in the contemporary labour migration regime (Gibson and Graham, 1986). This has consequences beyond the plain fact of a byzantine visa procedure to be negotiated by each member of the touring group. It also shapes conversations around their performance repertoire, professional reputation and organizational mission. To study the mobilities emerging at the periphery of the global creative industries is thus useful in attending more meticulously to the unevenly structured conditions of creative labour as experienced by its living subjects, in ways that would have been excluded, if CCI research left unturned its abstraction of Western urban creative workers’ experiential epistemologies of creativity (Alacovska and Gill, 2019: 197). I seek to contribute to the broader projects of reflexively displacing (Bhabha, 1994), provincializing (Chakrabarty, 2000), deimperializing (Chen, 2010), or decolonizing (Gibson, 2006) the universalist ethnocentrism of creativity, insofar as it remains limited to the disciplinary parameters of Western-centric CCI research. Specifically, I trace the material patterns of sociocultural difference in the mobilities of cultural workers in some way positioned marginally to the West. In doing so, I hope to reframe the economic question of creativity’s nature and value with a view to inquiring into ‘alternative connections, circuits, and joins’ that might yet emerge from the dynamics of survival, profit and livelihood (Gibson, 2012: 290). It behooves us to ask how mobility enables performing artists from the global South to produce and circulate such work in varied spaces of exchange, competition and collaboration, given the potency of the performing arts to shape narrative and

146  Handbook on the geographies of creativity experiential knowledges of human diversity and commonality (Albright, 1997; Higgins, 2012). What shapes their capacity for and experience of touring – as they mobilize finished works, styles of performing and ways of relating in the space of the transnational, entangling domestic contexts of residence and livelihood with overseas contexts of education, networking, collaboration and competition? In what ways does their provenance matter in deciding the value of their work, both at home and abroad? How do these mobilities of labour, knowledge and art merge trajectories of creative work and formations of social and cultural identity?

CREATIVE MOBILITIES OF PERFORMING ARTS Analyses of labour mobility in performing arts – broadly understood to include dance, music, theatre and circus arts, and performance art – have tended to focus on the activities of diasporic artists and communities in destination countries of immigration (Connell and Gibson, 2003; Jazeel, 2005; Saldanha, 2002; Toynbee and Dueck, 2011) or the twin processes of globalization and localization which undergird modernity’s mutual transformations of differentially located creative expression through popular culture (Gibson, 2006; Keppy, 2013; Regev, 2013). In recent years, however, theoretical advancements in migration studies have effectively supplanted the unidirectional model of permanent emigration with more complex patterns of spatial and temporal cross-border movement. There is an increasing acceptance that the plethora of mobilities – seen in wage-earning jobs, educational programmes, romantic, spousal and familial relationships, and networked arrangements of industrial production – structure migrations that are temporary or transient (Constable, 2008), circular (Parreñas, 2008) and/or stepwise (Paul, 2017). In other words, the complex mobilities that now proliferate (in a broad range of labour and industrial sectors including CCI) require congruent approaches that demonstrate how the practice and livelihood of cultural difference – with their attendant issues of identity, belonging, authenticity, value and distinctiveness – complicate and activate static spatial binaries between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, and ‘global’ and ‘local’ (Connell and Gibson, 2003; Krüger and Tandafoiu, 2013). Research into festivals has noted their prominence in displaying and proliferating networked, project-based, and geographically dispersed practices of creative production (Bathelt et al., 2004; Grabher, 2002a, 2002b, 2006; Watson, 2012) and their potential as regenerative schema for host cities’ economies. The increase in number and type of funded festivals in the last ten years worldwide signifies a widespread acquiescence to a policy agenda of harnessing creativity as a strategy of spatial and economic development, where festivals constitute a major attraction for pulling in fresh tourist and consumer revenue. Although economic geographers and sociologists have tracked these developments through research into the impact of festivals on host localities and communities (Comunian 2017; Gibson et al., 2010; Glow and Caust, 2010; O’Sullivan and Jackson, 2002), few studies have been conducted into the short-term1 travel mobilities of visiting festival performers from overseas, faced

Transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles  147 as they are with the onus to showcase material that is in some way expected to be legitimately representative of their nationality, culture, or heritage. The obvious point to make here is that passport-holders of countries from the global South, particularly those countries which have a nefariously large and complex population of mobile citizens (such as the Philippines), are subject to a global visa mobility framework designed to constrict their access to legal travel as performers in countries with a high demand for their unique labour. Thus, performing arts tours rely on a web of partners, collaborators and assistants on both sides of the circuit to mitigate systematic risk at every step of the tour process. Abroad, there are concert promoters, festival organizers, host families and diasporic communities, home embassies and consulates, peers in the performance community and audiences. At home, there are travel agents, embassies and consulates of destination countries, non-touring members, potential funding sponsors, employers (if cast members have day jobs), creative collaborators, clients and family members who must cover tour members’ personal responsibilities and monetary contributions in their absence. This incomplete laundry list of people, institutions and organizations to whom mobile artists are accountable vividly illustrates the thick relationality (Grabher, 2006) to different communities and networks required for a creative worker to become mobile.2 Data for this paper came from one-on-one semi-structured interviews conducted from May to October 2016 and November to December 2017, with eight Manila-based members from Aleron (five) and Daloy (three) who held significant leadership roles as performers and organizational administrators in their respective ensembles.3 Seven of the eight interviews were scheduled at key points before or after the groups’ major performances in Manila and abroad. Daloy members were interviewed after their participation at the Setouchi Triennale in Seto, Japan, and while they were in preparation for a three-week performance and workshop tour in the US (Baltimore, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,). Meanwhile, Aleron members were interviewed before and shortly after the group’s first European tour to France, Germany, Slovenia and Spain over a span of two months. In addition, I draw on insights and observations culled from my personal engagement with the two groups as an audience member of and media writer covering ‘Under the Olive Tree’, a major concert by Aleron in Manila on 28 May 2016; and as a live music performer for ‘Unearthing’, which premiered at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines on 24 June 2016.4 This piece was subsequently reworked and performed during the Asia Performing Arts Market and Setouchi Triennal in Japan in November 2016, as part of a cultural showcase and community engagement event. Scheduling my interviews at these opportune times, when the artists were fresh from their tours, enabled me as interlocutor to provide a reflexive space in which they could relay their immediate impressions of their overseas experiences in light of the more enduring questions on cultural identity and creative labour which undergird their daily working lives and future aspirations. In the rest of the chapter, I focus on two such differences, which together comprise an ‘ambassadorial’ function operative in various processes and stages of the tour. The

148  Handbook on the geographies of creativity first is the work of embodying a larger national collective abroad, within communities of practice (i.e. genre-based ‘scenes’ of music, theatre, or dance), alongside contemporaries from other countries. The second is the possibility of assuming strategic leadership in communities of practice back home, earned through the perceived and actual advantages of overseas performance.

SERIOUS AND AMBITIOUS: ALERON CHOIR AND DALOY DANCE COMPANY Founded in Manila in 2012 and 2014 respectively, all-male choir Aleron and contemporary dance company Daloy belong to a diverse ecosystem of Philippine elite5 performing arts collectives, where members typically participate in varying modes of commitment (full-time and part-time), hierarchy (from director to scholar/trainee) and activity (performance, composition/choreography, teaching and facilitating, PR and marketing, project and organizational management). Like many of their peers, the groups balance public stagings of works with a steady stream of one-off performances at private events (such as religious ceremonies, corporate functions, non-profit organizational events and family celebrations) to generate funds for operational expenses and connect with potential tour sponsors. In this respect the two groups aim for a mixed project portfolio that balances both self-produced and for-hire engagements to achieve both ‘artistic’ and ‘financial’ ends, thereby exhibiting well-researched patterns of relational labour dynamics of project-based work, production, collaboration and organization typical of creative workers in the performing arts (Comunian, 2017; DeFilippi and Arthur, 1998; Grabher, 2002a, 2006; Watson, 2012). Where Aleron and Daloy differ from their contemporaries, and the reason why they occupy this chapter’s attention, is in the nature of their intended creative trajectories. Their attainment of the ‘usual’ milestones for Philippine performing arts groups is significant in light of the relatively short period of activity since their founding, and – in contrast with their peers – in the absence of a permanent host institution (such as a university, parish, or corporation) to lend sustained credibility and support. This achievement becomes all the more intriguing when contextualized within the groups’ larger visions of innovating their respective communities of practice in the country. In interviews, Aleron’s artistic director Christopher Arceo and Daloy founder and artistic director Ea Torrado describe this orientation as ‘serious’ and ‘ambitious’. Choral singing is an established and, to some extent, politically privileged genre of national music, owing to initiatives by ex-First Lady Imelda Marcos to showcase Philippine choirs as elite standard-bearers of the country’s tradition of vocal performance in the late 1960s (Castro, 2011). In the 40 years since Marcos’s top-down sponsorship, dozens of university-based chorales have embarked on victorious international competition tours in Europe, North America and Asia. One Aleron member remembers feeling a sense of trepidation upon starting the tour, knowing that even as

Transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles  149 an unknown choir, their Philippine provenance would locate them in the company of their formidable predecessors: We went to Ireland and they knew all about the [Philippine] Madrigal Singers, UE [University of the East] Chorale ... these international choristers, they know Filipino choirs. I got that feeling that they were kind of wary of us because, yeah, ‘Filipino choir’. Filipinos in the choir world are very well-known for being excellent, and for always raking in the awards. (Karl San Jose, personal communication, 17 October 2016)

This reputation, upheld by the succession of victorious Philippine choirs since the 1970s, is associated with a formulaic repertoire composed of serious music (folkloric and contemporary compositions from the Philippines and Asia; as well as selections from different eras and genres of the Western choral music canon) and a popular selection of Philippine and Anglophone ballads and novelty hits, ostensibly to appeal to mainstream audiences new to choral music. The dominance of this practice has arguably restricted national approaches to concertizing to a competitive mindset of bringing home the gold – a mindset that, according to Arceo, becomes a hindrance to the community achieving other, perhaps more creative aims: Why do Filipino choirs have to tackle a serious repertoire only because of competitions? That’s one of my frustrations. We did a concert in Manila last year and all the songs we did were difficult, I was afraid we might’ve alienated our audience [composed of other choral practitioners and personal contacts outside the choral scene]. They ended up really appreciating it because it was so new and they had never seen that here before. But it made me ask myself, why do we want to do music that’s difficult? ... It’s about something that is intellectually nourishing. Whatever it is that excites the mind. And the spirit as well. (Christopher Arceo, personal communication, 27 May 2016)

The urge to pursue ‘intellectually nourishing’ music is demonstrated not only in Aleron’s regular programming but also in a technically challenging and aesthetically diverse repertoire of works, with an emphasis on performing commissioned pieces by contemporary composers from the Philippines and elsewhere. The perceived risk of ‘alienating’ potential audiences in pursuit of a unique artistic vision is heightened by their specialization in all-male choral performance: The vision of this choir is really to expand the soundscape of the male choral sound. And we look at the voicing as one of the very limiting factors why the male choral scene has not really expanded in the Philippines ... because there has been that stigma associated with falsetto. Not just in this part of the world, but – I suppose – more so in this part of the world [chuckles]. Yet it’s part of the human voice and it’s interesting how we can cultivate it. It helps that you have people in the choir who are very serious in their craft. (Christopher Arceo, personal communication, 27 May 2016)

Aleron’s artistic mandate, therefore, stems from their organizational identity as an all-male choral ensemble seeking to intervene in the aesthetic and social conservatism of an established artistic sector. I suggest that this intervention works in accordance with a craft sensibility, which Richard Sennett (2008: 9) defines as ‘the intimate

150  Handbook on the geographies of creativity connection between hand and head ... a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking’. In this case, the group’s concrete practice of cultivating an under-explored faculty of the human voice yields the intangible ‘vision’ of expanding the soundscape of male choral music within and well beyond their home country. It may likewise be said to index an implicitly subversive agenda of questioning Philippine social norms around gender, masculinity, and the voice.6 Aleron’s strategy for enacting this intervention, however, is paradoxically circumscribed by the transnational performance mobilities that define the very soundscape they seek to expand, as the next section will show. A similar logic of longer-term artistic and social intervention in Philippine contemporary dance explains the creative and organizational origins of Daloy, as narrated by Torrado, a former prima ballerina turned choreographer, educator, and performer of contemporary dance: After I succeeded in creating a company with dancers of different sizes, genders, styles, it became a question of ... what next? Me being a very fiery person, and an ambitious person – my goal with forming Daloy became ‘I want a wider audience for contemporary dance in the Philippines’. Most of the time I’ve noticed at contemporary dance shows here, they have such a hard time getting an audience, so even if the piece is good, no one can see it ... only 20 people ... So I thought, ‘I’m gonna form this group, and then I’m gonna practice within the group so I can direct better and choreograph better, but at the same time I’ll really push for the marketing’. So that a lot of people will know that contemporary dance exists in the Philippines and it’s beyond the commercial stuff you see on TV – that when you say ‘contemporary’ it’s beyond the genre, it can be about the process of the choreographer, and so on. (Ea Torrado, personal communication, 14 July 2016)

In contrast with choral music, with its longer history of development and broader networks of activity with religious and educational institutions outside the performing arts, contemporary dance in Manila emerged only in the 1990s at the interstices of two existing genre communities: ballet and folkloric dance companies partially subsidized by government cultural agencies on the one hand; and on the other, the urban independent dance community, which overlapped with underground visual and performance arts scenes (Jacinto, 2015: 1). Like Arceo, however, Torrado’s comments show that dominant attitudes of unfamiliarity with and conservatism towards contemporary dance similarly foreclose the range of creative productions, expressions and innovations available to contemporary dance practitioners in the Philippines – affecting not only her particular directorial intentions with Daloy, but the larger national ecology of audiences, productions and events which supports her company. Daloy articulates its organizational identity via the critical as well as aesthetic features of contemporary dance, concerned as it is with exploring ‘the responsive dancing body, one that engages with and challenges static representations of gender, race, sexuality, and physical ability, all the while acknowledging how deeply these ideologies influence our daily life’ (Albright, 1997: xiii). Yet, to pursue this craft entails addressing the very structural and collective

Transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles  151 contexts which animate these ideologies, which then determine the short-term sustainability and long-term maturation of this ecology within the Philippines. In the next two sections I demonstrate how Aleron and Daloy’s ‘serious and ambitious’ approaches to all-male choral music and contemporary dance – as performance genres that foreground complex social aesthetics (Born, Lewis and Straw, 2019) of gender and cultural identity in/from the Philippines – are negotiated in response to the mobility between foreign and local audiences.

‘EVIDENTLY FILIPINO’: PERFORMING CULTURAL-ARTISTIC IDENTITIES For creative workers and collectives from the global South, the short-term mobilities of festival, competition and performance tours present the opportunity to craft their national-cultural identity on their own artistic and professional terms, a discursive agenda that is inseparable from the dual external assignation and evaluation of their reputation: first by foreign audiences, peers and consular bodies in the context of their geographic origins; and second by local peers, audiences, clients and donors in light of their international exposure and validation. Daloy’s 2016 performance tours in Japan and the US were organized and partially funded by KMP Artists, a Texas-based tour management firm and production company for live cultural arts. Within its geographically diverse roster of performing arts ensembles in contemporary theatre, dance and music is a subcategory named MyKA, ‘your cultural connection to Southeast Asia’ (KMP Artists, 2019). KMP assisted the touring cast with their American and Japanese visa applications; provided logistical support on tour; and arranged performances and workshops with partner institutions in the US (two dance schools) and Japan (organizers of the Setouchi Triennale). The company was also involved in determining Daloy’s tour repertoire. KMP selected two Torrado-choreographed works for the US tour: ‘Canton’ (2014–), a meditation on the lives of survival sex workers in Manila’s urban slums; and ‘Himalaya’ (2015–), a contemporary interpretation of Philippine folkloric dances ‘in various ritualistic, communal, and festive modes of community’ (Torrado, 2016).7 In one Daloy member’s view, the works were strategically chosen for the marketability of an apparent cultural distinctiveness: To begin with, our tour promoter chose to market [Daloy pieces] Canton and Himalaya because they were so evidently Filipino, and it was easier for them to sell the performance. And it is easier, especially if your target is Europe or the States. It’s – good to hear, I guess, like if someone told me, as a Pinoy in Manila, that ‘hey, there’s a French performer coming over to perform’, there’s an excitement factor there. So I guess it’s the same way when we go there [to the US]. If we’re selling a performance or a whole show. (Zyda Baaya, personal communication, 17 August 2016)

152  Handbook on the geographies of creativity For some Philippine and other non-Western touring performing artists, representing performance that is ‘evidently Filipino’ becomes a means to capitalize on the curiosity of potential audiences with varied levels of interest and literacy (some might be active in relevant communities of practice but know little about the Philippines; others are migrant Filipinos who understand the social import of welcoming their compatriots without being familiar with the genre). Still, the initial appeal to novelty and/or exoticism may provide the exact context for ensembles to shape perceptions of a little-known genre or cultural identity in accordance with their particular style and approach, a narrative freedom that they seldom experience in their usual home context. An Aleron member recalls the warm reception they received in the southwestern German village of Kirkel, whose residents, while choral music enthusiasts, had never seen a foreign choir before: We felt like celebrities there. They were fawning over us! I felt such a sense of excitement when Aleron went into ‘performance mode’, with the energy being well-directed [by our conductor], because when that happens it’s like we’re saying ‘this is the Philippines, this is representative of what we are capable of and we have something good happening in this part of the world’. (Ryan Garcia, personal communication, 21 November 2017)

Similar insights are made by a Daloy member musing on the ‘receptive’ stance of the Japanese public; and another Aleron member recalling how the warm appreciation from European audiences contrasted sharply with how their craft was typically received back home: Maybe they were more accepting in the sense that [the piece] was new, they’d think, ‘ah, so this group is from the Philippines, I wonder what sort of dance they do there – what does this dance group have?’ So they were just very receptive ... as compared to Filipinos, for example I’m a Filipino watching other Filipino groups, like ‘hey wait, this isn’t authentic’. There’s an immediate judgment. Because I’m from there. (Buboy Raquitico, personal communication, 11 August 2016) Being in a high school choir where it wasn’t an appreciated form of art in an all-male high school – and then hearing how it’s appreciated overseas, by people who don’t even understand what you’re singing – that was just something that appealed to us we started thinking about forming an all-male choir. (Kenneth Peter Lee, personal communication, 3 June 2016)

What are we to make of the fact that comparisons between audience responses abroad and at home, whether hypothetical or actual, featured frequently in the interviews? As the excerpts above illustrate, it is difficult to distinguish when performances are representative of cultural-national authenticity (‘in this part of the world’) and when they are representative of artistic and technical prowess (‘this is what we are capable of’). In certain respects, the mobility of performing overseas opens up a discursive space to rewrite (or at least play with) the indivisibility of cultural and artistic identities in ways seldom possible back home, where audiences can be at once more critical and indifferent to their nonstandard experimentations. Overseas audiences’ receptive stance grants touring ensembles two formative experiences: first, the seem-

Transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles  153 ingly uncomplicated acceptance from receptive foreigners grants a reprieve from the scrutiny felt in home communities of practice, where the depth of relational ties lends a weightiness to reflexively contesting the shared social aesthetics of authenticity. Second, the spatial effect of being abroad compels touring Philippine performers to situate themselves and their national community of practice within an imagined global spatiality of artistic kinship, one that is both inclusive and expansive. It is a vision of egalitarian cosmopolitanism akin to what migration historian Filomeno V. Aguilar calls ‘a wider consociation of nations ... indicative of a reserialized view of the global stage ... imbued with the principle of parity in the community of nations-as-persons’ (Aguilar, 2014: 117). In CCI research, festivals operationalize this ‘principle of parity’ in an intensive communal encounter of nations-as-performers, functioning as ‘temporary clusters’ of knowledge networks (Bathelt et al., 2004; Comunian, 2017; Gertler, 2003; Giuliani, 2007). Here, visiting artists learn by observation and comparison as they situate their work in relation to a culturally disparate and artistically proximate horizon of peers. For rapidly evolving genres such as contemporary dance, where opportunities for formalized learning are concentrated in major urban hubs in Europe and North America, transnational tours plug young companies and artists into shared and temporary co-locational spaces where they can give and receive feedback on each other’s work, and befriend and/or network with promising contacts in informal social settings. The opportunity to actively participate in, rather than merely following, the collective global work of knowledge production in their field imbues creative directors such as Torrado with a sense of sober responsibility towards their home communities. Conscious of her responsibility as mentor to her cadre of young dancers, Torrado is purposeful about seeking out international tour opportunities for their education and enrichment: One reason why I want the company to tour abroad [even though it’s difficult] is ... there are avant-garde, experimental festivals where the works are a hybrid of sound, music, text, gestures. Even just going there to watch, you can get a lot of education, from talking to other people, other cultures. So just imagine Daloy being able to perform in such festivals: it will make the dancers grow, it will make me grow. And in other countries, the funding, the conversations, the audience engagement to say what they truly feel about a piece, all of that is just stronger than it is here [in the Philippines]. Contemporary dance here is just starting. And I think it’s important for us to be exposed abroad so that we learn more. Especially since there aren’t many university programmes directed towards contemporary dance. So where else will we get that education? (Ea Torrado, personal communication, 14 July 2016)

Performing ‘Unearthing’ in Japan, one Daloy member recounts the unexpected moment when he realized that the work, which explores trance improvisation and interpretations of Babaylan (Philippine indigenous shamanic) philosophy, bore strong parallels with performances from completely different cultural backgrounds: Setouchi was still an opportunity because we met other artists – and it was delightful to see that we weren’t the only ones doing that sort of concept. So it was interesting to see the sensibilities of culture and to see the patterns with other contemporary artists in Southeast

154  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Asia, like ‘hey, Daloy is doing that kind of thing too, we’re not too far away’. There was an instant feeling of belongingness. Because you get to thinking that you’re on the same page even though you’ve never met each other. You feel you’re on the right path somehow. If, in our country, Daloy sees itself as different because contemporary dance is so commercialized here, then in the Asia contemporary scene – it’s not totally unprecedented; you actually have siblings! (Buboy Raquitico, personal communication, 11 August 2016)

The specific focus on non-Western artists’ performance mobilities shows that the conditions of participation in ‘a wider consociation of nations’ are both unavoidable and malleable, able to contain the multiple imperatives of creative work between constantly shifting registers of artistic (genre-based) and sociocultural belonging. Performance tours, particularly festivals, offer a condensed spacetime where different senses of being oneself and being with others as a performer, can be negotiated within and beyond the obligatory confines of representing one’s cultural identity: The thing is, there are festivals and workshops that are more interested in the work than the ... cultural identity, and those are more about artists collaborating because they’re interested in what we can do together. It’s really a balance, because apart from the prestige because you’re touring abroad, it’s also good to show other countries what we have here, back home. But sometimes you want a break [from performing ‘evidently Filipino’ works] – not that you get tired of it but that there are a lot of other things you can do, aside from that. I think the value of knowing what marketers and cultural institutions want is – we can work around that idea, but at the same time incorporate what we really want to do. (Zyda Baaya, personal communication, 17 August 2016)

‘THERE ARE FILIPINO CHOIRS THAT MEAN WELL’: NEGOTIATING CULTURAL-PROFESSIONAL REPUTATIONS The perpetual construction of social meanings which accumulate in a group’s national-cultural identity involve more than the creative labour of actual performance and repertoire generation. Members of Aleron and Daloy expressed a profound awareness and anticipation of how their conduct before, during and after their tours could subsequently shape overseas perceptions of a larger collective entity to which they belonged, one in which their cultural identities (as Filipino citizens) and professional reputations (as members of their respective genre communities) were intertwined. In this section, I consider two fragments of a much larger complex of ‘offstage’ organizational and interpersonal processes that go into mounting an international performance tour on both ends of the journey: addressing the shame of misconduct by fellow Filipino choirs; and using international prestige as a strategy to pursue ambitious initiatives at home. Unlike Daloy, which currently relies on an external promoter to handle significant aspects of funding and project management, the members of Aleron self-organize every aspect of their tours: from fundraising and promotion to training and logistical planning. It was simultaneously easier and more difficult for them to proceed with

Transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles  155 the undertaking: easier because there is already a well-developed ecosystem of funders, patrons, performance venues and embassies from which to draw upon in the Philippine choral scene, and more difficult because, as a relatively new choir with no institutional affiliation, the members have had to rely on their individual skills outside the strictly musical realm of performance to function as an artist-run collective (a high percentage of members are full-time lawyers, scholars, entrepreneurs, and doctors). From a year up to a few days before their departure, members carried out an extended fundraising campaign to defray tour costs averaging 1–2 million Philippine pesos (19 500–39 000 US dollars); acquire (in some cases unsuccessfully) Schengen and British temporary visas; liaise with festival organizers and promoters to arrange multi-performance itineraries; arrange multiple accommodation with host families for the touring cast and crew of about 40 members; and secure domestic and international travel arrangements (by bus, train and plane). It was in the issue of visa applications and pre-tour arrangements that Aleron confronted what I identify as the merging of cultural and professional identities, in which their ‘Filipinoness’ configures their terms of engagement with foreign collaborators according to larger discursive regimes of embodied difference (McDowell, 2015). I quote at length an anecdote from Raoul Carlo Angangco (Aleron’s assistant conductor and tour manager), where he recounts a conversation with a European diplomat after several members’ Schengen visa applications had been denied before the tour: The French consul [in Manila] told me personally that the reason why some of our other cast members were denied was because – um, European embassies are now very strict with Filipino choirs because of the big number of TNT [a Tagalog acronym for ‘tago ng tago’, lit. ‘perpetually hiding’; a colloquial term for an illegal immigrant]. They were very upfront with me about it being the real reason [for the visa denial]. And it’s not just from recent years, I mean we’re looking at accumulated cases of TNT over decades. [Pause.] And it’s across the board with all the European embassies in Manila. Apparently they talked to each other and sent each other blacklists. Like for instance, the French embassy grants me, a Pinoy chorister, a visa and then I go TNT somewhere in Germany during the tour. The German embassy will complain to the French one. That’s the dynamic. (Raoul Carlo Angangco, personal communication, 23 November 2017)

Aleron’s obligation to bear the consular consequences of other Filipino choirs’ illegal mobilities is linked to a second dialogue, this time with a choral concert organizer in Slovenia, where Filipino choirs had become ‘unofficially banned’: I further confirmed this dynamic when our main host – talked to me, more of ranted to me, for two hours, saying she had a very bad experience with another Filipino choir recently. She was approached by this choir to ask for a letter of invitation to perform in Slovenia – only to find out that the invitation was just for their visa application. Turns out they had no intention of going to Slovenia at all. This must’ve been the second or third time that it’s happened to her, so she got fed up. The bad part is, that she’s like the choral hub in Slovenia, and she’s got connections all over the country – and all of those concerts she organized got cancelled because of that choir that um ... ditched her. So it was a terrible

156  Handbook on the geographies of creativity experience for her and she was crying while she recounted the story to me. (Raoul Carlo Angangco, personal communication, 23 November 2017)

In the face of these associations, it is not unusual that Angangco and other Aleron members became sensitive to the ways that their conduct could potentially rectify these negative stereotypes. Atoning for the misdeeds of proximate others appears to be a key ethical consequence of operating from a deeply relational identity such as a shared nationality, one that does not square so easily with a homo economicus model of creative labour subjectivity. As Angangco explains below, this emerges as a ‘mission’ to embody and exert a virtuous presence abroad – not only for their own good (in the immediate context of the tour), but for future Filipino choirs and their chances of participating in the global community of choral practitioners as Filipino artists. I thanked [the Slovenian concert organizer] for still taking us in, despite our being an unknown choir, and despite having that experience. She said that she was happy she took the chance because she was very happy with us. So I think in that moment I realized that I’d like Aleron to pursue a sort of – mission. [Pause.] That um, we can show Europe and the world that Filipino choirs aren’t – as – tainted as they think. That there are choirs in the Philippines that mean well, and the goal is really to spread goodwill. And I’d like us to be one of those exemplars. (Raoul Carlo Angangco, personal communication, 23 November 2017)

Filomeno V. Aguilar’s concept of ‘transnational shame’ (2014) grows out of a stringent class critique of the elitism of middle-class professional Filipinos in Singapore, who distanced themselves from their compatriots in the low-skilled, and visibly gendered and racialized sectors of migrant domestic work. Although the apprehension expressed by Angangco comes from a different situation – a candid discussion with an important work contact, rather than the shared public space where Filipina bodies are pejoratively coded in gendered, racialized and classed terms – there is a similar impulse towards counter-representation. Angangco’s realization of an emergent ‘mission’ reveals the acceptance of an identification with Filipino peers whose actions, whether favourable or negative, delineate the frames of reception and perception that would meet him and Aleron abroad. This then leads us to consider how elite ensembles in the global South have been defined by the self-conscious imperative to positively represent – in certain cases reconstruct – national-cultural identity, to increase prospects of inclusion in the transnational ecosystem of festivals, competitions, and concerts. Here it becomes clear that the task of negotiating one’s embodied identity plays out in complex ways within transnational sites of performance and knowledge production. The caveat is that the actions of others to which one may share only a superficial identification of common nationality are inexorably imputed to one’s discursive locus of individuality – regardless of whether these actions are messes or successes. Social emotions of shame and (as I explain below) pride figure prominently in the interviews, because the entanglements of cultural identity constitute the relational nature of creativity – what gets created in the transnational, networked

Transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles  157 conditions of performance is not only aesthetic content; rather, the organizational processes of making performance also materializes multiple practices and registers of belonging, community and collective identity. Just as the shame of others’ professional misconduct potentially curtails the mobilities of their peers, so too does the sense of pride in the accomplishments of a proximate other – in the figure of a compatriot triumphing in a prestigious international competition, for instance – improve conditions for creative work at home. Here, members of both Aleron and Daloy described in near-identical terms a kind of shrewd pragmatism about the strategic benefits of gaining overseas accolades in the struggle to prove their relevance to audiences who would otherwise be indifferent to their artistic merits: The other reason why I want Daloy to perform abroad is – there is still an awareness of the game being played, that – as a company when other people see in our resume or our posts that we’ve been invited to do shows abroad, that carries some weight. That gives us some bragging rights. (Ea Torrado, personal communication, 16 July 2016) In the Philippines, you won’t really get much mileage from being good here. You get far more mileage being good elsewhere, because you bring the ‘Filipino pride’ thing and all of that, and, as much as it’s a sad reality, it’s really a way for us to reach more people. And for us to do that is to get credibility as a choir – in terms of being compared to other choirs, like we brought glory. And if we want something to brag about – at the start we were just another choir. Now we’re happy to say we’ve won one competition every year of our existence. Because the stuff that we’re doing? We’re really, really in love with it. And what we want is for more people to experience this kind of music. (Ryan Garcia, personal communication, 3 June 2016)

CONCLUSION The case of non-Western performing artists’ tour mobilities shows how the politics and economics of cultural identity play out beyond the actual performance of aesthetic content, and shape the organizational, economic and social dynamics of performing (as) oneself for distant others. What emerges is a transnational geography where different (im)mobilities entangle the cultural politics of difference with the creative economies of performing arts. These cosmopolitan mobilities feed into enduring narratives of cultural identity – racial stereotypes, industry lore, collective aspirations – of which touring artists are reflexively aware, as we have seen. While the predicament must certainly be critiqued for propagating the very essentialist/universalist bias we seek to avoid, the perspectives of Daloy and Aleron offer an alternative angle from which to ponder cultural identity as a primary locus for ethical and moral reckoning in the creative economy. Alacovska and Gill (2019) rightly sound the imperative for CCI scholars to expand the theoretical and social justice agenda of the field by attending to alternative moral economies of creativity that run outside of and counter to economistic imperatives of development, success and growth.

158  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Rather than depict creative work as uniform in its logic and dynamic of neoliberal precarity, attending to creativity’s differential mobilities of performance sensitizes us to its contradictory movements of expansion and constriction, acceptance and exclusion. On the one hand, the inevitability of an aesthetic-nationalist repertoire might be cynically read as yet another demonstration of the supremacy of capitalist-imperialist desires for cultural authenticity. On the other hand, this representational onus becomes, through a tangle of processes, the frame through which creative workers imagine larger ambitions that meet, then exceed, self-serving notions of success in the creative industries. Just as we briefly considered the value of transnational shame in weighing the politics of cultural identity for Filipino choirs, so too does the question of pride (particularly in its collective version of congratulatory self-regard) warrant a further exploration that lies beyond this essay. Suffice it to say for now that the conditions of cultural identity faced by performing artists from the global South hold open multiple sites of negotiation. To be cause for pride is to be worthy of trust, a form of requisite relational power that can be used to different ends. Aleron and Daloy’s mobilities make clear that beyond apparent imperatives of fame, renown, and profit accumulation, the value of performing away from home is in its logic of dreaming for home: in the rehearsal of ‘forms of social practice that can challenge accepted orthodoxies and provide the conceptual resources for creating images of alternative possible worlds – dream factories, in the broadest possible sense’ (Banks, 2018: 377).

NOTES 1. Short-term travel here refers to periods from two to 12 weeks, following a tour itinerary of multiple stops and public events (performances, workshops, courtesy calls, community visits) within one country (such as the US), or across several (for example Western/ Northern Europe and East/Southeast Asia). 2. By ‘transnational’ I refer to Philip Kelly’s definition of ‘social, economic, political, cultural, and organizational connections established by migrants’ (Kelly, 2009: 395), whether they are the touring artists themselves or migrants in destination countries who facilitate the artists’ social networks of collaboration and exchange. 3. At the time of publication, three of these eight respondents have ceased their active involvement in the ensembles. 4. See Torrado, E. and Daloy Dance Company (2016), ‘Unearthing (Trailer)’, available at https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​ESMaw7jXM2Q, accessed 17 July 2019. 5. I characterize both groups as belonging to a select cohort of elite performing arts ensembles, evidenced by their prolific track record of national and international activity. Aleron has won top prizes at the inaugural Andrea O. Veneracion Choral Competition in Manila (2012), Takarakuza International Chamber Chorus Contest in Japan (2015) and the Limburg Male Choir Festival in Germany (2019). Special invitations to perform have been extended by the World Choral Expo of the International Federation for Choral Music (IFCM) and the 2017 World Chorus for Music in Barcelona. Meanwhile, Daloy Dance Company was nominated as Best Dance Company in 2017 at ALIW, the Philippine national media and arts industry awards, in addition to performing internationally at festivals in East & Southeast Asia (Low Fat Art Festival (2014), Thailand; Goyang

Transnational tours of Philippine performing arts ensembles  159 International Dance Festival (2013), Korea) and the US and Japan (2016) under the aegis of KMP Artists. Grants received have come from the Japan Foundation and the National Commission of Culture and the Arts. 6. Aleron’s second European tour in 2019 is entitled Exploring Identity, which obliquely references the group’s ongoing interrogation of gender norms around the masculine singing voice. See https://​www​.facebook​.com/​aleronchoir/​photos/​a​.228694950595281/​ 1519004844897612/​?type​=​3​&​theater, accessed 16 July 2019. 7. Torrado, Ea (2016), ‘Himalaya’. https://​eatorradoblog​.wordpress​.com/​2016/​12/​01/​ featured​-content​-2/​). Accessed 8 July 2019.

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10. People, places and processes: crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global Susan Luckman

. . . there’s a huge shift in the market, and I think the shift in the market is also driven by new technologies because there’s an ability for people to ‘find their tribe’, to find their voice, to identify in a global world where you can talk to anyone, anywhere, any time. You want to find your roots and you want to identify. So there’s this kind of local–global phenomena that happens that you see yourself in this global interconnected world, yet you also want the identity and authenticity of who you are in a place and time, and makers provide that capacity. (Former national craft organization director, Canberra, Interviewed 2015)

Craft and design-led creative economies are presently enjoying a moment of growth, driven by consumer demand for unique, innovative and/or handmade objects (Luckman, 2015). Though the primary market for such goods is among relatively privileged citizens of the global north, having developed alongside a parallel rise in awareness of the exploitative labour and materials practices of fast fashion, the supply chains around craft simultaneously privilege both the hyper-local and a sense of the cosmopolitan global. Therefore, craft and design-led creative economies enable all kinds of opportunities for de-centralized creative practice beyond the urban locations previously privileged as densely clustered sites for creative ‘industrialization’. They also fit neatly in with consumer desires to ‘discover’ the different, unique, distinctive in the face of globalized supply chains and increasingly identical retail brand offerings around the global north. For visitors to a place, craft items have long offered a valuable reminder ‘of activities not part of the tourists’ daily routines at home’ (Littrell et al., 1993: 198). Distinct local economies and their products are valuable points of difference in the wider shift to niche authenticities and place-based marketing, for, like food-centred practices, place-based as well as maker story provenance is fundamental here. This chapter problematizes understandings that privilege creativity as mobility. Drawing upon Trubek’s work on the French understanding of terroir as a fundamental way of making sense of, and valuing (Trubek, 2008), the importance of place as embodied – smelled, tasted, felt – in specific regional food and wine practices, this chapter considers the extent to which we can see a similarly local–global ‘craft terroir’ at work in the contemporary craft economy. Within this larger socio-economic context of interest in the handmade and artisanal, unsurprisingly ‘[c]rafts are currently being rediscovered not only as a hobby but also as a desirable enterprise’ (Jakob, 2013: 127). The empirical data informing the rest of this chapter is drawn from ‘Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-Economy’,1 a four-year study of Australian designer-makers and 162

Crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global  163 craftspeople investigating how online distribution is changing the environment for operating a creative micro-enterprise, and with it, the larger relationship between the public and private spheres. In this project, we recognize that not all handmade micro-entrepreneurs are at the same stage of their career, or have the same origin story. Therefore, this qualitative, mixed-methods national research project consists of three parallel data collection activities: semi-structured interviews with established makers; a three-year annual interview monitoring of arts, design and craft graduates as they seek to establish their making careers; and a historical overview of the support mechanisms available to Australian handmade producers. At the time of writing, the project had interviewed 20 peak and/or industry organizations, 81 Established Makers, and had almost completed the third and final round of interviews with Emerging Makers (Year 1/‘1-Up’ = 32; Year 2/‘2-Up’ = 27; Year 3/‘3-Up’ = 19). The project employs this phenomenological approach to offer a rich ‘insider’ perspective on creative micro-enterprise. Semi-structured interviews of this kind are the best tool available for capturing the work/life stories of creative practitioners in their own words. The interviews are all professionally transcribed then thematically coded in NVivo as part of an inductive analysis process. What this project has revealed is that Australian craft and designer-makers, while profoundly globally aware, nonetheless tend on the whole to most immediately operate in markedly hyper-local creative economies.

LOCALITY AS MUSE, AND MARKET When the project was initially proposed in 2014, Etsy and other online outlets for the handmade were experiencing a moment of exponential growth coupled with the wider media hype that comes with the new. Consequently, the possibilities for further de-centralization of production as a result of online international retailing via ‘long tail’ (Anderson, 2007) distribution networks was an initial focus of the project. However, what we have actually found is that while some of the makers we interviewed were indeed having success online, very few stayed on Etsy and equivalent sites long after this initial moment of hype. Instead social media, Instagram in particular, or simply direct contact via email or from a business/personal website were the online mechanisms leading most directly to sales (see Table 10.1). Even online, geography matters, as we know; especially when the products being sold exist as physical (often fragile) items and not digital files. Those research participants who sought to shift their focus to other sales avenues offered a number of reasons for their lack of success with online selling sites. For some, the sheer number of sellers was seen as an impediment to the visibility of their products. For others, sales volumes did not warrant the effort, especially when the costs of postage from Australia to elsewhere in the world are factored into the buying decision. For others still, online sale sites lacked the personal touch and the ability for potential customers to ‘try on’ the highly tactile, handmade product.

164  Handbook on the geographies of creativity A number of the questions in the semi-structured interview schedule we employed with both Emerging and Established Makers sought to identify the actual outlets people were selling through, in particular the question: ‘Which of the following best describes the current distribution methods for your craft product?’ (see Figure 10.1) that we asked interview participants to complete themselves directly onto the page. Tabulating the top four outlets for the 81 Established Makers provides the results summarized in Table 10.1. What is not evident in the figures presented here are the actual percentages; in approximately half of the cases where people sold primarily through public craft fairs or street markets this was far and away their primary outlet, often listed at 60 per cent or above. Much of the balance of their sales was then made via ‘word of mouth’, often repeat customers (having first purchased from them at the market) or people who were aware of their work through friendship networks. In this way the majority of the people we have spoken to are still selling pretty ‘directly’ to customers; if not directly ‘hand-to-hand’, then generally within limited geographies and/or social networks. Perhaps ironically, the desire for some degree of intimacy with the experience of buying is one reason for the rise of Instagram as a marketing and sales tool; makers reporting success in this space noted the importance of the personal ‘word of mouth’ recommendations to ‘friends of friends’ that are easily enabled via the affordances of social media. Moreover, social media contact can simply be one mechanism by which existing friends and previous customers look to reconnect, and recommission, work from a maker. Even online, selling relationships frequently tended to the both socially and geographically local.

Figure 10.1

Interview questions for completion by interviewee

Crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global  165 Table 10.1

Top three responses to the above question from the Established Makers Main outlet

2nd most

3rd most

Total:

significant

significant

(in top 3

outlet

outlet

outlets)

Word of mouth

8

11

3

22

Direct to retailers (other than galleries)

10

6

1

17

Direct to public from studio/workshop/home

9

7

1

17

Online

7

5

4

16

Public craft fairs

10

5

1

16

Through a commercially funded gallery or exhibition 9

5

2

16

Direct commissions

4

7

3

14

Through a craft shop

5

3

6

14

Wholesalers

2

4

4

10

Through a publicly funded gallery or exhibition

3

7

0

10

Street markets

4

2

1

7

Other (co-ops/artist collectives)

2

0

0

2

Trade-only fairs

1

0

0

1

Note: No response or percentage given = 20 out of 81. Where equal percentages provided at 1st and 2nd all apportioned to top value, with corresponding number of further levels left empty. If multiples given at 3rd option data not included.

The project explicitly set out to be truly national, and thus the Established Makers whose selling outlets are presented above come from all states and territories in Australia, as well as represent a mix of urban, regional and remote experience. But they were also overwhelmingly not makers of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander background, and it is in this sector that the de-centralized geographies of international online craft and design retail are being more fully realized in Australia. An extension of the art centre model for creative production in Aboriginal and Torres Strait communities that has enabled artists to make a living while staying on their (frequently remote) country, in our project we have identified over 50 social enterprise art centres with some engagement at least with craft and design. For example, in the Central Desert: Ernabella Arts, Hermannsburg Potters – Aranda Artists of Central Australia, Yarrenyty Arltere Artists, Maruku Arts; Tiwi Islands (northern Australia): Manupi Arts, Bima Wear, Tiwi Arts; Arnhem Land (northern Australia): Maningrida Arts & Culture, Elcho Island Arts, Bula’bula Arts, Bábbarra Women’s Centre; Kimberley Region (north-west Australia): Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, Nagula Jarndu (Saltwater Woman) Design; Torres Strait (north eastern Australia): Gab Titui Cultural Centre, Moa Arts. Working across a spectrum of creative practice and price points, what unites this work is that it is globally unique. The expenses associated with postage in this context become not only something to be expected, but indeed part of the whole experience of purchasing work from these makers, based as they are in their own unique geographies. Similarly, whether it be in the maker’s stories they represent, the design elements employed, or the actual materials used in their production, these products tell a distinct story of place, and send this out to the world.

166  Handbook on the geographies of creativity While the small-scale and ethical affordances of artisanal production as an ‘intentional economy’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006) that seeks to use its business practices to address social and environmental problems are increasingly being recognized (Luckman, 2015), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander craft and design is a clear example of the connection of place to an ethics of cultural production. Writing more generally on this, Banks observes: the search for place appears an important dimension of the attempted remoralisation of social and economic practices . . . As actors struggle to re-embed life projects and biographical narratives, the desire to do so in particular locations becomes more pronounced. While this can generate social reaction, we might also suggest, for cultural producers, that the feel or sense of a place might provide a focus or inspiration for alternative forms of cultural production based on aesthetic, practice-based or social/ethical endeavour. (Banks, 2007: 145)

With millennia of story-telling and making in place underpinning it, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander craft and design in country sold via the internet operates precisely at the intersection of twenty-first century economies and technologies, and a politics of (disrupted) lives lived across time in a particular place. To tease this out through just one example, the Tjanpi Desert Weavers (https://​tjanpi​.com​.au/​) offers a unique take on the frequent hardwiring of non-urban cultural work to politics concerned with ethical production and environmental sustainability. ‘Tjanpi’ means ‘dry grass’ in Pitjantjatjara. The Tjanpi Desert Weavers was formed by the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council ‘to enable women in remote central deserts to earn their own income from fibre art’ (https://​tjanpi​.com​.au/​about/​): [The] NPY Women’s Council delivers services into the NPY region that – are not covered by government or any other organization. It’s filling a need, a gap as expressed by the membership itself, which are the women that reside on the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara Lands – the tri-state region of NT, SA and WA. So we cross three state jurisdictions [350,000 square kilometres] in the service delivery of that region. (Michelle Young, Manager, Tjanpi Desert Weavers, Alice Springs, Interviewed 2015)

The hundreds of women working in 26 communities across three states making woven products for sale or gallery display for Tjanpi Desert Weavers at any one time are not only inspired by their country but weave the very landscape into the work, incorporating the local grasses which are cultivated, collected and treated for this purpose. The presence of the grass actually poses a challenge to the growth of some international markets for the work, with customs requirements precluding easy importation. For this reason, at the time we spoke with the organization, the urban domestic market was their primary focus for market growth, together with international art commissions (work by Tjanpi artists was featured in that year’s Venice Biennale). Their country (the central desert landscape) and traditional forms (the coolamon or pitti bowl) is clearly evident here as not only a source of inspiration but as offering a unique product made by a diverse creative workforce, grounded in place and valued in a global market in search of points of difference; for things with a story and a provenance. Importantly here, mythic creative discourses of seemingly unlim-

Crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global  167 ited entrepreneurial scalability and growth are simply neither possible nor desirable in this creative economy, with a limited community authorized to tell/make its stories and its focus on social enterprise and handmaking in country.

‘FROM MY PLACE TO YOURS’: GLOBAL COSMOPOLITANISM AND TRANSLOCALISM As we have seen, while the site of making and the starting point for sales may remain very local in the Australian craft and designer maker economy, this is clearly not to say that the items themselves do not travel. My thinking here around the translocal movement of crafted items, and importantly the affects associated with them and of particular places they embody, is indebted to my earlier work on creativity and experience within local music cultures. Music studies has for some time now had as a central concept the idea of ‘the scene’ (Bennett, 2000; Bennett and Peterson, 2004; Cohen, 1991, 1994, 1995; Connell and Gibson, 2003; Straw, 1991). Scenes are emplaced, indeed highly localized, often discursively represented as a sound that could only have arisen in that particular time and place: grunge and 1990s Seattle, The Beatles and 1960s Liverpool; The Beach Boys and 1960s California; Detroit and Motown. The terminology of ‘scenes’ evokes the rich and complex creative ecosystems required to create unique music. But what is also acknowledged is that these local scenes rarely if ever sit in splendid isolation from either other (local) scenes nor the global flow of sounds, images, artifacts and ideas that otherwise circulate internationally around musical practices, genres and artists. They are at once influenced by elsewhere and impact upon other places, again often in highly localized ways: inspiring local acts; being enjoyed in a fan’s bedroom. They operate at a translocal level ‘because, while they are local, they are also connected with groups of kindred spirits many miles away’ (Bennett and Peterson, 2004: 8–9). As scenes scholarship has matured, some music studies scholars have come to critique the ways in which local scenes can become less about ‘organic’ relationships between music and the cultural history of the locale than with the ways in which emergent scenes use music appropriated via global flows and networks to construct particular narratives of the ‘local’ (Bennett and Peterson, 2004: 7). While valuably challenging the lack of community diversity or intersectionality in the local identities often represented by these narratives, the importance of understanding and appreciating the qualities of place, rendered often even more apparent through dialogue with elsewhere, remain. In a consumer landscape where the same chain stores can be found across the industrialized world, and the snow globes and other cliché forms of ‘I was there’ products made for the tourist market are all made in China no matter where in the world you may be purchasing them, the handmade (including its bespoke shops, craft fairs, street markets and open studios) is being embraced by local governments and tourists alike for the ways in which its products offer a unique memento of place:

168  Handbook on the geographies of creativity When people come to a region like this [tropical north Queensland/Great Barrier Reef], when they’re looking at souveniring from this region, they are looking for something that’s unique and individual. They already have a price point in mind that they’ll go to, no matter what it is. And so they’ve got the spending money in their pocket, they’ll buy five of that or one of that, and it’s that particular item that sums up and embodies their experience that will get it across the line. And that might be a beautiful bowl or a cup, or it might be a print, or it might be a range of jewellery, whatever it might be. Yeah, I have noticed that unique individual pieces are being more taken up than in the past. (Regional Arts Organization Director, Townsville, Queensland, Interviewed 2015)

Given the ongoing viability and value of market sales for Australian makers, many produce product lines aimed at appealing to this translocal demand for products that can embody this other unique visited locality in the hyper-local of one’s own home or office: So one of our things is all our products have on the back ‘Made in Perth’ engraved on them, and I would say at least half of the stuff that we make that goes out of [our gift shop retailer], so serving boards, coasters, table runners, badges, magnets, all end up overseas . . . a quarter of it probably go over east [to the more populated east coast of Australia] and a quarter of it would stay locally. (West Australian Maker, Interviewed 2017) A: . . . but I have fun doing vintage style tourist things or really hokey things that are almost daggy. But the tourists love it. Q: Just tourists? A: No, no, I do a cushion with Bondi on it and the Bondi resident is a curious creature. They’re hysterical. They love having things with Bondi in their house. I live in Coogee, but you know I don’t want a cushion with Coogee on it, even though I make them. But they never go into people’s houses. The Coogee cushion nearly always goes to the UK or I have a particular group of people, there’s an Irish community live in Coogee. And there’s a woman called Mary [and] I am her ‘go-to’ person for a going away gift. And so I just get phone calls that say: ‘Such and such is going home, can you do me a cushion in this colour?’ And so I have a standard thing for these people now, it’s called the Mary discount; if you’re Irish and you’re part of this group you get a Mary discount. (Robert Viner-Jones, Bob Window, New South Wales, Interviewed 2016)

But such practices are patently not without their challenges. Not the least of which is managing to maintain a sense of one’s own authenticity or making integrity while also wanting to make a living: Q: The Parap Markets – are you getting people going there who want to buy something from the [Northern] Territory? A: Yes, yeah, definitely, and I think what they like about my stuff is that it’s not like crappy souvenirs. It’s got the tourist appeal without being some crappy plastic piece of rubbish with ‘Darwin, NT’ printed all over it. Mind you, some people ask me if I – ‘Well, would you put Darwin on it?’ Because they want to take something home that’s got ‘Darwin, NT’ written on it, and it’s like, ‘No, I’m sorry, that’s not my schtick.’ (Robin Maclean, Bippidii Boppidii, Northern Territory, Interviewed 2017)

Crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global  169 The textile-based work of this maker foregrounds distinctive prints of her own design that feature Australian flora and fauna, including many motifs specific to the far north of the country. In this way, while the items themselves have a transferable functionality (bags, wallets, cases, cushions and so forth), the uniqueness is conveyed through both the actual originality of the design (not available elsewhere) and the specific evocation of place this affords. Importantly too, with Darwin an important tourist gateway for international visitors to Australia seeking to go to places such as Kakadu National Park, like a lot of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait fabric and fibre-based work discussed above, these fabric products are relatively easy to pack – lightweight and not fragile – for the trip home.

CRAFT ‘TERROIR’

Notes: Jax & Co is based near mallee scrublands in regional South Australia. The mallee root is the rhizomatic rootstock of the mallee tree. Source: Photographs by Rosina Possingham Photography.

Figure 10.2

Mallee root burl and resin bangle by Jax & Co (left image); The mallee root (right image)

But is this simply a take on niche marketing and Romantic inspiration, or is something more profound embodied in craft in place? Long before the slow food movement, craft beer and artisanal gins, the French had long referred to and had a word for the significance of place when it comes to the taste and mouth feel of especially wine: terroir. As Trubek (2008) writes in her book exploring the concept and its potential applicability to ‘new world’ agricultural production: The classic nineteenth-century French dictionary, Pierre Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, defines terroir as ‘the earth considered from the point of view of agriculture,’ and clarifies with le goût de terroir: ‘the flavour or odour of certain locales

170  Handbook on the geographies of creativity that are given to its products, particularly with wine.’ The ability to trace a connection between the symbolic and practical definitions of the earth and the tastes of food and beverage defines French food culture. (Trubek, 2008: 12)

While acknowledging the difficulty of actually trying to translate the word from the French in a way that adequately captures all its meanings – it often ends up being understood variously ‘as soil, locality, or part of the country’ (Trubek, 2008: 25) – Trubek explores French terroir as a means by which to interrogate why, at a culinary school in the USA, increasingly she was finding ‘taste’ consistently ‘being located, both in geographical terms (in the gravel, schist, or clay; on the hillsides, in the valleys, or by the river) and by name (Joey’s strawberries, Bill’s lamb, Laini’s cheese, Helen’s wine).’ (Trubek, 2008: 23). Food that is clearly from somewhere and someone, like craft and the handmade, offers ‘a transnational mode of discernment’ and ‘an intervention into the vast array of placeless and faceless foods and beverages now available to people everywhere’ (Trubek, 2008: 91). But in drilling down further into the French understanding of terroir and goût de terroir, she also foregrounds the ways in which today the concepts can also be mobilized as the basis for resistance through the upholding of traditional ways of doing things. Conservative approaches to setting into stone ‘the way we have always done things’ can of course lead to stasis, a lack of innovation, and the maintenance of problematic socio-political status quos. But when it comes to production systems in a globalized world, it can also foreground the local as the locus for positive action through an intentional economy: In the course of my research all over the United States and my day-to-day work in Vermont, people repeatedly pointed out to me what they identified as the elitism of the food and drink that I was considering. In California, Wisconsin, Vermont, and other places I would travel, this was a universal cultural critique. For most, this elitism revolved around cost: the grass-fed beef, heirloom tomatoes, and hand-rolled tortillas available for purchase at the farmers’ market or for sale to a restaurant were elite products because they were more expensive. But expensive relative to what? In comparison, it seemed, to the cost of beef, tomatoes, and tortillas available at your local supermarket. Few people made the connection that the higher cost at the farmers’ market increased the level of return to individual farmers and was in fact an exercise in food democracy. (Trubek, 2008: 119)

A tantalizing poetics to this politics emerges when she further articulates the value of terroir as a holistic means of understanding production in place as responsive to the needs and ongoing sustainability of that location itself: The regional foods that make up a cuisine du terroir taste of the land from which they come. Certain plants and animals are adapted to a particular spot – its soil, rocks, and climate – and draw out a distinct flavor. Among foods from a single locality, strong harmonies can occur. Historically, such foods developed slowly, and generations living in one place tended to favour what worked well and tasted best, other things being equal. (Trubek 2008: 139)

Quoting the work of rural sociologist Elizabeth Barnham, she observes how the institutionalization of terroir in the French AOC (appellation d’origine contrôlée) system

Crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global  171 – the reason sparkling wine from anywhere other than Champagne cannot be called champagne – is, Barnham argues, an exercise in Karl Polanyi’s theory of economic embeddedness ‘which argues that markets have always operated within environmental and social constraints’ (Trubek 2008: 40). For terroir, these ‘constraints’ have been productive. For while global food systems mean that those of us fortunate to live in the industrialized world with its supermarket networks can expect to be able to buy any fresh fruit or vegetable regardless of whether it is in season, it is the working with what is at hand that has delivered via terroir the unique, and particular, products so now in global middle class demand. While Barnham is referring specifically to the AOC system, Trubek observes how the broader terroir, having evolved from peasant farming practices and associated lifestyles, represents a working with the affordances of the local but not from a perceived position of lack. In a world marked by climate crisis and over-production, it valuably represents a system that foregrounds ‘what there is in nature to be known . . . rather than viewing nature as an obstacle to be overcome or controlled for production’ (Barnham quoted in Trubek, 2008: 40). To briefly further explore what all this might mean in the context of Australian craft and design, there are two locations in the study that consistently presented us with stories of making undertaken by non-Aboriginal craftspeople where the more-than-human affordances of location were still strikingly evident: the island state of Tasmania and the desert of central Australia. Tasmania – The ‘Extreme’ South Relative geographic isolation has long facilitated the development of unique, if not discrete, local cultural practices. For creative practitioners, the frequent lack of critical feedback in smaller and/or regional creative communities where often everyone feels the need to be able to get along with one another, coupled with the absence of professional development opportunities can be an ongoing barrier to developing professional skillsets and expectations and thus wider commercial and aesthetic success. But even while many acknowledge this, we are reminded by Scott Rankin, a Sydney-born theatre director, writer and co-founder and Creative Director of the arts and social change company Big hART, of his choice to live and work primarily in and from northwest Tasmania: One of the most liberating things about living and working in Tasmania is you feel freer from the eyes upon you. You spend less time second-guessing an imaginary audience of your peers, or imagining quite so strongly the success of others, where you are on the ladder, or whether their gains are your losses . . . Finding your vision or voice is like discovering a naïve parallel universe of thought – an expression of self – not a search for originality. This can be more difficult in the urban environment, because space, silence, and time are at a premium and the clamour for, and proclamations of, ‘originality’ can be deafening. (Rankin, 2012)

These processes of finding a unique ‘voice’ take a material turn for craftspeople and other artisanal makers:

172  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Q: Do you bring that out in the description of the products, they have names that are evocative of Tasmania? A: Yeah, and I don’t need it to be that overt – it might be through form, so this form is a reference to the dam wall in the Gordon River Dam, the double curvature wall, and looking back at our hydro-electric schemes and the engineering around that and that’s where the turbine series came from as well . . . so it might be through form. Or it might be through materials so this sandstone, this is all about just using the material that’s very Tasmanian and it has the GPS location of the quarry on the bottom also [see Figure 10.3]. So that idea of knowing exactly where it’s come . . . I love that idea of you literally owning or can hold a small piece of Tasmania. (Scott van Tuil, Tasmania, Interviewed 2018)

Source:

Photograph by Susan Luckman.

Figure 10.3

The source material’s latitude and longitude of origin feature on a van Tuil product from Tasmania

Forestry and logging remain sizeable, and contentious, industries in Tasmania. The availability of so much quality and unique timber has long meant that furniture making and design represent a sizeable part of the Tasmanian craft and designer maker economy, with furniture and other timber design products being exported nationally across Bass Strait to the Australian mainland and beyond. It also means that unique local timbers, the protected Huon Pine in particular, are part of the tourist offering increasingly sought out by visitors to the state in search of a memento. For decades stallholders at the Salamanca Markets in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart have offered up Huon Pine chopping boards, rolling pins and spatulas. But this material’s success has limited the possibilities for a broader understanding of the Tasmanian craft terroir in the eyes of many of the makers there, thus requiring a broader sense of the possibilities of craft terroir:

Crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global  173 When I was in Sydney we used to pay a premium for Tasmanian Oak, and when I moved down here I noticed the people down here use Tasmanian Oak as a building product or as firewood or fence palings. It really was a super undervalued resource. It was all about Huon Pine, Myrtle, Sassafras, Celery Top, all of these other timbers. And because I didn’t have a really good understanding or I was very wary of the environmental – of the politics that comes with those timbers, ‘where they were from?’, ‘how they were sourced?’, ‘was it ethically sourced?’ . . . I basically just took a big step back and said I don’t know enough and I’m not confident that I know where it’s come from. And then they locked up a lot of those timbers and so the timbers that you could get, you were either getting them from people who took them out – there are some cowboys out there that you don’t know how and where they got the timber. So from an ethical point of view it’s a little bit dodgy but then also from a very practical point of view, if a timber hasn’t been properly seasoned and air-dried and kiln-dried you can end up paying money for timber that’s not going to work or isn’t very good. So from a consistency of pricing and product and quality and the ethics of it I basically just said, ‘Okay, it’s Tas Oak. That’s what we’re working with and that’s all we’re working with.’ And we developed a number of different ways of using Tas Oak that – I mean I’ve really enjoyed it. We’ve developed a way of triggering the tannin in the black oak to make it go black by mixing up a combination of steel wool and vinegar and then spraying it on and it comes up this beautiful black colour. We’ve been working with soap finishes which are traditional finish of European lighter timbers and that triggers the colour. It takes all the pink out of the Tas Oak and it almost goes this sort of – it’s almost this kind of, this cool olive green kind of colour, more like spotted gum. Anyway that’s really beautiful. So there’s ways of actually handling Tas Oak that make it, elevate it. And even just calling it Tas Oak is the equivalent of calling a porterhouse steak meat. It’s just this generic term that covers about five different Eucalypt species and they just call it Tas Oak. I mean it’s Eucalyptus Regnans, Eucalyptus Obliqua, Delegatensis. It’s also known – they’re the Latin names but it’s called Stringy Bark or Mountain Ash. And all of these names are really evocative and beautiful and totally – and even just calling it the right name or the local colloquial name elevates it to another level . . . The tallest timbers down here are the Regnans, the Eucalyptus Regnans, the really old ones. So anyway but recently, maybe three weeks ago we had this guy from Hydrowood came to visit. And they’ve got the license to go to Lake Pieman, which is one of the lakes that hydro[electric scheme] flooded, and pull out some of the [Huon Pine] trees that are standing there. And so there is a way to get some of those timbers, which is, we know is ethical and they’ve been properly kiln dried and the timber is really stable. (Laura McCusker, Tasmania, Interviewed 2016)

In this long quote, what is evident is a depth of knowledge of materials in place, an ethics of sourcing, and joyful commitment to work with the affordances of what is possible; what is present in the location. To find the techniques that work for the materials, not the materials for the techniques. While the consumer may not be able to taste the terroir with craft as they do with wine and food, in sitting for generations at a table with its own documented story from piece of wood in the forest through to polished artefact that the body, foods, wines have interacted with, they certainly will be able to sense the traces of its locational origins through sight, feel and smell. Central Australia As a creative locale, Alice Springs is a city bigger than the sum of its parts, and certainly a more substantial global creative player than its remoteness and traceable

174  Handbook on the geographies of creativity population of around 25 000 people would perhaps lead you to believe. The strong affective relationships between many of its cultural workers – both Indigenous and (post)colonial settlers – and Alice Springs as an iconic place at Australia’s geographic heart, go a long way to explaining why this is the case. Alice Springs has a strong ‘spirit of place’ (O’Connor and Gu, 2010: 125) and the landscape and country of the MacDonnell ranges is central to shaping this. This location, and the affordances – material and aesthetic – of its landscape, are key to the practice of James B. Young, shoemaker and outfitter. Ten or so years ago James and his partner designer Elliat Rich, then recent graduates, took an extended time out to go camel trekking in the outback. The trek became a significant personal journey through place and its possibilities when they set themselves the challenge of making all their own equipment (including saddles, bags, swags, etc.). This practical experience of making-in-place today informs the professional making practice of both. James’s work, both in shoes (he has closed off his waiting list for shoes at a year, and has a wait list to get onto his waiting list) as well as other leather goods, represents his interest in an Australian colonial aesthetic, in many ways to rival the influence of the American woodsmen kind of figure permeating post-hipster aesthetic culture: I think certainly landscape is infused in my work in a really broad kind of way. I have a strong interest in a kind of, the heritage of an Australian style and identity, and I think that that’s, you know that’s certainly formed by my own experience of living in Australia. And you know I think Central Australia is unique . . . Certainly the Elbowrkshp [the couple’s shared studio workspace] stuff, there’s kind of narrative there around local materials and local industrial processes that we’re sort of attempting to utilise. But within my own [practice], it is broadly informed by early Australian style and design, it’s largely a Victorian aesthetic that’s been made to be durable, and has been made with a real paucity of materials, and often made very simply . . . I think just within that sort of simple kind of pared-back language there's something; the heritage of the older Australian style kind of suits. (James B. Young, Northern Territory, Interviewed 2015)

An integrated craft terroir is certainly evident in James’s ‘bread and butter’ higher turnover product: camel dubbin. Central Australia has remnant introduced camel populations that have gone wild, having been brought into the desert as an early form of transport following European colonization. The dubbin is made from boiling down the fat in the camel’s humps; a messy and smelly process but one that makes use of a part of the animal otherwise discarded. It is also evident in the products from the Elbowrkshp label he runs with partner Rich, which includes a limited range of goods also arising from the experience of their year in the outback: a scrap leather and wood travel mirror (initially made from a bit of swag canvas), leather plates. Rather than seeing being located in Alice Springs as a barrier to serious international design practice, these multi-award-winning designers explicitly embrace this location and its affordances precisely for the unique, frequently literally ‘grounded in the soil’ possibilities for craft and design practice it offers, while simultaneously staying connected to the national and international design scene.

Crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global  175

CONCLUSION: MATERIAL AUTHENTICITY IN A MOBILE WORLD Well I’ve personally really wanted to do stuff with Australian motifs . . . And I get really frustrated because you see motifs come up and it’s this, you know things are trending and everyone’s doing pineapples, and everyone’s doing deer, and everyone’s doing rabbits and everyone’s doing foxes, and I’m like: ‘you know they’re pest animals in Australia, they’re actually decimating our wildlife – why are we representing them? We’re not in Europe!’ (Queensland Maker, Interviewed 2015)

It is in working with the local that, potentially, a craft terroir can be not just place-based marketing strategy, but an emplaced ethics of more sustainably working with what is to hand, all the while also producing something that does lead to joy in its ‘consumption’. The ‘harmonies’ within a locality are not simply about how food and drink production result in products that take on the qualities of the soil, air and water, but craft-based practices too are fundamentally about working literally with place: clays, leathers, metals, stones, silicas, pigments, fibres and with their affordances. Materials, their textures and colourways, from the same location often also operate harmoniously. In this way craft terroir could be seen as an extension of leading British architect, industrial designer and craftsman David Pye’s evocation in his iconic 1968 book on craft and making, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, that ‘any given material takes, or can be made to take, certain shapes easily or directly. These unforced shapes are natural to it and are the right shapes to aim at. You must not torture your material’ (Pye, 1968: 86). Not ‘torturing’ one’s material is to work in harmony with it, to bring out the forms lying latent within it. This kind of understanding of their practice was common to many of the makers we spoke to, notably those working with wood and stone that can ‘resist’ more so than more pliable materials like clay, though obviously all material has its limits and affordances. This working with the material underpins the sense of material authenticity in play around craft economies. Terroir, working with the materials in place and exchanging the items in localized economies, deepens this sense of material authenticity by providing a framing of this relationship that goes beyond the individual item or practice, and into an ecology of objects and practices that work symbiotically together. The concept of terroir is one that we can use to animate a richer discussion about how craft and design can work with and in the local to address the global need for more ethical production practices. This said, in its strong relationship to tourism as a key market, much craft terroir remains in a compromized relationship to environmental sustainability. But through offering alternative stories that engage the senses, craft terroir also captures a capacity for translocal action; of embedded relationships with, and deeper understandings between, specific places, inhabitants and experiences. Craft objects with a strong story of place can have agency: This is so, because while it is possessed of particular characteristics, the qualities of an object are really only made manifest in the ‘tasting’ (literally or figuratively) undertaken by actors, in specific situations and contexts, who possess both shared and singular capacities

176  Handbook on the geographies of creativity and orientations to the object in question. In this respect, taste in culture is a ‘situated activity’ (ibid.: 101 [Hennion, 2007]) a moment of coming together between histories, objects and persons, aided by technologies and qualities of place and moment, that induce specific sensations which are neither pre-determined nor entirely individualistic, but emergent. (Banks, 2017: 29–30)

Of course, most if not all of these highly localized practices continue in reality to be undertaken within conditions of mobility of goods, people or both. It is precisely the increased uniformity of globalized consumption that is mainstreaming consumer desires for difference, and, ironically but not surprisingly, creating a familiar artisanal landscape of localized production globally in craft and beyond. Certainly the small-scale manufacturing ecologies of craft beer and small-batch distilling outlined in Ocejo’s study of largely masculinized artisanal retail in New York, is replicated across North America, Europe, Australasia and much of Asia: Craft distilleries are part of a groundswell of small-batch, ‘artisanal’ light manufacturing businesses that have recently emerged in the United States. Their closest cousin is the craft beer, or microbrewery movement. Along with their small size, businesses like craft distilleries have a number of attributes. They have respect for handmade products and all the subtle variations they contain. They promote a strong sense of localness in terms of where they source their ingredients, the regions where they sell their products, and/or how they use place as a basis of their brand’s identity. Perhaps most importantly, they create and promote a sense of authenticity, or the idea of a product full of integrity, truth, and real-ness as markers of its quality. And a product can be authentic because it is handmade and comes from a unique place. (Ocejo, 2017: 54)

The capacity for artisanal production to become just another creative or place-making gentrification strategy imposed all too similarly across multiple sites without real care or attention to the specifics of place (Luckman et al., 2009) is all too apparent. But as ‘localities are increasingly being viewed as the only remaining institutional arenas in which a negotiated form of capitalist regulation might be forged’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 343), just as it is for food, placing or localizing craft and design is one means by which we can ‘make it ours’ (Trubek, 2008: 27) as part of a process of reclaiming control of production and as an assertion of difference in an increasingly globalized world. For this reason, understandings of the global mobility of goods need to be further complicated and enriched by terroir-driven practices and logics. In so doing, production ceases to be simply something done ‘out there’ in an impersonal, unknowable void, but within a more knowable and known (and hence more able to held to account) network of actors and agents.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project funding scheme (project number DP150100485 ‘Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-Economy’). We thank Belinda Powles for her invaluable

Crafting authenticity through situating the local in the global  177 input and assistance with the research project and, as always, the makers who have generously shared their stories with us. I would also like to acknowledge the valuable support provided by the University of Leeds via the Cheney Fellowship that helped bring this chapter into being.

NOTE 1. ‘Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-Economy’ was funded through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project programme (DP150100485).

REFERENCES Anderson, C. (2007), The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand, London, UK: Random House. Banks, M. (2007), The Politics of Cultural Work, Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY, USA: Palgrave Macmillan. Banks, M. (2017), Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality, London, UK, and New York, NY, USA: Rowman & Littlefield. Bennett, A. (2000), Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Bennett, A. and R. Peterson (2004), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual, Nashville, TN, USA: Vanderbuilt University Press. Brenner, N. and N. Theodore (2002), ‘Preface: From the “new localism” to the spaces of neoliberalism’, Antipode, 34 (3), 341–7. Cohen, S. (1991), Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making, Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Cohen, S. (1994), ‘Identity, Place and the “Liverpool Sound”’, in M. Stokes (ed.), Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, Oxford, UK: Berg, pp. 117–34. Cohen, S. (1995), ‘Sounding out the city: Music and the sensuous production of place’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20 (4), 434–46. Connell, J. and C. Gibson (2003), Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, New York, NY, USA: Routledge. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN, USA and London, UK: University of Minnesota Press. Jakob, D. (2013), ‘Crafting your way out of the recession? New craft entrepreneurs and the global economic downturn’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 6 (1), 127–40. Littrell, M., L. Anderson and P. Brown (1993), ‘What makes a craft souvenir authentic?’, Annals of Tourism Research, 20 (1), 197–215. Luckman, S. (2015), Craft and the Creative Economy, London, UK and New York, NY, USA: Palgrave Macmillan. Luckman, S., C. Gibson and T. Lea (2009), ‘Mosquitoes in the mix: Just how transferable is creative city thinking?’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 30 (1), 47–63. Ocejo, R.E. (2017), Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy, Princeton, NJ, USA and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press. O’Connor, J. and X. Gu (2010), ‘Developing a creative cluster in a postindustrial city: CIDS and Manchester’, The Information Society, 26 (2), 124–36. Pye, D. (1968), The Nature and Art of Workmanship, London, UK: The Herbert Press.

178  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Rankin, S. (2012), ‘Tasmanian utopias: Island thinking from surviving to thriving’, Griffith Review, 39 (no pagination). Straw W. (1991), ‘Systems of articulation, logics of change: Communities and scenes in popular music’, Cultural Studies, 5 (3), 368–88. Trubek, A.B. (2008), The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir, Berkeley, USA, Los Angeles, USA, and London, UK: University of California Press.

PART IV CREATIVITY AS LABOUR

11. The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work Dawn Bennett, Olivia Efthimiou and Scott T. Allison

INTRODUCTION In an increasingly unstable and precarious labour market (Du Toit and Coetzee, 2012), employability is an important area of research. Whilst financial stability, job security and career progression are primary concerns for most aspiring and practising workers, it is becoming evident that employability is a developmental process that requires leadership and resilience across the career lifespan. This is particularly pertinent for workers in the creative industries where work is precarious, competition fierce and social protection diminished (Benach et al., 2016; Bennett, 2012; Reid et al., 2016). In terms of scholarly inquiry, the exploration of heroism within career development is relatively new. The field of heroism studies seeks to understand heroic behaviour through a close examination of its origins, types and processes (Efthimiou and Allison, 2017). Our previous research (Efthimiou et al., 2016) identified several heroism-informed themes on which we will draw here as potentially important ingredients of career resilience. To explore whether such heroic attributes are present in the career journeys of creative workers, for this chapter we analysed qualitative data from an Australian creative workforce study (Bennett et al., 2014). Our hypothesis was that heroism theory would provide a valuable new lens for understanding the decision-making of creative workers.

CAREER DEVELOPMENT AS A HERO’S JOURNEY Career identity – the alignment of career with individual motivations, interests and competencies (Erikson, 1968; in Skorikov and Vondracek, 1998) – is emerging as a critical and under-addressed aspect of research, largely because its development is increasingly challenging. The reason for this lies in heightened labour market precarity, which sees more workers becoming responsible for their career development and management across multiple concurrent roles. Increased precarity also prompts workers to transition, in part or whole, to roles that might not align with their training or their career calling. In cases of enforced transition, few workers can be defined as the ‘shifters’ who do not have a strong career identity, as described by Simosi et al. (2015). Rather, they are forced in spite of their career identity to explore the labour market and transit between roles, companies or sectors, or to change careers altogether. Significantly, as creative workers tend to have a strong emotional attachment 180

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  181 to their work, enforced transition is likely to feature a liminal period characterized by identity moratorium and acute identity conflict (Hennekam and Bennett, 2016). The impacts of this are likely to be felt at individual, familial and social levels that are beyond the reach of agency (Wilson and Ebert, 2013). In this context, career identity development and (re)negotiation occurs across the career lifespan. How, then, do creative workers overcome such challenges? Developed by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell in 1949, the hero’s journey details the discrete stages that an individual or community undergo when confronted with life challenges. The journey commences with a call to adventure demanding a physical and emotional departure from the protagonist’s reality. There ensues an initiation into an extra-ordinary and unknown world, followed by rites of passage, the discovery of a boon and then return to the ordinary world, resulting in a deep personal transformation. Today, the hero’s journey is widely used in the development of scripts in cinema and television, and it is extensively referenced in popular culture; herein lies an immediate and powerful connection to creative careers. Creative workers produce the very myths, artefacts and epic stories which have persistently captured our imagination. The hero’s journey also has a longstanding evidence base as a counselling and pedagogical tool (Brown and Moffett, 1999; Viega, 2017; Williams, 2016). As Williams (2017) contends, psychological creativity underpins the hero’s journey and is both a pathway and a boon for agents who manage to successfully solve the trials that face them. Contemporary scholars such as Hudson and Inkson (2006) describe modern career experiences as heroic experiences, and Dik et al. (2017: 334) conclude that ‘perhaps anyone can come to express heroic traits and engage in heroic acts within their chosen profession, even if quietly, in largely unsung ways’. The hero’s journey is also described as a discrete form of socialization in creative professional development (see Randles, 2012). Ultimately, the value of the hero’s journey and its application to career development and identity lies in the recognition of the career journey as a lifelong, fluid process of growth and transformation. Psychological theories of human growth and development emphasize stages of identity formation, crisis resolution, moral advancement, social growth and generative service to others (Erikson, 1980; Kohlberg, 1969; Rohr, 2011). These same stages lie at the centre of Campbell’s (1949) treatment of the hero’s journey, which features transformative growth along moral, mental, emotional, spiritual and professional dimensions (Allison and Goethals, 2014).

HEROIC LEADERSHIP AND HEROIC IMAGINATION IN CREATIVE WORK: DEFINITIONS AND THEMES The hero’s journey and its core features of lifespan development, life story and transformation underpin the emerging concept of heroic leadership. In this section, we provide a brief outline of the intersections between creative labour, social psychology

182  Handbook on the geographies of creativity and heroic leadership theories. We define heroic leadership as a dynamic and temporal process that incorporates various mechanisms underlying personal growth and developmental health implicated by the hero’s journey (Allison and Goethals, 2014). This type of leadership serves three functions: 1. Epistemic: the knowledge and wisdom imparted by hero stories. Hero stories and accompanying metaphors reveal deep truths, paradox and develop emotional intelligence, resulting in increased wisdom (Allison and Goethals, 2014); 2. Energizing: the ways in which hero stories inspire and promote personal growth and action (Allison and Goethals, 2014); 3. Ecological: the complex relationships which impact on our agency and dynamically regulate the opportunities for trauma and growth to achieve whole-of-life balance (Efthimiou, 2017). It follows that heroic leadership (rather than leadership per se) could be vital to creative workers’ career development and identity. For example, Bennett and Hennekam (2018) found that musicians tend to maximize their potential in early career by rethinking narrow, performance-based definitions of success. By mid-career, almost all musicians have changed career goals at least once and they compensate for insufficient income by adopting new roles and skills within and beyond music. By late career, musicians can be forced towards more precarious work as they manage declining physical or technical abilities. For these musicians, skills and knowledge are redirected to broader and often new fields of work rather than staying with the familiar. In line with the heroic journey, Bennett and Hennekam (2018: 123) found that rather than seeking to resolve their psychological stress, musicians perpetuate their identity work as a ‘fundamental aspect of the musicians’ identity’. Beech et al. (2016: 519) call this self-questioning identity work, citing musicians who describe themselves as ‘tortured artists for whom writing, arranging and performing music required them to heroically conquer artistic depressions, difficult band-work or stage fright’. Steiner (1999: 685) claims that creative people have the need to associate, compete and excel the cultural heroes of their own traditions. As such, he asserts that all creative people have ‘an awareness of being, or of the possibility of becoming, a creative hero’. However, what little has been written on heroism and the creative worker tends towards notions of the heroic self, talent and obstinacy. Such discussions invoke the mythical starving artist: artist-heroes engaged in an intellectual struggle and determined to create art that will not please the traditional patron (Schneider, 2007). Creativity is undeniably a core aspect of the career skillset for creative industries workers, and not only in relation to their artistic work. The ability to proactively and creatively inspire, self-motivate and self-educate oneself underpins the functions of heroic leadership and an entrepreneurial heroic career identity. Markus and Nurius’s (1986: 954) notion of ideal, expected and undesired possible selves provides ‘a conceptual link between cognition and motivation’, seen also in the heroic imagination proposed by Franco and Zimbardo (2006). Like Markus and Nurius (1986), Franco

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  183 and Zimbardo (2006: 31) assert that the ‘heroic ideal can help guide a person’s behaviour in times of trouble or moral uncertainty’. Employing a future-oriented creative imagination of what might yet be in respect of personal career growth, while at the same time retaining a self-reflective mindset, should reveal important insights in how the heroic affects our career motivations and agency. The heroic imagination can also stimulate a vision for a new social organization and standards (Csikszentmihalyi et al., 2017). This has particular relevance for the creative industries sector, which is founded on grassroots, community-based social networks (Peck, 2005) and is integrally linked with location and sense of place. In the context of a career journey, we envision the heroic imagination as igniting a vision for a potential career, for place-making and for making visible possible pathways for fulfilling that vision. Thus, the career heroic imagination may be a core aspect of career development as a lifelong journey metaphor, as the focus shifts from a functional rhetoric around job-getting and skills to a cognitive focus on the whole person, identity and well-being – the ‘path based lifecourses’ described by Banks et al. (2000: 463).

Figure 11.1

Heroic creativity and leadership practice in creative work

We next explore heroic leadership in relationship to career development. We do this across nine underlying themes of particular significance to creative industries careers (see Figure 11.1): travel and sense of place; mindfulness; post-traumatic growth; risk; metaphor; the transrational; paradox; inspiration and social connectedness; and lifelong learning. It is important to note that this framework is an initial attempt at outlining what may be the applied value of heroic leadership for sustainable career development in the creative workforce. This preliminary analysis is underpinned by

184  Handbook on the geographies of creativity emerging findings from contemporary creative careers, employability and heroism research, as presented below. Travel and Sense of Place A fundamental characteristic of everyday heroism and the hero’s journey is a sense of ‘quest’, and physically travelling beyond one’s known world into the unknown and often-dangerous world (Campbell, 1949; Franco and Zimbardo, 2006). In a qualitative study of expatriate experiences as transformational hero stories, Osland (2000: 235) describes the experience of travelling and becoming acclimatized to a different culture as a rite of passage, brought about by the discovery of a new ‘source of power’ in the form of previously untapped skills and resources. This aligns with contemporary findings investigating predictors of employability success (Maddux et al., 2014). Bennett’s (2010) study of ‘creative migration’ affirms the prevalence of migration patterns and overseas pilgrimages in the creative career journey and emphasizes the dramatic impact they can have on both artist and place. As a key aspect of their heroic journeys, creative workers’ detailing of travel and mobility patterns can thus enhance our understanding of the geographies of creativity in relation to the motivations, both intrinsic and extrinsic, which underlie creative work. Mindfulness Self-reflection and self-awareness are key to growth as a creative worker and heroic leader, and to a heroic career orientation (Du Toit and Coetzee, 2012; Osland, 2000; Robledo and Batle, 2015; Simpson and Coombes, 2001). Everyday heroism requires exercising mindfulness in order to take appropriate action (Franco and Zimbardo, 2006). This is essential to recognizing transformative epistemic and energizing value, and to utilizing these values as developmental tools for cultivating the emotional intelligence that drives career identity. Post-Traumatic Growth Resilience in the face of adversity is essential to the development of a heroic profile. Determination, initiative, drive, passion, problem identification and problem-solving are integral to overcoming crises (Franco et al., 2016; Williams, 2017) and to sustaining a coherent and purposeful career identity (Fugate et al., 2004). These heroic leadership qualities are often prompted by a transformative negative event: for example, in the case of English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking who overcame the emotional and physical anguish of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to become one of the most creative scientists of our time. Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996) remind us that a central component of post-traumatic growth is self-awareness. Dweck (2006) might align this with a process of identity integration and formation that emphasizes growth (a growth mindset) rather than acceptance by ignoring the constraints and expectations of discipline, market sector or traditional ways of working.

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  185 Risk The presence of risk or sacrifice is another key component of heroism (Franco et al., 2011; Stenstrom and Curtis, 2012). Creative thinking and creative problem-solving are essential for a lifelong heroic mindset, as discussed by Williams (2017) and expressed in the notion of the entrepreneurial spirit in career development (Schein, 1990). Here, Campbell’s (1949) alignment of a hero’s journey with a creative act is extended to risk in what Toms (2005) calls a ‘sticking one’s neck out’ or a ‘risk’ experience. Following Beck’s (1992) notion of risk as an analytical concept and Giddens’s (1991) concept of active trust, Banks et al. (2000) find that a ‘complex and contingent appropriation of personal and professional risk’ leads to the active, network-based trust which underpins what they call (dis)organization in the practices of creative work. Metaphor Metaphors underscore the transformative nature of the hero’s journey during the process of developing and redefining career identity. As a central aspect of heroic leadership, metaphor represents a tool for advancing emotional intelligence. A characteristic of all transformation is that the individual moves from one qualitative state of development to another in accordance with changing needs, motives and drives (Allison and Goethals, 2014, 2017). This can be seen in the use of metaphors to promote well-being, societal change and stronger career decision-making (Bennett, 2015; Inkson, 2004). The Transrational Developing heroic leadership as part of a healthy career identity necessitates the appreciation of complex life themes that defy logic and have spiritual significance, such as ‘suffering, sacrifice, meaning, love, paradox, mystery, God, and eternity’ (Allison and Goethals, 2014: 170; Robledo and Batle, 2015). This idea goes beyond the religious. In describing career search with the metaphor of ‘calling’, Dik et al. (2017) make a neoclassical link to a sense of destiny and prosocial duty. In this sense, the search for career identity is a transcendent summons from beyond, or from some untapped inner resource that contains the key to negotiating one’s heroic journey. Paradox The natural epistemic driver of heroic leadership toward revealing and managing paradox is particularly important. Researchers including Goldstein (2005) and Osland (2000) have identified inherent paradoxes within career identity development as a hero’s developmental journey in specific professions. In perhaps the strongest example of the value of paradox, Allison and Goethals (2014: 172) note that ‘every human being encounters painful challenges in life … [these] are an integral part of

186  Handbook on the geographies of creativity our own individual hero journeys . . . Hero stories teach us that only by confronting our dragons can we sow the seeds of our redemption’. It follows that developing heroic leadership alongside career decision-making could aid workers’ management of inherent paradoxes over a lifelong career journey. Inspiration and Social Connectedness Creative workers need to be proactive: to understand the material geographies which underpin the creation or identification of work. This signals that a heroic entrepreneurial spirit is critical to career development (Schein, 1990). Being inspired and the ability to in turn inspire others is a crucial property of the energizing function of heroic leadership. This intersects with the ecological function in the form of both formal and informal networking. Creative workers need to understand competition and the environment, not just in the workplace but in the locale in which they will work. This aspect of heroic leadership is crucial, particularly when work involves multiple concurrent roles, sites of work and employer relationships. Lifelong Learning Lifelong learning and the development and maintenance of personal, relational, professional and community networks are essential to creative workers’ careers and career identity (Watson, 2009) as they ‘reorient their learning . . . [and] create “expert selves” that are sustainable over the career lifespan’ (Bennett, 2013: 234). Similarly, lifelong learning is central to the epistemic function of heroic leadership. Learning might be aesthetic, technical, administrative or driven by labour market conditions; it might also help workers to cope with crisis, stress and challenge, or to manage emotions and relationships (as denoted by its ecological function). Such learning and development are crucial features of a heroic leadership profile, career identity and wellbeing. This includes lifelong or life-wide learning motivated by career advancement and financial reward, and by an intrinsic desire to learn about and to contribute to society. In this section, we explored the three functions of heroic leadership in relationship to career development across nine underlying themes, making preliminary links between these and the career development of creative workers. This thinking underpinned the study outlined in the following section.

APPROACH For this study, we analysed secondary qualitative data from creative workers who had responded to a call to ‘tell their stories’ and to describe formative events as part of an Australian creative workforce study (Bennett et al., 2014). Our intention was to determine whether the data revealed the presence of heroic leadership themes. We

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  187 Table 11.1

Primary creative role identified by respondents in this chapter’s Australian creative workforce study

Primary role identified by respondents (grouped into broad

Count (n=182)

% (rounded to 2 decimal

27

14.8

categories) Music

points)

Dance

2

1.1

Fashion

2

1.1

Visual and digital arts

46

25.3

Design

12

6.6

Writing and poetry

35

19.2

Photography

7

3.8 2.2

Production/direction

4

Education/training

5

2.7

Film and theatre

15

8.2

Puppetry

3

1.6

Technician and engineering roles

4

2.2

Arts therapies

2

1.1

Management and coordination

11

6.0

Textile, fibre or glass arts

5

2.7

Other (1 response only)

7

3.8

hypothesized that heroic leadership would provide a valuable new lens for understanding the role of heroic creativity and heroic leadership in the creative workforce. The sample included 182 creative workers from Western Australia, who were recruited using respondent-driven sampling administered through creative industries networks (Table 11.1). Respondents were aged from 18 to 80; 60 per cent were female. The largest representation was from visual artists, writers and musicians. Pseudonyms are used in this chapter. The survey instrument required closed and open-ended responses and included repeated items. The instrument addressed the characteristics of work, motivation and self-identity, the distribution of time, formal and informal learning, and demographic information. Respondents’ stories were recorded in text, pictures or sound, or with links to current projects. Given the centrality of story to the hero’s journey and heroic leadership, the presence of story made this an ideal dataset with which to explore heroic leadership themes as described above. Open-ended responses, descriptions of formative events and shared life stories were first analysed through the three core functions and associated themes outlined in the previous section. This revealed the presence or absence of heroic leadership skills. The final phase of analysis involved all three authors, who analysed deductively using the heroic leadership framework. Findings were triangulated to identify areas of convergence and divergence as well as the most persistent themes.

188  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION We next outline the importance of heroic leadership awareness, practice and functions as evidenced in the data (Figure 11.1). Travel and Sense of Place Travel, especially overseas, was a dominant theme in creative workers’ responses, often representing a formative career event or a key period of time during which career aspirations shifted. Examples abound: Alice, a visual artist working as a cultural development coordinator, noted the impact of her travel to the north of Australia: ‘[it] did nurture my conceptual thinking and I grew in appreciation of what art can do for a community’. So did visual artist Pat: ‘Travelling around Australia in a caravan with art gear in tow’. Celine, a painter, viewed her geographical relocation as transformative: ‘travelling and realizing there was a huge and diverse worldwide arts culture with many different forms’. For others, like opera singer and business consultant Mark, the decision to stop travelling was interlinked with economic and other motivations that no longer served a purpose: the ‘realization that I didn’t want to travel, was enjoying teaching less and less and not giving 100 per cent, and that income stream from performance was insufficient to provide for my sunset years’. A worker’s willingness to move is also telling of the level of risk or sacrifice the individual is willing to make for their art. Matt, now a government worker, reflected on this aspect: ‘I know as soon as I began my degree that it was unlikely to lead to paid work – at least, not without a lot of hard work, or having to move interstate – things I am unwilling or too lazy to do!’ Importantly, creative workers’ commentary around the profound significance of place is revealing of the transrational aspects in creative career journeys: Xav, a cultural development coordinator, described ‘Working in NE Arnhemland and discovering Yolgnu Indigenous art-making, conceptual thinking, and systems of community. Discovering a deeper sense of place, spirituality and community life’. At the same time, he commented that his next critical life event was completing his master’s thesis, ‘which related to [my] creative journey of People and Place over time and space’. Simone, a sustainability consultant and creative environmentalist, shared the impact of ‘an expedition of fellow creative environmentalists down the Whanganui river’, which ‘taught the power of place, people, language, stories, and ritual’. The qualities of heroic creativity and leadership emerged as being at once both intimately bound to the aesthetics, hi/stories and geographies of people and place that deeply inform creative identities, and transcendent of them, as is characteristic of hero stories and the hero’s journey in their universality (Campbell, 1949). Inspiration The data demonstrated the centrality of inspiration to career development and resilience in the creative industries. Sheila, a poet, recalled being ‘inspired to write’ after

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  189 ‘reading Sylvia Plath and Gwen Harwood’s poetry’. She positioned this as the second most formative event in her career and noted that inspiration is at the core of the ‘impact and value of the arts within the community’. Musician Joe noted ‘a fabulous and inspirational percussion teacher’ as one of three formative moments in his career. In a similar vein, Sasha, a choreographer and dancer, recorded her most formative experience as ‘performing in Germany as a tertiary dance student . . . A sense of possibility, of global connectedness and the power of dance to cross cultural divides excited and inspired me’. Other artists reported being inspired by nature or by transrational phenomena such as ‘the unknown’, denoting a link between inspiration and the transrational. Paradox When asked to consider how his arts career related to the career he had imagined as a student, music teacher and performer Shane shared that navigating paradox was an integral part of his journey. His career resembled what he had imagined ‘very closely for the first ten years, then diverged – but the same core activity although in a different situation – and branched out into performance. Totally unexpected’. These twists and turns are especially typical of a portfolio or protean career journey for creative workers as they negotiate what can be diverse professional identities under a coherent career goal (Hall, 1976). Tellingly, our respondents revealed disparity between the time spent on creative work and their identities as creative workers: of the 176 respondents who identified as creative workers, only 10 per cent earned above the national average income through their specialist arts work (Bennett et al., 2014). This suggests that identity as a creative worker might not align with sources of income; indeed, income derived away from the creative practice was often positioned as supporting a creative worker’s arts practice and, in some cases, enabling greater creative risk taking than would otherwise be possible. The presence of complex patterns of work was reported by respondents across the artistic or creative life cycle and across creative disciplines, suggesting that as Bain (2005: 29) explains, creative workers need ‘to exaggerate and exploit their individuality and to feed into popular myths to reinforce their occupational authenticity’. In this setting, then, individual narratives may extend beyond measures such as time to consider product, occupational and social prestige, and the position of creative work relative to other activities. In terms of managing the discord between career realities and expectations, and how this shapes creative identities, ‘the point at which creative purpose meets economic purpose helps to shape individual preferences and motivations, and this point is likely to change according to personal, social, and economic circumstances’ (Reid et al., 2016: 40). This was borne out in respondents’ accounts, which revealed a learned ability to manage inherent paradox.

190  Handbook on the geographies of creativity The Transrational Transrational themes such as love and sacrifice are notable in the data. Sam, a glass artist, reflected on his post-graduation experiences and recorded the role of sacrifice in arts practice: ‘I’ve since learned that very few “make it”, and that if you decide that you will sacrifice other things to make your career in the arts happen, then it can happen’. Simon, a practising musician, invoked his music idols as ‘Gods’: ‘I have always loved music, especially Rock ’n’ Roll, growing up in the late 50s and 60s and being there when Elvis Presley was God and then others . . . followed in his shadow’. Godly ascriptions were also noted by Sylvana, an actor, in her narration of a formative event which involved meeting her ‘acting teacher (sent from God!) and having her believe I could actually act’. Other respondents addressed the place of religion and the transcendent in their arts practice more directly and described this discovery as a formative event: for example, ‘Discovering a deeper sense of place, spirituality and community life’; ‘spiritual and emotional fulfilment’; ‘fragile forces of self-examination and new ideas, without constraint. Religion and science can’t do what art does’; ‘The spiritual oneness that can be achieved when a church music team enables congregational participation’. Emotional attachment was a prominent theme in the responses. In some cases, emotional attachment was leveraged by others, as described by actor Barry: ‘There are always bits and pieces that I’m asked to do for love’. Some respondents invoked love as something that was integral to their creative practice: ‘The illustration work I do is a gentle celebration of the love of things around me’; ‘The opportunities to share messages of love, reconciliation, and healing with the wider community through joyful performances’. Campbell (1990) argued that healthy, transformed individuals accept and embrace their growth and contradictions. ‘The psychological transformation’, wrote Campbell (1990: 207), ‘would be that whatever was formerly endured is now known, loved, and served’. Thich Naht Hanh (1999: 170) argues that loving what one does is ‘the very nature of an enlightened person’. Overall, our respondents’ responses describe how love, mystery, paradox, meaning and transcendental themes are inherent in creative practice. Metaphor Respondents were not asked to share metaphors of their career experiences. Certain metaphors, however, came across prominently. The most notable was that of the creative career as a journey: for example, ‘The journey has been expeditionary and included many people, mainly my writing groups’; ‘I have begun an exciting journey of discovery’; ‘The journey for all involved in the choir has been life-changing . . . To acknowledge and embrace the stolen generations and their journey of healing’. A second common metaphor involved a boat and the sea, as seen here: ‘From time to time, I realize I am getting away from my aspirations, so I know I have to stop to correct the “direction of my boat” again’; ‘Like a boat in a storm, it’s more a matter

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  191 of pursuing things that are within your grasp’; ‘I feel like a lone disciple in a sea of unbelievers’. Both commonly used metaphors invoke the notion of the career journey as a hero’s journey in which the hero-artist is called upon to navigate challenges and uncertainties, to arrive at a new sense of self, creative self-discovery, rebirth and healing. Lifelong Learning and Mindfulness Creative workers appeared to value lifelong learning and mindful knowledge acquisition, with many noting the importance of informal and peer learning; this indicates alignment with the energizing and epistemic functions of heroic leadership. Actor Jeff identified ongoing learning as a single formative event: ‘Meeting the wonderful people I have met in the industry and learning what I can from them to further myself as an actor and a person’. These ‘wonderful people’ of whom Jeff speaks represent the social sources of heroic transformation on one’s hero’s journey (Allison and Goethals, 2017). Monique, a writer, reflected that a formative career event was ‘learning to go deep into the ideas that mattered to me and to keep “going there” day after day through thick and thin’. Monique’s story reveals the heroic leadership of someone who has learned to ‘tap into inner reserves, gaining evidence that they are more capable than they had previously believed’ (Williams, 2017: 72). Singer Jaime noted that ‘any training just gives you some tools and insights of a career, but most things you are only going to learn in the practical world, exercising your profession’. Joe, a creative arts consultant, stated that he was ‘always seeking new knowledge and new opportunities’. Musician and artist Patrice reflected on the importance of the ecological (place-based) function of heroic leadership in lifelong learning: ‘I feel musical participation at a community level is an important part of learning and development’. Sarah, a poet, cited the knowledge, inspiration and wide-ranging skills that artists have to offer as one of the most impactful and important contributions the creative industries can have on the broader community – as Williams (2017: 70) highlights, ‘Transformed heroes are able to innovate and create in their everyday lives, providing an elixir for those around them’. Risk The data revealed accounts of the risk inherent in the creative career journey. In a poignant response, glass artist Desiree described the heroic leadership of her employer as a source of inspiration for her own practice; this had prompted a significant shift in her thinking: I think [my inspiration comes from] working for the artist I currently work for, as the investment and commitment they have made in their business is much greater than any other artist I have worked for. I see their grand vision about it all – the lifestyle they work towards, the people they want to employ, the scale they want to work at – and the risks they take to achieve those goals. I want to have the courage, experience and the resources to take on those challenges someday.

192  Handbook on the geographies of creativity The idea of high-risk art, which privileges creative purpose over economic purpose, emerged as the most valued form of art and professional practice. Sal, a painter, identified the most formative aspect of his work as that which was ‘based on hard work, practising what I preach and high-risk (not just “easy art”)’. Actor Michelle stressed that ‘commercially produced art is not the answer: commercially produced art is by its nature popular and therefore less risky and less questioning’. Actor Simon explained why this is the case: ‘The risks taken in State-subsidized work are greater than in the commercial sector and therefore can be more interesting and progressive, rather than conservative and “safe”’. We mentioned earlier the notion of the mythical starving artist or artist-hero who is engaged in an intellectual struggle and determined not to please the traditional patron. Bain (2005: 29), in her seminal work on the formation of artistic identity, describes this romanticized notion of the artist hero ‘as a Bohemian rebel, outsider and social critic who sacrificed status, money and material comfort for the supposed freedom this afforded the imaginative spirit to pursue individual creative expression’. In reality, the creative worker’s heroic journey is a balancing act between the selection, optimization and compromise of artistic, personal and financial concerns. The heroism is arguably in this self-questioning identity work rather than in the balance of ‘safe’ and ‘risky’ work with which creative workers seek to sustain their careers. Identity, like the hero’s journey, is a cyclical process of becoming. As proposed by Campbell (1949), the cyclical hero’s journey involves a pre-action stage prior to crossing the threshold into the unknown world; the central part of the journey defined by action and then descent into the ‘cave’ in which risk is heightened; and the return to the ordinary world which offers opportunities for reflection and to give back to society by sharing what one has learned. In a similar vein, developing heroic leadership in the face of risk emerged as an aspect of respondents’ creative practice. Tania, an actor, writer and dramaturg, emphasized that, ‘the variety [in creative industries careers] shows tenacity and a determination to survive’. In respondents’ accounts, the road to career identity development bore the hallmarks of such a journey. The capacity for reflective and creative abstract thinking emerged as an important quality for developing heroic leadership and a meaningful lifelong career journey. Creativity, and indeed creative risk, was a feature of becoming conscious of one’s calling, and then seeking it out, defining success and negotiating the actions required to succeed. Post-Traumatic Growth When asked to identify three formative events, some creative workers described positive events such as awards or significant funding; however, most recorded moments of challenge or career interruption. Stress and adversity featured prominently in accounts. Suffering, bearing it and working through it, is a creative process, and trauma can inform artists’ work. Campbell (1972: 214) proposed four functions of the hero’s journey, one of which is the journey’s function to ‘awaken us’ into participating in the ‘mystery of our own deep being’. He also describes this awakening

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  193 as an increased awareness of the ‘rhythms of life’, with these rhythms increasing our appreciative sensitivity to art and to music especially (Campbell, 1990: 261). Suffering awakens us and is an essential rite of passage in the hero’s journey and in the development of heroic leadership. Crises of confidence, common points along the heroic artistic career journey, included the rejection of artistic work, the experience of sexual harassment (see also Hennekam and Bennett, 2017) and the impact of funding cuts. In line with Dweck’s (2006) concept of a growth mindset, creative workers managed trauma and sometimes grew from it by gaining an understanding of events they could control, resources they could utilize, people who could help them and strategies for overcoming adversity. The process of becoming conscious of how to heal from trauma bore a striking resemblance to the stages of ‘awakening’ within the hero’s journey (Campbell, 2004), and particularly to the phenomenon of post-traumatic growth. This was apparent in accounts where challenges were described as transformative events. The powerful extract below came from a musician, Sarah, who told of her career journey as a heroic calling that transcended monetary, status and other rewards. For Sarah, the journey was felt as a deep longing and need despite family, relationship, or other obstacles. Without these, the artist-hero feels incomplete, broken and out of sorts with herself and the world; for, as Williams (2017: 71), quoting Campbell, points out, ‘the hero’s journey is the “quest to find the inward thing that you basically are”’. My third and last huge crisis happened when . . . because of familiar and financial pressure again I decided to give up my music career forever, in order to save my marriage (because of my kids). The result of this decision was, of course, a depression. Only by eventually going to an audition to a local band and being the selected one that I could overcome the depression and feel alive again. So I realized that being an artist is being myself and that I cannot stop being myself. Since then, I have been working with passion on my music again and getting more and more involved in the local music community and industry. Unfortunately, my marriage could not withstand it, so I have separated from my partner . . . My dedication and passion to my music career was always the big issue in our marriage. As I described, it took me many years to understand how vital is music to me and that literally I cannot live without being involved with it. So now that it is very clear to me, I feel good, enthusiastic, and confident under my own skin and I see my original career aspirations smiling at me again.

According to Campbell (1949), struggle and adversity promote growth, development and an awakening toward one’s full potential. Career journeys require people to invent and reinvent themselves, their goals and their identities. Career development requires an associated heroic shift in consciousness that provides a new ‘map or picture of the universe and allows us to see ourselves’ in new and energizing ways (ibid.: 56). Overall, an individual’s career journey, then, produces transformations that are mental, emotional and spiritual in nature (Allison and Goethals, 2017). The transformative power of loss and the reclaiming of one’s authentic self through the career journey in Sarah’s story revealed the profound impact that career identity can

194  Handbook on the geographies of creativity have on all aspects of a person’s life and the utility for the energizing, epistemic and ecological properties of heroic leadership as a survival tool.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS The hero’s journey is fraught with risks. The same can be said about career development, which is a consistent process of negotiation to create and sustain meaningful work (Bennett, 2016); hence, the career journey can be thought of as heroic regardless of whether one is in a hazardous profession. The act of ‘sticking one’s neck out’ is distinctly heroic: people need to be brave enough to put themselves and their ideas forward, to embrace change, and to foster personal growth and developmental health in their lifelong development as heroic leaders. Moreover, workers need to be prepared to fail. As heroes, failure will teach them that ‘the impossible can at least be attempted’, that ‘failure is an eminent teacher’ and that ‘they can tolerate levels of anxiety’ previously considered ‘intolerable’ (Williams, 2017: 72). We emphasize that the instrument developed for this study was not designed to probe only for the presence of the hero’s journey and heroic leadership; rather, aspects of the hero’s journey emerged naturally from the creative workers’ career narratives, creating an authentic account without the presence of prompts or leading questions. Future research might seek to focus on aspects of heroism in line with the presence of precarity, risk and trust. Nonetheless, the artists’ stories reveal that heroic leadership and its underpinning themes (Figure 11.1) may be beneficial for healthy career development and career identity. An interesting observation is the strong need of respondents to vocalize their stories of adversity, pain and resilience: although sharing their stories was an optional part of a lengthy, five-part survey, almost half the creative workers (43.7 per cent) wrote about aspects of their life story or provided links to their blogs and websites as a form of digital storytelling. This is noteworthy given the primacy of story and self-authorship in the hero’s journey and heroic leadership. The stories evidence a degree of risk present in creative workers’ heroic career journeys and their critical transformative function; as writer Elyse put it when narrating her creative/life story, ‘[w]e scrape together some form of success despite – not because of – the obstacles that exist’. Our respondents’ self-narratives also reflect their search for deep meaning, which is a central component of the epistemic function of hero narratives. Drawing from Frankl’s (1946) seminal work on meaning, Green et al. (2017) argue that heroic behaviour is intertwined with one’s ability to discover meaning or purpose in life. Seeking meaning and affirmations of a meaningful life may be a key to unlocking the latent hero that exists in all of us. These risks and meaning aspects of heroic career identities deserve attention in future research. One of the myths around the hero’s journey is that the hero exists solely to serve (or to save) others. This is seen in the positioning of creative workers as magnets for talent (as argued by Florida, 2002) and in the ‘starving artists’ (Schneider, 2007) who, for the sake of their art, refuse to conform. As Bilton (2010) points out,

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  195 however, the motivation of creative workers may be entirely intrinsic. In the accounts we analysed, both intrinsic and extrinsic drivers were evident. The creative heroism in these accounts related to the determination and passion that pushed these creative workers beyond what they considered possible. It related to grassroots development, work creation and learning. And it related to the creative workers’ ability to be the heroes of their own practice. Our analysis focused on the first eleven of the twelve stages of the hero’s journey, during which heroes venture into a dangerous world, encounter adversity, transform themselves and then accomplish their mission. These stages of the journey are purely an individual journey, but they are followed by the final stage of ‘giving back’ to society, or in Campbell’s (1949: 122) terms, ‘bestowing a boon to society’. Allison and Goethals (2017) emphasize the final stage of the journey consisting of the transformed hero’s transition to the role of mentor who helps other heroes on earlier stages of their journeys. Established creative artisans and scientists are known for training apprentices and students, thereby ensuring a continuing pipeline of neophyte heroes-in-training. As such, heroic creativity can be focused on sustaining meaningful work, well-being and identity, as well as on actions that result in public good. The complexity of the labour market for creative workers, we propose, demands a closer investigation of the development of a heroic sensibility on both a personal and social scale; this has arguably never been more urgent. To sustain their employability, creative workers overlap periods of work with periods of learning and re-training (Hall, 1976) whilst working with multiple employers and clients in digital and non-digital domains. This requires them to manage multiple, agile identities (Fugate et al., 2004). It also requires them to manage their own careers. These precarious realities, we argue, also necessitate the development of a heroic mindset. Labour market developments also demonstrate the importance of career fit, and the impact this can have on creative workers’ lives and well-being. There are no right or wrong choices in a lifelong process characterized by lifelong learning and identity work; rather, there is good and bad career fit. Similarly, in the context of the hero’s journey there are no bad career choices in the larger, long-term view of the journey: all heroes commit transgressions and suffer setbacks that ultimately yield treasure. Campbell (1949: 109) wrote, ‘[i]t is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure’. Reviewing creative workforce data from a heroic leadership lens reveals how we might assess the underlying motivations of these choices and begin to be more conscious of their consequences. Our hypothesis was that heroism theory would provide a valuable new lens for understanding the decision-making of creative workers, and this certainly appears to be the case. A heroic leadership and heroic creativity approach to career identity involves the paradox of actively working with, imagining and potentially mitigating harmful risk by recognizing the equally transformative value of failure and success, loss and elevation. It involves creative action and creative risk because a heroically driven career identity is not a risk-averse identity; it is defined by strategically informed, educated and inspired life decisions. It places individuals in a stronger

196  Handbook on the geographies of creativity position by helping them become self-aware and better equipped to negotiate career changes over time; it is, therefore, sustainable in every sense of the word. The inspiring, wisdom-gaining and grassroots properties of heroic leadership are likely to foster the career creativities required for workers to become an integral part of the creative geographies of people and place.

REFERENCES Allison, S.T. and G.R. Goethals (2014), ‘“Now he belongs to the ages”: The heroic leadership dynamic and deep narratives of greatness’, in G.R. Goethals, S.T. Allison, R.M. Kramer and D.M. Messick (eds), Conceptions of Leadership: Enduring Ideas and Emerging Insights, New York, NY, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 167–83. Allison, S.T. and G.R. Goethals (2017), ‘The hero’s transformation’, in S.T. Allison, G.R. Goethals and R.M. Kramer (eds), Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership, New York: Routledge, pp. 379–400. Bain, A. (2005), ‘Constructing an artistic identity’, Work, Employment and Society, 19 (1), 25–46. Banks, M., A. Lovatt, J. O’Connor and C. Raffo (2000), ‘Risk and trust in the cultural industries’, Geoforum, 31 (4), 453–64. Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London, UK: Sage. Beech, N., C. Gilmore, P. Hibbert and S. Ybema (2016), ‘Identity-in-the-work and musicians’ struggles: The production of self-questioning identity work’, Work, Employment and Society, 30 (3), 506–22. Benach, J., A. Vives, G. Tarafa, C. Delclos and C. Muntaner (2016), ‘What should we know about precarious employment and health in 2025? Framing the agenda for the next decade of research’, International Journal of Epidemiology, 45 (1), 232–8. Bennett, D. (2010), ‘Creative migration: A Western Australian case study of creative artists’, Australian Geographer, 41 (1), 117–28. Bennett, D. (2012), ‘The use of learner-generated drawings in the development of music students’ teacher identities’, International Journal of Music Education, 31 (1), 53–67. Bennett, D. (2013), ‘The role of career creativities in developing identity and becoming expert selves’, in P. Burnard (ed.), Developing Creativities in Higher Music Education, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 234–44. Bennett, D. (2015), ‘Pre-service teachers’ intentions to teach: Developing understanding through textual narratives and drawings’, in B.M. Apelgren, P. Burnard and N. Cabarogl (eds), Transformative Teacher Research: Theory and Practice for the C21st, Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, pp. 141–54. Bennett, D. (2016), ‘Developing employability in higher education music’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15 (3–4), 386–95. Bennett, D., J. Coffey, S. Fitzgerald, P. Petocz and A. Rainnie (2014), ‘Beyond the creative: Understanding the intersection of specialist and embedded work for creatives in metropolitan Perth’, in G. Hearn, R. Bridgstock, B. Goldsmith and J. Rodgers (eds), Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries: Innovation, Employment, and Education, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 158–74. Bennett, D. and S. Hennekam (2018), ‘Lifespan perspective theory and (classical) musicians’ careers’, in C. Dromey and J. Haferkorn (eds), The Classical Music Industry, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 112–25. Bilton, C. (2010), ‘Manageable creativity’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 16 (3), 255–69.

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  197 Brown, J.L. and C.A. Moffett (1999), The Hero’s Journey: How Educators Can Transform Schools and Improve Learning, Alexandria, Egypt: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Campbell, J. (1949), The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, NJ, USA, Princeton University Press. Campbell, J. (1972), Myths to Live By, New York, NY, USA: Viking Press. Campbell, J. (1990), The Hero’s Journey, Novato, CA, USA: New World Library. Campbell, J. (2004), Pathways to Bliss, Novato, CA, USA: New World Library. Csikszentmihalyi, M., M. Condre and I. Lebuda (2017), ‘Deviant heroes and social heroism in everyday life: Activists and artists’, in S.T. Allison, G.R. Goethals and R.M. Kramer (eds), Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership, New York, NY, USA: Routledge, pp. 249–61. Dik, B.J., A.B. Shimizu and W. O’Connor (2017), ‘Career development and a sense of calling: Contexts for heroism’, in S.T. Allison, G.R. Goethals and R.M. Kramer (eds), Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership, New York, NY, USA: Routledge, pp. 316–38. Du Toit, D. and M. Coetzee (2012), ‘Archetypal values of science and engineering staff in relation to their career orientations’, SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 38 (1), 1–14. Dweck, C.S. (2006), Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, New York, NY, USA: Random House. Efthimiou, O. (2017), ‘Heroic ecologies: Embodied heroic leadership and sustainable futures’, Sustainability, Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, 8 (4), 489–511. Efthimiou, O. and S.T. Allison (2017), ‘Heroism science: Frameworks for an emerging field’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 58 (5), 556–70. Efthimiou, O., D. Bennett and S.T. Allison (2016), ‘The influence of heroic leadership on career identity: A transdisciplinary perspective’, paper presented at The Rise and Future of Heroism Science: A Cross-Disciplinary Conference, Perth, Australia, 11–12 July. Erikson, E.H. (1968), Identity, Youth and Crisis, New York, NY, USA: W.W. Norton & Company. Erikson, E.H. (1980), Identity and the Life Cycle, New York, NY, USA: W.W. Norton & Company. Florida, R. (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class, New York, NY, USA: Basic Books. Franco, Z.E., K. Blau and P.G. Zimbardo (2011), ‘Heroism: A conceptual analysis and differentiation between heroic action and altruism’, Review of General Psychology, 15 (2), 99–113. Franco, Z.E., O. Efthimiou and P.G. Zimbardo (2016), ‘Heroism and eudaimonia: Sublime actualization through the embodiment of virtue’, in J. Vittersø (ed.), Handbook of Eudaimonic Well-being, Basel, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 337–48. Franco, Z.E. and P.G. Zimbardo (2006), ‘The banality of heroism’, Greater Good, 3 (2), 30–35. Frankl, V.E. (1946), Man’s Search for Meaning, New York, NY, USA: Buccaneer Books, Inc. Fugate, M., A.J. Kinicki and B.E. Ashforth (2004), ‘Employability: A psycho-social construct, its dimensions, and applications’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 65 (1), 14–38. Giddens, A. (1991), Modernity and Self-identity, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Goldstein, L.S. (2005), ‘Becoming a teacher as a hero’s journey: Using metaphor in preservice teacher education’, Teacher Education Quarterly, 32 (1), 7–24. Green, J., D. Van Tongeren, A. Cairo and N. Hagiwara (2017), ‘Heroism and the pursuit of meaning’, in S.T. Allison, G.R. Goethals and R.M. Kramer (eds), Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership, New York, NY, USA: Routledge, pp. 479–500. Hall, D.T. (1976), Careers in Organizations, Glenview, IL, USA: Goodyear. Hanh, T.N. (1999), The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, New York, NY, USA: Broadway Books.

198  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Hennekam, S. and D. Bennett (2016), ‘Involuntary career transition and identity within the artist population’, Personnel Review, 45 (6), 1114–31. Hennekam, S. and D. Bennett (2017), ‘Sexual harassment in the creative industries: Tolerance, culture and the need for change’, Gender, Work and Organization, 24 (4), 417–34. Hudson, S. and K. Inkson (2006), ‘Volunteer overseas development workers: The hero’s adventure and personal transformation’, Career Development International, 11 (4), 304–20. Inkson, K. (2004), ‘Images of career: Nine key metaphors’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 65 (1), 96–111. Kohlberg, L. (1969), ‘Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socialization’, in D.A. Goslin (ed.), Handbook of Socialization: Theory and Research, Boston, MA, USA: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 347–480. Maddux, W., E. Bivolaru, A. Hafenbrack, C. Tadmore and A. Galinsky (2014), ‘Expanding opportunities by opening your mind: Multicultural engagement predicts job market success’, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5 (5), 608–15. Markus, H. and P. Nurius (1986), ‘Possible selves’, American Psychologist, 41 (9), 954–69. Osland, J.S. (2000), ‘The journey inward: Expatriate hero tales and paradoxes’, Human Resource Management, 39 (2–3), 227–38. Peck, J. (2005), ‘Struggling with the creative class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29 (4), 740–70. Randles, C. (2012), ‘The “hero’s journey”: A way of viewing music teacher socialization’, Journal of Music Teacher Education, 22 (1), 11–19. Reid, A., D. Bennett and P. Petocz (2016), ‘Creative workers’ perceptions of worth: Understanding identity and motivation in a complex workforce’, Australian Journal of Career Development, 25 (1), 33–41. Robledo, M.A. and J. Batle (2015), ‘Transformational tourism as a hero’s journey’, Current Issues in Tourism, 20 (16), 1–13. Rohr, R. (2011), Falling Upward, Hoboken, NJ, USA: Jossey-Bass. Schein, E.H. (1990), Career Anchors: Discovering Your Real Values, San Diego, CA, USA: Pfeiffer. Schneider, E. (2007), Starving for Recognition: The Representation of Struggling Artists in America, 1810–1865, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Temple University. Simosi, M., D.M. Rousseau and M. Daskalaki (2015), ‘When career paths cease to exist: A qualitative study of career behavior in a crisis economy’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 91, 134–46. Simpson, J. and P. Coombes (2001), ‘Adult learning as a hero’s journey: Researching mythic structure as a model for transformational change’, Queensland Journal of Educational Research, 17 (2), 164–77. Skorikov, V. and F.W. Vondracek (1998), ‘Vocational identity development: Its relationship to other identity domains and to overall identity development’, Journal of Career Assessment, 6 (1), 13–35. Steiner, R. (1999), ‘Some notes on the “heroic self” and the meaning and importance of its reparation for the creative process and the creative personality’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80, 685–718. Stenstrom, D.M. and M. Curtis (2012), ‘Heroism and risk of harm’, Psychology, 3 (12A), 1085–90. Tedeschi, R.G. and L.G. Calhoun (1996), ‘The posttraumatic growth inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma’, Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9 (3), 455–71. Toms, M. (2005), The Wisdom of Joseph Campbell [Audio Recording], Carlsbad, CA, USA: Hay House. Viega, M. (2017), ‘From orphan to sage: The hero’s journey as an assessment tool for hip hop songs created in music therapy’, Journal of Genius and Eminence, 2 (2), 79–88.

The role of heroic creativity and leadership in creative work  199 Watson, D. (2009), Lifelong Learning and the Future of Higher Education, Leicester, UK: National Institute of Adult Continuing Education. Williams, C. (2016), A Mudmap for Living: A Practical Guidebook for Daily Living Based on Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero’s Journey’, Amazon Digital Services LLC. Williams, C. (2017), ‘The hero’s journey: A creative act’, Journal of Genius and Eminence, 2 (2), 70–78. Wilson, S. and N. Ebert (2013), ‘Precarious work: Economic, sociological and political perspectives’, The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 24 (3), 263–78.

12. The rise and fall of professional singers: a typology of creative career stages in the performing arts Kathleen Connell, Andrew R. Brown and Sarah Baker

INTRODUCING CREATIVE CAREERS The identification of creative careers has been popular in recent times but studies that focus on careers in the creative arts, and performing arts careers specifically, are still fairly limited. Performing arts careers encompass those creative practices performed for an audience including, for example, acting, circus arts, musical performance, theatre and classical singing. Pursuing particular forms of creativity in the performing arts may take a circuitous route to a vocational outcome yet few studies have investigated this proposition, especially amongst the many performing artists who are the mainstay of arts organizations across geographies that chart the spaces and places of our communities. In this chapter, we argue that while the impetus for creativity may be shared by a range of industries, the embodied characteristics of the performing arts is an important additional consideration in the analysis of career trajectories in professions that emphasize and are underpinned by the pursuit of creativity. This chapter explores performing arts careers by drawing specifically on a qualitative study of 13 elite classical singers interviewed between 2011 and 2012 to consider how creative careers can be understood to follow a trajectory of development and decline. The singers were all based in Australia at the time they were interviewed and each identified as being past the peak period of their careers in this industry. The value of interviewing older, post-denouement creative workers is in the opportunity to understand how the lifespan of creative careers unfolds after a stage of decline. Based on the narratives of their subjective experiences of their working lives, in this chapter we put forward a typology of the stages of performing arts careers. Our typology is underpinned by an understanding that the trajectories experienced by the singers in this study are somewhat representative of the career trajectories of performing artists more broadly, and that their narratives would share many traits with creative careers in general. The chapter outlines the stages of this trajectory, which we propose encompasses: (1) pre-career; (2) breaking in; (3) the peak period; (4) denouement; and (5) new directions. Before turning to this framework, we first outline the impetus for creativity, the embodiment of creativity in performing arts careers, and how these are tied into the identity of performers. Offering such a background is important for providing the context through which the rise and fall of a career as an elite classical singer is negotiated by those we interviewed. 200

The rise and fall of professional singers  201

THE IMPETUS FOR CREATIVITY The catalyst to pursue a career as an elite classical singer may have many stimulants and impulses. However, a consistent component is the individual’s inner drive to master the complex and challenging skills of the singing style required to compete in a work environment that is characterized by embodied virtuosity achieved through extended training, an incessant search for quality projects, intense competition for limited work opportunities, uncertain employment security and vocational environments with dynamic management changes. Resources are often limited and demand the coordination of many skilled artisans acting with ‘mutual responsibility’ and a need to balance ‘unpredictable and rapidly shifting consumer demands’ (Jones, 1996: 60). Despite this somewhat unattractive employment context, and perhaps in part because of ignorance of its challenges, people continue to be motivated to pursue careers in the performing arts. It has long been recognized that creative pursuits often correspond with intense ambitions. Hallman, as early as 1965, made this clear stating that ‘the one generalization which the data support is that strong motivation is indeed a major component of creativity’ (Hallman, 1965: 454). After surveying psychological and psychoanalytic literature of the time, Hallman goes on to suggest that creative artists display an ‘aesthetic motivation’ driven more by qualitative responses to the world than by pragmatic qualities such as survival. The impetus for creativity can be evident early in life (McPherson and Welch, 2012; McPherson et al., 2012) and is apparent in our own data. The elite classical singers in our study identified early adolescence as the age at which their motivation to seek creativity through music and song was realized. An environment that nurtures music and its performance can develop an individual’s propensity for lifelong engagement and propel individuals on to more advanced stages of competency. Finding boundless, yet subtle personal significance in the craft of singing and the sounds produced can fill an individual with a satisfaction that compels them to commit to honing the craft of singing and casting themselves into a journey toward an elite career in the field of performance. Developmental projects in which to live out one’s creativity in the field of classical singing are important stepping stones from early expressive engagement toward a professional career. Such projects can vary from community choirs singing ancient vocal works to amateur stage shows featuring the contemporary composers of blockbuster music theatre productions. In our study of the career trajectories of elite classical singers, we found that community music groups were often the nurseries (Bartleet et al., 2008) in which emerging singers begin to signal their skills, learn theatrical processes and drive their passion for singing and performance. Choral groups, music theatre organizations of varying hues, community concerts and competitive singing such as eisteddfods, form some of the tentative paths singers use to explore their passion and develop skills. These experiences intensify the initial creative impulse and reinforce social and cultural compulsion to continue developing the practice (ibid.; Coffman and Higgins, 2012).

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EMBODIED CREATIVITY AND PERFORMING ARTS Practices in the performing arts are forms of creativity that are the work of bodies (Daykin, 2005; Pettinger, 2015). Elite singers develop powerful understandings about the way in which their bodies operate in order to sing music which is often unamplified, competing with in excess of 60 orchestral musicians, and which is regularly performed in lofty and extravagant architectural spaces. As well, to perform successfully and convincingly requires a deft use of movement, gesture, appropriate facial shaping and a myriad of stage presentation skills. Other demands required to gain and sustain professional hirings include collaboration with other high level arts practitioners, meeting the publicity expectations of management and audiences, and maintaining the singer’s own intense conscientiousness regarding the quality of their work; which they measure against their competitors and peers (Hesmondhalgh, 2007; Jones, 1996; Ryan, 2002). Elite classical singers master detailed skills that are built through repetitive muscle actions, creating deep muscle memories which are wired to a finely tuned cognitive understanding of musical processes and conventions. Singers’ voices and bodies become conduits for varied sonic timbres, symbols of texts and performance actions that combine to form some of humankind’s richest sonic and storytelling offerings (Hesmondhalgh, 2007; Robinson and Aronica, 2011). The significance of an embodied practice on career development can also be found in career studies in the sports and dance fields. These fields have acknowledged that the career span of their elite practitioners will most likely peak as the performer reaches a physical and mental maturity for the intense level of competition expected (Baillie, 1993; Grove et al., 1997; Jeffri and Throsby, 2006). The performers’ training magnifies their commitment and specialization, bringing a sense of intense elation through the perfection of their skills. These personal motivations are enhanced by the specialized environment in which they perform, and the similar values and goals shared by those with whom they collaborate (Ensher et al., 2002; Jones, 1996, 2002; Oakland, 2010). Research shows that without awareness of forthcoming career events such as deselection, sudden injury and the effects of ageing, the sports and dance practitioners would, like our singers, resist changes to their career, bargain against the loss of their positions in sport and artistic teams, and seek further opportunities to continue to work in a role that they feel can never be replicated (Baillie, 1993; Grove et al., 1997; Jeffri and Throsby, 2006). In Baillie’s (1993) work on sports careers, he suggests that there are also serious transition periods for many sports practitioners. He writes, they often ask, ‘Will I ever find anything that equals the pleasure, passion and intensity that I found in sports competition?’ (Baillie, 1993: 405). Dancers express similar apprehensions according to Jeffri and Throsby (2006), who found that they were reluctant to discuss a probable career change for fear that such talk would jeopardize their dance work opportunities. The singers in our study found they were faced with a variety of issues regarding their hoped-for longevity of career as classical singers. Popular and anecdotal writings often indicate that a long and fruitful career as a singer is a possibility (Colin,

The rise and fall of professional singers  203 2014; Plotkin, 2017; Simeonova, 2016) and the singers recalled previous generations of opera singers who enjoyed long-lived careers. There was a perception amongst the singers that as a voice matures different roles are accessible at a later age. Singers often begin their careers in their late twenties and this may lead to an expectation that a career will be sustained. Those that do sustain a career, however, are often very few in number. Our study found multifaceted issues can besiege singers as they try to maintain a healthy approach to their voices, appearance, and emotional and physical fitness. Performance roles in the strict classical world of singing are often categorized by a fach system – a method of classifying voices and which implies certain physical and vocal characteristics (Callaghan et al., 2012). While some voices are able to traverse different categories, those singers are a small subset of star performers (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). For singers in our Australian study we found the fach system had little apportionment, as strict role classifications were often straddled. For example, one interviewee noted, ‘One night you would be singing a complex 20th century opera and the following a role in Verdi or Puccini ... In Australia you have to sing so much more. The new management said I fell into the cracks. They were using the fach system’ (M/090911/1). For the large proportion of interviewees, loss of work was more aligned to the structure and vacillating nature of the labour market. Other factors included oversupply of competitors, shifting managerial and market perceptions, lifestyle questions (including family needs or a preference for a more settled life), and a stalled career trajectory that resulted in the singers becoming bored or frustrated with their career (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Menger, 1999; Towse, 1993).

DEEP IDENTITY AS A PERFORMER The intensive skill development in the performing arts, as just described, leads to an intense identification with the domain that manifests as a deep sense of identity as a performer and creative practitioner. It leads to strong social bonds with others who ‘understand’ these motivations and experiences. These traits are often seen in a positive light, as when Robinson and Aronica (2009) encourage the alignment of skills and interests as a way of providing fulfilment. They suggest that ‘When people are in their element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose, and well-being’ (Robinson and Aronica, 2009: 21). Yet research into cultural industry careers has also found that there can be dangers in defining oneself too much through creative work (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011: 148). While it is recognized that over-identification can be experienced in all forms of work, cultural industry researchers argue that ‘there are specific forms this kind of attachment takes in creative labour’ (ibid.: 141). Our study found that singers were resolute in their outlook on skill development and vocational intention, and developed an identification with craft and métier often to the exclusion of making well-judged career decisions. As we will outline in more detail later, the energy singers apply to maintaining their careers is testimony to their

204  Handbook on the geographies of creativity investment in a highly specialized skill set that was at the centre of their identity and work life. That in the face of, often dramatic, career changes none of the singers in our study sought counselling or was offered assistance seems distressing. As one singer commented, ‘It was assumed you would just know what to do to get work’ (F/010512/13). Whilst they each made heroic efforts to either survive or revive their careers, it was without support or guidance from either collective groups, such as unions, or from training and industrial institutions or private practitioners in psychological or career counselling fields. In the face of such dramatic change and isolation, and in the absence of understanding the dynamics of a performing arts career, the singers’ identity shifted from being a positive influence through persistence and focus to a negative drag on the ability to imagine alternative futures.

CAREER LIFECYCLE In order to understand how the impetus for creativity, its embodiment and links to identity impact upon the development of a career in elite classical singing and the decline of the career, it is useful to think about how career progression occurs in stages which indicate the journey a singer takes as they create a career path to professional status. The stages we present here emerge from a thematic analysis of our participants’ subjective experiences of their career trajectories. Five distinct stages emerged and we deal with each in turn below. However, it is also important to note that while these five stages can be recognized as discrete phases of career progression, the transition from one stage to the next is less distinct and only recognizable by the singers with the benefit of hindsight. Stage 1: Pre-Career The relationships, influences and contexts that singers experience during their pre-career period are the strongest indicator of whether they will choose to pursue a career in professional singing (McPherson and Welch, 2012; McPherson et al., 2012). The singers in this study describe influential relationships within the family environment, musical communities, and with their singing teachers as having the most important impact on their pre-career experience. The singers recollect that important individuals contributed to their musical development, and influenced their belief that they could be a professional singer. A singer’s family, whether encouraging or complex, offered the most immediate source of this dynamic, and formed the basis of their pre-career development. Included in many family environments was the access to high-quality audio technology in the home, which allowed listening to established singers of international standard. One interviewee recalled, ‘I can still see Dad waiting to collect the Reader’s Digest recordings from the post. We loved listening together’ (M/170412/12). Schooling was identified by a small number of our participants as being significant in their singing development, but for the majority schooling made an unmemorable

The rise and fall of professional singers  205 contribution to their musical journey. Spruce and Odena (2012) have found that the influence of schools upon those interested in pursuing music is highly varied. Whilst school environments have the opportunity to inspire, they are not necessarily the main source when investigating why some individuals pursue music. Meaningful music-making happened in the community. Participation in community music-making was one of the strongest influences the singers described when discussing their pre-career musical journeys. Performance communities gave the singers practice and experience in the operation of a concert and theatre making and provided opportunities to perform for audiences. Enabled by these community groups was access to the encouragement and influence of individuals who offered assistance, ranging from support after the early death of a parent to opportunities to sing the solos of the canon of works from the vocal repertoire. The influence of community continued into early adulthood. As one participant recalled, ‘I loved the Gilbert and Sullivan shows at Uni. I met so many people who shared my love of music and performance’ (F/220312/9). Often disregarded as ‘amateur’ performance groups, these communities fostered creativity and nurtured the desire of our interviewees to perform, providing positive pre-career experiences and support beyond just musical or career development (Bartleet et al., 2008). Within this community context many of the singers participated in competitions or eisteddfods. Through these events singers learnt performance skills and met potential future colleagues, and a lucky few earned substantial funds to support further studies. Importantly, skills beget skills: success in these competitions increased the singers’ desire to pursue the possibility of a career in the industry (McPherson and Welsh, 2012; McPherson et al., 2012). Drawing inspiration from the community, the singers strove to invest time to learn the detailed skills required of a competent singer. The possibility of becoming a professional singer gradually became a goal they held for themselves. This objective became part of their identity and they carried this ambition into their next career stage; breaking into the labour market of professional singing. Stage 2: Breaking In Early entrances to the labour market are often met with struggle and uncertainty; however, those singers who were focused on achieving their career goal of elite singing found routes through that uncertainty to establish their presence and strengthen their skills and reputations. Most singers spent several years balancing non-arts work with auditioning, undertaking costly studies and pursuing an unwavering absorption in the craft. This is in line with Bennett’s (2008) findings that musicians have traditionally taken on a portfolio of roles to supplement their incomes and to gain a higher status. Singers in our study expressed complete dedication to their craft, including referring to their pursuit as ‘a calling’. Similarly, a study by Dobrow and Heller (2012) followed a group of highly trained musicians for seven years and found that they viewed a music career as a calling that became inseparable from their identity. Likening a ‘calling’ to the sounds of the mythical singing sirens, Dobrow and Heller

206  Handbook on the geographies of creativity (2012) warn that the quest may be enchanting but that skills and knowledge were essential to navigating a career path that anticipated and avoided a possible shipwreck. The imparting of these career skills has not been ubiquitous in performing arts training. In our study the singers, whilst focused on the complex craft required of elite singing, recall few discussions in their pre-career stage about the type of labour market they would attempt to enter and even less about strategies for sustaining a lifelong practice of music making in the creative industries. Having embarked on a career trajectory toward professional status, singers needed to find a way to break into the industry. Breaking into creative careers is a complex, hidden and rarely investigated part of the career cycle. However, Jones (1996, 2002) provides a model based on the career patterns of practitioners in the film industry that serves as a solid description of this process. Jones found that not only are complex skills in specialist creative practice required of aspirants, but they need skills in interpersonal communication, managing reputational signals, deft handling of gatekeeper relationships, persistence and the maintenance of intrinsic motivation. These skills help support creative practitioners as they cope with precarious work opportunities, low payments for work and high levels of competition. As one participant-singer said in our interviews, ‘Whether you were suitable for handling the type of work and market you were heading into was never discussed at my music training college’ (F/010512/13). Jones (1996, 2002) is one of several researchers (Bennett, 2008, 2012; Bridgstock, 2005, 2010, 2012; Caves, 2000; Towse 1993) who question whether the training for creative practitioners has equipped them with these capabilities. The singers in our study engaged in a diverse array of activities in order to break into professional careers. For some, their initial steps were supported by low-level jobs within arts organizations. These opportunities were put to good use as singers were able to see first-hand the operations, both artistically and administratively, of large cultural organizations. Throsby and Zednick (2010) have shown that most artists supplement their creative practice by undertaking administrative, retail, hospitality, and a range of other types of work. Bennett (2008) demonstrates that portfolios of work undertaken by musicians have been a consistent source of financial support for centuries. The casual nature of these types of work arrangements often leaves creative practitioners, such as singers, the room to work on their skills, attend auditions, and continue to seek opportunities to develop their reputation as an artist. Regular auditioning and performing for community groups were a plentiful source for gaining information about the profession, networking with those who might offer them work and furthering skills development. One singer in our study demonstrated the effectiveness of this path. She improved her dance skills amongst community theatre groups and then, in a postgraduate opera course, met the dance captain for the national opera company who observed her advanced dance skills and advised her to audition. As the singer recalled, ‘I didn’t have many opportunities during the course but the networking meant within a year I had a permanent contract with the national company’ (F/150212/7). Coffman and Higgins (2012) have similarly shown that community music-making can be life-changing.

The rise and fall of professional singers  207 A source of reputation-building for some singers came through prestigious singing competitions. For example, one singer reports that as she was handed the cheque for an award, she was advised to use the money on overseas training and to begin a career in singing. She reflected, ‘I didn’t even think someone could earn a living as a singer at that stage’ (F/220312/9). However, some in the creative arts are wary of competitions as a source for career building because criteria for selection of winners are highly subjective, unstated, and at times judges can be quarrelsome (Beeching, 2010; Caves, 2000; McPherson and Thompson, 1998). Few, if any, competitions have criteria that ensure competitors are suited to the demands of the market conditions. However, singers often express their awards in such competitions as stepping stones to breaking into the field. Towse (1993) comments that gatekeepers and hirers will use competition wins as a source of decision making regarding the hiring of emerging artists. Most singers found their own persistence to be their most valuable asset for breaking into the profession. However, they often relied on external support to maintain their efforts. Representation by agencies played a part, but was less important than support from teachers, parents, well-connected individuals and peers at the point of breaking in. In the end, persistence and external recognition of their skills prevailed for the singers in the study. Having entered their professional career as singers, new and exciting challenges lay ahead in the peak stage of their careers. Stage 3: Peak Period Classical singers and other performing artists eventually reach a career stage which finds them at the peak of their skills and popularity. At this stage they are usually engaged in elite projects with expert collaborators, and secure earnings and work offers which give rise to a sense of achievement. They are frequently sought after by elite companies and are capable of managing diverse and demanding roles ranging from operatic to music theatre. This period is often recognized only in hindsight as, like many upward climbs, the peak is only relative to the surrounding topography. Hall (2002) and Jones (1996, 2002) recognize this period for elite practitioners as significant. Hall (2002) denotes the peak period of a career as a complex one requiring constant adjustment to possible modifications. Jones’s investigation of careers in the film industry found that elite practitioners were capable of managing projects in quick succession, experienced a constant need for travel and were focused on the maintenance of skills and networks. Other skills identified at this stage include a high level of communication, a large investment of time, industry knowledge and an ability to comprehend the high levels of competition (Ensher et al., 2002; Jones, 1996, 2002; Towse, 1993). Both Hall and Jones describe a necessity at this stage to constantly evaluate and improve capabilities in order to continue being successful with elite projects and master new areas of work. For the singers in our study their career achievements, as well as perceived failures, underpinned their outlook on their trajectory. As one singer we interviewed observed: ‘I was not a superstar but I substituted for many

208  Handbook on the geographies of creativity stars and worked with high-level performers, conductors, and directors in iconic venues. These achievements deeply embedded my identity as an elite performer’ (F/020312/8). In this stage, singers in our study intensified their identity with the vocation as the craft became ever more central and encompassing of their lives. The singers’ working lives were extremely busy in this peak stage. As they constantly learned new roles and regularly travelled to expensive metropolitan centres, with some receiving industry awards, their specialized careers required intense energy and commitment. Long runs in commercial theatres and regular roles in subsidized companies or choral organizations led to a sense of security and higher earnings. For most singers such a privileged position had taken considerable time to achieve, and they needed to maintain physical, mental and emotional fitness to cope with the demands of their highly specialized craft. They were constantly being evaluated by audiences, management and their own sense of intense conscientiousness. There was an imperative to take on roles, perform at high levels in these and defend their position against younger competitors. All of these intensive activities leave a singer with little time for well-judged decision making regarding subsequent career steps (Hall, 2002). Western society places a high value on art, artists and associated careers (Abbing, 2013); yet as Jones (1996) describes, artists’ careers can be short-lived. In fact, performers at this stage are often reluctant to address matters of change and career trajectory for fear it would jeopardize their career and employment chances (Jeffri and Throsby, 2006; Ryan, 2002). With hindsight, the singers in our study found they relied on anecdotal concepts of career trajectories or models that had become outdated. Restiveness, boredom and stalling begin to make their presence felt; and when the singers attempt to take control of their career trajectories, they are often faced with immense challenges (Menger, 1999). One singer in our study reinforced this finding. I had seen older generations of singers begin as choristers, grow into supporting or comprimario roles and have a good career. I expected that to be my trajectory ... I understudied a role for more than 250 performances and not once did I perform the role ... I ask for a meeting with management to discuss my position ... I was told there were hundreds of singers with similar voices to mine and I would be unlikely to receive any further advancement ... I felt disappointed and stuck. (F/010512/13)

Exacerbating this lack of control is the fact that there are few programmes to assist performers with career planning. They are therefore left in a position of ameliorating those who would control their career and are ‘infantilized’ by an industrialized system of performance companies that are more concerned about box office receipts, conservative programming, and corporate professionalism (Crawford, 2015: 28). Just as the peak of a career may be difficult to judge at the time, so is it also difficult to anticipate its end. Logically there is an inevitable decline from the peak, but managing that transition can be a challenge.

The rise and fall of professional singers  209 Stage 4: Denouement The denouement stage follows the highly specialized, intense and vocationally exclusive careers the singers experience in their peak stage. Denouement is a French literary term that means untying a knot and bringing threads together in a following epilogue. Denouement has great value as a term to describe this next stage in the performing artist’s career, as it is a period of transition away from a sense of being at one’s peak. An uneventful career transition from elite performing practice to something else is rare. Although some people deliberately envision this change and plan for it, most singers in our study for whom the average age at this stage of denouement was 36–39 were left vulnerable to an unplanned mid-career transition. The journey toward a new career was therefore complex and hazardous. Open discourse regarding creative careers and their denouement remains under-exposed. An exception is Oakland’s (2010) study of the forced redundancies of seven full-time opera singers in the UK. She found that the singers experienced strong feelings of trauma and resentfulness as they tried to accept their career change and find new directions to continue their engagement in music making. A small number of Oakland’s subjects found that singing again, at any level, was too difficult to face. In our study there was a complexity in the manner and perception of how the participants’ singing careers drew to a conclusion. Whether by involuntary or voluntary means the majority of the singers experienced considerable loss, anger and trauma as they realized that offers for roles were declining or had stopped. For some, their awareness of an impending denouement was obfuscated by industrial practices, in particular the hierarchical and siloed nature of opera companies or the one-size-fits-all approach in commercial theatre (Hesmondhalgh, 2007; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). The singers recall lacking the skill and cogent understanding to negotiate career planning. Extreme busyness in learning and performing roles and concert performances, while beckoning, was sometimes a screen that masked the reality of dealing with a future that would need deliberation, engineering and forethought. As one singer recalled: ‘I really didn’t know how to discuss the possible dignified exit to my career with my agent or management’ (F/220312/9). As intermediaries in the hiring process, singers’ agents are engaged for the purpose of finding roles or work, relieving the singer of the time-consuming task of work search. However, they are not career designers and have little control over audience tastes and company budgets. Singers may miss the signs of career denouement but agents are not career counsellors. Many singers, then, bargain with the industry and themselves, attempting to maintain their career by travelling to other markets (especially Europe) to seek new opportunities only to find that, as another singer describes, ‘the harsh reality was there was no route to the ambitions I set for myself’ (F/010512/13). This awareness often came too late for dealing effectively with this concluding career stage. Planning a career change takes awareness, acceptance of potential change, and having psychological and financial buffers in place to cope with the upheavals. The study found few singers were prepared to address the needs of career denouement.

210  Handbook on the geographies of creativity There are very real issues concerning the emotional well-being and financial security of elite singers as they experience a denouement stage. The singers in our study recall intense feelings of loss, denial and anger, with many taking between five and seven years to mourn the forfeiture of their fiercely striven career as an elite singer. On reflection, many of the singers realize that they overestimated the probable length of their career. They relied on past and dysfunctional models of career trajectories that were unhelpful and did not create room for accepting change, nor allowed them to conceive of themselves beyond the industrial base of performance. Strategies and planning for life after absorbing ‘one of life’s little deaths’ (Jeffri and Throsby, 2006: 50) were not discussed, and so any preparation for this stage was absent for most of the singers. However, all eventually found their way through this stage and on to other opportunities. Stage 5: Moving On Whether planned or forced, almost all professional performing artists need to move on to something else following denouement. This moving-on stage can be one of renewal, but often involves considerable soul-searching and reskilling. Coming to terms with a change in their career and enacting new directions was difficult, complex and emotional for most of the singers in our study. Most had little or no buffer, either emotional or financial, to help them through the initial process. However, over time, they began to find new skills and especially new communities in which they could flourish. Often they sought, and were able, to remain close to their craft competencies, aesthetic agendas and creative practice. Renshaw (2010) has shown that artists, by working outside the arts sector, can be transformed by engaging meaningfully and with excellence, in a range of contexts, including judicial programmes, age care and health, remote and/or low socioeconomic communities, yet not without significant changes in the way artists are enculturated and trained. The singers in this study found they needed new skills and to enter communities where their highly specialized skills could be valuable. Leadership was a skill especially required moving forward, yet previous arts experiences had not developed this capability. One singer recalled the changes needed to secure work opportunities after an unsteady start: ‘Later I began a new collaboration. I learnt how to pitch an idea, seek funding, manage talent, and administer a company ... It was a great success but we still lost a lot of money’ (F/030712/11). While the singers often absorbed new skills and implemented these, the issue of finance was raised by most who endeavoured to start small performance businesses. Most avenues open to the singers required new vocational skills in enterprise management, pedagogical training, or marketing. These paths often involved steep learning curves in technology and business administration. With these new skills they could begin practices in teaching, small-scale performance enterprises (for example, community recital series, opera boot camps) and business ventures. They needed to recast their identities as creative practitioners who connect with communities, rather than as workers relying upon institutional arts organizations for a career framework.

The rise and fall of professional singers  211 Finding steep learning curves in new technologies, the singers learned that an openness to new concepts about how their artistic practice could endure was essential. Life was still blurry at the time, but I recall meeting someone during that period who suggested starting a semi-professional opera group ... Reality began to strike ... I could sell, sell, sell my singing career or I could stop reacting to what had happened and take a bold new step ... So I went on to start [a new opera company], and it saved me. Initially there was a large personal debt and the group was disbanded, but it helped me find my creative energy and was a way of addressing some of the things I thought were wrong in the development of young voice artists in this country. (F/291011/3)

Exacting lessons were learnt, emotional wounds were shed, and today a vision to train aspiring singers in many skills and capabilities through a small performance enterprise is highly regarded and sustained. Other singers took opportunities to retrain, either returning to tertiary institutes to complete degrees or begin new ones, and start a journey into different communities that valued their diverse skills. Transference of the skills accumulated as an elite singer took some time to be recognized as valuable, and on reflection many of the interviewees now identify diverse capabilities which can serve their communities. Other singers took self-devised apprenticeships as a result of their experiences in the theatre industry and today are successful sole traders operating independent practices, micro businesses or a portfolio of roles as creative practitioners (Arthur et al., 1999). Maintaining an involvement in the creative industries was a goal for the singers, as they began to realize their careers as elite professional singers were changing. For a limited number of singers, a planned and guided exit was something they looked toward, but most singers faced an end that triggered waves of emotional struggle as they looked for a route toward their new purpose. The majority of the singers in this study found that teaching singing suited their personality and maintained an identification with their craft. Other singers endeavoured to maintain a performance profile by venturing into enterprises that require skills in marketing, business administration, and managing an array of resources. Many of these ventures were unfamiliar and thus taxing on the singers. Cultivating networks and skills that sustained or even began to help turn a profit would prove an onerous task. Recent studies investigating skill sets required for those looking to sustain a career in performing arts have turned their attention to the readiness and comprehension that creative practitioners have about sustaining careers in an economic landscape that challenges traditional concepts of artists learning and practising. It suggests that the training of artists, including those destined to be elite classical singers, will need to include vocational skills which augment capabilities, and promote less siloed and broader engagement in artistic practices and career longevity and diversity (Beckmann, 2010; Bridgstock, 2005, 2010, 2012; Gotsi et al., 2010).

212  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS The demands of elite performing arts careers are experienced in a labour market that has distinct and selective practices which can expand some careers at particular stages, and limit others at another stage. As outlined in this chapter, prominent stages of performing arts careers are: pre-career, where training and motivations are the focus; breaking in, where performers seek to establish themselves in the professions; peak period, in which work lives are busy and performers develop a sense of achievement; denouement, when work opportunities diminish and performers struggle to develop new career directions; and moving on, where acceptance that the performing career has passed occurs and new opportunities are embraced. Most particular for the career trajectories of performing arts practitioners is the denouement stage which often arrives unexpectedly. Performing arts careers are time-limited, as are other embodied careers like being an elite sportsperson or a labourer, and it seems from our study that too often there is little recognition of this and thus poor planning for moving onto further career stages. For a number of the singers in our study, success was brought to a sudden end against a backdrop of changing managerial practices, and for others a sense that the mechanics of arts bureaucracies have limiting channels. The singers we interviewed were mostly unprepared for the changes that would complicate their lives, as their embodied and cherished careers as elite singers began to peel away. In our study we encouraged singers to reflect on their skills and the sort of transition they experienced, and offer some advice to emerging singers. A common theme was the need for an open discourse that a singer’s career can be quite short, yet the singers recognized the reluctance of emerging singers to face this issue. Two singers reflected on this: ‘the industry can be abusive ... with a “tough it out” attitude ... Taking counselling should not be seen as a weakness’ (F/291011/3). Another advised that ‘older artists ought to take out a paper and pen and write out plans and contingencies ... it’s unwise not to consider an end ... and then feel let down’ (M/170412/12). The singers observed that the need for planning, support services and reskilling was essential to a well-adjusted transition, reinforcing observations by Ebberwin et al. (2004) and Heppner (1998). Following denouement our interviewees were eager to maintain connection with their craft and domain, whether by pedagogical practice or pursuing a performance arts venture. The interviews demonstrate the need for skills that enable better financial and business literacy and technological competency, and for a broader perspective on how the skills a singer possesses could be transferred to new arenas. The domains of elite sports and dance seem to offer better acceptance of the time-framed nature of these highly specialized, embodied creative careers and subsequently offered services for those exiting the field including career planning and counselling services. As Oakland et al. (2012: 145) noted, ‘sports and dance have recognized systems in place to guide individuals through the inevitable transition. Career transition is now a fundamental issue for musicians worldwide ... we have an obligation to strive for

The rise and fall of professional singers  213 greater understanding of the issues specific to musicians’. To date, this situation seems little improved. In this chapter, we have described how creative careers in the performing arts follow a somewhat unique trajectory that is driven by specific labour market conditions. We have argued that the uncertainty of performing arts careers is complicated by many factors and that the lack of consideration of longevity and career sustainability exacerbates the problem. Professional singers experience highly intense career stages, yet often neglect career planning. These reported experiences lead us to suggest there must be more to creative careers than an impetus for creativity.

REFERENCES Abbing, H. (2013), ‘Poverty and support for artists’, in R. Towse (ed.), A Handbook of Cultural Economics, second edition, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 344–9. Arthur, M., K. Inkson and J. Pringle (1999), The New Careers: Individual Action and Economic Change, London, UK: Sage Publications. Baillie, P. (1993), ‘Understanding retirement from sports: Therapeutic ideas for helping athletes in transition’, The Counseling Psychologist, 21, 399–410. Bartleet, B.L., R. Letts, P. Dunbar-Hall and H. Schippers (2008), ‘Sound links: Community music in Australia’, Brisbane, Australia: Griffith University. Beckmann, G. (2010), ‘“Adventuring” arts entrepreneurship curricula in higher education: An examination of present efforts, obstacles, and best practices’, The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 37 (2), 87–112. Beeching, A. (2010), Beyond Talent: Creating a Successful Career in Music, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Bennett, D. (2008), Understanding the Classical Music Profession. The Past, the Present and Strategies for the Future, Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Bennett, D. (ed.) (2012), Life in the Real World. How to Make Music Graduates Employable, Champaign, IL, USA: Common Ground. Bridgstock, R. (2005), ‘Australian artists, starving and well nourished: What can we learn from the prototypical protean career?’, Australian Journal of Career Development, 14 (5), 40–48. Bridgstock, R. (2010), ‘Skills for creative industries graduate success’, Education and Training, 53 (1), 9–26. Bridgstock, R. (2012), ‘Not a dirty word: Arts entrepreneurship and higher education’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 12 (2–3), 122–37. Callaghan, J., S. Emmons, and L. Popiel (2012), ‘Solo voice pedagogy’, in G. McPherson and G. Welch (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, vol.1, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 559–80. Caves, R. (2000), Creative Industries. Contracts Between Art and Commerce, Boston, MA, USA: Harvard University Press. Coffman, D. and L. Higgins (2012), ‘Community Music Ensembles’, in G. McPherson and G. Welch (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, vol.1, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 844–59. Colin, M. (2014), ‘Before what age does it take to be an opera singer?’, sfcv.org, accessed 10 December 2017 at https://​www​.sfcv​.org/​article/​age​-before​-what​-does​-it​-take​-to​-be​-an​ -opera​-singer. Crawford, T. (2015), ‘Feudal positions and the pathology of contentment: Sites of disconnection for Australian theatre actors’, in M. Seton (ed.), About Performance: The Lives

214  Handbook on the geographies of creativity of Actors, no.13, Sydney, Australia: University of Sydney, Department of Theatre and Performance, pp. 23–43. Daykin, N. (2005), ‘Disruption, dissonance and embodiment: Creativity, health and risk in music narratives’, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 9 (1), 67–87. Dobrow, S. and D. Heller (2012), ‘A siren song? A longitudinal study of the role of calling and perceived ability in career pursuit’, in Academy of Management Conference, 2012, Boston, USA, accessed April 2016 at: http://​eprints​.lse​.ac​.uk/​65984/​. Ebberwin, C., T. Krieshok, J. Ulven and E. Prosser (2004), ‘Voices in transition: Lessons on career adaptability’, The Career Development Quarterly, 52 (4), 292–308. Ensher, E., S. Murphy and S. Sullivan (2002), ‘Boundaryless careers in entertainment: Executive women’s experiences’, in M. Peiperl, M. Arthur and N. Anand (eds), Career Creativity: Explorations in the Remaking of Work, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 229–55. Gotsi, M., C. Andriopolous, M.W. Lewis and A. Ingram (2010), ‘Managing creatives: Paradoxical approaches to identity regulation’, Human Relations, 63 (6), 781–805. Grove, J.R., D. Lavelle and S. Gordon, S (1997), ‘Coping with retirement from sport: The influence of athletic identity’, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 9 (2),191–203. Hall, D. (2002), Careers In and Out of Organisations, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage Publications. Hallman, R.J. (1965), ‘Aesthetic motivation in the creative arts’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23 (4), 453–59. Heppner, M (1998), ‘Adults in involuntary career transition: An analysis of the relationship between the psychological and career domains’, Journal of Career Assessment, 6 (3), 329–46. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2007), The Cultural Industries, second edition, London, UK: Sage Publications. Hesmondhalgh, D. and S. Baker (2011), Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Jeffri, J. and D. Throsby (2006), ‘Life after dance: Career transition of professional dancers’, International Journal of Arts Management, 8 (3), 54–62. Jones, C. (1996), ‘Careers in project networks: The case of the film industry’, in M. Arthur and D. Rousseau (eds), The Boundaryless Career, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 58–75. Jones, C. (2002), ‘Signalling expertise: How signals shape careers in creative industries’, in M. Peiperl, M. Arthur and N. Anand (eds), Career Creativity: Explorations in the Remaking of Work, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 209–28. McPherson, G., J. Davidson and R. Faulkner (2012), Music in Our Lives: Rethinking Musical Ability, Development and Identity, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. McPherson, G.E. and W. Thompson (1998), ‘Assessing music performance: Issues and influences’, Research Studies in Music Education, 10 (1), 12–24. McPherson, G. and G.F. Welch (2012), ‘Introduction and commentary – music education and the role of music in people’s lives’, Oxford Handbook of Music Education, vol. 1, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 5–20. Menger, P.C. (1999), ‘Artistic labor markets and careers’, Annual Review of Sociology, 25 (1), 541–74. Oakland, J. (2010), ‘“Giving voice”: Enforced occupational change in opera choristers’, Unpublished Thesis, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. Oakland, J., R.A. MacDonald and P. Flowers (2012), ‘Re-defining “me”: Exploring career transition and the experience of loss in the context of professional opera choristers’, Musica Scientia, 16 (2), 135–47.

The rise and fall of professional singers  215 Pettinger, L. (2015), ‘Embodied labour in music work’, The British Journal of Sociology, 66 (2), 283–300. Plotkin, F. (2016), ‘How old is too old for the opera stage?’, wqxr.org, accessed 10 December 2017 at http://​www​.wqxr​.org/​story/​how​-old​-too​-old​-opera​-stage/​. Renshaw, P. (2010), Engaged Passions. Searches for Quality in Community Contexts, Delft, The Netherlands: Eburon Academic Publishers. Robinson, K. and L. Aronica (2009), The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, London, UK: Penguin Books. Ryan, S.M. (2002), ‘Life-span development perspectives of the professional dance career’, Unpublished Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Simeonova, J. (2017), ‘Who’s afraid of the aging singer?’, Schmopera, accessed 10 December 2017 at https://​www​.schmopera​.com/​whos​-afraid​-of​-the​-aging​-singer​_2/​. Spruce, G. and O. Odena (2012), ‘Commentary – music learning and teaching during adolescence; ages 12–18’, in G. McPherson and G.F. Welch (eds), Oxford Handbook of Music Education, vol. 1, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 437–40. Throsby, D. and A. Zednick (2010), ‘Do you really expect to be paid? An economic study of professional artists in Australia’, Sydney, Australia: Australia Council for the Arts. Towse, R. (1993), Singers in the Marketplace: The Economics of the Singing Profession, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

PART V CREATIVITY AS CULTURE

13. Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture: Chumvan Sodhachivy’s YouTube page Amanda Rogers

This chapter traces the relationship between contemporary Cambodian dance and the constitution of national culture. It examines filmed dance performances and screendances created by the contemporary Cambodian dancer Chumvan Sodhachivy (Belle) and her troupe, ‘Silver Bell’, that are regularly uploaded onto her YouTube page.1 Analysing these filmed and filmic works highlights the varied sites of dance practice among professional contemporary dancers in Cambodia, and the role of practitioners in reproducing and re-constituting national culture. Artistic practices can promote a new image of Cambodia, with dancers reworking elite practices in response to the sensibilities of young Cambodians and social issues. Belle’s YouTube page reflects a global, outgoing perspective that cuts across everyday and state-led realms of (national) culture, displaying different modes of expression across sites that range from disused buildings, to beaches, casinos and foreign cultural institutes. Through this discussion, the chapter contributes to an emerging body of work that investigates the relationship between creative practice and (geo)political phenomena (Ingram, 2011; Kuhlke, 2014; Militz and Schurr, 2016). Specifically, it develops research examining the intersections between performance and nationality (Cronin and Till, 2017; Plancke, 2016; Rogers, 2018) by attending to how dancers create emergent forms of national culture as they traverse different locations: commercial sites; non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and global cultural circuits; and everyday Cambodian landscapes. In so doing, the chapter highlights that the nation is a performed entity, but its importance fluctuates in prominence and intensity.

NATION, CULTURE AND CREATIVITY The nation is the pre-eminent form of political organization, being conventionally defined as a human population that ‘shares myths and memories, a mass public culture, a designated homeland, economic unity and equal rights and duties for all members’ (Smith, 1995: 56–7). However, research has highlighted how the nation is not a pre-given, naturally existing phenomena (Edensor, 2002; Weber, 1998) but an emergent ‘category of practice’ through which the world is ordered (Brubaker, 1996: 21). Performative metaphors have emphasized that the nation is contingent and constantly in process (Jones and Merriman, 2009; McConnell, 2016), with recent 217

218  Handbook on the geographies of creativity geographical research exploring how the arts expose contestations around territory, the constitution of post-conflict world orders, and assumptions around the production of national culture (Ingram, 2009; Pinkerton and Benwell, 2014; Rogers, 2018). The imaginative potential of the arts therefore makes them fertile ground for interrogating and reconstructing spaces of nationality, particularly through the body (see Mayer, 2004, more broadly). Research in anthropology and dance/performance studies has long investigated the interchange between dance and nationality, analysing how dance produces ‘embodied communities’ (Hughes-Freeland, 2008) that are often also intersectional or highly gendered (Shapiro-Phim, 2008). Research has also examined the tense, contradictory relationship between dance and national cultural heritage (Tuchman-Rosta, 2018), and the transformations that result when dance is inserted into circuits of globalization (Plancke, 2017; Reed, 2010). For Plancke (2016: 151), dance is a ‘strong symbol for making identities’, particularly at the national level, as individuals and communities seek to differentiate themselves amid the flux and uncertainty of globalization. Interdisciplinary dialogues between dance studies and geography can develop these discussions through an attention to questions of spatiality whilst also building on geographical concerns that ‘there is much more to be said about the nation’s aesthetics’ beyond conventional material artefacts and iconographies (Stephens, 2014: 62). The tension between presence and absence, documentation and ephemerality that characterizes performing arts praxis points towards how we might think through the shifting ‘tonalities and intensities of nationality’ (ibid.), to when – and where –performances of nationality come to matter. Implicit in these discussions is that national cultures and creative processes are both protean. As Richardson (2017) has argued, culture and creativity are often synonymous in cultural geography, despite the multiple and overlapping theoretical lineages of each term. This multiplicity can be a strength, a way of thinking through the possible work that creative practice can do and the kinds of worlds or cultures it might create (Hawkins, 2017). Here, I similarly hold the plural relationship between creativity and culture in tension because contemporary Cambodian dancers traverse sites of praxis that differently configure the (re)production of national culture through the performing body. As a cultural–creative practice, dance can operate as a form of innovation that produces easily consumable products in the context of commercial globalization (Liep, 2001). However, Belle’s contemporary dances reflect an ongoing creative process that continues and extends existing cultural formations, multiplying their meanings and values (Ingold and Hallam, 2007). When thinking through these dynamics in relation to national culture, contemporary Cambodian dancers bridge elite and everyday spaces of nationalism. Traditionally, research on nationalism has fallen into two camps. Firstly, there has been a focus on ‘high’ cultural forms such as ceremonies or pageants; eventful activities that iconographically represent state-sanctioned ideologies (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Secondly, research has examined popular, everyday forms of national culture that go unremarked or unnoticed (Billig, 1995). Edensor (2002) argues that the latter are more politically ambiguous, a site of greater cultural dynamism or con-

Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture  219 testation than the former. However, studies of nationality in geography are starting to muddy these divisions. For instance, Antonsich (2016) argues that attending to what and where constitutes the ‘everyday’ brings state-centric reproductions of the nation into dialogue with those occurring in everyday sites of activity. This chapter contributes to these debates because contemporary dancers traverse different realms. Professional dancing bodies in Cambodia are predetermined as national bodies owing to their historical associations with the state and the Royal Family, as well as their institutional training in traditional dance forms at the Secondary School of Fine Arts (SSFA) and the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA). Many (but not all) contemporary dancers work as dance teachers in the state education system, teaching traditional dance forms in the morning before experimenting with movement vocabularies and developing modes of expression elsewhere in the afternoons and evenings. Professional dancers in Cambodia are part of elite national culture, including those working in a contemporary vein, and all can perform dances associated with that realm. However, some also create movement vocabularies that adapt traditional performance vocabularies, using these to express everyday concerns such as environmental pollution on the streets of Phnom Penh, social expectations of women, or the need for education. This blurring features in the lives of many contemporary dancers. Belle’s YouTube page highlights the varied spaces through which these different modalities of ‘contemporary Cambodian dance’ emerge and their fluctuating relationship to nationality.

METHODOLOGY Geographers are increasingly undertaking online research, particularly using social media sites such as YouTube (Laurier, 2015; Longhurst, 2009). The internet is a source of empirical information and a research location that places ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces on a shifting continuum. YouTube is a ‘site of dynamic and emergent relations between market and non-market, social and economic activity’ with its variety of producers, audiences and interests marking it out as a unique site (Burgess and Green, 2009: 90). This growing interest in online research coincides with increased experimentation with videographic methods to explore and capture embodied space-times (Simpson, 2011). Video is often incorporated into a broader ethnographic toolkit whereby methods are combined and used in innovative ways. For instance, Veal’s (2016) geographical articulation of a choreographic notebook incorporates videography alongside diagrammatic notation (such as Labanotation), movement description, photographic representation, sketching and interviews. Film has long been used to capture the movement, rhythm, affective qualities and social contexts of dance (Hughes-Freeland, 1999). Nevertheless, dance studies are grappling with how to analyse screendance, where dances are filmed to be watched on screen, rather than live. As screens become more prolific in society, screendance changes the composition and form of dance because the dancing body seems to no longer be elusive or immediate (Rosenberg, 2012). Instead, the body is co-produced

220  Handbook on the geographies of creativity through lighting and the technological manipulation of distance (the close up), duration (editing) and spatiality (the frame) (Norman, 2010; Somdahl-Sands and Adams, 2014). Belle’s YouTube page contains 84 videos at the time of writing, uploaded over seven years, though some are older. They range in length from under a minute to over fifteen, and are diverse in content, technological quality and stylistic approach. The majority are films or recordings of dance, rather than dance films or screendance. They are often documents of live performances recorded from a conventional audience perspective, straight on or slightly to one side. The films have variable viewing figures, with some being viewed a handful of times, and others hundreds of times. Her commercial performances are often the most viewed, which perhaps reflects how Belle uses these to ‘show what you have done before. Then you can see on my video, on my phone.’ However, some dances created in artistic settings also have high viewing figures. Much of the existing work on YouTube dance videos is based around a single genre (see Peters and Seier, 2009, on home dance). Here, I focus on a single practitioner, using YouTube as an autobiographical archive that documents both their movement history and how it cuts across genres and spaces, extending research that examines how this platform stages the self. Belle insisted that ‘I do not have a professional “this is my website of contemporary dance”; I just put it up and keep for myself as a document.’ As such, her YouTube page was used for publicity, personal inspiration, reflection, remembering, and as an archive of her praxis. Following mixed-methodology approaches, I use video analysis alongside interviews conducted with Belle in Phnom Penh in 2014 and 2018, and my own experience in learning and performing various dance forms. Specifically, I undertake a conventional form of image-based content analysis that categorizes the type or genre of dance performed (commercial, screendance, artistic/NGO, other) whilst also attending to the location of filming. Indeed, a dance’s choreography and form usually responds to the site of performance. In using dance ethnography, I also examine ‘narrative, iconographic gestures, symbolic images, social relationships in choreography, but also . . . how meaning is literally embodied in the dancer’s physicality, in the phenomenological realities of weight, space and movement intentionality’ (Albright, 1997: 50). There are limitations to this approach in terms of capturing experience and feeling, but observational techniques can convey the expressiveness of the performing body (Rogers, 2012; Veal, 2016). For screendances, issues of editing and screen spatiality are paid greater attention.

DANCE AND NATIONALITY IN CAMBODIA First, I provide a brief overview on classical and contemporary dance in Cambodia and illustrate how dancers such as Belle traverse multiple sites of praxis. Dance is synonymous with Cambodian national identity, being ‘essential to the perpetuation of Cambodia as a cultural and political entity’ (Phim and Thompson, 1999: 2). Classical dance has been performed for the king since at least the ninth century, but

Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture  221 in the 1940s it was overtly linked to the state-led promotion of national identity, when dancers accompanied King Norodom Sihanouk on diplomatic tours. Under the Khmer Rouge (1975–79), 90 per cent of dancers were executed owing to their elite associations, and much of the post-genocide era has focused on restoring Cambodia’s dance heritage. In the process, the relationship between dance and nationality has intensified such that nationality has become a ‘unique weight [for dancers] to bear’ (Shapiro-Phim, 2008: 63). However, younger dancers can have a slightly different relationship to their cultural heritage as they have an outward-looking, cosmopolitan perspective. Some arts NGOs have responded to this, facilitating international residencies and collaborations with contemporary dancers from Europe, North America and Asia. In Cambodia training in contemporary dance is limited and only began in 2017–18 at RUFA. A ‘professional’ dancer has graduated from RUFA in dance or choreography, with students training since childhood in a specific traditional dance form (classical dance, folk dance, lakhon khol or shadow theatre). Classical dance comprises four roles (male, female, giant, monkey) using over 4500 hand gestures (kbach) that are combined with bodily postures. State educational settings therefore promulgate the reproduction of traditional dance and, by extension, its association with nationality (Eggert, 2011). Professional dancers reproduce this association because after graduation one employment option is to work as a teacher at the SSFA or RUFA. Some dancers join the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts’ Department of Performing Arts, where dancers perform in the traditional repertoire (particularly on state visits) and undertake limited choreographic reconstruction. Contemporary Cambodian dance takes two main forms. The first entails taking classical dance lexicons and re-choreographing them to tell existing stories from the Reamker (the Cambodian Ramayana) in new ways, to tell new stories about Cambodian life, or to explore expressive possibilities and ideas (see Shapiro, 2010). Here, however, I focus on the second type, where traditional dances are integrated with various other genres such as hip hop, modern dance, ballet and belly dancing. This process shifts the embodied physical motion and meaning of dance and has created concerns over the loss and degradation of traditional dance vocabularies. The historical embeddedness of dance in the reproduction, indeed rebuilding, of Cambodia, means that concerns over expression are also concerns over the constitution of nationality. Belle’s career reflects these dynamics. Born in 1986, she started learning the classical female role aged eight before being switched to the male role because she grew too tall for the petite, delicate embodiment required for the female role. Her training was therefore exclusively in a traditional dance form, but she felt restricted by its codified lexicon. In her teens she therefore began to explore other dance genres: I told my mum that I wanted to do something new. My mum brought me to a private dance club for lessons in the evening. The dance was pop dance, Michael Jackson, and aerobic because at that time he was very famous . . . When I study it, I can experiment with my body

222  Handbook on the geographies of creativity on how flexible I am to do the new movements that I never did before. I still study classical dance until I graduated. On the other hand, I research something new what is fitted with me.

Belle described a spatially segmented world: the strictures of classical dance in educational settings; and the different, perhaps more freeing, routes for personal expression found outside these realms. This division was mapped onto spaces of nationalism and cultural globalization, and it persists today. Dancers described teaching at school in a strict fashion in order to perpetuate national cultural traditions, including Belle, who was adamant that ‘it is our root. You cannot do anything besides what teacher tells you . . . Students should know the difference, you must respect the tradition, you cannot change the movements . . . This is our culture, our identity.’ However, international arts NGOs and cultural institutes are key sites for dancers developing contemporary dance styles, and have helped legitimize this genre in Cambodia. Cambodian arts NGOs therefore enable dancers to explore different dance forms vis-à-vis cultural globalization, although Belle also mentioned using the internet to watch contemporary dance. Dancers also establish peer networks and friendships in order to explore and develop contemporary dance possibilities. This chapter highlights how Belle’s contemporary dance practice illustrates that cultural forms can be developed in ways that do not pose an opposition between a static, elite form of national identity and a fluid globalization that erodes national attachments. Rather, there are ‘innumerable pathways, connections and sources’ between the two (Edensor, 2002: 33). For instance, when discussing watching contemporary dance from abroad, she described how: When you watch . . . contemporary performance of foreigners, it is their own idea and style, but we have to see it as another world. For our world, we have to work with our people also to discuss about our own problem, happiness, and idea. We need our original idea, Khmer idea, from us.

Here, Belle implicitly challenged common accusations that contemporary dance in Cambodia is copying, and that it undermines traditional (national) dance forms. One reason why she liked contemporary dance as a genre was that it could ‘connect with daily living’, creating discussion about different ideas and perspectives so that ‘you understand what your idea means, how it relates [to society], and what dances you want to create’. The cosmopolitan attitude of openness fostered by learning dance genres from abroad extended to Cambodian society at home, such that contemporary dance can help explore everyday worlds and their links to national cultures, rather than assuming that the traditional, particularly classical, dancing body is the sole arbiter of national culture. When Belle’s teacher questioned her commitment to her national culture (as embodied in dance) she responded: I said to her, ‘Do you know the reason I do contemporary dance? It is also because I love classical dance. I love my culture. I want to develop it. The way I want to develop it is by taking contemporary dance style.’

Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture  223 Here, Belle’s understanding of Cambodian culture is aligned with ideas of creativity as continuous adaptation and change (Ingold and Hallam, 2007). Developing contemporary Cambodian dance as a genre was also a marker of pride in being a developed country and in ‘being Cambodian’. The different ways that dance articulated the interplay between culture, creativity and national identity were therefore not seen by Belle (or indeed by other contemporary dancers) as incompatible; rather they co-existed.

CONTEMPORARY DANCE AND COMMERCIAL SITES OF PERFORMANCE Discussing these dynamics prevents a simplistic reading of the videos on Belle’s YouTube page, particularly those in a commercial vein (which at 42 videos constitute the largest group). Commercial dances are choreographed either for the tourist or entertainment market, or for company events and product launches. These sites render Cambodia’s insertion into globalization obvious by engaging with cultural difference vis-à-vis the dancing body. These dances are easily consumable set pieces at around five to six minutes. The dance on display is of two types: forms of contemporary dance that emerge in Cambodia through circuits of cultural globalization without referencing traditional Cambodian forms, what Belle called a ‘fusion’ style; and those that gesturally reference traditional Cambodian forms, but mix these with other genres. Belle created her dance troupe, ‘Silver Bell’, explicitly for commercial work as friends started to ask her to create dances for their workplaces. This became a way of earning money because professional dancers are paid very little, with teachers sometimes not earning enough to cover their travel costs to work, making multiple jobs necessary (see Tuchman-Rosta, 2018, for more on the economy of Cambodian dance). However, Belle described her increased selectiveness around the commercial work she undertook as she became older, recommending others to choreograph certain events, and considering the values attached to projects or products rather than simply earning money: When I was young I did create dance for beer companies and cigarette companies, but right now it’s not what I want. What is going to happen to the people that are smoking? We need money but we need value also. It’s a personal thing. But if it is about babies, the meal for old people to support the bone, the memory, the health, ok, I’m interested.

These negotiations around economic capital coincide with a recent increased emphasis on her page towards choreographic work, to making pieces that other dancers then perform (see below) and to showing dances in rehearsal. With age comes increased responsibility towards cultural values in Cambodia, particularly for women, alongside increased tolls on the body, focusing attention on her choreographic, not only dancing, abilities. In turn, this changes the relationship between her own dancing body and its production of economic value.

224  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Dances performed in entertainment settings such as NagaWorld use a ‘fusion’ style, combining salsa, samba, Egyptian belly dancing undulations, hip hop or American pop music and movement, performed in triangular or linear formations that characterize western pop dancing (rather than the ‘figure 8’ movement-spaces of classical dance). These routines are spectacular, designed to elicit entertainment and excitement through culturally ‘exotic’ references, particularly as they use glittery costumes and incorporate showpiece movements (such as firebird jumps from western ballet, or high lifts). Specific movements and gestural imagery create spectacles that induce affective experience in ways that divorce dances from their historical, cultural and national contexts. Plancke (2016) views this process as part of the capitalist commodification of dance, which is unsurprising in these settings. At business events or product launches, choreography is linked to the financial context of production, with dance used to make products appeal to particular markets, such as hip hop routines created to promote smart phones for young Cambodians (including Samsung), a dance based on office behaviours and western pop movements for a Colgate-Palmolive conference, or using jumps, reaches and straight extended limbs for an insurance company whose logo is a star. Sometimes the encultured physicality of the Cambodian dancing body is utilized, such as in upturned toes, or in simple Cambodian kbach (notably the flexed-back hand that signals a leaf, or the touching of forefinger and thumb with the remaining fingers extended and splayed that means a flower). The kbach are then combined with different dance vocabularies. For instance, the hands may use kbach but these may be performed at speed with angular hip hop arms, or they may move slowly but be performed with basic western ballet postures for the arms and legs (second, fourth, fifth position) or with belly dancing hip rolls, full body undulations and side steps. Classical Cambodian dance movements, particularly the distinctive stretching of the fingers in the kbach, thus become part of an international expressive toolkit that can be reconfigured depending on market demands. Indeed, Belle’s ability to perform multiple dance genres, whilst also referencing Cambodian forms, clearly holds a ‘glocalizing’ appeal (Robertson, 1995). However, references to national culture via kbach are usually gestural, reflecting ‘the transformation of complex local traditions of performance into aestheticized events’ (Reed, 2010: 5; Rogers, 2014). Nevertheless, these works reflect how Cambodian businesses and the country’s young population want to be seen as a modern nation conversant in cultural globalization. It is commonplace to suggest that commercial settings signal the death of cultural performance forms, but commercialism also offers creative possibilities. Firstly, the commercial inclusion of traditional Cambodian dance can promote national cultural forms in a fun and far-reaching way, although Belle was aware that this was a double-edged sword. She was concerned that young people who wanted to study with her thought that fusion or contemporary dance was classical Cambodian dance, so she told them to ‘research more’ before approaching her again. Nevertheless, these dances stimulated interest among young audiences who often know little about traditional culture (see also Grant, 2016). Belle epitomizes how dancers can engage with

Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture  225 multiple genres and styles of movement in a cosmopolitan fashion whilst reinforcing respect for, and facility in, a mode of embodiment that represents specific national or cultural backgrounds (Pine, 2014). Secondly, commercial sites provide money and technology to experiment with staging. In an interview, Belle described how technical difficulties impacted on what contemporary Cambodian dance might become: If you go abroad . . . New York City, their show is really amazing like the technique, costume, and lighting. When you come back here, it is different! . . . I want to create a piece, with my dancers here and the light here, but in Cambodia, we do not have the same lighting technology . . . Here, you do that by choosing another idea for creation on what we have. Candle lighting or torch! . . . You have to think as a Khmer!

The limitations posed by Cambodia’s creative infrastructure meant that deciding how to stage a work also makes it Cambodian. In a commercial arena such limitations are reduced. This is evident in a dance created for ISI Steel that uses hi-tech projections, with a lone male dancer dressed in silver performing a space battle sequence inspired by comic book action films. The dancer performs jumps and cartwheels with kneeling and fighting postures as he uses a steel shield to deflect laser targets. Such settings can therefore push the imaginative boundaries of contemporary dance creations.

CONTEMPORARY DANCE AND THE NGO SECTOR In developing discussion about sites where Cambodian movement vocabularies and international dance genres intersect, arts NGOs are important. As I have discussed elsewhere (Rogers, 2015, 2018), transnational and intercultural spaces are key to developing creative expression in the performing arts. In dance studies, Desmond (2017) similarly argues that cultural transmission and artistic transformation should be considered in relation to circulation and multi-sited re-creation. In Cambodia, international arts NGOs are sites where these spatialities are practically worked through, enabling dancers to develop contemporary expressions through cross-cultural embodied encounters. Of importance here is Belle’s work with the NGO Amrita Performing Arts and performances sponsored or hosted by the Institut Français du Cambodge (IFC). Not all of her dances created for these organizations are presented on her YouTube page owing to issues of copyright (such as Alphabet, a contemporary dance about the importance of education that uses Cambodian poetry and alphabetic recitations learned in school, that I witnessed Belle choreograph at the IFC in 2014). Belle’s choreographic style in dances created for NGOs is driven by creative, rather than commercial, interests. Although work in these sites is paid, it is more exploratory and developmentally driven. The Cambodian cultural references are greater with the dances often using movement vocabularies from classical dance or being grounded in ‘Khmer ideas’ and issues, even as they draw upon other international contemporary dance forms. This is where Belle’s personal expression sits; it

226  Handbook on the geographies of creativity is in line with her perspective in interview and in the screendances discussed below. This setting provides a more refined sense of how cultural engagement works across multiple sites in the way that Desmond (2017) suggests. Indeed, Amrita and the IFC have facilitated sustained training for Cambodian dancers in different international contemporary dance genres, part of the process of developing, professionalizing and legitimizing contemporary Cambodian dance as a genre. Belle’s choreography can therefore be interpreted for how it criss-crosses multiple transnational spatialities, from the body, to the locale, to the nation, to international performance networks (see Rogers, 2015, 2018). In the process, creative and cultural practices shift in their mode of enactment. These processes are displayed in a range of videos, such as a recording of a Cambodian television special that focuses on her career as a contemporary dancer and that shows her performing several dances for national audiences, or her performance of Tiger Bell at a street dance event in Koh Pich (the ‘diamond island’ of Phnom Penh’s waterfront) organized by the IFC. There is also an excerpt of Cello II, part of a series of dances Belle choreographed for Amrita in 2013 using Bach’s Cello Suites. The series explores social issues such as the role of women in society and the legacies of the Khmer Rouge, grounding its narrative themes in a Cambodian context whilst expressing these through her dance vocabulary. Similarly, a rehearsal of a recent piece performed at the 2018 contemporary dance festival, called Living Cement,2 plays with ideas around the weight and vibrancy of tradition: The piece starts with Belle entering in classical costume, complete with song book, then dances in a classical style, slowly turning 360 degrees on one foot, other leg bent back, foot flexed, arm postures using kbach but adapting these to fluidly hold the book to the audience to view. A gong sounds. Three students (two women, one man) enter upstage. Belle slowly walks with the grounded fluidity and bent knees of classical dance towards the students and beckons them as she moves to the singers and musicians sat at the side, passing the book to them before she sits. I feel this is a reflection of her own position as choreographer and teacher. The students sampeah to the small group as a mark of respect, but although their knees are bent, this is not in the classical dance manner. The three dancers then start to perform a series of synchronized movements in the way that they would at the start of every classical dance rehearsal. However, although using a traditional structure, with Cambodian music and singing, the dancers execute a varied set of contemporary movements. They do not stay on one spot as in classical rehearsals, but instead move as a group around the stage with speed, combining the curves of classical dance with its low centre of gravity, bent knees, S-bend in the spine, flexed feet and arms with the angular or straight lines of running, moving 360 degrees on the spot in postures at speed, upright jumping, and fluid modern dance movements. A sudden sway of the body with a sharp side snap of the head, as they follow the movement of their flexed back hands away and out from the eyes. Running of the hands along the arms, circles, reaching up, then to the ground. Arms wrapped around their own waists, then reaching up, their crossed hands flexed back as they lunge. They move into and out of classical sitting postures using planks, rolls, circular runs. At times they move together in tandem, at other times they do the same movements in different directions, slowly building to doing independent choreographies that then return to group formations.

Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture  227 The framing of the dance, alongside its choreographic vocabulary, situates contemporary Cambodian dance as part of an evolving, rather than static, tradition. It lives and morphs, whilst respecting what has come before. Videos show this type of work being performed in other artistic settings, such as Sa Sa Bassac, the leading contemporary art gallery in Phnom Penh, music concerts and, increasingly, in government settings. Indeed, the contemporary dance festival in 2018 was organized by the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, signalling the increased legitimation of contemporary dance. This style of contemporary dance therefore reworks the cultural association between dance and nationality in sites that are open to, and intervene in, cultural globalization, including the state. The dancing body therefore multiplies the production of national culture through different choreographic combinations. However, whilst creatively reworking choreography occurs in sites that are embedded in cultural (and economic) globalization, Belle also takes this movement vocabulary into everyday locations across Cambodia, something particularly evident in her screendances.

SCREENDANCE AND EVERYDAY SPACE In his analysis of performance documentation among Cambodian visual arts practitioners, Nelson (2014) argues that the documentary imperative has emerged because artists now encounter performances through the internet, and there is an increased availability and everyday use of video technology. The Cambodian genre, simply called ‘performance’, is not concerned with a live encounter, and views photographs and videos as performances in and of themselves. Although Cambodian practitioners working in this vein have been exhibited internationally, Nelson (2014: 108) argues that they are more interested in the ‘newness’ or ‘strangeness’ of the genre, in its experimental possibilities, than in making works for foreign markets. ‘Performance’ is also distinct from existing performing art forms in Cambodia, such as dance, as it is not structured by codified traditions, but is instead a genre that has evolved from different impulses. In thinking about a group of videos on Belle’s YouTube page that are a form of screendance, where the dance is created for the camera, it is worth highlighting that these works have emerged less from an engagement with international dance worlds and more from the cross-medium fluidity of Cambodia’s art worlds. As Belle described: I have a lot of friends who do contemporary work but with photographing, installation, painting, and costume design. It means my generation we start with dancing, arts, photos, and painting, we start something new that we call contemporary dance style. We have been talking and learn from each other also.

There exists a dialogue between different artists, medias and genres that facilitates the development of contemporary cultural expressions. However, Belle’s work has to be seen in relation to Cambodian dance’s codified history alongside these emergent forms of visual art practice.

228  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Several screendances appear in multiple iterations on Belle’s YouTube page, cut to different music or lengths. For instance, Her First Sunday,3 set in a partially demolished building, relays a story of relationship breakdown. The camera is placed on the floor with Belle aware of the spatialities of the frame that she can perform in and the architectural qualities that she can draw on (such as a doorway and a crumbling staircase, perhaps referencing a home). The effect is that the viewer feels as though they are spying on a personal moment of breakdown and violence, with movements such as clutching and circling her head in despair or falling as though she has been slapped round the face to the ground. One version uses a mournful instrumental that correlates with the destructive environment and choreography. Another uses a jazz recording of Silent Night with its references to peace and calm, creating an explicit contrast with the choreography, but a more hopeful ending as the lyrics of redemption coincide with her smoothing her hair, standing upright and walking away looking ahead, as though she is leaving this setting behind. There is a visible process of experimentation in operation that explores the creative possibilities for a work’s aesthetic and meaning, rather than a commercial imperative, as Nelson (2014) suggests. The screendances are therefore more about personal motivations and interests, about creative exploration and collaboration as Belle indicated; ‘I’m a dancer and I love to dance! Everywhere! New places always have meaning and something for us to learn and to feel.’ Indeed, in relation to the extract below, Belle described how performing on Bokor Mountain in Kampot was a personal challenge that also strengthened the technical and emotional qualities of her dancing: That is scary and high! The time I decide to dance on the mountain and it’s stony and then you dance there and it’s – phew!! And then you see, slowly, when you are scared of something you can do it. So this is a good memory for me! First, it’s a challenge, two, it’s the atmosphere, the view, the air, the nature – it really inspires you to be strong. And when you feel strong from here (inside), it makes your dance strong and then the is feeling there. You completely forget what you fear.

Such explorations further pluralize the impulses behind, and types of contemporary dance being created in Cambodia, but a key thing to note is the site-specificity of such work (see Norman, 2010). These are personal responses to being in particular environments, and sometimes were created on visits where dance was not the original purpose. This is true of Rainbow Mountain, a screendance of Belle performing amid snow-covered mountainous when she went to New Zealand on the English Language Training for Officials (ELTO) programme. However, the screendances are usually made in different locations across Cambodia, such as dry rice fields in Banteay Meanchey Province, Ou Chher Teal Beach in Sihanoukville and buildings in Phnom Penh (for example, the White Building, an iconic site demolished in 2017 that re-housed artists after the Khmer Rouge): Or Kun (trans: thank you) to Nature.4 We hear the sound of crickets, cicadas and the wind. She reaches up to the sky, her hand comes down the centre of her body as she undulates, comes down to the ground, reaches out and touches the rocky outcrop she is stood on, pulls

Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture  229 her hands up into a sampeah (thank you/prayer gesture) to her head. She kneels, moves into a flying posture, faces out into the wind towards the foggy view, stands, arm outstretched, looking out, like she has left something behind, turns around towards the camera but looks down, hands covering heart, slowly walks away.

The screendances harness landscapes for effect, and often explore feelings of being in or out of place. Their choreography responds to the settings, such as that feeling of wonder and strength inspired by nature. Similarly, a recent series of works choreographed by Belle and performed with/by other dancers explore ideas of shelter and the right to a home. Filmed in central Phnom Penh amid construction sites, old buildings, and performed even on a single brick, the films are wistful, longing and speak to the capital’s current rapid development and the displacements it is creating. In interview, Belle also described how contemporary dance entails learning how to improvise and respond to different places, environments and atmospheres. Although this is part of what she saw as the form of contemporary dance, she also commented that in other countries performers do not always use a set stage, so being able to collaborate internationally entails having the facility to perform outside and the ability to respond to different stimuli. Although there is, in part, an international impulse behind these works, there is also a concern with using contemporary dance to create dialogues on Cambodian social issues, to develop artistically and expressively, and to create ‘contemporary Cambodian dance’ as a genre. Through the visual aesthetics of the screendances, Belle also reworks the geographical spatialities of Cambodian dance in ways that are inclusive and responsive. Her expression draws upon classical dance, even as the body moves in and out of postures in ways that are more undulating or derived from other dance styles. Unlike the classical dance form that she was trained in, which is traditionally performed in elite spaces (the Royal Palace, Angkor’s religious temples, and now the Chaktomuk Conference Hall), Belle’s screendances use a contemporary reworking of traditional cultural forms to create a dialogue with the everyday spaces of Cambodian life. Even where her expressions draw more upon Euro-American modalities of movement, the screendances use choreography to respond to a Cambodian location. The filming style also emphasizes Cambodia’s landscapes. Although the framing often uses a conventional audience perspective (rather than cutting up or focusing on specific parts of the body), the landscape is very much part of the visual imagery, the scenography, as well as an active participant to which Belle responds. This also gives the screendances an art installation quality. Her work as a performer highlights how a new form of dance vocabulary, one forged through the encounter between cultural globalization and cultural tradition, is used to create dialogic responses to specific everyday places. In the process, these sites help produce, and shape, contemporary Cambodian dance as a new national cultural form (see also Fowler and Jones, 2007).

230  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

CONCLUSION This chapter has explored how dance relates to the reconstitution of culture. Cambodian classical dance has historically been associated with nationality, and attempts to eradicate it under the Khmer Rouge has only intensified the relationship to national domains. However, some younger dancers such as Belle are creating alternative dance cultures that respect these traditions whilst also making them speak to Cambodian society today. In the process they rework the conventional image of the classical dancer, its modes and meanings of embodiment and, by extension, the production of nationality. The chapter has explored the multiplicity of such creative practices and how they relate to specific spatial domains through an analysis of Belle’s YouTube page. Her videos enable a consideration of how ‘elite’ dancers who have trained in a highly encultured form of movement are developing choreographic vocabularies across multiple cultural sites. In the process, the tight association between the dancing body and the national sphere loosens, enabling individual modes of expression to come to the fore. As a result, my analysis illustrates that not only is the nation a performed and performative entity, but that its importance shifts according to the spaces of its enactment. It is evident from the above that formal sites of national cultural reproduction (that is, government settings) rarely appear on Belle’s YouTube page, despite their importance in her daily life as a classical dance teacher at RUFA. In general, her page signifies how being (and earning a living as) a contemporary dancer occurs in varied sites outside these channels. However, her page also constructs an image of her contemporary practice as professional – a descriptor usually only associated with traditional Cambodian dance forms. Uploads of rehearsal footage, multiple variations and edits of her work, and the increasing emphasis on choreographing contemporary works for other dancers makes her creative process visible and signals the effort and expertise needed to create contemporary dance. Examining Belle’s choreography, and her role in Cambodia’s dance worlds, also extends work that blurs neat divisions between ‘elite’ and ‘everyday’ forms of nationality (Antonsich, 2016; Edensor, 2002). By attending to different sites of praxis, it becomes evident that her work is particularly embedded in Euro-American forms of cultural globalization. However, the impact of this on the reproduction and reworking of dance as a national cultural form varies. In some commercial settings, there is very little reference to Cambodian aesthetics or movement vocabularies. In others, the reference is gestural, as dance becomes used to promote specific products or companies. However, in sites where creative or personal expression comes to the fore, the training in, and use of, multiple dance vocabularies enables her to explore specifically Cambodian topics, ideas or landscapes. Even screendance as a form emerges in Cambodia predominantly from cross-genre forms of experimentation that are specifically local. However, as she traverses these sites, Belle’s contemporary movement lexicon articulates dance genres from different locations at home and abroad. These are never simply reiterated or ‘copied’ but instead harness dance as a process of creative cultural adaptation. In so doing, her practice undercuts the idea

Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture  231 that the dancing body is simply a container for, or representative of, nationality. Rather, the dancing body is a vehicle that produces a dialogue between the past, the present, the site of performance and multiple spaces of cross-cultural encounter.

NOTES 1.

See Sodhachivy, C. (2018) ‘YouTube page’, accessed 24 September 2018 at https://​www​ .youtube​.com/​user/​Chivybelle/​videos. 2. See Sodhachivy, C. (2018) ‘Living Cement SilverBell’, accessed 24 September 2018 at https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​-dxenFjV0C8/​. 3. See Sodhachivy, C. (2014) ‘Copy of SBD Her First Sunday 2014’, accessed 24 September 2018 at https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​gKDAILnxRs8. 4. See Sodhachivy, C. (2013) ‘Or Kun to the Nature’, accessed 24 September 2018 at https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​-X4jCHWodUs.

REFERENCES Albright, A.C. (1997), Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance, Middletown, CT, USA: Wesleyan University Press. Antonsich, M. (2016), ‘The “everyday” of banal nationalism – ordinary people’s views on Italy and Italian’, Political Geography, 54, 32–42. Billig, M. (1995), Banal Nationalism, Thousand Oaks, California, USA and London, UK: Sage. Brubaker, R. (1996), Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Burgess, J. and J. Green. (2009), ‘The entrepreneurial vlogger: Participatory culture beyond the professional–amateur divide’, in P. Snickars and P. Vonderau (eds), The YouTube Reader, Stockholm, Sweden: National Library of Sweden, pp. 89–107. Cronin, N. and K. Till (2017), ‘Embodied geographies of the nation: An introduction’, The Irish Review, 54, 1–7. Desmond, J.C. (2017), ‘Tracking the political economy of dance’, in R.J. Kowal, G. Siegmund and R. Martin (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 29–52. Edensor, T. (2002), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Oxford, UK: Berg. Eggert, A. (2011), ‘A Cambodian leitkultur: Cambodian concepts of art and culture’, in B. Hauser-Schäublin (ed.), World Heritage Angkor and Beyond: Circumstances and Implications of UNESCO Listings in Cambodia, Göttingen, Germany: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, pp. 69–93. Fowler, C.I. and R. Jones (2007), ‘Placing and scaling the nation’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (2), 332–54. Grant, C. (2016), ‘Finding new ground: Maintaining and transforming traditional music’, in K. Brickelland and S. Springer (eds), The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 420–31. Hawkins, H. (2017), Creativity, New York, NY, USA and Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger (1983), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hughes-Freeland, F. (1999), ‘Dance on film: Strategy and serendipity’, in T. Buckland (ed.), Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, pp. 111–22.

232  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Hughes-Freeland, F. (2008), Embodied Communities: Dance Traditions and Change in Java, New York, NY, USA and Oxford, UK: Berghan Books. Ingold, T. and E. Hallam (2007), ‘Creativity and cultural improvisation: An introduction’, in E. Hallam and T. Ingold (eds), Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, Oxford, UK and New York, NY, USA: Berg, pp. 1–24. Ingram, A. (2009), ‘Art and the geopolitical: Remapping security at green zone/red zone’, in A. Ingram and K. Dodds (eds), Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror, Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 257–77. Ingram, A. (2011), ‘Making geopolitics otherwise: Artistic interventions in global political space’, Geographical Journal, 177 (3), 218–22. Jones, R. and P. Merriman (2009), ‘Hot, banal and everyday nationalism: Bilingual road signs in Wales’, Political Geography, 28 (3), 164–73. Kuhlke, O. (2014), ‘Dancing in foam city: Berlin and the viscous embodiment of German national identity at the Love Parade, 1989–2006’, in O. Kuhlke and A. Pine (eds), Global Movements: Dance, Place and Hybridity, Lanham, MD, USA and London, UK: Rowman Littlefield Publishing, pp. 39–76. Laurier, E. (2015), ‘YouTube: Fragments of a video-tropic atlas’, Area, 48 (4), 488–95. Liep, J. (2001), Locating Cultural Creativity, London, UK: Pluto Press. Longhurst, R. (2009), ‘YouTube: A new space for birth?’, Feminist Review, 93 (1), 46–63. Mayer, T. (2004), ‘Embodied nationalisms’, in L.A. Staeheli, E. Kofman and L.J. Peake (eds), Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography, New York, NY, USA and London, UK: Routledge, pp. 153–68. McConnell, F. (2016), Rehearsing the State: The Political Practices of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Militz, E. and C. Schurr (2016), ‘Affective nationalism: Banalities of belonging in Azerbaijan’, Political Geography, 54, 54–63. Nelson, R. (2014), ‘“Performance is contemporary”: Performance and its documentation in visual art in Cambodia’, Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies, 12, 95–143. Norman, K. (2010), ‘In and out of place: Site-based screendance’, The International Journal of Screendance, 1 (1), 13–20. Peters, K. and A. Seier (2009), ‘Home dance: Mediacy and aesthetics of the self on YouTube’, in P. Snickars and P. Vonderau (eds), The YouTube Reader, Stockholm, Sweden: National Library of Sweden, pp. 187–203. Phim, T.S. and A. Thompson (1999), Dance in Cambodia, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Pine, A. (2014), ‘Salsa cosmopolitanism: Situating the dancing body as part of the global cosmopolitan project’, in O. Kuhlke and A. Pine (eds), Global Movements: Dance, Place and Hybridity, Lanham, MD, USA and London, UK: Rowman Littlefield Publishing, pp. 121–40. Pinkerton, A.D. and M. Benwell (2014), ‘Rethinking popular geopolitics in the Falklands/ Malvinas sovereignty dispute: Creative diplomacy and citizen statecraft’, Political Geography, 38, 12–22. Plancke, C. (2016), ‘Contemporary dynamics in Rwandan dances: Identity, changing creativity and the globalisation of affect’, Dance Research, 34 (2), 150–69. Plancke, C. (2017), ‘Dance performances in post-genocide Rwanda: Remaking identity, reconnecting present and past’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 11 (2), 329–46. Reed, S.A. (2010), Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual and Politics in Sri Lanka, Madison, WI, USA: The University of Wisconsin Press. Richardson, L. (2017), ‘Book review of Creativity by Harriet Hawkins’, Cultural Geographies, 24 (4), 652–3.

Contemporary Cambodian dance and sites of national culture  233 Robertson, R. (1995), ‘Glocalization: Time–space and homogeneity–heterogeneity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds), Global Modernities, London, UK: Sage, pp. 25–44. Rogers, A. (2012), ‘Emotional geographies of method acting in Asian American theater’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (2), 423–42. Rogers, A. (2014), ‘Thinking through intercultural spatialities on Imelda: A new musical’, The Journal of Intercultural Studies, 35 (1), 53–73. Rogers, A. (2015), Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geographies of Performance, New York, NY, USA and Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Rogers, A. (2018), ‘Advancing the geographies of the performing arts: Intercultural aesthetics, migratory mobility and geopolitics’, Progress in Human Geography, 42 (4), 549–68. Rosenberg, D. (2012), Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Shapiro, S.C. (2010), ‘Dancing off-centre’, in S. Burridge and F. Frumberg (eds), Beyond the Apsara: Celebrating Dance in Cambodia, New Delhi, India and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 109–20. Shapiro-Phim, T. (2008), ‘Cambodia’s “Seasons of Migration”’, Dance Research Journal, 40 (2), 56–73. Simpson, P. (2011), ‘“So, as you can see …”: Some reflections on the utility of video methodologies in the study of embodied practices’, Area, 43 (3), 343–52. Smith, A.D. (1995), Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Somdahl-Sands, K. and P.C. Adams (2014), ‘Spaces of mediated performance’, in P.C. Adams, J. Craine and J. Dittmer (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 347–61. Stephens, A.C. (2014), ‘National feelings and the question of alternatives’, Political Geography, 40, 61–3. Tuchman-Rosta, C. (2018), ‘Performance, practice and possibility: How large-scale processes affect the bodily economy of Cambodia’s classical dancers’, unpublished PhD dissertation, UC Riverside. Veal, C. (2016), ‘A choreographic notebook: Methodological developments in qualitative geographical research’, Cultural Geographies, 23 (2), 221–45. Weber, C. (1998), ‘Performative states’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 27 (1), 77–95.

14. Whose culture? Spatializing the museum, migration and belonging in Manchester Saskia Warren

INTRODUCTION ‘The New North and South Network’ marks the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence from Britain. In 2017, 11 South Asian and Northern England organizations launched a series of artistic, cultural and intellectual exchanges around the legacies of British colonialism. Indian independence sparked partition where two new states were rapidly created, India and Pakistan, and later what is now Bangladesh. At a time of critical debate and reflexivity on social injustices around race, racism and religious difference, ‘New North and South’, as it is termed, highlights the pervasive slipperiness of the term ‘culture’. Raymond Williams (2014: 87) observed that culture is ‘one of the most complex and elusive words in the English language’. Culture has typically been understood as an organism, a way of life, or the arts (see Jackson, 1989; Mitchell, 1995). Within cultural geography literature has tended to represent a persistent distinction between everyday lived culture (for example, Cook and Crang, 1996; Nayak, 2017; Tolia-Kelly, 2004), commodity culture (see Crang et al., 2003), and the world of artists and cultural institutions (for example, Bain, 2004; Hawkins, 2010; Neate, 2012; Sjöholm, 2014; Warren, 2013). More recently, however, attention has been afforded in geography to the blurring of lines between culture as a way of life and culture and the arts (Edensor et al., 2009; Hawkins et al., 2015; McLean, 2014; Warren and Jones, 2015), with reflection on how popular culture inflects national identity (Edensor, 2002), and criticality towards contexts of increasing diversity that are shifting patterns of value, belief, rituals and of creativity itself (Idriss, 2016; Tolia-Kelly, 2004, 2010; Warren and Jones, 2018). Crucially, this is at a time when urban diversity on the one hand is seen as a threat to social cohesion and on the other hand an opportunity within neoliberal market-places (Back and Sinha, 2016). ‘New North and South’ therefore raises longstanding questions on culture and its linkages with geography and power: Whose culture? How is it represented? And where? Public museums and art galleries are under intense scrutiny to address their relationship within British colonialism. Many are clustered in the cities of Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, enriched by trade and industrialization. The symbolic role of material culture to show the wealth and cultural superiority of the British Empire is manifest in the intensive building of museums and art galleries in the nineteenth century. Objects that were carefully categorized and ordered according to their countries of origin were intended to represent 234

Spatializing the museum, migration and belonging in Manchester  235 discrete cultures for the education and refinement of the visiting public (Macdonald, 2003). In articulating and concretizing a sense of national identity, museums ‘invited people to conceptualize a sense of national or racial difference from others’ (ibid.: 5). Indeed, for Crang and Tolia-Kelly (2010: 2321), ‘The dry, educative register of the… museum belies the violence of colonial taxonomies of race and culture’. Du Bois (1917: 440) reflected on these entrenched racial hierarchies in the world social order: Everything great, good, efficient, fair and honourable is White. Everything mean, bad, blundering, cheating and dishonourable is ‘yellow’, brown and black.

Not only can colonial legacies be observed in the politics of curatorial display in museums and art galleries – which artists show, which objects are displayed, and where – but who visits, and who gains access to employment. Recently, The Arts Council of England (ACE) emphasized its sustained commitment to diversity, with Sir Peter Bazalgette the first chair to prioritize diversifying audiences, artwork and work-forces (Faruqi, 2017). However, questions of social justice and inequalities around cultural institutions and their functions are not new. Since the 1990s, museums have been asked to contribute towards social inclusion in remits that have extended well beyond traditional curatorial and even educational functions (Morse and Munro, 2018; see DCMS, 2000; Hooper-Greenhill, 1999, 2013; Sandell, 1998). By addressing social disadvantage through community engagement programmes, museums have performed a role in spaces of care and belonging that move well beyond the original site into ‘ordinary’ spaces and lives (ibid.). Policies around social inclusion have meant that museums are increasingly targeting local communities, which has involved programmes focused on minority ethnic groups, neighbourhoods with social deprivation and disability groups (Tlili, 2012; Tlili et al., 2007; Warren and Jones, 2015). The social inclusion role of museums is intended to help tackle social fragmentation, alienation and segregation. Museum identities are therefore evolving as their remit and boundaries shift. Often unremarkable spaces – the English language classroom, local libraries, community centres, markets and parks – are meanwhile acting as conduit spaces that connect individuals and groups, forming new relations to each other, and the places in which people live (Warren, 2017). The potential for greater social and cultural exchange is underlined in identifying the relationality of public museums with other, more ordinary kinds of civic space. In this chapter, insights are drawn from a decade of empirical research investigating the different registers of how people are creatively engaged and engaging creatively with place. They are informed by qualitative research and site visits conducted in Britain with residents, artists, arts professionals and entrepreneurs. By bringing into view creative practices in multiple, overlapping spaces in Manchester, I argue that new understanding is offered into the axis of urban diversity and cultural engagement. Meaningful relations are co-ordinated in these instances through community education programmes by cultural institutions and ethno-religious organizations as spaces of care and belonging. To provide some further context, Manchester

236  Handbook on the geographies of creativity is a medium-sized city with a population of 503 127. It comprises a majority white British population of 59 per cent; non-white population of 33 per cent; and white other/white Irish population of 7 per cent (Census, 2011). Of those who identify as non-white, the largest single migrant group is Pakistani (9 per cent) and second largest is African (5 per cent) (ibid.). The experiences of creativity discussed are thereby located within an urban landscape of diversity and marked by unequal social, material and religious relations (Falah and Nagel, 2005; Hopkins et al., 2012; Hopkins and Gale, 2009; Warren, 2017). By showing sensitivity towards different kinds of urban space and their social and racial encodings, we can become more attuned to minority groups and patterns of participation within British cultural life. Minority artists and audiences, and symbolic works representing minorities, are under-represented in major galleries and museums. Narratives acknowledging imperialism and its impact on migration flows and transnational identities in cultural institutions are mostly absent (for an exception see ‘The Past is Now’, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 2017–18). As Crang and Tolia-Kelly (2010) observe, the affectual and emotional power of spaces of museums and heritage sites are also distinct depending on racial and ethnic positionality. Consequently, ‘The New North and South’, and work around decolonializing museums and art galleries, signals a new momentum in the arts world. The significance of symbolic culture and minority role models are linked with intrinsic, social and economic benefits, including self-actualization, education and, more contentiously, economic participation. Its lack, meanwhile, is indicative of structural inequality, negative stereotyping and racial exclusion (Crenshaw, 1991; Meghji, 2017; Warikoo, 2016). This chapter seeks to highlight the complex and spatially diffuse cultural ecology connecting ethno-religious spaces and museums within our cities. It does this by focusing on two seemingly discrete case studies: an ethno-religious minority event on the outskirts of the city and a leading art institution in the city core. It makes the case that to satisfy aims of engaging more diverse audiences, institutional cultural repertoires need to expand on entwined issues of representation, form and minority identities that give recognition to British colonial histories and migration flows.

CULTURE AND DIFFERENCE Stuart Hall has powerfully articulated the entwined nature of culture, identity and geography. In his chapter ‘The West and The Rest’, Hall outlines the thesis that not only was the idea of Western culture defined in contrast to the non-Western, its very meaning was constructed according to imperialist hierarchical views of superiority on knowledge, culture and economy (‘western’ = urban = developed; or ‘non-western’ = non-industrial = rural = agricultural = under-developed; Hall, 1992: 186). The supposed ‘threat’ of Islam in Europe – so closely identified with Christianity that for centuries it was referred to interchangeably with Christendom – meant being ‘Western’ was defined against Islamic culture (the Middle East rather than Far East was the original territorial imaginary of ‘The Orient’). As Said (1979: 42) observed:

Spatializing the museum, migration and belonging in Manchester  237 ‘the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority’. Hall established that cultural identity, including ideas of ethnicity and race, were formed through a dynamic relationship with politics and capitalism. Rather than fixed and static, cultural identity (and culture) is ‘always a production, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, of representation’ (Hall, 1990: 222). In contemporary usage there are three key meanings of culture: culture as a growing organism; culture as art, with associations of ‘high culture’ and ‘pop culture’; and culture as a ‘way of life’. In the latter sense – the meaning favoured by cultural geographers in the mid to late twentieth century – culture was viewed as a shared pattern of beliefs, attitudes, behaviour, practices, institutions and customs. Importantly, culture was not singular, for example, ‘British culture’ as one national culture. Instead, informed by the work of Hall, a plurality of cultures were emphasized that gave shape and meaning to everyday life. Understanding culture as processual was also advanced by Cosgrove and Jackson (1987: 99), who describe ‘the medium through which people transform the mundane phenomenon of the material world into a world of significant symbols to which they give meaning and attach value’. In fact, ‘it is the very medium through which social change is experienced, contested and constituted’ (ibid.: 95). From the 1970s and 80s onwards culture has widely been understood as always political and always processual. Culture can only be properly understood according to its context and there will always be contestation of meanings over what it signifies and to whom it matters, or ‘culture wars’. In cultural geography there remain schools of work that broadly distinguish between representations of the world of artists and institutions on the one hand, and everyday spaces and everyday lived culture on the other. Research on artists and cultural institutions have laid emphasis on the specialist sites of making and display in artists’ studios (Bain, 2004; Sjöholm, 2014), sculpture parks (Warren, 2013, 2014), art galleries and museums (Hawkins, 2010; Neate, 2012). Themes of power and knowledge production, empire, nationhood and citizenship are well explored in discourse around the politics of collections, display and education. The work of Bourdieu (1984; Bourdieu et al., 1997) on the love of art and social distinction has been particularly influential in scholarship which has understood the experiences of audiences alongside issues of class and aspiration (for example, Edensor and Millington, 2013; Hill, 2005; Warren, 2013). Scholarship on everyday culture has meanwhile tended to focus on the personal and micro-level, considering how the social and political collide; with especial attention on how a more expanded framework of identity politics including gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, disability and sexuality impacts upon inclusion or exclusion in space and place, and sense of belonging (for example, Crang 1998; Nayak, 2017; Rogaly, 2016). These have taken the spaces of everyday life – the workplace, street, park, square, bench, or public transport – as the site of enquiry. Matters of identity and politics of representation are present in either body of work, and yet the kinds of spaces attended to are different, along with the social subjects who comprise them. More recently, however, keener attention has been paid in geography to the dynamics between culture as a way of

238  Handbook on the geographies of creativity life with culture and the arts (Edensor et al., 2009; Rogers, 2012; Warren and Jones, 2015). Geographies of creativity beyond elite, institutional and specialized spaces are characteristic of these contributions. Edensor and Millington have written expansively on working-class culture and the annual Blackpool Illuminations (Edensor, 2012; Edensor and Millington, 2013; Edensor et al., 2009). Vernacular creativity is part of a wider field of work that has given emphasis to accessible forms of cultural production and consumption; that is, symbolic work that does not require qualifications (or other training), income and residential status in global cities, such as yarn-bombing, stamp collecting and photography using mobile phones. The boundaries between the amateur and professional, and consumer and producer, have been destabilized in the creative industries. YouTube, blogs, Instagram and various music platforms have low barriers to entry and are now launching taste-makers and influencers shaping new trends and consumer practices, and fragmenting market-places once dominated by multinational companies (Hracs et al., 2013; Thomson Reuters, 2017). New technologies have forged new online marketplaces that in turn are impacting upon commodity production and its spatialities, including black and Islamic cultural spheres that offer challenge or resistance to mainstream and majority white culture. Relatedly, Back and Sinha (2016) observe that migrants make spaces for themselves in cities that are divided by racism. Indeed, more critical evaluation is required on how contexts of increasing diversity are shifting patterns of value, beliefs, rituals and of creativity. Faruqi (2017: 8) wrote in a recent report on diversity in cultural policy commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council: This conversation is by its nature political, that is it is fundamentally related to what it means to be part of public life. It is about how we define the group that we call British society, and more specifically here, British cultural life and the arts.

In urban studies on minority groups research has often moved beyond the city core. In Britain, neighbourhood co-commissioning has been looked at with reflection on social difference, and longer histories of ethnic, racial and religious tension and violence (Warren and Jones, 2018). This has drawn out the ways multiple minority groups live together and share civic spaces, reflecting upon the distribution of resources according to the status of the minority group (ibid.). The creative productivity of migration flows is explored in the compelling work of Dudrah (2002), looking at how Bhangra music emerged as a fusion of Sikh drumming and black urban beats in British cities. Meanwhile, in work on the global south, creative practices undertaken by migrants take place in urban edgelands with beadwork-making for survival in South Africa (Daya, 2015). These contributions tell us that forms of culture are always processual, responsive to the environment, cultural norms, politics of representation and, also, a means to scrape a living. Thus, creativity is not the preserve of an elite. Nor is creativity confined to marble plinths or museums and galleries fashioned in a neo-classical style as secular temples

Spatializing the museum, migration and belonging in Manchester  239 for art. Creativity is a process that can take place, too, in ordinary and everyday lives, as well as peripheral and marginalized spaces. Ordinary, unremarkable spaces can often function as spaces of informal education and creativity. Bekerman et al. (2006) have shown that informal education takes place in museums, libraries, the street and the home. It is voluntary and participant-led, in contrast to formal and mainstream education, with qualified teachers, formal qualifications and school-based learning. The aim and learning content in informal education can be observed as an addition to what is perceived as missing or lacking in mainstream education, and occurs across the life course. In the case of ethno-religious heritage spaces and events, informal education can connect individuals and groups, forming new relations to each other and the places in which people live. Yet there are also public concerns about increasing segregation and lack of social mobility that have been exercised in particular around Muslim community spaces.

BRIDGING ETHNO-RELIGIOUS AND MUSEUM SPACES In this chapter I seek to bridge understandings of culture as a way of life and the arts by showing how these two meanings are already inter-mingling within our urban contexts. The examples provided further connect everyday spaces of the city with specialized spaces of art making and display: Muslim Lifestyle Expo, a temporary event located in an exhibition venue on the outskirts of Manchester city, with The Whitworth Art Gallery, winner of the prestigious ArtFund Museum of the Year 2015. A sprawling urban landscape of flexible building spaces besides extensive commercial trading space marks the site of the Expo in EventCityUK, an unprepossessing event space. By contrast, The Whitworth Art Gallery is a nineteenth century redstone building just south of the city centre at the far side of the University of Manchester campus. Community engagement programmes that bridge for-profit and not-for-profit organizations are now delivering alternative spaces of education and belonging for minorities. Muslim Lifestyle Expo was sponsored by 23 organizations and businesses including secular companies such as a large multinational supermarket and major museums, including The Whitworth. A celebration of Muslim entrepreneurialism in fashion and visual arts, among other sectors, it brought together over 12 000 people who mainstream institutions and businesses are keen to bring into their spaces. Small stall spaces and minority entrepreneurial actors are often viewed by urban planners and policymakers as operating at the margins of civic and economic life (Hall, 2012; see also Dwyer et al., 2016). But this chapter argues they can directly inform our urban knowledge of living with difference, and how socio-economic, cultural and racial structural hierarchies are spatialized.

240  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Muslim Lifestyle Expo The third Muslim Lifestyle Expo took place across a late October weekend in 2017. Located next to the Trafford Shopping Centre, the exhibition space is ringed by dual carriageways and flanked by large concrete carparks. The ordinariness, even blandness of the setting is in contrast to the marketing campaign for the event: The Expo is a spectacular mix of modest fashion shows, top celebs, the latest products and services, top brands, entertainment, business seminars, kids activities and so much more!

Entering into the exhibition space, stalls were lined up selling and advertising halal products, including perfume and abayas, Muslim Heritage Centre radio, Asda supermarket, fine art paintings and collections for humanitarian conflicts. Live food demonstrations, nasheed performances and modest fashion shows took place at intervals on stages that ringed the stalls. There were also scheduled regular seminar sessions: from learning about UK intellectual property rights, to the representations of Muslim ‘baddies’ in Hollywood and Muslim women in the workplace. Family orientated, the event stated: A fantastic, fun-filled weekend for the whole family awaits you. Bring your friends, mates, BFFs. Bring mum, dad, auntie, uncle, granny and granddad.

Facilities supported this with a dedicated area for children’s play, along with food stalls catering to South Asian and Western tastes: samosas, chips, cheese and onion sandwiches. It allowed for religious observance with a special area for prayer. The 150 exhibitors were mostly entrepreneurial start-ups. However, there was also a number of high-profile British Muslim speakers to attract members of the public. These included Saliha Mahmood-Ahmed, the winner of a high-profile TV cooking show Masterchef 2017; Dr Rimla Akhtar, Member of the British Empire (MBE) and Football Association Council Member; and Roohi Hasan, Senior Producer for ITV News. During a seminar panel titled ‘Empowering Muslim Women’, Mahmood-Ahmed, Akhtar and Hasan discussed the need for Muslim families and communities of all cultural backgrounds to support aspiration and creativity. Hasan noted, ‘I was told “no” 50 times by people both within and outside my community [to get work in media] . . . [But] there are not “clean” careers and “dirty” careers’. Cultural, religious and gendered norms were tackled on ‘suitable’ occupations for Muslim women (and men), with calls for this to change with the times (see Essers and Benschop, 2009; Warren, 2018, 2019). Panellists and the audience reflected on the challenges of balancing various kinds of career, family life and faith. The seminar offers a good example of informal education; in this instance around career pathways for Muslims living in a non-Muslim state. In discussion, it opened ways of negotiating Muslim life with a dominant secular society (Afshar, 1994; Mohammad, 2005), and can therefore be seen as bridging a minority space with mainstream economic and civic life. This was further shown through a seminar session in the exhibition venue delivered by an

Spatializing the museum, migration and belonging in Manchester  241 Imaan on living comfortably with Sharia and British law, and a seminar co-ordinated by the British Government on intellectual property rights, which together cast light on how minority spaces can support a sense of place and belonging within majority cultures. Yet in the British context the relationship between minority and majority spaces has become subject to perceptions of national threat. Steven Vertovec (2010: 85–6) found that minority spaces are often aligned with issues of segregation and security, as: Policy-makers feared that such seeming separateness might provide a breeding ground for extremism; and the fact that the 2005 London bombers were home grown terrorists, born and raised in the UK, seemed to exemplify this.

Due to fears around segregation, and causal arguments that (Muslim) minority spaces lead to radicalization, Peucker and Ceylan (2017: 2406) argue ‘Muslim community organizations have become particularly contested sites in the UK and many other western countries’. However, minority spaces can act as important bridges for minority groups. In their work on ‘do-it-yourself’ citizenship among young Muslims in Australia, Harris and Roose (2014) recognize how informal network-building in everyday spaces within the workplace and neighbourhood are forms of citizenship. DIY citizenship connected minorities into civic and political life and performed a pivotal role in diasporas for sharing information and fostering spaces of belonging (see also Isin, 2008). Minority spaces were positioned as fostering care and belonging within communities, which, importantly, created capital for engaging with wider society. Whereas some fear mobility traps, Peucker and Ceylan (2017) instead emphasize affordances. They reflect on the enablement of individuals to thrive through their engagement with minority spaces: There is generally little doubt that minority community organisations are important agencies for new immigrants, as they offer orientation in a culturally and linguistically unfamiliar environment, provide psychological support, solidarity and opportunities for cultural maintenance, and generally assist in coping with the crisis of settling in a new country. (ibid.: 2409)

More than supporting new arrivals, minority spaces and temporary events may offer multi-generational affordances, including for those who are already established over generations, perhaps, and those faced with prejudice, hostility and exclusion. This is particularly relevant with living with Islamophobia, a subject of another panel during the event. The Muslim Lifestyle Expo posits itself as a positive celebration of Muslimness, with an emphasis on highlighting the breadth and range and difference of Muslim identities and lifestyles across the world. A celebration of religious and cultural identity, it brings together informal education and leisure with aims to build recognition of halal businesses, and enterprise in culture, the arts and recreation in Britain. Multiple references to space and scale were not without significance, for example ‘the world’s leading Muslim lifestyle event’. We might view the expo, and other

242  Handbook on the geographies of creativity similar conferences and exhibitions, as temporary clusters for knowledge and network development (Comunian, 2017). In this special case the temporary cluster was organized along lines of religious and cultural affiliation, and on the edge of the city where a minority group could make space for itself. While well connected by motorways, it was notable that the cultural activity was hidden from view at street level and exhibitioners were disappointed the projected 20 000 visitors failed to materialize. Whitworth Art Gallery and Park Originally opened in 1889, the Whitworth Institute and Park was intended for the education and recreation of the people of Manchester. Taken over by the University of Manchester in 1958, the Whitworth Institute became the Whitworth Art Gallery, with Manchester City Council as lease holder. Following a major capital build extension, the Whitworth was reopened in February 2015 under Maria Balshaw (now the first female director of the Tate). The ward in which it is located, Moss Side, is well known for its minority diversity in terms of ethnicity and age. In Moss Side the largest single group identified as Black African with the next largest group identifying as Pakistani heritage and the second largest Arab community in Manchester. It also comprises one of the highest densities of young people of any area of Manchester. Representing local and city-wide diversity and using the greenery of Whitworth Park are significant for connecting local residents from all walks of life into the internal galleries. In fact, increasing the exchanges and flows between nearby residents, the park and the gallery are crucial to the vision of the Whitworth Young Contemporaries (WYC). The best example is a recent seminar for a Thursday late opening event, where the gallery opened its doors into the night. Over 40 people took part in an audience debate organized by WYC about the value of Black History Month on its thirtieth anniversary in the UK. Annually, the dedicated month – that takes place in the UK, US, Canada and The Netherlands – comprises talks, exhibitions, publications and other cultural events to foster learning and showcase achievements in Black history. It works towards addressing inequalities and social justice for people of black origin. The Whitworth panel comprised young artists, a Moss Side youth representation and a senior curator at the Whitworth (who herself entered the profession through a diversity access programme). Issues of institutional racism in museums and higher education were raised, and whether syllabi and collections needed to represent minority ethnic people and women more equally. Accordingly, the debate resonated with wider transatlantic movements around decolonializing knowledge and action-based research. Speakers placed emphasis on racial hierarchies that not only structured economic trading historically, but continue to resonate due to art institutions functioning as ‘white spaces’. As Meghji (2017) explains, art institutions are aligned with white and middle-class groups, and therefore function as white spaces. This has led to either a rejection of the spaces by non-white people, or a feeling of the need to ‘code-switch’ – to adjust speech, clothing, hair, in order to better ‘fit’ in order

Spatializing the museum, migration and belonging in Manchester  243 to become employable in a gallery. Notions of white space and code-switching therefore illuminate the observations of panellists who shared the view they were seen as ‘sell-outs’, or disloyal to their race, for boundary-crossing into art institutions. Consequently, to show its commitment to diversity, the Whitworth was asked by WYC speakers to offer greater ‘porosity’ and ‘spatial flexibility’. One idea was to make use of Whitworth Park in which the Whitworth is situated as a conduit space. Events such as the Manchester Mela Carnival, an annual celebration of South Asian culture, are socially and spatially networked with Whitworth Park and Art Gallery as performers use their spaces for dance practice. Furthermore, as a direct result of the Black History Month event, an exhibition was curated (‘Bodies of Colour’) to show work by Black artists or ‘people of colour’ in a positive light. The WYC offer an exemplar of how education and learning programmes can stimulate organizational change. They began by supporting emerging artists to gain experience as organizers and performers in festivals, exhibitions, events and talks, and providing a platform for their professional visibility. Moreover, WYC for Black History Month raises the continued need for institutions to collaborate with the residents of the neighbourhood and wider city in which they are situated, to provide more opportunities to develop professional skills, and to amplify the representation of non-white people. Accordingly, in the legacies of colonialism the ‘challenges’ in attracting audiences from minority backgrounds and fostering spaces of belonging are interwoven with hierarchies of power, culture and racialized difference. These are recognized as shaping the composition of workers, collections and exhibitioning or performance cultures in art institutions. For museums and art galleries in the twenty-first century, the lessons to be taken from cultural geographers (and cultural studies) are vital to staying relevant in contexts of increasing diversity. Culture is recognized as always dynamic, processual and political. Working with difference and opening the reach of museums beyond the city core can enable a lively engagement with new users and cultural forms, instead of viewing minority ethnic and young people as passive recipients, or only business potential in highly diverse market-places.

CONCLUSION Museums have been reworked since the 1990s to become spaces of education and belonging in line with social inclusion policies. Informal and independent-led learning organized by museums extends beyond their immediate sites, through work with schools, youth groups and in extending to adult settings in community engagement. This function is performed for programmes that ‘usually involve individuals or groups who do not or cannot use museums, and that may take place both in museums and in a range of community spaces’ (Morse and Munro, 2018: 358). Community engagement is taking place through practice, but also by partnering with ethno-religious spaces, such as the Muslim Lifestyle Expo in Manchester. Partnering or sponsoring is a means of expanding knowledge of the museum in order to attract new audiences with more diverse minority backgrounds. This outreach work is

244  Handbook on the geographies of creativity seeking to address historic exclusions where non-white and working-class groups are less likely to visit and to enter the workforce of art institutions, where the culture on show often fails to resonate (Macdonald, 2003; Meghji, 2017). Museums and art galleries are now recognizing a need to address these silences and exclusions and to reconsider who and what they stand for. In 2017, the anniversary of Indian independence and Black History Month are observances that call for recognition that symbolic power in museums needs to change to give visibility and recognition to the legacy of empire and social movements on justice and equality. The Whitworth, founded on wealth created by industrial engineering at the height of the British Empire, is seeking to reach new audiences, including minority ethnic groups that are resident in the surrounding neighbourhoods, and city more broadly. Flows of history, migration, creativity and knowledge show the complex ways in which culture is always dynamic, processual and political. So, too, do the hierarchies by which cultural forms and spaces are distinguished according to markers of status and esteem that are bound with social encoding, privileging white and secular bodies in ways that are often imperceptible to those who benefit most. The Whitworth, along with other art galleries, has represented the tastes of white middle- and upper-class collectors, with fewer object-orientated cultural forms such as performing arts, especially those from Black and Asian artists, struggling for space. Debates around issues of access are culturally specific, as Karen Warikoo reminds us. For instance, in Britain and the USA there are distinct approaches and understandings in elite universities around the allocation of scarce resources, posing the question: what kinds of merit or identity or context matter? Colour-blindness (or post-racial) approaches favoured in Britain stand in contrast to US diversity frameworks that are race and ethnicity positive and allow for differentiation. While distinct in understandings of meritocracy, both approaches are cognizant of the power differences between minority and majority groups but diverge in the course of action needed to address this gap. Learning from these paradigms, culture as a way of life and culture as the arts are not meanings that run in parallel, but instead reflect distinctions around what forms of knowledge, symbolic value and talent are recognized, and how these are socially and spatially ordered over time. Guided by the seminal work of Stuart Hall and Edward Said, it remains pertinent that British culture is enmeshed in hierarchies of racial, ethnic and religious categories. These are the legacies of our colonial past and continue to impact upon issues of representation in institutional collections, employment and patterns of visitation today. Minority groups are doubly excluded, meanwhile, as dedicated spaces for ethno-religious groups are often viewed with suspicion due to fears of segregation and social mobility traps. As Peucker and Ceylan (2017) have shown, these fears misunderstand the range and complexity of identity, as well as the porosity of many spaces in enabling informal education and enhancing the likelihood of civic and political participation. Meaningful relations can be co-ordinated through the coming together of minority and mainstream organizations to foster spaces of care and belonging though cultural activities. For instance, this chapter shows the Muslim

Spatializing the museum, migration and belonging in Manchester  245 Lifestyle Expo functions as a minority temporary cluster to showcase the diverse and rich cultural experiences of being Muslim in Britain. Partners include non-Islamic organizations such as public museums looking to engage with new audiences. It is also pertinent that through education and learning programmes, such as WYC and Black History Month, museums are undertaking a wider social remit than in the past in order to ensure their future relevance in contexts of increasing diversity. We therefore see that creativity is not bifurcated between minority and mainstream, the everyday and authoritative, nor does it occupy distinct and discrete spatialities. Instead, by revealing the expanded role of the museum and its exchanges with multiple cultural and popular forms, this chapter highlights a new, more diverse cultural ecology. Addressing the flows – and blockages – in a racial and religiously literate understanding of culture and its meanings renders clear the need for enhanced visibility, representation and future inclusion of social and cultural difference. Back in 2003, Sharon Macdonald (2003: 10) observed, ‘What we have seen is that museums are capable of being put to work in the expression of other kinds of identities than the national, homogeneous, and bounded’. We need to take pause to reconsider Macdonald’s statement fifteen years later in a context of Brexit, austerity, high diversity, and fear of security and segregation. ‘The museum’ is no longer a bounded entity: its functions stretch far beyond its walls, into local neighbourhoods, community centres and minority event culture. As Les Back and Shamser Sinha argue, the deficit model of culture loss in contexts of urban diversity is resultant from a longing for coherence in global cities: ‘Our point here is that convivial tools make the conditions for a liveable home in the micro-public space . . . even if it is temporary and made in the midst of social damage, inequalities and exclusions’ (Back and Sinha, 2016: 530; see also Massey, 2004). A relational understanding of cultural engagement programmes – one that looks at the inter-connectedness of partnerships between museums with minority spaces, minority and majority actors, culture as identity with art – reveals in turn the conditions for our museum futures.

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Spatializing the museum, migration and belonging in Manchester  247 Hawkins, H. (2010), ‘“The argument of the eye”? The cultural geographies of installation art’, Cultural Geographies, 17 (3), 321–40. Hawkins, H., S.A. Marston, M. Ingram and E. Straughan (2015), ‘The art of socioecological transformation’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105 (2), 331–41. Hill, K. (2005), Culture and Class in English Public Museums 1850–1914, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (ed.) (1999), The Educational Role of the Museum, London, UK: Routledge. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2013), Museums and Their Visitors, London, UK: Routledge. Hopkins, P. and R. Gale (2009), Muslims in Britain: Race, Place and Identities, Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Hopkins, P., L. Kong and E. Olson (eds) (2012), Religion and Place: Landscape, Politics and Piety, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Hracs, B.J., D. Jakob and A. Hauge (2013), ‘Standing out in the crowd: The rise of exclusivity-based strategies to compete in the contemporary marketplace for music and fashion’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 45 (5), 1144–61. Idriss, S. (2016), ‘Racialisation in the creative industries and the Arab–Australian multicultural artist’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 37 (4), 406–20. Isin, E.F. (2008), ‘Theorising acts of citizenship’, in E.F. Isin and G.M. Nielsen (eds), Acts of Citizenship, London, UK: Zed Books, pp. 15–43. Jackson, P. (1989), Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography, London, UK: Unwin Hyman. Macdonald, S.J. (2003), ‘Museums, national, postnational and transcultural identities’, Museum and Society, 1 (1), 1–16. Massey, D. (2004), ‘Geographies of responsibility’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86 (1), 5–18. McLean, H.E. (2014), ‘Cracks in the creative city: The contradictions of community arts practice’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (6), 2156–73. Meghji, A. (2017), ‘Positionings of the black middle-classes: Understanding identity construction beyond strategic assimilation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (6), 1007–25. Mitchell, D. (1995), ‘There’s no such thing as culture: Towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20 (1), 102–16. Mohammad, R. (2005), ‘Negotiating spaces of the home, the education system and the labour market: The case of young, working-class, British-Pakistani Muslim Women’, in G.-W. Falah and C. Nagel (eds), Geographies of Muslim Women: Gender, Religion and Space, London, UK and New York, NY, USA: Guilford Press, pp. 178–200. Morse, N. and E. Munro (2018), ‘Museums’ community engagement schemes, austerity and practices of care in two local museum services’, Social & Cultural Geography, 19 (3), 357–78. Nayak, A. (2017), ‘Purging the nation: Race, conviviality and embodied encounters in the lives of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (2), 289–302. Neate, H. (2012), ‘Provinciality and the art world: The Midland Group 1961–1977’, Social & Cultural Geography, 13 (3), 275–94. Peucker, M. and R. Ceylan (2017), ‘Muslim community organizations – sites of active citizenship or self-segregation?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40 (14), 2405–25. Rogaly, B. (2016), ‘“Don’t show the play at the football ground, nobody will come”: The micro-sociality of co-produced research in an English provincial city’, The Sociological Review, 64 (4), 657–80. Rogers, A. (2012), ‘Emotional geographies of method acting in Asian American Theater’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (2), 423–42.

248  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Said, E. (1979), ‘Knowing the Oriental’, in Said, E. Orientalism, New York, NY, USA: Vintage Books, pp. 31–48. Sandell, R. (1998), ‘Museums as agents of social inclusion’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 17, 401–18. Sjöholm, J. (2014), ‘The art studio as archive: Tracing the geography of artistic potentiality, progress and production’, cultural geographies, 21 (3), 505–14. Thomson Reuters (2017), State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2016/17, accessed 4 August 2017 at https://​ceif​.iba​.edu​.pk/​pdf/​ThomsonReuters​-stateof​theGlobalIslam​ icEconomyReport201617​.pdf. Tlili, A. (2012), ‘Efficiency and social inclusion: Implications for the museum profession’, Cadernos Sociomuseologia, 43, 5–34. Tlili, A., S. Gewirtz and A. Cribb (2007), ‘New Labour’s socially responsible museum’, Policy Studies, 28, 269–89. Tolia-Kelly, D.P. (2004), ‘Locating processes of identification: Studying the precipitates of re-memory through artefacts in the British Asian home’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29 (3), 314–29. Tolia-Kelly, D.P. (2010), ‘The geographies of cultural geography I: Identities, bodies and race’, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (3), 358–67. Vertovec, S. (2010), ‘Towards post-multiculturalism? Changing communities, conditions and contexts of diversity’, International Social Science Journal, 61 (199), pp. 83–95. Warikoo, N.K. (2016), The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities, Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press. Warren, S. (2013), ‘Audiencing James Turrell’s Skyspace: Encounters between art and audience at Yorkshire Sculpture Park’, cultural geographies, 20 (1), 83–102. Warren, S. (2014), ‘“I want this place to thrive”: Volunteering, co-production and creative labour’, Area, 46 (3), 278–84. Warren, S. (2017), ‘Pluralising the walking interview: Researching (im)mobilities with Muslim women’, Social & Cultural Geography, 18 (6), 786–807. Warren, S. (2018), ‘Placing faith in creative labour: Muslim women and digital work in Britain, Geoforum, 97, 1–9. Warren, S. (2019), ‘#YourAverageMuslim: Ruptural geopolitics of British Muslim women’s media and fashion’, Political Geography, 69, 118–27. Warren, S. and P. Jones (2015), Creative Economies, Creative Communities: Rethinking Place, Policy and Practice, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Warren, S. and P. Jones (2018), ‘Cultural policy, governance and urban diversity: Resident perspectives from Birmingham, UK’, Journal of Economic and Social Geography, 109 (1), 22–35. Williams, R. (2014), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

15. Ambient culture: making sense of everyday participation in open public space Nikos Papastergiadis, Stephanie Hannon, Scott McQuire, Danielle Wyatt and Paul Carter

THE INS AND OUTS OF CULTURE Traditionally, the reception of art and other recognized forms of ‘high culture’ has taken place within enclosed institutions, and been governed by particular rules and conventions (Bennett, 1998). Publics would approach these spaces with a specific mindset, and direct attention towards cultural objects in a focused and deliberative manner. In part, this focused perspective was fostered by the design of these interior spaces (Friedberg, 2006: 28). As Tony Bennett (1998: 208–10) argues, the interior of the museum disciplines the subject: the visitor is encouraged to adopt a hushed and reverential manner; walking through the ordered collections according to a guided map which traces out a clear scopic regime. But what happens when art, culture and the moving image move outdoors? Critical focus on interior experiences risks missing a wide range of contemporary modes of cultural participation. These include not only reflexive forms of aesthetic interpretation, but also the more distracted forms of attention and augmented modalities of interaction that occur through digital devices such as mobile phones. Today, the point at which art meets popular culture is increasingly in outdoor events such as festivals, carnivals and parties. These events frequently involve recognized artists and large-scale artworks. They are popular as community celebrations and also an increasing priority in urban renewal projects and city branding exercises. And there are no signs that this will abate. In 2016 Australia’s pre-eminent light festivals attracted record numbers. An estimated 2.3 million people visited Sydney’s Vivid, up from 1.7 million in 2015 (NSW Government, 2016), while 600 000 people visited Melbourne’s CBD for the all-night festival, White Night (Cuthbertson et al., 2016).1 In 2014–15 the number of visitors to the outdoor spaces of Federation Square almost exceeded the combined total of all visitors who entered the interior spaces of other state-owned cultural organizations.2 These events attract large numbers of residents and visitors who collectively witness, and often participate in, the transformation of the city through art, digital media and computer-controlled projection and lighting installations. Whether stuck in the crowd or cruising the open spaces, visitors in these events experience a variety of stimuli. There is no single point of focus, no precise moment when the experience begins or 249

250  Handbook on the geographies of creativity where it ends. The rules of conduct and expectation are loosened, and the authorial boundaries of physical and virtual interaction are reconfigured. This experience of multi-sensory stimulation is not unique to festivals and urban cultural events. In his book Ambient Commons, Malcolm McCullough (2013: 27) identifies one of the most significant issues facing contemporary public spaces as the ‘superabundance’ of information and managing the resulting ‘effect of information pollution’ (ibid.: 260). This effect has been understood in terms of increasing levels of public distraction, as new forms of media and display create new thresholds for attention (Crary, 1999: 44). Attention has been viewed as a scarce resource as different actors in the city compete to gain access to it. In this framework, focused attention upon a single cultural object is the privileged mode of cultural engagement. And this kind of engagement continues to determine many commercial strategies, where attention rather than information is seen as the scarce commodity to be subjected to market discipline.3 McCullough adopts a similar standpoint albeit with a different rationale, arguing that the role of urban design is to strike a better balance between ‘background’ and ‘foreground’ information needed in contemporary urban settings. In this chapter we suspend the binary distinction between distracted and focused attention, and examine instead the creativity in cultural experiences set in open public spaces. We argue that a critical examination of what we call ambient public culture not only goes beyond both the classificatory genres of discipline based enquiries (Brown, 2004), and the approaches that favour cognitive practices (McGuigan, 2011: 83), but that capturing ambient public culture also requires a new methodological toolkit. Paying attention to the embodied and affective modes of participation provokes a number of practical and philosophical questions: Given the high level of contingency and variety of media platforms, what is the perspective for engaging with culture if it is located in an outdoor setting? How does the entangled experience of embodiment and networked connectivity alter the modes of creative interplay, cultural communication and public interaction occuring in these spaces? How might public space be designed to enhance cultural reception within a multi-perspectival and multi-media environment? How does this multi-modal, sensory and porous experience of culture impact upon the theoretical frameworks informing how we understand its social value and articulate its politics? Media-rich cities ask us to interrogate the relationship between urban form, sensory experience, perception and participation. Through these relationships, the public is increasingly recognized as a co-producer in cultural experiences (Papastergiadis, 2014: 11). As such, making an account of public participation sharpens our attention to the creativity of publics at a moment when creative industries policies seek to distribute creative activity beyond the institution, while at the same time concentrating value around a narrow set of commercially oriented products and services. Expanding the aperture for how we look at culture thus has implications for how governments and policy-makers shape visions around an ideal cultural realm, for where we locate creativity and the kind of value we invest in it, and beyond this, for how we distribute public resources in the realization of these ideals and values.

Making sense of everyday partcicipation in open public space  251 A re-assessment of cultural value begins with attending to the dynamics of ambient public culture itself. As Scott McQuire (2008) argues, the media city is ‘not simply [creating] a new form of urban spectacle but a new mode of urban performance, one that alters the dynamics of public space’. A public, open cultural space, rich with digital and networked communication platforms, is not designed to foster one fixed perspective. Rather, it enhances both the combination of multiple perspectives and iterative feedback systems, requiring both a cognitive and sensory negotiation of the space. McCullough (2013: 23) contends that contemporary design no longer assumes a user will engage directly with an object. Instead designers rely upon tacit knowledge and situational awareness as a means of directing attention (ibid.: 78). The ability to engage in a multi-perspective setting is dependent upon cultivating the interplay between sensory awareness and cognitive processing. Importantly, it is a form of tacit knowledge, whereby the individual is both attuned to a variety of sources and negotiates a specific pathway through the urban environment. There is a renewed emphasis on a multi-perspectival process of focusing and tuning in and out to manage the amount of information presented to the urban inhabitant (ibid.: 87). As McCullough (ibid.: 45) notes, ‘surroundings play an important part in [attention] practices’. Though there are no established and explicit directions about how to use and occupy, there are unspoken rules about the appropriate practices in this space (Sennett, 1994: 374) that have emerged through habitual use and are now part of people’s tacit or situated knowledge (McCullough, 2013: 46). Papastergiadis and Amelia Barikin (2015: 85) note that, throughout the twentieth century artists have increasingly experimented with and interrogated the ‘metaphorical and ideological attributes of perspective’. They have termed this ambient awareness a ‘sensibility that tends to the field by relating elements that are peripheral to each other and organising them into a new form’ (ibid.: 83). While these are the qualities of ambience that are lauded, they often come under criticism for failing as aesthetically and socially critical works. Art critic Seth Kim-Cohen (2016: 12–13) has posited that, by placing affect at the centre of the experience of art, criticality is lost. For Kim-Cohen the prominence of ambient art practices is linked to a cultural trend that prefers ‘fuzzy’ experience over sharp political consciousness. For Cohen, ambient aesthetic works are like smoke-screens that blur and diffuse the critical function of art.4 By contrast, art theorist John Jervis (2015: 173) argues that public negotiation of difference can also be experienced through an embodied affective experience. Affect questions the borders between self and other as identification with the other is dependent upon sensory experience rather than representation (Jervis, 2015: 175). Jervis understands that the public sphere should be a space for the negotiation of difference and engagement with others. However, he posits that, under the right conditions, affect and ambience has a role in these negotiations (ibid.: 182), negotiations which we conceive as dispersed creative acts of public making. Ultimately the critical potential of this position is dependent upon whether the atmosphere encourages the heterogeneity or homogenization of sensation.

252  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Reconceptualizing public participation for media-rich urban environments means being aware of the dynamics at play between the built environment, embodied sensory perception and social praxis. General statements about the potential of spaces to facilitate forms of cultural participation (or control) need to be grounded in an understanding of the specificity of the space itself. The range of perspectives and practices articulated in Federation Square highlight the importance of research that is textured and collaborative. The fragmented plurality of perspectives that our research reveals comes out of a space that has been deliberately designed to foster these outcomes. While there is certainly scope for the criticisms articulated by Kim-Cohen, it is important to consider how an ambient awareness of the peripheral aesthetic, social and environment elements comes to shape how people act in this space, without a sense that this is pre-designed or controlled. However, to advance this debate we would need to test the proclivities of ambient awareness and the potential affordances in public spaces. What are the tools that are best suited to answering questions on the nexus between subjective perspective and social interaction in a networked cultural environment?

MEASURING AND MAKING SENSE OF AMBIENT CULTURE In the humanities, the dominant approaches to understanding aesthetic and cultural experience have been formed from the perspective of the single viewer before a discrete object, text or performance. Viewing typically occurs in an interior space, and evaluation tools have been formed on the basis of this relatively controlled environment. From the historical appreciation of high art to the decoding of advertisements in cultural studies, a dominant mode of interpretation and evaluation has centred on the discerning eye of the critic, or what Pallasmaa (1996) calls ‘frontal ontology’. This approach has produced rich texts and refined the practice of reflection and contemplation through various forms of close reading into the relation between images and ideology (Berger, 1972), heightened the frameworks for evaluation through cross-cultural audience comparisons (Ang, 1991) and opened new connections between historical codes and the practical symbols of everyday media life (Silverstone, 1994). In short, this mode of critical and imaginative thinking has deepened and widened the field of interpretation, but it has done so from the standpoint of an individual expert who either investigates or contemplates on behalf of others. The critic surveys the field, zooms into an object, compares, connects and ultimately assesses in a deliberative manner. While this approach has been subject to critique from feminist and post-colonial critics perspectives, the focus has remained on the status of the singular cultural object, bounded text or image, or discrete performance presented on stage. In the context when culture moves outside, or is created in immersive environments, the potential points of viewing perspective are not only multiplied, but unbounded. The viewer at best receives a partial viewpoint, spatially and frequently temporally. How, then, do we evaluate cultural experience in

Making sense of everyday partcicipation in open public space  253 fluid, ambiguous and open settings, when the conventional pre-conditions for expert critique are absent? One possibility is to draw on the sophisticated quantitative tools that sociologists have developed to measure attendance, identify demographic patterns and develop insights into the motivations and participation rates at large-scale public events (Gunter, 2000; Novak-Leonard and Brown, 2011: 12). Yet this data provides us with little understanding of the quality of such experiences (Heath and von Hehm, 2004; Novak-Leonard and Brown, 2011: 27). While there have been numerous attempts to combine quantitative and qualitative approaches, there is still a tendency to revert to traditional binaries of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998: 36; Livingstone, 2004; McQuail, 2000: 362). These approaches seem of limited use when we seek to measure and make sense of the experience of what we are calling ambient public culture. In this context, while a cultural experience may be aggregated to a mass scale, it does not mean the particularities of that experience will be felt and understood identically by all those involved. Our aim is to explore the slippage between new forms of networked public collectivity and new modes of subjectivity. However, this investigation is often hindered by debates that tend to dismiss mass events as superficial and rebuke the public for shallow levels of engagement. Even when critics acknowledge the significance of artistic projects that deliberately seek to activate public participation, there is a tendency to confine critical evaluation to the political merits of activism, or to celebrate the intelligence of the artistic proposition (Kester, 2013). This discourse shines a valuable light on the role of art in the reclamation of public space and expands the criteria of aesthetic excellence. However, it still averts its attention from verifying the fit between laudable social goals, artistic intent and what the public actually experiences. Following Flusser’s invocation, our aim is not simply to decode the text that is embedded in artistic projects deployed in public spaces. Rather, it is to identify the multiplicity of directions, connections and relations that are expressed in these everyday public experiences. As a preliminary exercise in understanding ambient culture, our research team undertook a brief period of fieldwork on the public experience of Federation Square. The research did not attempt to develop either a statistically significant sample of respondents, or aim to produce an overarching viewpoint from which we would be able to extrapolate a ‘general’ view of the space. Our modest intention was to create a collage of some of the different views and perceptions of Federation Square in order to provide an indicative typology of the modes of attention that arise from the experience of people passing through the site.5

FEDERATION SQUARE: AN OPEN SPACE Federation Square opened on a 3.8 hectare site in the heart of Melbourne’s civic centre and adjacent to the Southbank Arts precinct in 2001. Its bold architecture captures the eye as you walk past, and the undulating topography invites people into the centre of the square, slightly above street level. This central area is designed as an

254  Handbook on the geographies of creativity amphitheatre, with the main viewing area oriented towards a semi-permanent stage. Above the stage is one of three large video screens installed in the square. The other two slightly smaller screens can be found towards the back of the square and in the atrium. The design and architecture of the square is deliberately open to encourage interaction within the space, including a sense of flow with the surrounding laneways. The design also: ‘disrupts many of the conventional assumptions about the uses of entrances and lobbies in museums and galleries. It encourages a more incidental and accidental passage that took inspiration from the multiple laneways in [Melbourne]’ (Papastergiadis et al., 2016: 143). Like the nearby Southbank Arts precinct that was designed as traditional cluster of arts and cultural institutions from the 1960s, cultural institutions have acted as anchor tenants at Federation Square. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and the National Gallery of Victoria’s Australian collection are housed in the large buildings that run along its north-east edge. These institutions encourage destination visits. A selection of food and beverage outlets run along the southern edge of the square towards the waterfront. This view to the Yarra River is largely obscured by the buildings, however there are access points along the southern part of the site. While there are clear affiliations with the Southbank Arts Precinct, Federation Square also plays a distinctive role. Many of the visitors are not focused primarily on activities housed in one or other cultural building, but gain cultural experience while moving through and around the site — which is to say, in-between the branded institutional spaces. Thus, Federation Square provides a place in which we can begin to explore the complexity of cultural and artistic participation in networked public spaces that are increasingly commonplace in media cities. In the following section we outline the different modes of public engagement and indicate the need for a collage of observations gained from interviews and fieldwork. Throughout the interviews it became clear that Federation Square was most commonly associated with openness. This was expressed at a physical, geographic and symbolic level. People embraced that ‘it’s such a wide open space’ (Respondent 1, 14/6/16). ‘Openness’ also alluded to accessibility and the fact that the space is permeable, allowing for different movements. Respondents often referred to the ability to just ‘pass through’ the space: ‘you can just walk back and forth and – yeah’ (Respondent 2, 19/6/16). Finally, openness was employed at a symbolic level of being an inclusive space: ‘open for everybody’ (Respondent 3, 13/6/16). This openness was often contrasted with the interiority of traditional cultural institutions. Similarly, this contrast between interior and exterior affected perceptions in different ways. When Respondent 5 (14/6/16) was asked why they enjoyed the space they stated, ‘I suppose it’s a different space, because of – it’s the open, public nature of it, rather than – like, I went in to the gallery today, but it’s all very enclosed, sterile kind of spaces’ (Respondent 5, 14/6/16). For this individual Federation Square is not conceptualized as a cultural precinct, but as an open space where she can sit and be with others. She contrasts this with the interior space of the gallery visited earlier in the day. Similarly, she also commented that Federation Square provides ‘something that you wouldn’t get in a kind of

Making sense of everyday partcicipation in open public space  255 pre-designed environment like a cinema or an art gallery’ (Respondent 8, 13/6/16). What is meant by ‘designed’ here? Federation Square is also a highly designed space. From the fractals of the facade, to the paving artwork by artist and writer Paul Carter, art and design are tightly integrated into the space (Federation Square, 2016a). However, the Square was designed with a deliberate porosity around and between its individual buildings, atypical of traditional arts precincts. It is therefore significant that the open space of Federation Square is contrasted to a ‘designed’ space of the cultural precinct. For Respondent 8 (13/6/16) it appears that ‘design’ refers to the social codes and normative boundaries that both symbolically and architecturally frame a cultural experience. Hence, the design of Federation Square is somehow not in the foreground; what is most prominent in her experience of the space is the opportunity for sociality. The distinction between internal control and external openness also extended to other people’s perception of Federation Square’s programming. Federation Square maintains an ambitious programme that comprises more than 1600 planned activations in the Square (Federation Square, 2016c: 5), which includes major festivals like Light in Winter through to smaller stage performances or community festivals. Yet there is still a sense that these types of event are not ‘culture’ in the same way that institution-based exhibitions are: ‘[Federation Square] is less controlled than the museum. It’s not – what can I say? Like, you don’t come for culture here’ (Respondent 1, 13/6/16). Distinct from the relative control of interior space, ‘open’ public spaces must inevitably contend with the unexpected. This can be as innocuous as breeze drifting through the square, to ambient noise from a nearby protest. Respondent 8 (13/6/16) described a moment from the previous evening, when she had visited Federation Square with her daughter to see the Koorie6 campfire, Leempeeyt Weeyn’: There was a little bit of kind of spontaneity last night. There were some people who’d brought a guitar and just kind of started playing and engaging with some people who looked as though they might have been tourists, who were just, like, happy to have some friends. (Respondent 8, 13/6/16)

Leempeeyt Weeyn’ was created for the first The Light in Winter festival in 2007 by artist Vicki Couzens who is a Gunditjmara Keerray Woorroong woman from the Western Districts of Victoria. The Light in Winter festival is a celebration of local and international art and performance works to encourage Melbournians to ‘embrace the winter season’ (Federation Square, 2016b). During the 2016 festival, the fire burned continuously from 2 June to 17 July to provide ‘a space out of time in the heart of the city’ (Federation Square, 2016b). Couzens’ installation was complemented by a programme of events including musical performances, Indigenous language workshops and poetry readings. Outside of the programmed events, the fire burned continuously and people could sit by the fire. Aside from the occasional security guard and a small sign, there was limited direction to the audience as to how to behave in front of this public hearth. Sometimes only a handful of people sat around

256  Handbook on the geographies of creativity the fire, staring at the flames or maybe reading a book. At other times, though, as the woman above reflects, there was spontaneous social interaction as a new element, the guitarist, was introduced into the installation. In this example, we catch a glimpse of the minor or informal forms of creativity invited into these porous spaces. This is not an illustration of performer and audience, but one of sponteneous shared public making, configured, fleetingly, at the interface of multiple participatory modes – touristic, artistic, performative, social – and experienced through the transmission of affect and atmosphere. Creativity constellates here in the interstices between bodies, forms and feelings. But though this openness can allow for a range of different creative interactions, it can also lead to a problematic ambivalence. While the unstructured nature of the installation allowed for this spontaneous musical moment, Respondent 8 also highlighted confusion: ‘some groups who were using the space, and that there wasn’t an interpretative element going on or – yeah. And the poor Sudanese security guard was getting a lot of questions. He had no idea’ (Respondent 8, 13/6/16). Consequently, as Respondent 8 highlights, openness can lead to a possible slippage in meaning, particularly for those unfamiliar with the local culture and history. As the architect Bernard Tschumi argued, spaces don’t exist without events. The meaning of a space is dependent on the hybrid and uncertain qualities activated by the events that traverse it. These ephemeral qualities and unpredictable features are now the basis of public subjectivity rather than the problem or exception to public life (Amin, 2008; Sennett, 2013). People approach Federation Square with a wide range of expectations and motivations: from the distracted, idle encounter of the local, to the more attentive outlook of the tourist. What distinguishes such spaces from many other spaces of culture is that no single mode of experience dominates here; it accommodates both formality and informality, the deliberative, the incidental and the serendipitous. Federation Square’s openness might also be considered in relation to the social habits, routines and practices that comprise urban life. The central location of Federation Square within Melbourne’s CBD means that it functions as both a destination and an interstice. Of the respondents, the overwhelming majority were just passing through; Federation Square was one location as part of a larger journey. As Respondent 1 (13/6/16) stated: ‘You just come for a good event or meeting people, and after you go to a different place’ (Respondent 1, 13/6/16). In their journeying through the city, Federation Square becomes a natural pause in activity, a place ‘to sit and wait’ (Respondent 10, 13/6/16). In these moments, Federation Square is a space of respite, where people take a break or pass the time in the presence of others. Noticing this, Federation Square staff introduced deck chairs and protective umbrellas into the space, transitioning this impromptu impulse into an informal but collective and public performance of sitting and resting. In its polyvalent meanings, the openness of Federation Square troubles traditional boundaries of culture. Dominated either by measurements of attendance or quality, understandings of culture are predicated upon the assumption that the audience comes into being once they cross a threshold into a designated space or moment in

Making sense of everyday partcicipation in open public space  257 time. Sites like Federation Square have no such clear points of demarcation through which art might be distinguished from the rest of the world. People meander through, pause for respite, arrange a rendezvous with friends. In the midst of this there is the possibility that other cultural signs will seep into consciousness. Although it is a highly networked space where people can pick up free wi-fi, it is also a place where people do not feel obliged to connect at all; they can remain in their own private thoughts. These mixed experiences highlight how cultural events and praxis situated outside the confines of institutional space might be permeated by a myriad of other influences and expectations. In this indeterminacy, people might have new encounters or constellate, momentarily into an unexpected public; they might also be susceptible to the messaging of capitalism and the propulsions of commercial culture. In this sense, ‘openness’ is an ambivalent quality, requiring a nuanced lexicon of cultural analysis. Renegotiating Attention in Public Spaces If, as posited earlier, there is relationship between urban design and sensory experience, we must ask: how does the relative fluidity and openness of a site such as Federation Square shape visitor perceptions of the space and public performativity? This section focuses on the different ways that perceptions and experiences were articulated by visitors to Federation Square. We describe three different types of audience engagement, but stress that these should be considered as points on a heuristic spectrum rather than neatly defined positions held by particular individuals. 1. Attentive The first form of consciousness we discern in Federation Square is directed and focused attention towards an object or event in the Square. This focused attention typically arises through programming the square’s many open spaces. As part of the Light in Winter Festival, ENESS installed The Sonic Light Bubble: a bubble of 4.5 metre diameter containing 200 LED lights responsive to human touch. Situated in the upper half of the square, just out of the regular trajectory of passers-by, the bubble was inflated every evening after sundown. On weekday evenings people pass through the lower section of the square on their way to Flinders Street station. The viewers of the installation we spoke to on a Tuesday evening had not come upon the bubble by chance; they were aware of it beforehand, either through a previous visit or informed via an official source or friend. Respondent 4 (14/6/16) had become aware of the bubble the previous evening: ‘I was here last night, very briefly, and I got a couple of pictures of it. But tonight I wanted to come back and maybe see if I could do something better’ (Respondent 4, 14/6/16). His focus was completely given over to the bubble, an aesthetic engagement involving capturing something visually pleasing. He was waiting until the lighting of Federation Square turned red as a backdrop to the bubble. The installation appealed to this respondent because it was both immersive and took people out of their regular routines:

258  Handbook on the geographies of creativity To see that people just take the time to stop and go, ‘Wow. I’m just going to, you know, check this out for a few minutes.’ ... I think that’s a great advantage of a place like this, where people can actually do that, because so many people are locked into the home-to-work-to-home kind of things. (Respondent 4, 14/6/16)

The bubble is both surprising and calming; it disrupts the visitor’s usual routine and, through its combination of light, sound and movement, envelopes them in a momentarily private sensory engagement. As Papastergiadis et al. (2016: 214) highlight screen-based media has the ability to facilitate an ambient awareness that combines ‘both a more directed and a more distracted mode of attention’. We asked whether part of the reason Respondent 4 had been in the square the day before was due to the Queen’s Birthday football match. While he recognized that some people might have been watching the large screen at the time, in his view: ‘I think people would have been here whether it was Bugs Bunny up there [on the screen], you know’ (Respondent 4, 14/6/16). To him the screen itself was not engaging. It was a form of white noise; indiscernible, disaffecting content. Anything beyond the immediate focus on the bubble became background. This level of deliberative engagement was more typical where someone had come to Federation Square with the expectation of having such an experience. We observed others who also walked through the square and were distracted by the object for a time, and then continued on their way. Such attention-drawing public offerings are not always viewed with reverence or delight. A number of people did not enjoy the screen-based media in Federation Square, particularly the large screens. There was a perception among some respondents that the large screens play commercial content, particularly advertising. One respondent stated, ‘I think it’s mostly commercials and stuff, so I don’t really focus so much on that’ (Respondent 2, 19/6/16). Another respondent questioned the utility of the screen relative to other elements in the square: ‘I mean, it’s peaceful and relaxing. You watch the screen and that, but I don’t know. I just feel we watch the screen so much nowadays’ (Respondent 7, 13/6/16). This respondent’s experience of the space and screen is expressed in three distinct parts: first, this is a peaceful and relaxing environment; second, the screen presents an implied imperative, or least invites you to watch it; and third, an underlying sense of guilt about being susceptible to this lure. It is worth noting that Respondent 7 was a mother of two young children visiting Federation Square as part of a family trip to the city. We can only speculate as to whether this informs some of her sense of guilt about screen-time. Importantly, we get a sense here of the ambivalence around ‘engagement’ or ‘participation’ particularly where these governmental and institutional ideals pertain to screens in public. 2. Uninterested In contrast to these attentive engagements (both positive and negative) were those who seemed largely uninterested in the images, sounds and installations surrounding them. When people were asked whether they had any particular expectations of their visit to Federation Square, many responded that they had none. Some could point to

Making sense of everyday partcicipation in open public space  259 some vague motivation, but were rarely specific about what this would be: ‘I didn’t really have any special expectations for coming today, no ... Maybe just, like, activity or – yeah’ (Respondent 2, 19/6/16). This sense that ‘something’ would be on or available to engage with was a common response. As Respondent 2 reflected further she revealed her awareness of the surrounds. When prompted about the screens she stated, ‘I notice them now, but actually I didn’t before’ (Respondent 2, 19/6/2016). Respondent 2 disengages with the screen because she dislikes its commercial content. It is difficult to specify how this noticing of the screen has come about. Perhaps it was the commerciality of the material that drew her attention? Or perhaps, as Respondent 7 comments, we are so inured to the embedded commercialization of urban space and the languages of advertising that it was these qualities of the screen content that, for a long time, made it somehow invisible to her? As McCullough (2013: 7) says, ‘As a cultural force, [advertising] has few equals. And as environmental experience, it often leaves you little choice but to tune out the world’. Disengagement here might be rethought as a subtle form of deliberate non-awareness, through which people protect themselves from the ‘superabundance’ of information (McCullough, 2013: 260). 3. Blocking out Blocking out characterizes individuals who deliberately retreated from their surrounds. In a space like Federation Square this is difficult, although it can be achieved through the use of headphones or concentrating on a handheld device. In collecting interview or survey data, inattention is difficult to delineate: the act of approaching an individual naturally brings their focus back onto the site under investigation. In this context then, observation can be more valuable. However, while we can see that someone’s attention might be focused somewhere, we cannot ascertain exactly how that ‘where’ has been assembled (McCullough, 2013: 44). At the time of our fieldwork, the game, Pokémon Go7 had just been released. We observed a number of people fixated upon their mobile phone, chasing Pokémons through the square. Others sat on the stairs at Federation Square, headphones in, absorbed in their phones. Some people block out the activity of the square by passing through quickly. This evasiveness was also evident in some of the respondents who sought to answer our questions as quickly as possible. For example, Respondent 7 (14/6/16) was waiting to meet a friend. When we asked if she was interested in participating she seemed uncertain and quickly noted that she was waiting for someone. We reassured her the interview would only be a few minutes, but it wasn’t long before her friend arrived. From this point, it was clear she was attempting to finish the interview as quickly as possible. Her responses were short, but she did note that what made her feel good was ‘the atmosphere. Yeah’ (Respondent 7, 14/6/16). Where disengagement refers to a lack of interest in or, or disconnection from, the attributes and features of a public space, we associate blocking out here with the withdrawal from the unplanned sociality these spaces promise. Headphones and absorption in a personal mobile device can ward off even the most basic forms of social interaction, like eye-contact. As Ito, Okabe and Anderson note (2009: 74), this should not necessarily be viewed negatively. They identify a form of ‘cocooning’

260  Handbook on the geographies of creativity whereby people create a protective barrier between themselves and the environment through the means of mobile technology (see Farman, 2012). This use of personal devices is considered a ‘coping’ strategy to managing the excess, rather than a lack, of stimulation in the urban environment (Rodgers et al., 2014: 1062). The issue here, as with Simmel’s blasé disposition, is balance; there is a fine line between withdrawal as ‘coping’ and the slippage into more extreme forms of social avoidance. In some interviews individuals spoke about choosing particular locations within the Square, such as the Atrium, which are quieter and allows them to tune out and, presumably, reduce their incidental contact with others. What is interesting about these behaviours is the way that public spaces, threaded through with digital infrastructure like free wifi, offer the opportunity for forms of relative privacy in public. In some sense, they are spaces in which the private worlds of individuals – the intimate social dynamic between friends; immersion in a private game; absorption by the media worlds of our smartphones – are made visible to a wider public. What kind of social value, if any, might we place on this form of publicness? And how might the way we frame the interplay between creativity and public culture, as it shapes future design, curation and art-making for public spaces?

CONCLUSION This ‘collage’ of perspectives on different forms of public engagement, creativity and performativity at Federation Square highlight the complexity inherent to open mediated public spaces. Our fieldwork proposes more pointed theoretical questions about the social and aesthetic purpose of the public sphere. Jürgen Habermas (1989) describes the public sphere as a form of public engagement that is predicated on expression of private opinion in public in collective dialogue. Goffman (1963) and other scholars discuss performativity as an essential skill of public interaction. Yet, as these channels for public oratory moved into the domestic sphere, first with radio and later with television, there was a tendency to conceptualize public participation as pacified (McQuire, 2008); collective dialogue and performativity narrowed to the private sphere of the home or extended only to a sphere of like-minded individuals. In this historicization of the public sphere, spectacle and individual consumption fill the void of once democratic forms of collective interaction and deliberation (Debord, 1983). A public space like Federation Square demands that we reconsider this binary thinking. This space brings together many elements and their respective modes of engagement: large screens for mass display; wireless connectivity for private communication and despatialized consumption; artworks and performances which range from intimate one-to-one engagements to lavish, immersive spectacles; and stages for community performance and public discussion. The Square provides one example of how cultural and civic programming can be open and varied, but still strongly tied to social and cultural objectives. As former CEO Kate Brennan stated, ‘We want [the public] to see that Federation Square is not just this big open space

Making sense of everyday partcicipation in open public space  261 that somebody manages but that it is a living, breathing entity that has a value set and an agenda, of support for the community at large’ (cited in Papastergiadis et al., 2016: 149). Federation Square implores us to develop more nuanced terms for understanding the value of public participation, terms that go beyond neat binaries of attention and distraction, active deliberation and passive consumption, spectacle and democrative engagement. To trace these different experiences without recourse to an idealized vision of public participation, or remaining caught within a predetermined hierarchy of cultural value, are first steps in reconceptualizing contemporary forms of public engagement. A second step demands attending to the practicalities rendering this engagement visible and legible. As culture moves out, beyond the black boxes and white walls of institutional interiors, it is timely to reconsider whether we have the right tools to account for emerging ambient and open experiences of culture. Purely quantitative measurements of visitation are unable to discriminate between the different types of visits in permeable open public spaces that cater for a multitude of different uses. Similarly, purely qualitative approaches that depend upon an individual interpretation of a work, event or environment provide only one viewpoint in what is often a collective and dispersed experience. The tools developed to capture the nuanced engagements of ambient culture have implications for practices of evaluation, and, attached to this, the formation of cultural policy.8 Even as we recognize the expanded, complex nature of ambient participation, we must also acknowledge its ambivalent significance. In the past three decades we have seen the priorities of neoliberal governance extend into the domain of arts and culture. Ambient participation has emerged as much from the ‘event cultures’ (Palmer and Richards, 2010) of the globally competitive creative city, as from the rise of networked digital media and the participatory impulses of contemporary arts practice. Participation and creativity are now deeply embedded in the economically oriented agendas driving urban redevelopment, creative industries policy, and programmes of soft diplomacy. In this context, we cannot pretend that the present moment, while full of possibility, does not also represent a moment of risk. Federation Square suggests that participation in and of itself does not necessarily correspond with any social virtue. Rather, the ideals of cultural democratization and inclusion referenced by Kate Brennan depend upon finely judged practices of design, curation and arts practice that attend to people’s existing appetites and impulses, while also allowing for serendipidy, openness to encounter and play. Without this careful attention, and the policy frameworks to inform the development and management of such spaces, the creativity of publics is vulnerable to appropriation by commercial interests; the richness of participation is reduced to instincts of the narcissistic prosumer. An effective toolkit and a critical vocabulary that can capture the diversity of participatory experience is not only about informing artists, curators, designers and policy-makers in their independent practices. These tools and frameworks confer value upon this neglected aspect of cultural experience and make it communicable and visible. The failure to do so risks perpetuating models of cultural knowledge and cultural policies

262  Handbook on the geographies of creativity that are both inappropriate to ambient urban environments, and miss their potential to give life to more expansive visions of public culture in the twenty-first century.

NOTES 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

Reflecting this, the White Night festival expanded to Ballarat in regional Victoria in 2017 (Victorian Government, 2016). According to their 2014–15 Annual Report, 10.1 million people were estimated to visit Federation Square. Creative Victoria (2016) note that in 2014–15 the Arts Centre, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Geelong Performing Arts Centre, Museum Victoria, Melbourne Recital Centre, National Gallery of Victoria and State Library of Victoria attracted 10.2 million visitors combined. See Davenport and Beck (2001). McCullough (2013) argues the role of design is to strike a balance between ‘background’ and foreground’ information. Claire Bishop (2009) makes a similar analysis of the (lack of) political edge to participatory practices. Data was collected during June and July 2016 at Federation Square. We conducted approximately 20 five-minute interviews with people in three key areas of the Square, the main square, the stairs facing Flinders Street station and the Atrium. The data from interviews was then coded to draw out consistent themes. Coding of the data also led to the development of short survey, which aimed to test some of the key themes emerging from the interviews. This was a short web-based survey that was completed by 58 respondents. The finding discussed in the remainder of the paper draws from this data. The project drew upon work by Yue et al. (2011) on cultural indicators In their work with the City of Whittlesea they undertook a series of interviews with local residents to understand the localized cultural practices. The insights from these interviews then became the basis for the development of a survey that was cognizant of the particularities of cultural practices in that area. It enabled Yue and Khan to capture data on a number of less formal cultural practices that may not have been identified in a more traditional understanding of culture. While this project is at a significantly smaller scale than the cultural indicators framework (2011) it did draw from the principles espoused in their approach that data collection is an iterative process and cultural practices require context, which can be provided through interviews and site observation, in order to measure what matters Koorie are the Indigenous people of Victoria and New South Wales. Pokémon Go is a game where players catch Pokémon in the real world using their mobile phone and the GPS. Pokémon can be found at multiple points throughout the city and large public spaces such as Federation Square were common places to find them. Curatorial practices and programming are already shifting in response to contemporary installations and new media artworks (McQuire and Radywyl, 2010), but the application of these approaches in public open spaces warrant further investigation.

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Making sense of everyday partcicipation in open public space  263 Berger, J. (1972), Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Bishop, C. (2006), ‘The social turn: collaboration and its discontents’, Artforum International, 44, 179–85. Brown, A.S. (2004), The Values Study: Rediscovering the Meaning and Value of Arts Participation, Hartford, CT, USA: Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Crary, J. (1999), Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Creative Victoria (2016), ‘State cultural organisations’, Creative Victoria, 8 August, accessed 7 November 2016 at http://​creative​.vic​.gov​.au/​research/​data/​state​-cultural​-organisations. Cuthbertson, D., D. Cooke, A. Ross and C. Woodhead (2016), ‘White Night Melbourne 2016: All-night party lights up city’, The Age, 20 February, accessed 7 November 2016 at http://​ www​.theage​.com​.au/​victoria/​white​-night​-melbourne​-2016​-allnight​-party​-to​-light​-up​-city​ -20160220​-gmzbvo​.html. Davenport, T.H. and J.C. Beck (2001), The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Brighton, MA, USA: Harvard Business Press. Debord, G. (1983), Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, MI, USA: Black & Red. Farman, J. (2012), Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media, London, UK: Routledge. Federation Square Pty Ltd (2016a), ‘History and design’, Fed Square, accessed 7 November 2016 at http://​fedsquare​.com/​about/​history​-design. Federation Square Pty Ltd (2016b), ‘The Light in Winter’, Fed Square, accessed 7 November 2016 at http://​fedsquare​.com/​about/​our​-program/​creative​-program/​the​-light​-in​-winter​-3. Federation Square Pty Ltd (2016c), Annual Report 2015/16, Melbourne, Australia, accessed 27 March 2019 at https://​s3​-ap​-southeast​-2​.amazonaws​.com/​assets​-fedsquare/​uploads/​ 2016/​10/​Annual​-Report​-June​-2016​.pdf. Friedberg, A. (2006), The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Goffman, E. (1963), Behaviour in Public Places, New York, NY, USA: The Free Press. Gunter, B. (2000), ‘Overview of media research methodologies: Audiences’, in B. Gunter (ed.), Media Research Methods, London, UK: SAGE, pp. 22–54. Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Heath, C. and D. vom Lehn (2004), ‘Configuring reception – (Dis-)Regarding the “spectator” in museums and galleries’, Theory Culture & Society, 21 (6), 43–65. Ito, M., D. Okabe and K. Anderson (2009), ‘Portable objects in three global cities: The personalization of urban places’, in R. Ling and S.W. Campbell (eds), The Reconstruction of Space and Time, New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Transaction Press, pp. 67–87. Jervis, J. (2015), Sympathetic Sentiments, London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. Kester, G. (2013), Conversation Pieces, Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press. Kim-Cohen, S. (2016), Against Ambience and Other Essays, New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury Publishing. Livingstone, S. (2004), ‘The challenges of changing audiences: Or, what is the audience researcher to do in the age of the internet?’, LSE Research Online, accessed 1 February 2019 at http://​eprints​.lse​.ac​.uk/​412/​1/​Challenge​_of​_changing​_audiences​_​-​_spoken​_version​.pdf. McCullough, M. (2013), Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information, Cambridge, UK: MIT Press. McGuigan, J. (2011), ‘The cultural public sphere – A critical measure of public culture?’ in L. Giorgi, M. Sassatelli and G. Delanty (eds), Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, London, UK: Routledge, pp. 79–91. McQuail, D. (2000), McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory, 4th edition, London, UK: SAGE. McQuire, S. (2008), The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, London, UK: SAGE.

264  Handbook on the geographies of creativity McQuire, S. and N. Radywyl (2010), ‘From object to platform: Art, digital technology and time’, Time & Society, 19 (1), 5–27. Novak-Leonard, J.L. and A. Brown (2011), Beyond Attendance: A Multi-Modal Understanding of Arts Participation, accessed 3 February 2019 at https://​www​.arts​.gov/​sites/​default/​files/​ 2008​-SPPA​-BeyondAttendance​.pdf. NSW Government (2016), ‘Vivid Sydney 2016 smashes visitor record with 2.3 million’, Destination NSW, 27 June, accessed 1 February 2019 at https://​ www​ .destinationnsw​ .com​.au/​news​-and​-media/​media​-releases/​vivid​-sydney​-2016​-smashes​-visitor​-record​-2​-3​ -million. Pallasmaa, J. (1996), The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy; Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons. Palmer, R. and G. Richards (2010), Eventful Cities:​ Cultural Management and Urban Revitalisation, Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann. Papastergiadis, N. (2014), ‘Introduction’, in N. Papastergiadis and V. Lynn (eds), Art in the Global Present, Sydney, Australia: UTS Press, pp. 9–26. Papastergiadis, N., and A. Barikin (2015), ‘Ambient perspective and endless art’, Discipline, 4 (4), 80–91. Papastergiadis, N., A. Barikin, X. Gu, S. McQuire and A. Yue (2016), ‘Mobile Methods and Large Screens’, in N. Papastergiadis (ed.), Ambient Screens and Transnational Public Spaces, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 131–208. Rodgers, S., C. Barnett and A. Cochrane (2014), ‘Media practices and urban politics: Conceptualizing the powers of the media–urban nexus’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (6), 1054–70. Sennett, R. (1994), Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York, NY, USA: W.W. Norton. Sennett, R. (2013), Together, London, UK: Yale University Press. Silverstone, R. (1994), Television and Everyday Life, London, UK: Routledge. Victorian Government (2016), ‘Labor government secures the return of White Night Melbourne’, Premier of Victoria, accessed 1 February 2019, http://​www​.premier​.vic​.gov​ .au/​labor​-government​-secures​-the​-return​-of​-white​-night​-melbourne/​. Yue, A., S. Brook and R. Khan (2011), ‘Developing a local cultural indicator framework in Australia : A case study of the city of Whittlesea’, Culture and Local Governance, 3 (1–2), 133–49.

PART VI CREATIVITY AS INTERVENTION

16. En/acting radical change: theories, practices, places and politics of creativity as intervention Heather McLean and Sarah de Leeuw

FEMINIST ARTISTIC GEOGRAPHERS (NOT EASILY) IN PLACE: AN INTRODUCTION We are both artists. We are also both geographers. While we operate in this world as cis-gendered white women, we are also both feminists and activists committed to anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-oppression scholarship and practices. We are, in short and as best as we are able and being cognizant of all the pitfalls it entails and all the mistakes we will surely make and have made, committed to trying to make the world a better place (de Leeuw, 2017a; Kobayashi et al., 2014; McLean, 2016, 2017). We do this in part through creative work, and we do it partly through tools we have been trained with as critical social scientists. We do this sometimes with anger, we do it often with love and humour and happiness. We are increasingly trying to make the world a better place, often within and from an academic and scholarly climate (although we also practise well outside the strictures of academic environments) in which excitement is growing about the potential of creativity and arts-based methods and methodologies. While it is not our intent to quash that excitement, it is our intention to bring the excitement into conversation with, for instance, Ahmed’s (2017) call to be a ‘killjoy’ if that ‘joy’ is anchored in or perpetuating normative (especially white) hetero-patriarchal systems of power. We are, thus, especially interested in exploring and highlighting creative work that overtly and self-consciously pushes against the ‘joys’ of academic scholarship, that disrupts naive readings and doings of creative work being carefree or somehow beyond the confines of critical social science engagement. We are interested in finding new grounds, critical and differently charted, grounds of creative practice and thought. As a poet and literary non-fiction author, Sarah de Leeuw (2013, 2015, 2017b) tackles issues of radical female sexuality, ecological devastation and colonial marginalizations of (especially rural, northern and Indigenous) peoples and places. De Leeuw’s (2013) poetic work has consciously reclaimed the anatomy and desires of a (cis-gendered) woman’s erotic encounters. The work has been censored and lauded, has led to a number of heated conversations during readings (in which attendees have voiced feeling very uncomfortable with de Leeuw’s language), but was ultimately awarded a Dorothey Livesay award for the best book of poetry in British Columbia in 2013. De Leeuw’s works of non-fiction, which are formally experimental as 266

En/acting radical change  267 short poetically-informed essays, are avowedly concerned with social justice and anti-colonial feminism: she writes often about her own engagement and encounters with gendered and geographic violence. Still, and despite politics or liberal progressive ideologies being touted as the death of art (see, for instance, Perl, 2014), her last book of creative non-fiction was nominated for the most important literary prize in Canada: The Governor General’s Literary Prize. As a performance artist and former community planner, Heather McLean critiques the gender, class and race dimensions of neoliberal urban policies. McLean draws from her experience working within the entrepreneurialized realm of urban planning for five years before she embarked on her doctoral research of creating her Toby the ‘Tool for Urban’ change drag king performances (McLean, 2016). As Toby, she satirizes contemporary strategies to ‘re-invent’ neighbourhoods and cities into ‘green’ and ‘creative’ spaces for young, white urban professionals. Performing alongside Dirty Plotz (Tigchelaar, 2017), a feminist cabaret that explores the historic and ongoing exclusion of women in the arts, Toby’s fictitious projects draw attention to the gender dimensions of neoliberal policies. For example, her Toby performances make connections between city officials’ increasing reliance on networks of white male, private sector consultants, leading exclusionary urban ‘revitalization’ projects, and the intensification of racialized and colonial gentrification processes (see Parker, 2017). While working in Glasgow as a post-doctoral researcher, McLean’s Toby performances mapped the connections between the corporatization of the university sector and the policing of disinvested neighbourhoods with revanchist ‘regeneration’ policies. This chapter, in the third section, provides an in-depth, thick autoethnographically-informed analysis of McLean’s (2016) work to offer site-specific examples of these politicized in-situ creative performances. Although we are both feminist creative practitioners, McLean’s work provides clearer insights (than de Leeuw’s) into ways specific geographies may be mobilized to ensure direct and immediate interventions for social justice and change. Reflecting on the reach and impact of creative writing is more difficult to undertake – readers are, after all, a diffuse audience with whom an author rarely has direct contact. Indeed, this distance, this lack of direct proximity between creative expression and audience, is something geographers working in and through writing, in and through text (which many of us do) might well take account of: creative writing is often a more mediated form of creative practice, in terms of direct politicized immediacy, than other forms of creative work. In this chapter, and reflecting upon our experience working in anti-colonial, feminist artistic collaborations, we explore the potentials and pitfalls of the current excitement about ‘creative’ practices in geographical research and teaching. We discuss how arts-based interventions offer innovative ways to explore space, place and identity formation. We also demonstrate how such methods furnish feminist, queer and anti-colonial researchers with tools to craft new sites of struggle, solidarities and co-production that decentre hierarchal and colonial ways of knowing. We also, however, take a critical look at current geographical forays into arts praxis current contexts where scholars are pressured to produce competitive but

268  Handbook on the geographies of creativity community-engaged and ‘impactful’ work. We ask: how do we make sure creative arts practice is not a ‘flash in the pan’ trend circulating within academia, a momentary ‘new thing’ that allows academics in search of metric-boosts to publish and then move on? Have creative scholars – including geographers – properly accounted for how to ensure that artists are not ‘sources of extraction’ in a complex relationship that results in an amplification of academic/ivory tower privilege? How, when geographers are becoming artists themselves, do we measure the worth of this output? By grappling with these difficult questions, we seek to work in and against, as well as to refuse, extractive and corporate settler university culture. Such creative reworkings, we contend, present possibilities for challenging historical and ongoing geometries of power and reorganizing them to imagine and build new worlds. Following Ahmed, we contend ‘we generate knowledge from working out the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, including within the academy’ (Mehra, 2017).

CREATIVITY, CREATIVITY: WHAT’S BEING SAID, DONE AND ENACTED Creative, arts-based methods and methodologies are, of recent, becoming increasingly popular in human geography (Crang, 2005; Hawkins, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015; Madge, 2014; Marston and de Leeuw, 2013). While still studying the creativity of others, geographers have recently engaged in methodologies including painting, photography, bio-art, performance, theatre and slam poetry as ways to explore geographic thought (de Leeuw, 2017a; de Leeuw and Hawkins, 2017). Such aesthetic practices furnish geographers with innovative and relational conceptual and methodological approaches to explore how we make and remake spaces, places and human relationships (Hawkins, 2015). Arts-based methodologies also open up opportunities for critical and reflexive attention to the presence or absence of certain voices, practices, or ways of engaging in thought-making in the discipline of geography (Nagar, 2014; Noxolo, 2016). Creative inquiries can also offer emancipatory research methods to address the lived and learned experience of under-served and under-represented communities. Critical feminist, queer and anti-colonial scholars have engaged in performance art, dance, spoken word poetry and film projects to critique the race, class and gender dimensions of precarious work, the exclusionary politics of neoliberal urban policies, the prison–industrial complex and unnatural disasters (Han, 1998; Hurricane Season Curriculum, 2017; McLean, 2017). Geographers have co-created zines and cookbooks as ways to co-research trauma, transnational queer and trans organizing, and migrant justice activism with activists and community organizers (Bagelman and Bagelman, 2016; Ustundag and Donovan, 2017). Moreover, geographers have worked with students and activists to devise critical walking tours about radical activist histories and labour organising (Pulido et al., 2012). Many critical geographers engaged in creative practice take inspiration from relational, arts-based scholars in performance studies, queer theory and disability studies

En/acting radical change  269 who are unsettling and re-working what ‘counts’ as theory, practice and activism. For example, McLean draws inspiration from queer, feminist performance theorist and artist T.L. Cowan (2012, 2017). As the character Trixie Crane, a retired soccer mom public speaker, activist scholar T.L. Cowan engages in sensual, politicized and hilarious alter-ego performances to craft queer worlds and forge solidarities. For her, cabaret is a ‘vital, if incoherent, form of entertainment and social commentary, a community-building, sustaining a transformative site of political activism and aesthetic innovation’ (Cowan, 2012). McLean is also inspired by Alex Tigchelaar, feminist performance artist, theorist, activist and founder of sex worker arts collective Operation Snatch. Having curated feminist and queer cabarets for years, Tigchelaar (2014) contends that alternative performance spaces have historically provided room for angry and politicized women, LGBTQI and disabled artists, as well as artists of colour, who have been pushed to the ‘fucking crazy making margins’. These margins, however, are understood as generative spaces where minoritized artists can voice their frustrations and ‘bring into existence a reality that we didn’t see elsewhere . . . hacking together our own existences’ (Cowan, 2017). For geographers engaged in creative practice, then, we wonder about the politics of centring, surfacing and potentially making mainstream the creative works and practices of others. Are there risks of uncovering, of outing, of engaging artists or the spaces and places of artists? What might the limits of our scholarship be, or the ethics of leaving something alone? Does bringing into academic forums art that is produced in marginalized spaces threaten the generative power of creativity? Tigchelaar’s observations echo the late Muñoz (1999) who claimed that cabaret is a particularly radical space because it makes room for queer artists of colour to engage in acts of disidentification. Disidentification refers to the efforts by artists of colour to situate themselves both within and against the various dominant discourses of a disempowering white supremacist, heteronormative and ableist culture. Through these acts, artists co-opt, recycle and re-think violently encoded discourses to include and validate minority identities. Artists also craft radical counterpublics, or ‘communities and relational chains of resistance that contest the dominant public sphere’ (Muñoz,1999: 146) and challenge the white heteronormativity of majoritarian cultural production through these performative interventions. Following Nyong’o (2013), such acts of fabulation override our rational brain and unlock and unleash ‘novelty in an otherwise deadlocked symbolic order’ (cited in Cowan, 2017). White settler colonialism is, in many geographies, a deadly and deadlocked symbolic order that perpetuates violences against Indigenous peoples across time and at various scales (de Leeuw, 2003, 2017a; Hunt, 2014; Simpson, 2017; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Non-indigeneity continues to pervade the discipline of geography (Hunt, 2014; Hunt and Holmes, 2015). The majority of contexts in which Indigenous arts-based scholars produce work, or in which Indigenous geographers metaphorically undertake creative work (like dancing) (Hunt, 2014), remain very non-Indigenous, very white, very heteropatriarchal and very colonial. Some of these spaces and contexts are, therefore, not conducive to de-colonial creativity: put powerfully another way, decolonization remains a metaphor, a myth at risk of re-centring Euro-white suprem-

270  Handbook on the geographies of creativity acy (Tuck and Yang, 2012). As Indigenous scholars engaging in performance-based and visual work are pressured to translate their practice into text-based scholarship digestible to colonial institutions, they become ensnared in colonial hierarchies that value the written ‘archive’ over the embodied and performative ‘repertoire’ (Taylor, 2003). Indigenous scholars also find themselves hindered by colonial understandings of knowledge creation and ownership as academic granting bodies and journals emphasize single, principal investigators and solo-authored articles. Métis scholar and artist Zoe Todd (2017) writes, ‘in Euro-American academia, the arts, media, politics, and literature we are enthralled, obsessed with two things: “innovation” and individuality . . . the triumph of individual will to manifest something new new new’. For Todd (2017), these regimes exclude ‘whole teams of human and more-than-human beings who make certain projects or ideas possible’. Nishnaabeg artist and theorist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017: 30) also critiques the violence of colonial knowledge hierarchies that favour individual theory makers. Simpson works with Indigenous scholars, activists, artists and community members to generate knowledge through a ‘combination of emotion and intellectual knowledge with the kinetics of our place-based practices, as mitigated through our bodies, minds, and spirits’. A praxis that involves ‘her body and her life’, she draws from Nishnaabeg practices of ‘hunting, fishing, harvesting rice and medicines, making maple syrup, parenting, and storytelling’ (ibid.: 31) as sites of community-engagement, critique and analysis. She also draws from the ‘painful and uncomfortable knowledge’ that she carries which is the result of existing as an Indigenous woman in the violent context of settler colonialism (ibid.). Working within this context, the colonial university’s emphasis on producing ‘outputs’ by individual researchers reinforces deeply violent practices that negate the rich, embodied knowledge of Indigenous women scholars and the communities they work and learn with. The corporatized neoliberal colonial university also presents practical, everyday challenges for Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers (de Leeuw et al., 2013), including art-based scholars committed to decolonization through creative practice. Because this is a relatively small sub-field within geography, only a small number of scholars can review this work. Academic publishing regimes also foster the production of ‘fast scholarship’ (Great Lakes Feminist Collective, 2015) or the creation of work within a short amount of time. Last (2015) captures these contradictions as she writes: I came to geography, or to academia, from a background in fashion design. In a way, I feel like I’m still battling the same problem of fads and fashions. Academia, too, has ‘hot topics’, and while these may be justified by a need to present an urgent response, the need for responses and the urgency of a topic do not always map onto one another, especially when it comes to issues that don’t go away – unlike academic indicators of ‘hotness’ that tend to change very quickly.

Indeed, even well-meaning research produced within this context can result in ‘fraught and violent collateral damages’ (Todd, 2017) including the exploitation of precarious scholars, roughshod ethics, and a lack of trust from communities that

En/acting radical change  271 researchers are engaging with. Administrators and professors also reproduce settler colonialist discourse in the ways they approach academic writing. In the UK, for example, university administrators and funding bodies often refer to knowledge ‘pipelines’ and encourage researchers to ‘pump prime’ for competitive research. They also warn researchers not to fall behind and become ‘leaky pipelines’. Contemporary geographers writing about colonialism continue to use language and logics that were the very tools of settler colonists who did so much to violently disrupt the lives and spaces of Indigenous people. Despite the upsurge of creative practices in the discipline, we have done little to change our story/research-telling methods (de Leeuw, 2017a). Other tense and contradictory realities also continue to (de)limit the politics and possibilities of creative activities, despite the somewhat ‘joy-filled’ lauding of creative methods and methodologies. Current administrative pressures to produce work that promises to make an ‘impact’, or create measurable change in communities, continues to reinforce hierarchies and exclusions for geographers engaging in creative, arts-based research. Feminist critics charge that the impact trend, another technology of governance in the neoliberal ‘audit culture’ (Pain, 2014), reproduces particularly masculine and colonial power/knowledge relations. These critical scholars also question the extent to which researchers can engage in meaningful participatory research with communities because this work takes time and relies on the unpaid, gendered, classed, and raced emotional labour of community members, activists, and artists (Great Lakes Feminist Collective, 2015; Pain, 2014). In her writing on embodied research ethics, Audre Mitchell claims that, in some ways, ‘impact’ and ‘knowledge mobilization’ can engage broader communities and publics and raise awareness of important issues that can help in broader efforts to decolonize knowledge. She simultaneously cautions, however, that these trends posit knowledge as only beneficial if it is available to the public and can ‘expose knowledge to predation, instrumentalization, (wilful) misinterpretation or violation’ (Mitchell, 2016). Referring to the work of Indigenous scholars, she encourages researchers to consider refusing to divulge information in cases in which exposure is harm in itself. Furthermore, as universities increasingly forge public–private partnerships in urban regeneration projects with think tanks, corporate-backed arts festivals and third sector groups, scholarly funding bodies tend to favour arts interventions that align with impact strategies (McLean, 2016). Within this context, arts-based research risks becoming another flash-in-the pan trend in a system where commodification, consumption and competition has become ‘hardwired into academic production through institutional demands’ (Pain, 2014). Geographers also reinforce colonial dynamics by negating fleshy, messy bodies in their arts-based interventions. As an example, eco-poetry written from a place-less standpoint often lacks ‘fleshy, material, guts, and tendons; any embodied, physical, intertwining of people – especially diversely constituted and positioned human subjects – with the physical environment’ (de Leeuw and Hawkins, 2017). As a result, such work negates the feminist and queer potentials of risky border crossings, messiness and contamination (ibid.). Furthermore, when geographers do not expressly and

272  Handbook on the geographies of creativity purposefully reflect on authorial power, gender and race identity, they are always at risk of naturalizing a Eurocentric colonial performance of ‘universalisation and rationalism’ (Sundberg, 2014) and the colonial god-trick like authorial placelessness (Haraway, 1990). Such standpoints risk reproducing white supremacist and colonial hierarchies of what counts as artistic and theoretically rigorous (de Leeuw, 2017a). Moreover, geographers practising arts-based methods rarely employ critical modes of analysis so well established in social and cultural geography to reflect on the politics of their work or their work’s implications (de Leeuw and Hawkins, 2017). In our experiences as symposium and workshop participants on panels about arts-based research over the past few years, we have noticed that such conversations are often bereft of reflexivity about the contradictory politics of the hierarchal, heteronormative and colonial spaces in which we produce this work. Panel and workshop participants on community theatre, yarn bombing, gardening as creative practice and participatory arts interventions meant to enliven public spaces, for example, rarely grapple with difficult intersectional discussions about white privilege, colonialism, citizenship status, ability, or class. And rarely do arts-based researchers expressly concern themselves with the vexing politics of representation, coloniality and race. We are, then, a very long way away from decolonizing geography: we are a long way from a discipline that does not (re)produce gendered, racialized, heteronormative, able-bodied spaces and privileging. Our creative work exists in, and dialogues with, these oppressive spaces and contexts. Should we not commit to political and ethical imperatives identified by queer, anti-colonial and Indigenous geographers with respect to Indigenous people and their lands? If creative work does not do this, is it at risk of supporting and perpetuating hierarchies and exclusions? What are the implications of this when thinking about creative methods and methodologies within the disciplinary expectations of academic geography?

THE POTENTIALITIES AND PITFALLS OF CRITICAL PERFORMANCE: MCLEAN AND TOBY SHARP As a feminist artist and researcher, I (McLean) engage in collective performance interventions to explore the contradictory politics of neoliberal policies that promote competition, consumption and individualism (2016, 2017). Working alongside other feminist artists, I examine the impacts of market-oriented arts-led regeneration policies on under-represented artists of colour, Indigenous artists, disabled artists and women artists. I also investigate how, within a context where even politicized art interventions are consumed as spectacle, feminist and queer artists can become ensnared in exclusionary gentrification dynamics. Performance art also, however, furnishes me with ways to explore feminist and queer ‘affinities and alliances’ (Nagar, 2014). It also provides artistic strategies to playfully and performatively re-work and resist hegemonic values. My work is inspired by a range of performance artists and theorists including King (2011: 2001) who write about ways critical

En/acting radical change  273 feminist and queer women artists engage in radical aesthetic and political praxis to continually resurface, again and again from the margins, to resist their erasure. Over the years, my forays into art-based practice have included performing Toby Sharp in activist cabarets in Toronto and Glasgow. Toby is a satirical character who draws attention to and satirizes the rise and influence of masculinist neoliberal planning policies (Parker, 2017). A composite character, Toby is based on the well-resourced, confident cadre of white male urban consultants I encountered working for five years as a community planner before I embarked on my doctoral research. Working in the urban planning field, I often collaborated with high-profile architects and planning consultants who (from my perspective) in somewhat cavalier ways or with self-referential motives, dropped in to disinvested public housing neighbourhoods. Their aims were to lead projects meant to ‘reinvent’ people’s homes, parks, schools and community centres into ‘higher-end’ condominiums, commercial spaces and cultural facilities amenable to middle class professionals. Replicating plans they shared via global consultancy networks (McLean, 2014), their calls for arts-oriented real estate development could only be read as ‘art-washing’ over the violent displacement of dynamic working class communities that were once home to new immigrant families, single parents, seniors and disabled residents. Between 2013 and 2014, I performed Toby in a series of TED Talk-like performances as part of the Dirty Plotz cabaret. Conceived of by Tigchelaar, Dirty Plotz explored the intersectional dimensions of gentrification, the everyday violence of settler colonialism, and the role of witchy, queer humour in forging feminist solidarities. In my bawdy performances, Toby presented a range of fictitious urban revitalization projects as a way to satirize the connections between entrepreneurialized cultural policies and the privatization of urban planning processes. The fake projects included the Rex-Rose Hoagie Hub, a participatory project that was part of the fictitious Toronto International Art Biennale. The Hoagie Hub project encouraged residents from the affluent Toronto neighbourhood of Rosedale to construct a large-scale sandwich with residents from the disinvested inner-suburban neighbourhood of Rexdale. A celebration of sandwich artistry and economic development, the project encouraged residents to collaboratively build a hoagie, as well as to purchase organic cheeses and meats from the project’s various corporate partners. As Toby enthusiastically recounted the Hoagie Hub, he described how the sandwich was eventually suspended by cables over Liberty Village, a ‘revitalized’ neighbourhood in a former Toronto brownfield site featuring yoga studios, high end coffee shops, securitized condominiums and greenspaces for young professionals (Catungal and Leslie, 2009). Behind him, an image of a phallus-like sandwich hovered over the city skyline as he proclaimed that the sandwich symbolized ‘the power of community’. With clownish and grotesque humour, Toby signalled the masculinist politics of urban consultancy expertise. The hovering hoagie was inspired by corporate-sponsored festivals animating Toronto with participatory arts interventions meant to market the city’s ethnic ‘diversity’, including the high-profile Luminato festival. Spearheaded by powerful private sector consultants to transform Toronto into ‘the most creative city in the world’

274  Handbook on the geographies of creativity (McLean, 2014), Luminato has featured a range of community-engaged activities meant to animate downtown public spaces and parks for the past decade. The primary goal of these activities is to encourage Toronto residents to take part in ‘re-inventing’ Toronto into a cultural hotspot for tourists and culture industries. For example, one year the festival partnered with President’s Choice, a brand of Loblaws Companies Limited, a large-scale Canadian food retailer, to host an enormous community buffet. Marketed as an interactive arts intervention meant to celebrate diversity the buffet was an opportunity for festival-goers to enjoy President’s Choice Memories of Marakesh couscous and Memories of Bangkok noodles in a trendy downtown neighbourhood. As part of the event, participants could even sign their own President’s Choice plate to share on a collective wall. While journalists have celebrated Luminato for transforming neighbourhoods into zones of interactive creativity attractive to tourists and arts enthusiasts, critical artists have fiercely critiqued the festival. Some charge that Luminato relies on an army of unpaid interns and celebrates the gentrification of disinvested public housing neighbourhoods. Critics also claim that it glosses over racialized inequalities in the city as it promotes ‘diversity’, what Catungal (2016) refers to as ‘the tendency for urban placemakers to create consumptive spectacles of race that reduce people of colour and their cultures to spices that can liven up boring urban space’. Moreover, critical artists charge that the festival signals the marketization of cultural policies: public arts funding is increasingly directed to public–private partnership-funded ‘arts carpet-bombing events’ (McLean, 2013) that make a big impression but do little to support artists and communities in any sustainable or even meaningful way. Performing Toby with Dirty Plotz at Buddies in Bad Times, a queer theatre company in Toronto, was a praxis-oriented research journey that deepened my understanding of the potential of cabaret for re-working and resisting neoliberal values (Cowan, 2012). In each cabaret, Toby performed alongside an eclectic mix of politicized feminist artists who veer from the comical to the serious. The line-up included Nari, an Egyptian spoken word artist whose fierce and rhythmic poetry calls out white liberal celebrations of multiculturalism circulating in mainstream Canadian politics; Tigchelaar’s Operation Snatch, a sex work collective that critiques the racialized violence of liberal feminist efforts to shut down strip clubs and massage parlours; and Canon Cook, an Indigenous artist whose performance-based work addresses the ongoing violence of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canadian cities. Together, our individual performances collectively uncovered and resisted racialized and settler colonial neoliberal logics. We also engaged in politicized feminist acts of disidentification (Muñoz, 1999), re-working and resisting majoritarian values, through performance. By working in concert with other feminist, queer and racialized artists beyond the academy, my creative work is also held accountable in ways I rarely find when working with other (primarily) academic practitioners – even if those academics are working with artists. Since 2014, I have performed Toby in Glasgow in activist cabarets including Fail Better, a politicized cabaret that showcases the work of under-represented working class artists, disabled artists and artists of colour. For Fail Better, the world-travelling

En/acting radical change  275 consultancy expert gave a talk about various fictitious projects he was spearheading including BAWBAG, a community–university partnership in Glasgow’s disinvested East Side neighbourhoods. Referencing Scottish slang for the ‘sack of skin that holds a man’s testes’, as a Glaswegian friend explained, this satirical initiative brought together banks, developers, the Home Office, IT companies and universities. With grotesque humour, Toby drew attention to the links between the policing of working class and racialized migrant communities within urban ‘regeneration’ schemes, the competitive masculinity of consultancy-led planning and the gender dimensions of think-tank ‘experts’. By performing Toby and attending cabarets like Fail Better, I have learned about the rich arts-activist scenes taking place in Glasgow. At Fail Better, performances have included spoken word artists and musicians contesting Dungavel, an inhumane detention centre located only a few hours from the city (McLean, 2017). The evenings have also featured disabled arts collectives critiquing the brutal violence of benefits sanctions and cuts to community services with music, performance and spoken word poetry. These collaborative and performative experiences have enriched my research on feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist arts activism in Glasgow and Toronto. Tensions have emerged, however, when I attempted to translate the work into writing within a neoliberal colonial university system. When I wrote about performing with Dirty Plotz, for instance, I in some ways played into knowledge hierarchies, rendering collectively produced work into sole-authored articles. I was also particularly uncomfortable profiting as an academic researcher by writing about the cabaret in a moment when Canada’s Bill C-36, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, criminalizes sex workers as it restricts access to where they might conduct business. Within this context, I risk reaping the ‘rewards of making edgy art’ with sex workers when ‘sex workers themselves remain endangered by ideologically driven policy’ (Tigchelaar, 2017). I also became entangled in colonial processes as I wrote about my Indigenous collaborators’ performance work that explores deeply personal trauma and resilience. Echoing Smith and Todd, my drag king practice became complicit in an extractive publishing regime that translates collectivist performances work into the scholarly ‘repertoire’ (Taylor, 2003) that upholds the myth of individual achievement. Moreover, some of my feminist colleagues, researchers who write about performance interventions, warn me to downplay Toby on my CV and in job applications. A few have warned me that he is ‘too weird’. They have even cautioned me not to be ‘too weird’ at conferences, and that I won’t be taken seriously as I describe flying phallus-like sandwiches, if I enact Toby literally foaming at the mouth as he describes his joy of innovation, of hubs and planetary knowledge leadership. Meanwhile, my colleagues and I are increasingly pressured to attend professional development workshops. One was led by private sector consultant (his claim to fame is coming up with a marketing strategy for a cat food company) about how to brand our work, compete with our knowledge and perform the ‘global research expert’ – nothing ‘weird’ here!

276  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Similarly, after moving to the UK, I discovered that my community-engaged arts practice has been a particularly valuable supplement within the university’s audit culture. Since moving there, my colleagues have pressured me to prove that my Toby performances with groups like Fail Better make an ‘impact’, or shift attitudes and make measurable change in Glasgow’s arts scenes. However, I am particularly uncomfortable instrumentalizing my soft-shoe drag performances within this accounting regime. How can I claim that I made an ‘impact’, or changed people’s perceptions, in a cabaret made up of a mix of politicized and collectively-produced projects? By stating that my comedic drag performances shift people’s perceptions, don’t I reproduce a highly individualized and masculinist understanding of artistic production and pedagogy that I critique in my performance interventions and research? Finally, I would not be honest if I didn’t note that rendering my queer-feminist performance, inspired by angry and politicized women artists into measurable ‘outcomes’ for my CV and for on-line citation systems, crushes my soul. I remain uneasy claiming that my Toby performance makes an impact in Glasgow’s activist-arts scenes. My hesitance stems from the fact that I have shared the stage with artists who are understandably distrustful of university researchers building cultural and symbolic capital off the unpaid and emotional labour of women artists, artists of colour, working class and disabled artists. As I write this, I think of a queer disabled poet who I met through Fail Better. In her performance poetry, she vividly recounts the harrowing experience of having her benefits sanctioned, an experience that left her unable to pay for access to heat and food. At other disability activist events, she has expressed her frustrations towards entrepreneurial arts funding bodies that consider her work ‘too radical’ to fund, and towards masculinist activists who have ignored her work as ‘too artsy’ and not radical enough. As a result, she continues to survive as an artist working from the margins. Living and being between worlds. Any claims to have made an ‘impact’ by performing on a stage with artists like her would be an act of institutional violence. I would reinforce deeply colonial and extractive dynamics that I strive to contest, not benefit from, through my work. Furthermore, from a relational feminist perspective, impact agendas that claim to make change for marginalized disabled, working class and deeply precarious residents and residents living in limbo without citizenship status have set up a system where academics profit directly from communities increasingly punished by the same neoliberal systems imposing corporate agendas on universities. Following Ahmed (2017), our work as critical scholars should be to consistently play the role of ‘killjoy’ within this particular conjuncture. As Nagar (2014: 148) contends, however, ‘if people sitting in unequal places will not come forward to build alliances then gulfs between our intellectual and material struggles will continue to widen’. Her insights echo feminist and queer anticolonial researchers who seek generative possibilities and opportunities for crafting alliances within the contradictory power dynamics of the neoliberal and colonial university. Her ongoing work, as well as the work of a rich network of feminist, queer and Indigenous scholars, reminds us that ethical, caring, reflexive, fraught and joyous collaborations are key. Todd captures this generative potential as she writes:

En/acting radical change  277 A focus on fostering strong relationships within academe and beyond, and an insistence on celebrating those relationships – rather than only celebrating singular voices – inherently disrupts the attempts of consumerist–capitalist academic structures to burn through our lives like brush fire . . . let’s make sure we also nurture and foster a culture of joyous and raucous co-celebration of the relationships which make our time here possible. (Todd, 2017)

For me, collaborating with Dirty Plotz artists has been such a raucous and joyous journey. As a university researcher, I have done my best to embody an ethic of co-creation: I check in with artist-collaborators, I send them drafts to read over and I seek out funding opportunities to materially support these collaborations. Inspired by feminist researchers, I also continually seek out possibilities for feminist, alternative impact that foregrounds the perspectives of marginalized communities in co-produced research. I also refuse, however, to translate some of the performance work I have engaged in, or write about the artists that I have encountered in my practice. Because their creative work speaks back at violent colonial neoliberal structures, I am deeply uncomfortable translating Indigenous, trans, and women of colour artists’ and disabled artists’ practice into measurable research ‘outcomes’. Although these are small interventions, such everyday ‘doings’ are part of ‘an active, emergent, and evolving praxis’ (Barker and Pickerill, 2017) that we try, fail at and try again as we negotiate exclusionary university structures. Refusal and disengagement can be powerful tools in creative and arts-based realms: perhaps if more geographers simply refused to entangle creative practices with academic spaces and expectations, creative practices would not risk being interpolated into metricizing schemes upon which neoliberal institutions so increasingly rely. Might there not be something radical and activist in simply not offering our creative practices, our work, up for institutional scrutiny?

STILL MESSY, STILL DIRTY: SOME UNEASY CREATIVE CONCLUSIONS We are reticent about conclusions generally: they suggest a tidy summary, a kind of wrapped-up cohered set of finalities. While we have presented a series of notes on overlaps between critical geographies and creative practices, we are loath to close with any set of summaries: in many ways, creative work in critical geographies is still too new a domain for such conclusiveness. Instead, we pose a series of questions with tentative provocations, which we hope many more generations of critical creative geographers will grapple with and expand upon. Perhaps one of the most prescient questions, which has been woven throughout this paper and that remains for us – and for many critical feminist queer creative practitioners and geographers – concerns an ethics of creative practice, what Audre Mitchell refers to as ‘lived experiential ethics’ (Mitchell, 2016). This is particularly sharp in realms of co-creation, especially when academics with non-precarious employment, academics with secure work, engage in co-creation with artists or mar-

278  Handbook on the geographies of creativity ginalized peoples in peripheral or fringe spaces and places. How, we also wonder, do we manage to work creatively and politically? Moreover, how do we respect and amplify the voice of underrepresented artists when we produce under ‘constant surveillance and production mania’ (ibid.) of a colonial university system that materially rewards individual researchers and ‘impactful’ scholars producing ‘measurable’ creative work. For us, creative researchers speaking back to the extractive university system offer us hope, humour and tactics for crafting collectivity. Todd (2017) writes: I reject the idea of the academic rock star and offer instead the academic rock arena, all blaring guitar and laser-light and fist-pumping glory as we revel in the power of our collective badassery . . . without these myriad relationships there could be no singular triumph. And without these relationships, the work we do would be pretty dull and dreary.

Finally, we want to hypothesize, to project into the future, where lively, vibrant and bad-ass creative geographies might be in five years, in ten years. Again, we have no answers: indeed, we suspect that definitive and clear answers are at odds with the potential of creativity and more in line with a closed, tactical approach to making and sharing knowledge that is exactly what we are suggesting critical practitioners in creative geography might want to avoid (see also de Leeuw et al., 2013). We want to leave things open-ended, unconfined, unfinished. We thus have a creative call, a song-word-work textual geography we can only hope lifts (even a teensy bit) off the page and into the world – a world we sincerely hope will see more social and spatial justice in the not too distant future. In keeping with creative practices themselves, and with our hearts and minds solidly turned toward and tuned into generations past and present (and future) of the hardscrabble-still-not-compete work of radicals, of feminists and rascals, of queer or differently-abled peoples, of those living racialized geographies and those living the marginalization of contemporary colonial violence, those ‘hacking’ the worlds they want to see (Cowan, 2017) we offer this this incompleteness, this not very much but what we have. Right now. We offer ourselves with our best intentions, knowing full well that’s just how that proverbial road to hell was paved. We offer our love our joy and our love of the killjoy. We offer our willingness to support and scream and also stay silent and refuse. We offer drag-kinging and queening and tricksters and poets of all shapes and sizes. We offer anecdotal work, storytelling, ‘weird work’, insights that might be dismissed as irrelevant. We offer the awkwardness, the sweat, the dirt and the things that elude all that seeks to professionalize us. We offer our willingness to be refused, to fail, to have our support turned down. To not be enough, to be too much. We offer ourselves, we offer to move the hell over, to shut up, to yell to perform to write to do nothing and love your nothing too. We offer that we can’t offer enough. That we can’t. And we sure can’t do it alone. We offer that especially. That we need you, we need each other. We offer that even if we’re trying to do what we can, and will do just that, we offer what we can. We offer to know, what we can, that we live in impossible places

En/acting radical change  279 and moments and we offer to try and understand. We offer all the offerings we have on offer, to laugh with you and cry with you and to be ignored by you when that’s what’s right for you. We offer our hope. Our hope that something wild and wily and irreducible and impossible is never bucked up lassoed down quantified reduced metricized made palatable and sanitized and churned into something offered not with care. We offer to care, we offer our care. We offer to recognize it’s political, yes it is, and it’s just not good enough to pretend we can side step that, so we offer too a sly sideways stepping, a little jig, a jot, an itsy-bitsy giggle, but we’re still roaring angry too, and we offer we offer we offer we hope, please, please don’t try to place the creative too particularly, don’t try to map it too carefully, too clearly, don’t. We offer. This. In hope.

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En/acting radical change  281 Perl, J. (2014), ‘Liberals are killing art: How the left became obsessed with ideology over beauty’, The New Republic, accessed 9 February 2019 at https://​newrepublic​.com/​article/​ 118958/​liberals​-are​-killing​-art​-insisting​-its​-always​-political. Pulido, L., L. Barraclough and W. Cheng (2012), A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA: University of California Press. Simpson, L.B. (2017), As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minneapolis Press. Sundberg, J. (2014), ‘Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies’, Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33–47. Taylor, D. (2003), The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press. Tigchelaar, A. (2014), ‘The creative ass class’, in M.-P. Boucher, J.-M. Dufresne, G. Melgar and J.-F. Prost (eds), Heteropolis, Montreal, Canada: Adaptive Actions. Tigchelaar, A. (2017), ‘Sex worker resistance in the neoliberal creative city: An auto/ethnography’, paper for HENV 650, Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University. Todd, Z. (2017), ‘Tending tenderness and disrupting the myth of academic rock stars’, accessed 11 December 2017 at https://​zoestodd​.com/​2017/​07/​20/​tending​-tenderness​-and​ -disrupting​-the​-myth​-of​-academic​-rock​-stars/​. Tuck, E. and W. Yang (2012), ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1), 1–40. Ustundag, E and C. Donovan (2017), ‘Graphic narratives and nomadic subjectivities: Critical geographies of trauma’, Studies in Social Justice, 11 (2), 221–37.

17. Performing alterity: creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan

Tactics in creative practice intervening with the contemporary cultural politics are often framed by dominant forces of the invincible other. Engaging with the postcolonial context of Hong Kong (hereafter HK), I examine how under the hybrid logic of capitalist reproduction and semi-authoritarian governance, creative agents in civic struggles engage with ordinary livelihoods in and affective identifications with the home city. Amid neoliberalist and postcolonial changes, locals on the ground make do and drift along with variedly entangled routes to discover, position and fashion themselves as civic subjects confronting the hegemonic order set by the power bloc governing the place after 1997, when HK’s colonial rule officially ended with the establishment of the Special Administrative Region (SAR) under the People’s Republic of China. Unpacking layers of contestation and negotiation in critical civic practices as a modality of change, I ask how people’s creative moves to dissent answer the problematics of their dialogically constituted self. Drawing on several instances of collective HK experience emerging from recent civic activism, I locate the practice of alterity in the self’s performative struggles for alternative cultural-political action. These publicly mediated identity struggles, as they also turned out to be, all involve counter-hegemonic intervention against state-led strategies of one-dimensional nation-building and political encroachment on people’s freedom and autonomy in making their livelihoods. With this focus, I discuss tactics in the civic-creative process registering what HK people want through four exemplary cases of engagement in local cultural politics.

HONG KONG SPIDIE, OCCUPYING LION ROCK During the 2014 Umbrella Movement (UM) a group of young rock climbers who called themselves the Hong Kong Spidie (香港蜘蛛仔) hung a huge banner off the peak of Lion Rock in the early morning of 23 October. According to their own account (Hong Kong Spidie, 2014b): Today, a group of climbing enthusiasts, namely The Hong Kong Spidie, unfurled a 6m × 28m banner on the top of the Lion Rock. Symbolizing the toughness and persistence spirit of Hong Kong people, the Lion Rock is a well-known local hill located in Kowloon.

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Creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics  283 Through this action, The Hong Kong Spidie aims to redefine the beauty of the ‘Hong Kong spirit’ not merely as manifested in the city’s economic growth but in the recent Umbrella Movement demands for democracy and universal suffrage.

The three minute video captures at close range and in real time detailed moves by the anonymous climbers as they physically perform the amazing act off the cliff of Lion Rock, declaring to the world through five huge characters ‘I-Want-Genuine -Universal-Suffrage’ (我要真普選), the slogan and goal of HK’s democratic movement. The familiar music and lyrics of the rock group Beyond’s song ‘Wide Sea and Open Sky’ conveys powerfully the love of freedom up on the local hill with climbers overlooking the city below. On the day of its release on YouTube, the sociopolitical condition and cultural situation articulated by the video was dire, with the UM in full action. The Lion Rock protest act was therefore truly touching. In ‘Hong Kong Liminal: Situation as Method’, Meaghan Morris (2017: 27) suggests that the Spidie’s athletic act of unfurling the banner was itself a rare and remarkable work of political performance act; visible for a day over much of the city before it was taken down by the government, the banner’s vertical yellow form, umbrella logo and black characters affirming ‘I Want Genuine Universal Suffrage’ rapidly spread.

Indeed, the stunning image of the banner stuck to the top of Lion Rock made significant impressions on spectators (cross-border web-browsers) from all walks of life. The experience was deeply moving when one saw the yellow umbrella logo carrying the people’s demand to the world from the signature hill-top. As the video ends, the five-character banner attached to the ‘lion’ head signifying the can-do HK spirit touches the hearts profusely. This image has since become monumentalized in the city’s imaginary, despite police removal of the banner soon after the Spidie’s unpredictable action. The anonymous climber-protestors were never identified or arrested, but their marvellous intervention beautifully performed the will and sentiment of the time. In Roger Silverstone’s (1999) succinct account of the complex work of mediation in contemporary culture: ‘Experience is constructed through these webs of meaning, the texts and discourses of the everyday, and experience in turn is dependent on our participation . . . in the performative and in performance’ (ibid.: 70). In this light, the banner enunciation has created refreshing moments for people to communicate about UM. It spoke the plain commoner’s language but unfolded layers of meaning and spaces of imagination through performative articulation. Re-invented in such receptions was an immensely emotional engagement mediated by effective social and personal identifications, precipitating an inexplicable sympathy and urge for collective action. Performed for us and with us, the Spidie’s protest words acted with unthinkable momentum; thus, ‘in making manifest what we feel or think we create the reflexive basis for changing our feelings and thoughts because of the constitutive character of expressive speech’ (Negus and Pickering, 2004: 29). Through embodiment of a collective desire, the mountaineering performance enacted an endless array of spontaneously dialogic forms of creatively mediated expression. The

284  Handbook on the geographies of creativity cultural-political ramification of the banner as viewed off the Lion Rock linked the UM to its reiterative act of ‘hanging’. Immediately intervening, the protest climbers moved us very close to the cause, determination and affective anchor that had driven them to undertaking the incredible action. Never in HK history has the consensus of the people been so aesthetically publicized in the open. With superb connectivity, the Spidie have innovated a most endearing form of political community, as ordinary surfers saw in energized close-ups how their will could be freely, firmly and unashamedly shared across domestic, cultural and geographical borders, in no time. Amid an atmosphere of uncertainty, risk and danger, the Spidie uptakes during the UM were captivating and creative in their performance. The semiotic signification of social emotions and personal aspirations was lived, at street and domestic level alike, with liberating bodily engagement, as much on the mobile screen as in the holding environment of Mongkok, now imaginable anew in a different spirit of Lion Rock.1 Echoing the 1970s spirit, the Hong Kong Spidie re-invented the feel of contemporary activism: ‘Today we are occupying Lion Rock’. Thus a lone climber dressed as Spiderman presented his fellow citizens with a commoner’s manifesto: We are an average group of Hong Kong people. After seeing students camping out, construction workers building bamboo barricades, cars driving slow in protest, we thought that with what we’re good at, we’d climb in support of the umbrella movement. Some days ago, CY [Leung, the Chief Executive] said if there’s civil nomination the election system would lean in favour of the poor. In fact, we think that that won’t be such a bad idea! So, we decided to fight for the rights of people under the Lion Rock – including myself – from its top . . . The CE only cares about the rich living on Victoria Peak. Why would they care about the poor living under Lion Rock like you and me? We believe the Lion Rock spirit isn’t just about money; it shouldn’t be apolitical either! Now people are fighting in different sites for universal suffrage all over Hong Kong, with much perseverance. No doubt, this persistence in the uphill battle against injustice, this strength in face of obstacles, is the true fighting spirit of the Lion Rock. (Hong Kong Spidie, 2014a [my translation])

Here the Spidie have not so much reasserted the conservative HK values as re-invoked the grassroot spirit of the underclass uttering in unison. On this everyman’s political performance, the uptakes and supportive messages left online are unmistakable. Most poignantly encouraging is the shared communal pride in the otherwise isolated Lion Rock act: ‘You guys have marked history today’, ‘I salute you’, ‘REAL HONG KONG PEOPLE’, ‘Most beautiful work of our quest for democracy’, or ‘Comparable to the Statute of Democracy erected at Tiananmen Square by university students in Beijing in 1989 amid their historic occupy acts’. In performing the alterity of status quo, the unknown heroes have returned people to ordinary human decency, dignity and destiny, fundamentals that still occupy the core of HK’s spirit even when the heroic acts are no longer visible. In full visibility, creativity has taken the form of what Negus and Pickering (2004: 24) call ‘an act of conferral’ in its norm-breaking ‘moment of inventiveness’. Embodying the commoner’s will to protest, the Spidie’s courageous acts are overwhelmingly communicative. They suggest how creativity as human expression is inseparable from the form of its communication as action, and action as commu-

Creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics  285 nication. The compressed act of dissenting public conferral they invoked brought about spellbinding impact, even to people who were not at all involved with local politics. For an imaginable future, the Spidie’s creative action epitomizes the lived experiences and desires of people who care about the lost, fighting spirit of the Lion Rock. The latter’s uncanny alterity, as it were, was re-invented in this supra-mediated performance, with the miraculous banner engaging the spectator as an end, creating a vivid, permanent call for action. In this intervention we witness how political performativity works from street to screen and back to the street, as one engages affectively with creative action as ‘a kind of mediation’ (Silverstone, 1999: 71). Thus, during the UM, with creative affectivity the Spidie’s doubly accentuated performance conferred on the social imaginary for status quo an extraordinary ‘sensuousness for its own sake, perception for its own sake’ (Reckwitz, 2017: 11).

BENNY TAI, THE PERSISTENT FIGHTER FOR DEMOCRACY If the Spidie’s determination, courage and imagination that drove their fantastic act of protest were socially and affectively powerful beyond ideology, then our next creative agent demonstrates an even stronger commitment and perseverance, albeit with controversial receptions, in his fight for democracy in HK. He is the well-known democracy advocate and civil activist Benny Tai, the Hong Kong University law professor who is the initiator and mastermind of the 2013–14 Occupy Central with Love and Peace (hereafter OCLP) movement as well as other campaigns that followed. Since his first Occupy Central proposal in January 2013 to fight for universal suffrage, Tai’s single-target activism has left significant marks in history and continued to generate impact in HK’s democratic movement. His primary aim, genuine universal suffrage, takes root in the promise made under the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ political design. For obvious reasons, due to the impact of OCPL/UM, Tai is now regarded by both HK and Beijing authorities as ‘anti-China’. Not yet imprisoned, he has expressed his readiness to go to prison for his acts of civil disobedience. Four years since the crackdown of UM (September–December 2014), Tai’s personal fate – to be marked by the length of imprisonment he will soon receive – is taken as a barometer of the degree of freedom left in the SAR. With the overtones of a political idealist and social innovator, Tai reasoned that civil disobedience was the radical but productive way for HK people to ‘achieve justice through breaking the law’ and engaged himself actively in debates on the legality of the OCLP protest (Yuen, 2015: 50–52). When put to practice in mid-2014, this unprecedented, massive project of social dissent which Tai epitomizes drove the ruling establishment to strong and overt reactions. For never had the order of stability and status quo held deeply ‘at the forefront of the minds of the Chinese leadership’ (Chan, 2014: 578) been put to such challenge.2 Encouraged by the termination of British colonial rule, like many HK people Tai was once optimistic about the SAR achieving universal suffrage. Twenty years after the 1997 handover, despite the

286  Handbook on the geographies of creativity invincible new sovereign at the helm, he believed that time was ripe for people to think, strategize and act for the future they wanted. He realized that the rise of China in the preceding decade meant Hong Kongers should be ready to pay higher prices for democracy. As quasi-authoritarianism set in since 2012, the scale and difficulty of HK’s democratic struggle must be measured against China’s growing global power and influence. Tai is genuine in his belief that high price must be paid if HKSAR is to win democracy under China. He is ready to take the lead as a civic advocate to overcome any obstacles his home-city faces. In taking risks, Tai saw and still sees real possibilities. For he remains convinced that democratic self-governance is embedded in the very design and letters of the Basic Law, considered to be HK’s mini-constitution. I intend to probe into the aesthetic and cultural-political implications of this conviction and activism. Jacques Rancière (2000 [2004]: 8) is known for taking aesthetic practices to mean broadly the ‘ways of doing and making’. I borrow this insight to examine the range of activism embodied in Tai’s recent endeavours as a democracy fighter. Following Rancière (ibid.) I share the perspective of an ‘aesthetics’ operating ‘at the core of politics’, though this ‘should not be understood as the perverse commandeering of politics by a will to art, [or] by a consideration of the people qua work of art’. Instead, I argue that Tai’s civic projects might be taken qua what Rancière (ibid.) calls ‘intervention’, which affects the cultural-political ‘distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationship they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility’. Regarding the state of political visibility in HK’s democratic struggle, Tai’s pioneering vision and total commitment has been crucial in steering the democratic movement in the last five years. For despite the apparent failure of OCLP and the resultant experience of disillusionment and despair widespread among HK people in the post OCLP/UM years, what the civic activism Tai has created for the three-decade-long HK democratic movement is a turning point with new orientations. By invoking immensely powerful social energies he allowed ordinary HK people, activists and non-activists alike, to re-appreciate for themselves the moral needs of and affective calls for democratic movement as a dissent movement (Cheung, 2017). Thus, OCLP and the subsequent projects Tai has single-handedly brought to the forefront of the city’s fight for a democratic future serve to re-orient politics ‘around what is seen and what can be said about it’ (Rancière, 2000 [2004]: 8). Through tireless discursive persuasions and meticulous civic engagements (during and between protests), Tai alone, and no one else, was able to lead people to ask what they could do for HK as ordinary citizens given the hugely unjust balance between authoritarian power and popular mandate (Chan, 2014: 572) institutionalized in the postcolony. Significantly, his work involves the lasting register of emotions in civic actions and public spheres, generating the affective volume OCPL/UM has retained in multiple forms since its disorienting closure. Therein lies the politics of aesthetics of Tai’s radical civic interventions. Like boxers, democratic fighters must through experience learn to handle failures and enhance their capacities before they can win. Tai might well have ‘underemphasized the disparity between the “one country” and the “two systems” in his analysis’ (Cheung, 2017: 392), but the two-systems perspective he

Creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics  287 foregrounds did win the hearts and minds of ordinary, fair-minded people at a time when ennui began to spread everywhere in HK. For sure, China has in recent years taken back her word on the promised ‘high degree of autonomy’ for the SAR. Nonetheless, Tai sees the dynamic of opportunities and dangers at the crossroads HK faces. These are in turn transformed by the courage, wisdom and ability the man mustered to make the moral call and the political-aesthetic appeal for the people to dissent (Cheung, 2017: 388, 391), resulting in specific programmes of counter-hegemonic projects at various stages of the movement. In his advocacy for a peaceful movement, OCPL for Tai was ‘intended to be the last resort’, following rounds of ‘civil discourse on various political models’ at the end of which civic participants ‘would make an informed choice of one of the models proposed by the community’ (Chan, 2014: 574–5). Tai led the collectively performed protest to demonstrate that ordinary citizens who cared to fight for democracy could envision what is possible, instead of living with the given scenarios of political development. Thus, in June 2014, 800 000 people turned out to vote on the Chief Executive election models in the civil referendum Tai initiated, an admirable outcome considering that it was conducted solely with community efforts and resources. Then, with the 79 Occupy days, a collective, energizing social life was ‘performed’ by over one million people who had in one way or another visited the occupied sites and supported the UM despite its doomed ‘failure’. Here we witness the social performance of political and affective engagement as a grand act registering what Silverstone (1999: 71) would call the lived ‘dimension of the social as subjunctive’. People from all walks of life taking over the streets in Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mongkok shared the transformed, re-invented domestic space there as if to compensate for the home-space they felt they were losing grip of (Abbas, 2017). Politics here, indeed, revolves ‘around the properties of space and the possibilities of time’ (Rancière, 2000 [2004]: 8) as OCLP/UM participants experienced their civic struggle individually and collectively. In that unique protest performativity, ‘daily played out both in front of, and beyond the reach of, television cameras and the notebooks of journalists, we [participants and spectators alike] put our own stamp on things’ (Silverstone, 1999: 74). Tai’s civic intervention sets off the unpredictable subjunctive work of collective bodily protest, evoking experiential, hence aesthetic, action in the greatest social protest HK has seen. The possibility for what would pass for the civic body in UM was created in public space among ordinary Hong Kongers much like the Spidie and their interlocutors; strangers now sharing an imagination for the social as they had never experienced before. None of these would have been possible without the initial advocacy and the persistent execution of Tai’s non-political politics, to borrow Havel’s phrase. As politics for HK before 2014 has been evolving progressively, Tai’s civic activism is anchored in his subtle style of leadership. I argue that his non-conventional advocacy of engagement underscores a politics of aesthetics, which is ultimately about ‘who has the ability to see and the talent to speak’ (Rancière, 2000 [2004]: 8). As a corollary, civic activism brings acts of resistance but also innovative sense-activities culminating in an assemblage of social affects. In short, amid the trends of hyper-mediation we live

288  Handbook on the geographies of creativity by, creativity is contextually ‘as much a decision about and an attitude toward life as it is a matter of ability’, in Robert Sternberg’s (2003: 98) pertinent analysis. Looking at the decision-making process, he points out that to invoke creativity the agent concerned must take the initiative to do something: ‘To be creative, one must first decide to generate new ideas, analyse these ideas, and sell the ideas to others’, for ‘creative people seek opposition, in that they decide to think in ways that countervail how others think’ (Sternberg, 2003: 95–7). We know that, in democratic movement, the crucial factors are none other than determination, perseverance and commitment. The HK case is no different in this regard. As a civic fighter who upholds non-violence in his struggles, Tai’s political intervention consists in the very embodiment of creativity in his readiness and effectiveness as a civic leader to ‘decide to overcome obstacles [and] take sensible risks’, to emulate Sternberg (2003: 97). Vision, strategy, pragmatism and high principles are ingredients of his civic embodiment. Not only are Tai’s endeavours for civil disobedience instrumental in shaping and propelling the OCLP, but his creative, aesthetic (in Rancière’s sense) intervention to HK’s road for democracy is further enhanced by the projects he introduced after the UM: namely, Project Thunderstorm (雷動計劃) and Project Fung-wan (風雲計劃). The 2015 District Council (DC) election was ‘held in a highly divided HK’ (Lam, 2017: 363); it provided an opportunity for voters to show their support or otherwise for the OCLP/UM. In the Fung-wan endeavour he initiated right after the ‘failed’ protest movement, amid a widespread sense of disillusionment and despair Tai attempted without much political support among the democratic camp to change people’s perception of the DC election, so that more voters would take it as a useful avenue to advance democracy. To date, Tai remains singularly convinced that DC can become the collective platform for achieving better representation in the Legislative Council and Election Committee (for Chief Executive selection).3 The HK people must begin to think differently and re-imagine possibilities. To be forward-looking, they should not relinquish any thoughts or attempts to realize democracy by nurturing the collective consciousness for self-determination, and to develop a future-oriented vision with that will.4 More supporters of the democratic movement have since shared this minority view first advocated by Tai publicly through his discourse and action in the aftermath of UM. Having learnt from the problems encountered in the last project Thunderstorm of 2016, Tai wanted to address practical obstacles at all levels of election; he proceeded to identify and focus on the 11 per cent of votes which disappeared by comparing DC with Legislative Council election outcomes.5 He reckoned that if democrats could work together to close that gap of votes in their favour, the chance for a first democratic control in the establishment is possible. His task is to debunk the common belief about DC: that there is no choice of democratic candidates, no chance for democrats to win more seats because they handle trivialities, and that democrats’ victory is impossible due to the small constituencies involved. Tai’s bottom-up approach is rational and principled, his strategic thinking creative, and his oppositional tactics meticulous but provocative. The man has been working non-stop for the past two years to debunk the myth that DC has little to do with democracy. His persistently creative civic activism results in the gradual

Creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics  289 re-distribution of civic sensibility6 and with it the responsibility to work against the dominant forces in multiple levels of institutional orthodoxy. Advocating against the grain, he is the first if not the sole individual to argue unceasingly that, given its single-seat, single-vote system, DC election is not useless, and that indeed fighting to win there would be crucial for HK’s democratic outlook. His efforts are innovatively but pragmatically focused: to get the vanished votes out against the pro-establishment camp in the 2019 DC election.7 Sternberg (2003: 91) calls such a persistent calculation of a far-sighted and complex social project part of a strategic ‘investment’ which ‘concerns the decision to be creative’: based on the notion that creative people decide to buy low and sell high in the world of ideas – that is, they generate ideas that tend to defy the crowd (but low), and then, when they have persuaded many people of the value of the ideas, they move on.

Accordingly, ‘creativity requires a confluence of six distinct but interrelated resources: intellectual abilities, knowledge, styles of thinking, personality, motivation, and environment’ (Sternberg, 2003: 94). These are qualities one would readily find in Tai, who, as soon as he recovered from the depression after the UM, began to indulge himself in the analysis of election scenarios and voter turnouts and soon took up at no one’s request the job of advocating a collective pan-democratic plan to fight the next DC election in 2019. He is convinced that this is the way out of the current deadlock, and that there is enough political space for democrats to win in the 400-plus directly-elected local seats. While, despite their advocacy of localism, the so-called Umbrella soldiers (novice candidates without previous political experience) had won a significant proportion of votes in the post-UM elections (Lam, 2017: 367), Tai believes that mainstream democrats should work with them to win the collective battle against the establishment in 2019. The younger, more UM-energized/ disillusioned generation are also his targets of persuasion, both as potential DC candidates and voters. Tai appears to be persistently hopeful against all odds, wanting always to ‘to dream the impossible dream’. Targeting Legislative Council election in 2020, Election Committee election in 2021 and the Chief Executive election of 2022, he advocates on a weekly basis that a democratic DC control will allow HK to make changes at the grassroot levels and alter political configurations from bottom up. Regardless of chance, these are the only feasible options for the people to gain sufficient bargaining power and experience as players in their fight for better governance and self-rule! We might all be dreaming, but in Tai’s projects we are left with this one small, concrete choice and hope toward democratic advancement under the present hegemony. Much like Spidie on top of the Lion Rock, he wants to believe that down on the ground HK people deserve this much for their political right, dignity and option.

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JOHNNIE TO, DINNER WITH MASTER TO Social creativity is needed for HK people who today find themselves lost for options amid a vacuum of hope. World-renowned filmmaker Johnnie To (2017b) made the promotional video Dinner with Master To in March 2017 for former Financial Secretary John Tsang’s campaign in the last HK Chief Executive election. Amid an overall atmosphere of depression, tendencies of societal deadlock and imminent prosecutions of UM participants, the 2017 election was taken as the ‘political litmus test’ for people’s support of the OC movement and its continuation (Lam, 2017: 355, 363). What is common in the ventures by Hong Kong Spidie and Benny Tai are likewise found in the Tsang-To alignment. Though the election in question is undemocratic, and Tsang is not a politician with bottom-up vision or popular mandate, his image as an amicable Hong Konger had allowed him to gain popularity because the ordinary folks were fed up with the power game controlled by the pro-establishment camp under Beijing’s puppetry. In a series of moves to win people over despite the small-circle election, the 4-minute video ‘Johnnie To x John Tsang’ (To, 2017a) published earlier in the campaign opens with the director’s praise for Tsang’s appreciation of the local film culture. Tsang’s care for emergent directors who made films such as Weeds on Fire (Stevefat, 2016) and Mad World (Chun Wong, 2016) had impressed To, who, as his audience would know, has a strong touch with local people and their way of life. In the solo video, the well-respected filmmaker addresses them with inspiring thoughts about Tsang: It’s time to do something. Having lived here the past 62 years I feel I must say something for Hong Kong. When no one speaks the truth, when you don’t come out to say what’s right, I just fear that I might regret. Why do I support John Tsang? I trust him. He won’t say things that hurt anyone. He won’t inflame the situation at hand, for fights are really damaging today leaving us in total disorientation. If Hong Kong were a movie, we are only midway in the plot [from 1997 through 2017 to 2047]. Expect some turn of events; we’ll see changes, turning points. The upcoming 20–30 years are decisive. In the next decade we’ll experience a critical time; we’d now need to rest and recuperate.’ (To, 2017a [My translation])

In this tactical filmic analogy, To presents himself openly, sincerely and unprecedentedly, sharing his cultural-political take on the lived predicament: I wish to see a harmonious HK in future and hope that no one’ll have to face any of the struggles that we’ve experienced. For the remaining 30 years we must re-build HK – the one we grew up dreaming of, a city with hope! I have faith in Mr Tsang for this . . . [In closure, To leans forwards, looking into camera] Mr Tsang, winning or losing is not important. For me, representing the voice of HK people you’ve already won! (To, 2017a)

Movie-goers would instantly recognize this last line as the motif in To’s philosophical film Throw Down (2004), which offers meditations on mundane life choices

Creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics  291 through stories of modern-day judo fighters in HK. To’s screen endeavours are never didactic; but beyond film the creative practice at hand is probably the first occasion when he decides to speak out as a man of cultural politics. In anticipation of the Chief Executive election on 26 March 2017, Tsang was seen again three days before in the video Dinner with Master To walking with To down a local wet market to buy food for the dinner they were going to cook and show (To, 2017b). Not only does To play the local at marketplace, but back in the domestic kitchen the two celebrities also prepare dinner on camera. As she introduces the video with the crisp opening ‘Give the people of Hong Kong a chance’, former TV anchor Cheung Po-Wah preludes the dinner with the saying ‘To govern a country is to cook a meal’. Casual conversation between the two men in aprons sets the tone with emphasis on Tsang’s popular sensitivity as a man of feeling. Then as the guests arrive, around the table one finds gathered a spectrum of HK people. Quickly, after dinner, the real conversations began with the question of trust.8 The exchange served to reiterate Tsang as the local man who speaks the language of the people and stays close to their pulse. With Trust, Unity and Hope as campaign keywords, Tsang (2017) took the election to be critical for HK, though behind the scene he would know he could not win. Indeed, everyone knows that ‘[t]hose who are in power have no popular mandate, and those who have a popular mandate have no power’ (Chan, 2014: 572). The dinner ends as the group sing Sam Hui’s classic Cantopop song (1976) ‘Voice of the Sojourners’ with Tsang at the guitar. To had selected the song for the occasion as he believed it would best capture the local flavour and social sentiment. (This is according to the dinner guest Yau Ching-yuen of the online 852 Post, who also disclosed that To had made use of eight cameras and devoted much effort into editing the 3.5-hour film of the dinner into the 15-minute 45-second video for internet.9) Tuning into the nostalgic HK mood, the film fades away with its cityscape. And with that the social affectivity generated registers what words, lyrics or images cannot. Believing that the place people call home deserves a better future, To reiterates, ‘Mr Tsang, in my mind, you have already won’ (To, 2017b). This is where performativity interfaces with tactics of discursive intervention. Moments like this offer an understanding of the space and work of creativity whereby people’s tactical moves to dissent answer the problematics of their fight for an alternative. Under hegemony, the discursive self thus invoked became active, albeit in a moment of transience, through performative struggle for another – impossible – space of imagination. Whatever one thinks of Tsang, To, Tai or the Spidie’s appeals, despite the divergent political or ideological takes, the local people could imagine their collective, hopeless ‘life situation’ broken. They would find their urge for resistance given voice in those accentuated, dialogic acts. Not surprisingly, web-surfers lost in HK’s dire situation would involuntarily transpose their sense of anxiety and disorientation to the affectively generated trust they found in the civic agents’ creative endeavours. Knowing that they have no ballots in hand, locals on the ground drifted along with some doomed campaign or movement in confronting the hegemonic status quo with which they could do very little. Their enthusiasm is inter-played with the empathy they find in the agent advocating certain transient acts. For Tsang,

292  Handbook on the geographies of creativity supporters did turn out in the thousands in the fortnight leading up to the ‘election’ day, on Facebook, in shopping centres around town, and at a public space in Central. The indulgent surfers-citizens making their voice heard for Tsang had surprised all, including themselves. This spontaneous upsurge of affective identification, captured already in the critical-creative moves by To, Spidie and all the UM ‘heroes’, finds the local people committed to upholding the pro-HK experience they deem coterminous with the familiar faces and tunes they treasure in culture. This exemplary sort of ordinary creativity, as Negus and Pickering (2004: 30) put it, is ‘central to this process in producing a state of consciousness which is active, open and alert to feeling, perception and thought’. Being a creative master himself, To’s civic intervention helped propel the popular empowerment and generation of hope where there had been none for the ordinary folks. As such the counter-hegemonic intervention manages ‘to move the field to a different, as-yet-unreached starting point and then to move from that point. The propulsion is thus from a new starting point in a direction that is different from that the field previously has pursued’ (Sternberg, 2003: 103). In this light, the Tsang-To video creativity appealed significantly to the common people whose hearts and minds were won miraculously in the field of popular imagination. For a habitat deemed not only liveable but hopeful, the cultural act of mediation successfully articulated to the people’s desire for (the lost) trust, unity and hope. In his analysis of creative practice, Sternberg (2003: 100) suggests that strategic propulsion also underscores the role of leadership: A creative contribution represents an attempt to propel a field from wherever it is to wherever the creator believes the field should go. Thus, creativity is by its nature propulsion. It moves a field from some point to another. It also always represents a decision to exercise leadership. The creator tries to bring others to a particular point in the multidimensional creative space. The attempt may or may not succeed.

Tsang did not win the race for HK’s top position, to nobody’s surprise; but as To’s video suggests, when lies prevail every compatible political attempt to stand by truth and integrity is itself an act of hope. In that light, any creative exercise of leadership in the struggle for a common will against despair is a rarity, qua acts of resistance. Not something anyone could take for granted, the incidental Tsang-To collaboration is an exemplary case of creative intervention qualifying as ‘re-initiation’, in which: a field or subfield . . . exhaust[s] itself moving in the direction that it is moving. But rather than suggesting that the field or subfield move in a different direction from where it is . . . the contributor suggests moving in a different direction from a different point. (Sternberg, 2003: 112)

Supporting Tsang’s impermanent charisma as political leader, To came out to ask that people be truthful in questioning the status quo and bold enough to re-orientate their vision. Shifting positions from a starting point with alternative assumptions about HK, the cultural-political re-initiation propelled by Tsang’s campaign may

Creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics  293 still work despite its failure. Hence, creativity could well re-initiate people to dream of ‘moving in a different direction from a different point’ (Sternberg, 2003: 101), of some ‘major paradigm shift’ (ibid.: 112). In this ostensibly straightforward move, To’s tactical intervention applies to ‘sensuous acts distinct from end-oriented action, acts that affect us emotionally, touch us and alter our moods’. For affects are ‘corporeal intensities of stimulation or excitement’ (Reckwitz, 2017: 12); and the powerless ordinary people tended to want to remain indulgent in some dreamlike state as in the last weeks of Tsang’s uncanny campaign, struggling in full steam with the hegemonic other. This latter that people desire to fight was unmistakable: the surrogate picked by Beijing to be HK’s head following the horrific rule under C.Y. Leung. The 2017 election was merely one last act to demonstrate how One Country, Two Systems cannot work. For dreamers, winning the election was out of the question as Tsang was not Beijing’s chosen puppet. The issue was precisely that he could command the trust of HK people. ‘Politics is the enacting of a disruption in the parcelling out of allocated space, time and sense . . . Central to this is a description of the social that is fundamentally aesthetic’ (Rancière, 2000 [2004] cited in Highmore, 2001: 47). What we do see in HK politics are ‘aesthetic’ endeavours by rather conservative ‘dreamers’ like Tsang-To who expanded the field of creative intervention, however mild, in facilitating critical engagement with hegemony through a multiplicity of spaces beyond the power-bloc, thus shaping subjectivities in the process.

CONNIE LO, VANISHED ARCHIVES In shaping these alternative subjectivities, Chantal Mouffe’s (2013) ‘counter-hegemonic interventions’ constitute practices that ‘subvert the existing configuration of power’. Cultural practitioners who engender spaces of resistance through their creative efforts act as ‘organic intellectuals’ (ibid.: 104–5). Veteran journalist Connie Yan-wai Lo is one such organic intellectual whose contribution is her pioneering documentary Vanished Archives (Lo, 2017a; 2018), a courageous work attempting to tell an investigatory story about the notorious pro-Cultural Revolution 1967 riots in HK. In May 1967, at the peak of Chinese Cultural Revolution, the ‘leftist’ (Maoist) groups in HK launched an aggressive campaign spreading random violence among the local population. In eight months, a total of 8074 real and fake home-made bombs were planted in all corners of neighbourhoods, resulting in 51 deaths, 830 injuries and 2077 sentences for imprisonment. It was the most violent social unrest in HK since the Second World War. The causes and records of the 1967 violence were never reviewed or made known to the public. There is no mention of it in the history books, and just a casual note in the historical museum (Hui and Chan, 2017). The late historian John Young (1994) was pioneering in his insight that local HK identity emerged from the devastating disturbances of 1967 in light of people’s effectively ‘passive resistance to the Red menace’ as well as the historical irony that ‘for the first

294  Handbook on the geographies of creativity time in Hong Kong’s recent history, the inhabitants believed that the British-HK government was “their” government’ (ibid.: 140). Fifty years later, the enigma of history is still unresolved, though it has aroused critical interest by historians, archivists and journalists like Lo. Since 2012, Lo has made efforts single-handedly to research into the riots. This resulted in the documentary film, on which Lo spent four years thinking ‘I cannot tolerate lies’ (Hui and Chan, 2017). In September 2012, when she first met the elderly ‘young prisoners’ (teenage ‘YPs’ when imprisoned amid the 1967 riots), they were presented to her as ‘heroes’ of anti-British colonialism (Lo, 2017c). Intuitively she wanted to tell their stories in counteracting colonial violence during that lost time of history. A journalist with over 30 years of experience, Lo spent eight months in 2013 immersed in the Hong Kong Public Records trying to locate anything and everything on the riots. She simply wanted to know what happened that year. To her surprise, all she could find after 50 keyword entries (on ‘1967 riots’, ‘disturbances’, and so on) into the official search engine was a 21-second video clip of a confrontation (without conflict) between the protesting crowd and the police. According to the voice-over in that clip: ‘1967 was the busiest year for the Hong Kong Police’ (Hui and Chan, 2017). As no other images or documents were found in the entire archives about 1967, the vanished archives became the motivation for her incessant search for truth (Lo, 2017c). Determined to let history re-surface, Lo dug into newspapers and interviewed eye-witnesses; after going through 40 record files, she was certain that what was missing constituted the most crucial part of the archives. If 1964, 1965, 1968 and 1969 are there, why was the year 1967 missing, asked Lo, disturbed by the lies and traps she encountered (Hui and Chan, 2017). In 1967 Lo was five years old. One year into her research, she discovered that her childhood playground in Taipo was the first site of a random bomb explosion in that horrific year. A former Kuomintang military, her father had told her that bombs were all over and she should not touch anything ‘political’ (Lo, 2017c). Personal memory readily articulated to socio-political history, though most revealing for Lo was the 84-page Notes on ’67 she found by Ng Dick-chau, the top Chinese Communist cadet responsible for local cultural work (news, films, publications and so on). Commander of the 1967 HK ‘uprising’, Ng had taken part in covert activities as an underground Communist from 1948 to 1962 (Lo, 2017b). Notes was made available by his daughter Ng Fai, whom Lo interviews in her film, revealing internal power struggle among the local leftists in 1967. In an engaging scene, Ms Ng described how her father had prevented the delivery of 8400 blades from Shenzhen to HK to be used as weapons in the ‘uprising’ (Lo, 2017b). In the four years of filmmaking, Lo worked tirelessly for she could not tolerate to see history being twisted into lies (Lo, 2017c). She felt she had to intervene. Premiered on 8 March 2017, Vanished Archives drew instant if short-lived attention by the media, and no commercial cinema would show it. Even the Hong Kong International Film Festival denied its screening, on the pretext of its unsatisfactory film quality. By the end of 2017, over 200 community screenings have been made locally attracting a total of about 10 000 spectators (Lo, 2017c). Bringing the documentary to community locations including universities, schools and townhalls, Lo

Creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics  295 has met both enthusiasm and criticism. Some old leftists came to screenings and called her names (Hui and Chan, 2017). In the absence of archive laws in HK, Lo and her team continued to strive to ensure that the history and memory of 1967 are retained. With veteran journalist Ching Cheong, she toured several North American cities showing the film at universities and communities in Fall 2017. As Ching (2017) says, remembering the 1967 riots today is of paramount significance. People must respect history, respect truth and respect conscience. And someone must be ready to intervene with the growing tendencies to distort history. On 19 August 2017, to remember the fiftieth anniversary of the radio host Lam Bun’s murder during the riots, Lo organized a small walking trip to ‘re-enact’ the horrific event.10 About two dozen journalists, scholars, media commentators and opinion-leaders took part in the unique tour Lo organized. It was the only collective remembrance of the critical incident. The group walked from Lam’s mansion to where his car was stopped by a fake road construction stop-sign in 1967. Participants took turns recounting the event by reading newspaper accounts. As they reached the critical spot where Lam’s car was thrown gasoline by two assassins disguised as road workers, the walkers imagined how history replays itself – as people remembered the outspoken media man being burnt to death ‘in full visibility’ for his freedom of speech. Records show that at about 8am on 24 August 1967, Lam and his brother were killed instantly on the spot. The assassination deepened the public’s distrust and disapproval of the local terror (Cheung, 2000: 103–4; Cheung, 2009: 119–20), though no murderers were ever found. Strongly critical of the Maoism in the 1967 riots, former ‘leftist’ journalist Ching (2017) calls them ‘red terror’. History continues to be eroded and in the absence of ritual or bouquets, Lo’s on-site remembrance is the sole practice resisting the given status of history. For its relevance to the future, this social memory must be re-activated. No doubt: ‘The social was left to our imagination, and to the memory of an event in which we both did and did not participate’ (Silverstone, 1999: 76). As thoughts were shared afterwards in a nearby playground in Lam’s former neighbourhood, walkers engaged in articulating the critical pain and memory to contemporary violence. Thus, the 2017 narrative-spatial practice created space for the walker-participants to re-think what had transpired and what to look forward to. In Rancière’s (2000 [2004]) terms, counter-hegemonic acts generate temporal-spatial dislocations in ‘the distribution of the sensible’ when attention is drawn to something previously neglected. When a solitary tune was performed by a participant, all present stopped to observe a moment of silence at the local crossroads. In historical juncture, the politics of aesthetics is interfaced with disturbingly affective engagements. In the experience invoked by such act of creativity a collective state of feeling, perception and thought was generated in what Vivian Patraka (2003: 92) calls spectacular suffering, in which ‘witnessing’ becomes ‘an active process of spectatorship rather than a passive consumption of a pre-narrated spectacle’. Indeed, Lo (2017c) has been affected by the duplication of terrorist acts. She recalled how, in 2013, when the OCPL was on the verge of action, some old leftists were gathered in Shenzhen across the border ready to attack its participants in HK

296  Handbook on the geographies of creativity (Hui and Chan, 2017). As suffering withers away in the mainstream, contending narratives of critical events bring oppositions and contradictions. Struggling with the hegemonic order of the ‘status quo’, Lo clings on to her work persistently, as ordinary people begin to grow scepticism against multiplications of ghostly influence.

EPILOGUE Fighting these horrific forms of the invincible other, creative agents like the Hong Kong Spidie, Tai, To and Lo embody their situated cultural-political stances in their various commitments to resist domination. The new Lion Rock (Hong Kong Spidie, To) or local Quixotic (Tai, Lo) spirit drives people to confront domination on multiple levels. With these counter-hegemonic acts, intervention works ‘not to unveil “true reality” or “real interests”, but to re-articulate a given situation in a new configuration’ (Mouffe, 2013: 79). There is little doubt that all the fantastic acts outlined above have re-invented the mode of cultural politics, often with shocking, refreshing impacts. The protests are social acts of conferral taking place in and on the public(s). For civic activism, defeatism has no place. In critical engagements, the subjunctive nature of intervention is undeniable. ‘Creative expression seems most effective when it is seamlessly continuous with its content’ in which ‘the dancer becomes the dance’ (Negus and Pickering, 2004: 30). Struggling to fight with one’s entangled ties with the other, struggling to engage the other as the radical alterity of the search for an anticolonial sense of belonging, the civic agents decide to push forth their projects despite limited support and resources. If creativity is ‘as much a decision about and an attitude toward life as it is a matter of ability’ (Sternberg, 2003: 98), the HK organic intellectuals here perform their will and passion with grounded work of intervention. Win or lose, their critical practices partake in the making of alternative subjectivities and the imagination of a new world beyond the vacuum of hope they face.

NOTES 1. The Lion Rock spirit was shaped by the popular TV drama series on local livelihoods Under the Lion Rock, produced by Radio Television Hong Kong from 1972 to 1980. 2. For a background of the Occupy Central trio’s initiative, see Yuen (2015); for a contextual account of Tai’s campaign based on his beliefs in civil disobedience, see Chan (2014), Cheung (2017) and Lam (2017). 3. Wind and Cloud (Fung-wan) in Every District (區區風雲), D100 internet radio (https://​ bc​.d100​.net/​), 28 July 2017. 4. D100, 27 Oct. 2017. 5. D100, 23 June 2017. 6. See Rancière (2000 [2004]: 7): ‘A distribution of the sensible . . . established at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This . . . is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and form of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution.’

Creative practice as intervention in postcolonial cultural politics  297 7. D100, 23 June 2017. 8. Dinner guests Allen Lee, James Tien, Ben sir, DJ Sammy and others spoke: ‘People’s support is on your side, John. Why do they trust you? Will the Election Committee select you? Can they be trusted?’ 9. 852 post, 23 March 2017. 10. Lam Bun’s (林彬) highly popular radio programmes ‘Can’t Stop Me Talking!’ (欲罷 不能) and ‘Everyman’s Diary’ (大丈夫日記) at the Commercial Radio Hong Kong had tremendous impact. His assassination in 1967 was directed by top-level leadership of underground Chinese Communists.

REFERENCES Abbas, A. (2017), ‘Posthumous Socialism’, seminar given at Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, 23 October. Chan, J. (2014), ‘Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement’, The Round Table, 103 (6), 571–80. Cheung, C.-Y. (2017), ‘“One country, two systems” after the Umbrella Movement: problems and prospects’, Asian Education and Development Studies, 6 (4), 385–400. Cheung, G.K.-W. (2000), Inside Stories of the 1967 Riots in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Pacific Century. Cheung, G.K.-W. (2009), Hong Kong’s Watershed: The 1967 Riots, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Ching, C. (2017), ‘Source of terrorism of the 1967 riots’, Standnews, 19 August, accessed 24 November 2017 at https://​thestandnews​.com/​politics/​67​%E6​%9A​%B4​%E5​%8B​%95​-​%E7​ %9A​%84​%E6​%81​%90​%E6​%80​%96​%E4​%B8​%BB​%E7​%BE​%A9​%E6​%A0​%B9​%E6​ %BA​%90​-​%E4​%B8​%8B/​. Highmore, B. (2011), ‘Everyday aesthetics’, in Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. Milton Park, UK and New York, NY, USA: Routledge, pp. 21–57. Hong Kong Spidie (2014a), Up on the Lion Rock: Universal Suffrage for Hong Kong, 23 October, accessed 1 November 2017 at https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​1gnLA... Hong Kong Spidie (2014b), Up on the Lion Rock: Behind the Scene! 23 October, accessed 1 November 2017 at https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​iEQ2rj​-7DDE. Hui, C. and S. Chan (2017), ‘Three films: war of memory on the 1967 riots’, Initium Media, 5 May, accessed 8 May 2017 at https://​theinitium​.com/​article/​20170504​-hongkong​-memory​ -battlefield/​. Lam, J. (2017), ‘Hong Kong District Council elections 2015: a political litmus test for the Occupy Central Movement’, Asian Education and Development Studies, 6 (4), 354–71. Lo, C. (2017a), Vanished Archives (消失的檔案), 119-minute documentary, accessed 8 May 2017 at http://​vanishedarchives​.org/​site/​. Lo, C. (2017b), ‘Historical supplement: lost archives – Ng Dick-chau and his time’, Citizens News (8 March 2017), hkcnews.com, accessed 8 May 2017 at https://​www​.hkcnews​.com/​ article/​2416/​歷史補遺:消失的檔案——吳荻舟和他的時代 Lo, C. (2017c), ‘Lost archives: people and incidents of the bygone years’, Citizens News (7 March 2017), hkcnews.com, accessed 8 May 2017 at https://​www​.hkcnews​.com/​article/​ 2377/​消失的檔案——那些年的人和事 Lo, C. (2018), Vanished Archives, 119-minute DVD, Studio of Public Humanities. Morris, M. (2017), ‘Hong Kong liminal: situation as method’, in S. Chu (ed.), Hong Kong Culture and Society in the New Millennium: Hong Kong as Method, Singapore: Springer, pp. 3–32. Mouffe, C. (2013), Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London, UK and New York, NY, USA: Verso.

298  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Negus, K. and M. Pickering (2004), Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value, London, UK: Sage. Patraka, V. (2003), ‘Spectacular suffering: performing presence, absence, and witness at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’, in E. Striff (ed.), Performance Studies, Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 82–96. Rancière, J. (2000 [2004]), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill (ed.), London, UK: Bloomsbury. Reckwitz, A. (2017), The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New, trans. Steven Black, Cambridge, UK and Boston, MA, USA: Polity Press. Silverstone, R. (1999), Why Study the Media? London, UK: Sage. Sternberg, R. (2003), ‘The development of creativity as a decision-making process’, in R.K. Sawyer, V. John-Steiner, S. Moran, R.J. Sternberg, D.H. Feldman, J. Nakamura and M. Csikszentmihalyi (eds), Creativity and Development, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 91–138. To, J. (2017a), Johnnie To x John Tsang (杜琪峰 x 曾俊華 拍住上), 4-minute 53-second, Hong Kong Good Show, 12 March, accessed 5 October 2017 at https://​www​.facebook​.com/​ johntsangpage/​videos/​1868771970062113/​. To, J. (2017b), Dinner with Master To (杜sir飯局), 15-minute 45-second, Hong Kong Good Show, 23 March, accessed 13 October 2017 at https://​www​.facebook​.com/​johntsangpage/​ videos/​1874462422826401/​. Tsang, J. (2017), 2017 Chief Executive Election Candidate Election Platform Highlights: Trust, Unity, Hope, Hong Kong: John Tsang Election Office. Young, J. (1994), ‘The building years: maintaining a China–Hong Kong–Britain equilibrium, 1950–71’, in Ming K. Chan and John D. Young (eds), Precarious Balance: Hong Kong Between China and Britain, 1842–1992, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; New York: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 131–47. Yuen, S. (2015), ‘Hong Kong after the Umbrella Movement: an uncertain future for “One Country Two Systems”’, China Perspectives, 1, 49–53.

18. Cultures of creativity and innovation in Greater China Michael Keane

INTRODUCTION Disruption is a two-edged sword in today’s fast-changing world. By definition disruption engenders uncertainty. In 1997, the business management writer Clayton Christensen (1997) coined the expression ‘innovator’s dilemma’ to describe how ‘unprepared’ firms falter in the face of rapid technological change. In this account, often cited in the genre of business entrepreneurship manuals found on airport bookstands, the firm that learns to live with and love disruption prospers. Disruption, or at least the term ‘disruption’, has gained considerable traction where one might least expect it – in the People’s Republic of China. Disruption is regularly mentioned in the domain of culture, often as a negative force, but more recently it appears as a positive one. China has had its share of disruption throughout history – one has only to reflect on the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the mid-twentieth century. The memory of such historical events raises the spectre of chaos, making it easier for the government to maintain an authoritarian model of cultural management. Fear of social turbulence in a population numbering 1.4 billion, many of whom are coping with fast changing economic realities, is very real. Good governance is about ensuring a ‘harmonious society’ based on the age-old Confucian textbook, and entails guidance by enlightened leaders. Perry Link (2013: 203) says that ‘the association of formal language and correct performance’ dates back to the ancients. Traditionally the job of culture, and cultural workers, is to reinforce this guiding DNA, to direct the balanced flow of cultural energy, and where necessary to intervene in order to rectify imbalances. Over the course of China’s history, disruption has been viewed as antithetical to human progress. In modern times rectification, along with strategic intervention, has taken place under the stewardship of the great reformers, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and now Xi Jinping. In 2001, China signed on to World Trade Organization protocols, ensuring easier access to world markets but at the same time allowing foreign media new opportunities to send their cultural products to China. Uncertainty prevailed: could China’s cultural sovereignty be maintained in the face of international market pressure? Would the balance be irrevocably disturbed? Could threatening western ideas be contained? Moreover, how might Chinese cultural products and media institutions go global? How might the internet be used to bring about the realization of the Chinese 299

300  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Dream, President Xi Jinping’s signature manifesto of a glorious rejuvenation of the Chinese nation?1 In this chapter, I investigate implications for China’s creative economy. By way of setting the scene, the first section offers a glimpse into a possible future where the artificial and the real coexist, illustrating why the digital creative industries have been pushed to the forefront of China’s development agenda. The discussion then takes a philosophical turn, looking at creativity as intervention, in the past, now and in the future. I introduce the key policy background in China since the late 1990s, showing tensions that played out as the state opened up investment opportunities for cultural industries. Whereas such investments during the 2000s were spatially concentrated, primarily directed toward city branding and gentrification, the following decade saw the emergence of private communications companies. The discussion identifies a digital turn, signalling a moment when the optimism manifest in the ‘analogue’ cultural industries was transferred to digital culture, culminating in the announcement of Internet Plus, a developmental blueprint that has allowed three of China’s powerful commercial internet companies to assume the mantle of ‘national champions’. The final section looks at how these companies have moved out of China, responding to the call for China’s culture to go global, specifically making inroads into Greater China, and even anticipating the geographical challenges on offer through the state’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a bold plan to extend China’s presence into Eurasia. Throughout the discussion, I am mindful of systemic difference. The ‘cultural system’ (文化体制) is a widely used policy terminology in China depicting the balance between publicly funded institutions (事业) such as China Central Television (CCTV) and commercially owned or oriented enterprises (产业，企业), for instance independent media companies. The so-called ‘reform of the cultural system’ (文化 体制改革) describes the contested policy terrain. Undoubtedly, intervention by government – often in the name of national security or protecting the morality of citizens – disrupts the market power of China’s commercial enterprises. Alternatively, government intervention can also be a benefit, a means of protecting emerging Chinese companies and allowing them to compete globally. Disruption also comes from fringe elements and is not always conducive to innovation; for instance the activities of hacker communities, the growing incidence of fake news and racial abuse. In China, the cultural system is kept in check by rules and regulations, many of which are imbued with the flavour of Marxist–Leninist historical materialism, which follows universal laws. Various reforms since 1978, moreover, have allowed ‘productive forces’ to assume a leading role. However, with innovation in China heavily dependent upon exogenous inputs, for instance foreign know-how and technology standards, the bodies that regulate the productive forces are confronted by unprecedented challenges. Technological innovation, the key driver of Schumpeterian creative destruction (Schumpeter, 1942), challenges national sovereignty (McKnight et al., 2001); online media in particular is now responsible for the bulk of cultural consumption. As a December 2017 report published by McKinsey Global Institute announces: ‘China has become a leading global force in the digital economy. The country has 42 per cent of global e-commerce, processed 11 times more mobile

Cultures of creativity and innovation in Greater China  301 payments than the US, and is home to one third of the world’s unicorns.’2 So, in this respect we also need to ask: how is the Chinese ‘cultural system’ faring in its attempts to contain disruption?

FROM ARTIFICIAL CULTURE TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE A decade ago, many tourists visiting Shenzhen, then a boom city in southern China, were surprised to see reconstituted foreign culture – an almost full-scale replica of the Swiss ski resort Interlaken, a miniature-sized Eiffel Tower in a theme park called ‘Window on the World’ and Van Gogh masterpieces for sale at the Dafen Oil Painting Village. By the mid-2000s, Shenzhen had established the dubious honour of being named the birthplace of shanzhai (山寨) a form of grassroots technology design that produces cheap knock-off products for millions of Chinese consumers. Shanzhai phones proliferated, capitalizing on lax intellectual property enforcement and a willingness among Chinese consumers to purchase cheap versions of international products (Han, 2017; Keane and Zhao, 2013). Once a place where copy culture was seen as retarding China’s ambitions to become an innovative nation, Shenzhen is now a centrepiece of China’s thirteenth Five Year Plan (2016–20). At the 2014 World Economic Forum held in Tianjin, Premier Li Keqiang announced a new development slogan: ‘mass entrepreneurship, mass innovation’ (大众创业万众创新). This was followed in March 2015 with a major initiative branded as Internet Plus (互联网加). The objectives of Internet Plus are: ‘to integrate mobile Internet, cloud computing big data, and the Internet of Things with modern manufacturing, to encourage the healthy development of e-commerce, industrial networks, and Internet banking, and to get Internet-based companies to increase their presence in the international market’ (China Daily, 2015). In this vision, digital technology will transform China, moving the economy to ever dizzying heights. Premier Li’s ‘intervention’ took place at Chaihuo (柴火), translated literally as ‘firewood’, a popular Shenzhen maker space. Shenzhen now has hundreds of maker spaces (now rebranded as ‘mass innovation spaces’); in fact, it probably has more incubators, accelerators, fab labs and co-working spaces per population than any other city in the world (Lindtner, 2015). Shenzhen’s status as an entrepreneurial city can be traced back to the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) policies of the early 1990s. In February 1992, Deng Xiaoping rebooted his economic reform agenda on the so-called ‘southern tour’, enticing would-be entrepreneurs and investors to move south. The influx of people from all parts of China, as well as Shenzhen’s proximity to cosmopolitan Hong Kong, engendered an entrepreneurial mindset. However, in contrast to many other cities in China, Shenzhen was considered to be a cultural desert. Perhaps aware of this national deficiency, the city leaders inaugurated an annual International Cultural Industries Expo in 2006. Lacking the traditional art districts and cultural relics that lure planeloads of tourists to China, the city artificially replicates international culture. The line between

302  Handbook on the geographies of creativity real and artificial, genuine and fake is, however, blurred. Reality is increasingly virtual (VR) and augmented (AR); design firms embed artificial intelligence and RFID chips; and virtual currency is driving business – just a quick scan of QR codes using WeChat, the popular messaging service, and one can pay for taxis, groceries or share a bicycle. The transformation of Shenzhen owes much to the business acumen of its entrepreneurs, perhaps enhanced by their geographic distance from Beijing. The headquarters of Tencent, China’s largest internet technology company, is located in Shenzhen, as are mobile technology giants Huawei and ZTE. Importantly, the transformation of Shenzhen is due to strategic intervention by provincial and local government, especially in regard to managing and guiding the rapid development of this former special economic zone.

THE EVOLUTION OF TERMS: CREATIVITY AS INTERVENTION How did the shift from cultural deficiency to creative emergence come about, not just in Shenzhen but in many other regional hotspots? In the years leading up to WTO accession, it is fair to suggest that the internet was not central to the plans of China’s cultural reformers, aside from concerted efforts by Propaganda Department officials to monitor its influence. Discussion of technological convergence was confined to small groups of media scholars. During the early 2000s, the dominant development theme was the cultural industries (文化产业), the leadership’s attempt to fortify the nation against the onset of globalization, most notably the forces of Hollywood, often portrayed as ‘wolves at the door’ (Su, 2016). The cultural industries were inscribed in the eleventh Five Year Plan, coinciding with China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 (Keane, 2007). Cultural industries research, which was published in Blue Books (蓝皮书) (see Qiu, 2016), generally focused on how best to reform the cultural system, as well as identifying regional developments, for instance tourism, cultural quarters and clusters. A later variant, the ‘creative industries’, came to China imbued with characteristics of liberalism due to its UK origins. As I have shown elsewehere (Keane, 2007, 2013), the creative industries, with an emphasis on nurturing iconoclastic ‘against-the-grain’ creativity, received a lukewarm reception. Ministry of Culture (MoC) officials in Beijing saw the imported idea as a direct threat to the cultural system, and to the government’s advocacy of a harmonious society. The cultural industries remain the default national terminology. However, the foreign variant is now incorporated within the thirteenth Five Year Plan (2016–20). The ‘digital creative industries’ (数字创意产业) are listed as one of the five key development priorities; they provide a blueprint for manageable disruption: as I have noted above this is depicted as ‘mass entrepreneurship, mass innovation’ (大众创业 万众创新). The attribution ‘digital’ before creative industries serves to differentiate it from foreign usages: in effect, adding digital mitigates the threat associated with disruption, echoing a view that technology is not ideological, while accommodating the benefits of grassroots collaboration. To understand how this recalibration of

Cultures of creativity and innovation in Greater China  303 disruptive capacity took place, we first need to investigate the historical foundations of the term ‘creativity’, and more recently ‘innovation’. Historically and philosophically, Chinese culture has never countenanced a need for the kind of disruption that underpins Western origin myths (see Puett, 2001), which informs modern debates about novelty and innovation. Yet Chinese culture has a deep connection with innovation, creativity and newness. In The Book of Beginnings, the sinologist François Jullien (2015) examines three key accounts of creation: the Judaic, the Hellenic and the Chinese. In the Judaic/Christian account, the world was created by an outside force called God, who took just six days. What then ensued was a symbolic disruption, a separation of man and God. The struggle by humankind to overcome nature was a key tenet of the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton. In the Greek account depicted in Hesoid’s Theogeny, the gods are plural and imperfect, human-like beings who needed to be controlled by Zeus. Jullien (2015: 55) writes, ‘everything is made by generation: then those engendered powers turn against one another and come to blows’. The narrative in both accounts is one of chaos and struggle to impose a human-made order. In China, The Book of Change, also known as Yi Jing,3 dispenses with the need for gods and confrontation. The world is characterized in four characters: self-initiation, expansion, profit and rectitude. The key point of the Chinese account of beginnings is that there was no rupture, no disruption, just an ‘initiatory capacity’: equilibrium ‘must continually transform itself’ (Jullien, 2015: 63). In this account humankind (man) is not privileged, other than being part of the ‘ten thousand things’ (万物). Elsewhere, Jullien opines that whereas European innovation is about disruption, Chinese innovation is about seeking continuity.4 Such a view does entail a kind of cultural relativism, which is hard to sustain when describing modern times, or depicting Chinese people living overseas. Nisbett (2003), for instance, has utilized the frame of individualist-collectivist societies, i.e. East Asian versus ‘western’, suggesting that the former are inclined to seek consensus and hence disinclined to be as autonomous as ‘Europeans’; this is certainly a well-travelled view. However, there are problems with this approach. In his sample Nisbitt includes Chinese living on the mainland as well as Chinese of the Diaspora, Koreans and Japanese (Nisbett, 2003: xxii, cited in Lloyd, 2007: 160). The Chinese American novelist Gish Jen (2013) has discussed how overseas Chinese negotiate cultural difference through a process of ‘creative selective assimilation’; that is, they live within a dual East–West frame of reference. Elsewhere, the Singaporean scholar Chua Beng Huat (2012) argues that many overseas Chinese groups consider cultural differences – between them – to be greater than similarities. When Chinese people move outside China, cultural stereotypes lose their explanatory power. Yet there is some continuity between the past and present that relates to the nature of creative intervention. The fact that scholars in traditional China were employed as court officials predisposed them to avoid conflict. Charlene Tan believes that the traditional Confucian literati of the early dynastical period, known as junzi, were creative in their dealings with superiors–they knew when and how to intervene (Tan, 2016). The officials, scholars and business leaders that offer advice to the modern

304  Handbook on the geographies of creativity socialist leaders no doubt employ similar strategies and tactics. The key point, therefore, is not that Chinese are less creative than westerners, but that persons who work in authoritarian settings need to know boundaries, which are often deliberately ambiguous. Yingchi Chu is more sanguine about the possibilities for Western style critique in China, where peoples’ cultural conditioning is still predisposed toward Confucian obedience (Chu, 2014: 168; emphasis in original). Elsewhere, John Howkins’ universal edict that ‘creativity needs freedom’ (Howkins, 2009) somewhat dismisses China’s chance of being creative. Yet, the virtuosity of critical word play found in the popular tradition of Chinese ‘skits’ (小品) and ‘crosstalk’ (相声), often with oblique references to government control, verifies that critical creativity exists; the problem is that foreign interlocutors or audiences cannot fathom it (see Chu, 2014). When one considers how and where creativity manifests in mainland China today it is important to account for government policy. Sayings familiar to Chinese natives include ‘edge ball’ (擦边球), referring to journalistic practices that imply critique, and ‘on the top there are policies, below there are strategies’ (上有政策下有对策). Both illustrate a fertile zone of creative friction. Such a mode of creativity might be compared to Margaret Boden’s concept of ‘exploratory creativity’, which ‘exploits some culturally valued way of thinking’ (Boden, 2016). Boden’s typology of creativity includes combinational, exploratory and transformational. ‘Combinational’ refers to how familiar ideas are combined in different and novel ways; ‘exploratory’ is primarily about ‘tweaking’ and pushing what already exists; whereas the ‘transformational’ mode generates things of value that might have seemed impossible. In the conclusion, I surmise that the exploratory mode of creativity may offer a way to exploit artificial intelligence (AI). Pope (2005) believes that ‘modern’ creativity became fashionable in the US in the late 1950s following its discovery within the field of psychology, in particular the utilitarian sense that creativity was a means to solve difficult problems and engineer a better society. Creativity, according to Reckwitz (2017), is an ‘invention of the late twentieth century’: he introduces the term ‘creativity dispositif’, derived from Foucault to illustrate a formation that occurs at a particular historical moment: the creativity dispositif ‘connects segments of various fields, arranging them into a new order’, in this case presumably a modern western order. Reckwitz dismisses ‘the art of ancient China’ as based on prototypes, inferior to western creativity with its yearning for novelty. Yet in his view Western creativity-as-novelty is a product of the past thirty years. He makes no comment on modern China – or Asia – where creativity has found new outlets on digital platforms. Elsewhere Lubart writes: ‘the Eastern view of creativity seems less focused on innovative products’ (Lubart, 1999: 340). Such a view fails to account for the changing social conditions of production, illustrated by our snapshot of Shenzhen: this is perhaps what the government now means by ‘productive forces’. Moreover, a tendency to see Chinese creativity as less authentic because of a widespread disregard for intellectual property also fails to acknowledge the control of big corporate players in both eastern and western hemispheres over the innovation

Cultures of creativity and innovation in Greater China  305 ecosystem. In 2015, the Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina raised some eyebrows internationally when she suggested Chinese people can’t innovate or think creatively. The former CEO of the industrial giant Hewlett Packard was quoted as saying: I have been doing business in China for decades, and I will tell you that yeah, the Chinese can take a test, but what they can’t do is innovate . . . They are not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial, they don’t innovate, that is why they are stealing our intellectual property.5

While playing to a political constituency, this intervention by Ms Fiorina had some elements of truth. Many Chinese see little point in taking risks when they can adapt, borrow (or steal) ideas from foreigners. On the other hand, business commentators without political affiliations are more inclined to make positive comments about the emerging new generation of Chinese innovators. Edward Tse, author of China’s Disruptors (Tse, 2015), believes that innovation is not only increasing in China, but extending beyond its borders. The book’s subtitle proclaims the rise of China’s digital champions: ‘How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and other companies are changing the rules of business’. Tse identifies a cohort of capitalist-style businesses with international ambitions, while downplaying the authoritarian role of the state, as if this band of Chinese entrepreneurs has the same cultural mindset as their counterparts elsewhere in the world. The Chinese model of state intervention is largely conducive to innovation, particularly with respect to protecting Chinese tech companies from international competition, although in the wake of escalating tariff wars and disputes about technology theft with the US under Donald Trump, it remains to be seen how this intervention will proceed. The terms creativity and innovation are used loosely, and are often complementary. The fuzziness of these terms, and their exploitation by government, however, is not confined to China. Creativity, as currently understood within the globalizing creative economy discourse (Kong et al., 2006), is a recent addition to policy development in China. As I have noted elsewhere (Keane, 2007, 2013), the introduction of the global policy format called ‘creative industries’ into China found adherents among local governments keen to build links with international business but encountered distrust from Ministry of Culture officials. Innovation, on the other hand, is a much more admissible construct: it produces tangible economic outcomes. In the late 1980s the government initiated the Torch Programme to promote Science and Technology Industrial Parks, Software Parks, Science-Tech Business Incubators and Productivity Promotion Centres. The 863 Programme was later established to encourage science and technology talent to return home from abroad. But it was only after China joined the WTO in 2001 and was forced to comply with international norms that the nation began to imagine a global presence. In 2006, the State Council launched an ambitious plan to strengthen China’s science and technology (S&T) development. China would become an innovation-oriented nation (创新型国家) by 2020. Along with this it

306  Handbook on the geographies of creativity proposed a National Informatization Development Strategy 2006–20 that entailed developing national standards rather than having to buy core western technologies. Growth signs were extremely promising in technology thanks to the leap-frog effect but culture, and China’s cultural influence, was lagging behind, especially when compared to South Korea and Japan. In 2009, governmental think-tanks turned their attention to the ‘convergence of technological innovation and cultural creativity’ (科技创新与文化创意融合). Essentially innovation and creativity became ‘solutionist concepts’ (Keane and Chen, 2017), dispensing with the problematic social aspects of the latter, for instance its association with dissidents, iconoclasts and visionaries (see Pope, 2005). Cultural practitioners needed to use technology to extend the reach; in the film industry, this entailed the full range of special effects that made blockbusters so popular. For now, however, we can simply note that terms for creativity (chuangyi) and innovation (chuangxin) are embedded in educational curricula, pop culture and economic planning. The digital technology companies that have moved centre stage have the resources that the government needs. The question that follows is: can these companies with their legions of young workers, many returning from the west, change perceptions of China, internationally as well as domestically? Will China become recognized as a leading innovative and creative nation or will it be stereotyped as a copier nation? At this point it is important to clarify what we mean by perceptions of China. As noted previously, it is well known that the Chinese government has a habit of intervening into the cultural sphere, and this impacts on a lot of projects that might help change China’s image. But has the game changed? Can the digital technology companies force the hand of government by virtue of their expertise in driving consumption? Helga Nowotny, a social scientist with an interest in technological change, says that the nature of the complex systems that increasingly determine the global economy produces ‘tipping points’ (Nowotny, 2016); for instance, events leading to the global financial crisis of 2008. As Yu Hong (2017) writes, the global financial crisis produced a tipping point in China, pushing it deeper into the digital economy and a closer entanglement with Silicon Valley-style capitalism. While this engagement was initially seeing China as providing a cheap offshore location, know-how gleaned from this interaction over the past decade has allowed China to consolidate its own digital economy, drawing Silicon Valley startups to China in search of innovation. The culture of Silicon Valley in particular has infiltrated the discourse of Chinese-style entrepreneurship. The Silicon Valley ethos is encapsulated in the popularity of the late Steve Jobs in China. Jobs’ biography, penned by Walter Isaacson, author of The Innovators, was an instant best seller when translated into Chinese (Isaacson, 2011; 2014). With mass innovation becoming a buzzword in 2015, a dizzying array of maker spaces, mass innovation zones and incubators emerged bearing colourful names such as Seeed Studio, Geek Camp, Bay West Accelerator, Demo Now, Magic Bean Works and the Tencent Maker Base. The MIT-based scholar Jing Wang (2016a: 47) writes: ‘This triple shift – from “made in China” to “created in China” and now to “making in China” – is perhaps a sign that innovation is now

Cultures of creativity and innovation in Greater China  307 a societal concern: every maker should participate in this long tail revolution, not just state designated IT and creative industry clusters.’ In May 2015, the State Council announced Made in China 2025, ostensibly a replica of the German vision Industry 4.0; a plan to develop ‘smart manufacturing’. By energetically upgrading the mostly backward industrial processes of China’s manufacturing sector, the Chinese government hopes to enhance the competitiveness of its enterprises on domestic markets and to propel their global expansion. In 2016, the extant National Informatization Development Strategy, initiated in 2006, was modified ‘on the basis of new circumstances’, namely the exponential growth of the internet technology sector which was probably not imagined in 2006, and the more recent implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative, which will allow the rollout of China’s networks and platforms into new territories, establishing what the State Council calls a China–ASEAN ‘information port’. An important addendum to the revised document is China’s commitment to cyber-sovereignty, which may complicate the terrain for foreign internet-related businesses in China. In the newly titled Outline of the National Information Technology Development Strategy, the term informatization is superseded by the more straightforward concept of IT.6 The Chinese Communist Party has stared down the dangers posed by the internet. It has erected firewalls to stop unwanted foreign ideas, although such restrictions have hindered rather than stopped the flow. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has threatened to close down all virtual private networks (VPNs), which according to some estimates are used by up to 20 per cent of the population, including business enterprises that deal with international investors. Since 2014, the Chinese government through the aegis of the CAC has organized what it calls the ‘World Internet Conference’ in the picturesque town of Wuzhen, outside Shanghai; in 2017 the government invited CEOs from Apple and Google (the latter’s operations are severely constrained in China). While advocating an ‘open internet’ to promote the digital economy, the Chinese government has proposed the concept of ‘internet sovereignty’ to restrict people’s access to information that is deemed unhealthy or dangerous to its national interest. In other words, it advocates positive disruption for the development of the digital economy, but steers away from disruption as social dissent. The internet, it seems, has a role to play in the popularization of the Chinese Dream, at least that part of the dream that speaks to the idea of a great cultural rejuvenation.

DISRUPTORS AND CHINA’S CULTURE ‘GOING OUT’ What then are Chinese disruptors doing to enhance the Chinese Dream, the great rejuvenation? Edward Tse (2015: 221) contends that China is producing a generation of experimenters. He says: ‘These people know that the rewards, though unpredictable, can be enormous. They are by definition high risk takers – and have big egos.’ In this sense Tse is probably correct: the opportunity to become a digital champion is something that was not available when Deng Xiaoping made his tour of Shenzhen

308  Handbook on the geographies of creativity in 1992. The question of egos is probably less clear cut: some of the disrupters have certainly attained lofty heights and basked in the limelight. Others have suffered setbacks by overextending their ambitions. Not only are the new digital leaders lauded in China, they are regaled by some pundits outside China as representing a new kind of Chinese-style innovation, despite the fact that much of their success is based on copying the business models of their western competitors. Yet, a closer look shows they are doing more than merely picking ‘the low-hanging fruit’. Becoming successful in China requires a certain kind of business acumen, an ability to navigate the policy landmines while keeping investment channels open. The road that many businesses have taken in the past decade has been to ‘go out’ (走出去), responding to a call by the government to take China’s culture and ideas to the world, including the newly designated BRI territories in Eurasia, previously known in English as The Silk Roads.7 A triad of companies, known by the acronym BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent), have led the charge. Another key player to move its business internationally is Dalian Wanda. As the Chinese equivalent of Google, Baidu was born digital. Its platform, QIYI, was formed by Baidu and Providence Equity Partners (PEP), building a reputation for commissioned production, video streaming and user-generated content. In 2012, QIYI was fully acquired by Baidu in 2012 becoming iQIYI, and thereby gaining full access to Baidu’s search data. PPS Net TV, another streaming site, came into the Baidu stable in 2013, adding movies, Japanese anime and sports programmes. The following year the company acquired an online literature platform, Zongheng Literature Website.8 Baidu (iQIYI)’s international ambitions include co-production with Sony Pictures, a mandarin language version of the US TV series Chosen. iQIYI’s Qing dynasty costume drama Empresses in the Palace was then reformatted for Netflix subscribers. Most overseas Chinese would have viewed the series, already shown on iQIYI’s existing overseas platforms. While its international reception on Netflix was far from a success, it did at least show that Chinese content could be made available on Western platforms, with some reformatting to accommodate foreign viewing tastes. The most prominent of the BAT cohort to move offshore is Alibaba, an e-commerce company that has made inroads into the content market. In 2013, it invested $586 million to acquire an 18 per cent stake of the popular microblogging site Sina Weibo (Merced, 2013). The following year, it acquired an 8.1 per cent stake in the Chinese film and TV colossus Huayi Brothers. Alibaba then acquired a controlling stake in China Vision Media Group, a leading film and TV drama production and distribution entity in Hong Kong; along with this was a name change to Alibaba Pictures Group Limited. This was followed by undisclosed investment in Hong Kong’s premier television station TVB (Yeung, 2015) and acquisition of the flagship print media the South China Morning Post in December 2015 (Chow, 2016). By then Alibaba had assumed control of Youku Tudou, China’s premier streaming video giant. Adding Youku Tudou allowed the company to reach out to international audiences, Chinese-speaking audiences that is, and compete head-on with iQIYI (Frater, 2016). The acquisition of Youku also complements Alibaba’s e-commerce

Cultures of creativity and innovation in Greater China  309 business as vendors use online video to promote their products on T-mall (Taobao), a platform that reaches deep into the Diaspora. Elsewhere, in seeking to prepare the ground for internationalization Alibaba has invested heavily in the Silicon Valley startup Snapchat (Chan and Rigby, 2015), which although currently banned in the mainland, adds to the company’s mobile brand presence in the youth market. In keeping with the image of a cultural icon befitting his company move into creative content, Alibaba founder Jack Ma cast himself in the short movie Gong Shou Dao,9 singing the title track in a duet with Chinese singer Faye Wong (Wang Fei).10 The movie is purportedly intended to share Chinese culture and promote the defensive martial art of Tai Chi but as at least one commentator wryly noted, it is also a brilliant exercise in advertising.11 The third member of BAT, Tencent, has its own internationalizing ambitions, made more concrete by its massively popular instant messaging platform Wechat, which has close to a billion subscribers, many of whom reside overseas.12 The platform allows users to share videos and chat, as well as a range of services including virtual payments. Starting with mobile gaming, Tencent acquired several significant investments including a majority stake in the US game company Riot Games as early as 2011 and US-based Activision Blizzard in 2012. Adding to its content war chest it began investing in both Hollywood and Chinese film. In September 2016, the company invested equity in STX, a Hollywood studio. Tencent has been active in the Asian region over and beyond purely ethnic Chinese territories. In the north Asian region, it has acquired a stake in Kakao Talk, the popular South Korean messaging and networking app (Jiang, 2012). It has spread its tentacles to Thailand with a 49.2 per cent stake in Sanook Online, a package which includes a web portal, a news portal, music streaming, instant messaging and e-commerce (Lee, 2016). Elsewhere in the region, the company has made moves into gaming with acquisition in Sea Ltd, formerly known as Garena, a successful Singapore-based gaming site (Hanson, 2015); in this way, Tencent is expanding its own entertainment offerings while drawing on existing gamers in Southeast Asia, a region whose population is relatively young compared to other parts of the Asia-Pacific such as Japan, Korea and China. In some ways Dalian Wanda, the entity formed by Wang Jianlin, is the exception. Its core business is real estate not digital media; however, Wanda has expressed aspirations to become a digital creative industries player, leveraging on its accumulated assets in the entertainment industries. It has acquired more assets abroad, and further afield than the BAT: starting its entertainment industry war chest with the acquisition of AMC Entertainment, the north American theatre chain in September 2012, it followed up with Australia’s Hoyts theatre chain in June 2015 and the European motion picture exhibitor Odeon and UCI in 2016. In the interim it was extending its assets, buying up sporting teams and sports marketing companies in Europe. In his book called The Wanda Way, Wang Jianlin writes: The Wanda Group is the first private investor in China to invest in the cultural industry, and the largest investor in cultural businesses among all Chinese companies. In August

310  Handbook on the geographies of creativity last year, I reported to the leaders of the central government on Wanda’s cultural business development, and our achievements were regarded positively by the leaders. (Wang, 2016b: 187)

In a speech made in February 2012 at the Wanda Institute, Wang pointed to his ambitions to develop Wanda into a ‘global brand’: ‘our business operations need to be scaled up to an international level’ (Wang, 2016b: 179). To undertake its offshore raids Wanda had availed itself of generous loans from China’s state-owned banks. By 2017, however, Wang’s ambitions were scrutinized by the government, with Wanda forced to divest overseas real estate assets in Europe and the US. In effect, Wang’s overreach is a warning sign that the government’s agenda must be followed. In this case, Wang’s pursuits of Hollywood studios, and his conspicuous display of Hollywood celebrities in his marketing, sufferered from government intervention.

CONCLUSION: TECHNO-UTOPIA OR FALSE DAWN? In the beginning of this chapter I drew inspiration from Shenzhen, a city where the expedience of artifice has merged with the affordance of artificial intelligence, where virtual reality is more popular than socialist realism, and where the Internet of Things is the postmodern manifestation of the ‘ten thousand things’,13 the traditional Chinese concept of emergence. Earlier I also noted Boden’s three types of creativity: combinational, exploratory and transformative. Boden believes that AI is likely to assist exploratory creativity, which typifies much of the incremental and edge-ball variety we find in China today. Can machines therefore make China’s culture more creative, more internationally recognized? Certainly, computer-generated creativity currently exists in some narrative forms (novels and soap opera plots), but these are unlikely to produce a Nobel Prize, Emmy, or Oscar nomination. Big data, likewise, can predict what kinds of stories audiences will likely respond to. The most famous instance is the success of the television series House of Cards, which was initially rejected by television executives, before being funded by Netflix based on big data. However, while the machine age promises incredible gains, and while programmes can potentially transform themselves, human judgement is required. Even if machine inspired stories are written, in China they have to navigate the gamut of internal ‘programmers’, the state’s censors. As I have argued, disruption has taken on a new life in China. Globally, views are often expressed that celebrate its transformative effects, in particular, the genre of business guides referred to previously in this article. The social critic Paul Mason believes we are seeing: ‘the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organizations . . . that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy’ (Mason, 2016: xv). Despite Mason’s enthusiasm about post-capitalism, the US economist Tyler Cowen (2014) believes that Western society, specifically the US, is less innovative than at any time in history. Cowen is pessimistic about technology. Certainly, most great innovations like radio, television

Cultures of creativity and innovation in Greater China  311 and the telegraph occurred over a hundred years ago. If America, and Silicon Valley, is simply guilty of ‘picking the low-hanging fruit’, what does this mean for China? In China, with the government backing the technological revolution as a means to rebalance China’s economy (Hong, 2017) and establish China’s reputation as an ‘innovative nation’, critical views currently lie beneath the surface. Manageable disruption is seen by the government as a stimulus to the economy, particularly with respect to the exponential gains promised by the digital economy. The global breakout success in 2018 of Tik Tok, a made-in-China app for creating and sharing videos, led The New York Times to pronounce ‘How Tik Tok is rewriting the world’.14 Yet, with some degree of veracity, the writer could perhaps have concluded: ‘how Chinese innovation is rewriting the world’. Technological solutions come thick and fast from the new capitalist didgerati class, people like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. Ma, as well as others in this new ‘leadership group’, have established connections with like-minded entrepreneurs in nations where the free exchange of ideas and a belief in the power of the sovereign individual underpin creative endeavour. How far the government intervenes into these ambitions remains to be seen but already with the case of Dalian Wanda it has fired warning shots that acquisitions of foreign media companies will continue to be monitored. The government, as it has done for the past 70 years since the founding of the Republic, retains the right to intervene.

NOTES 1. The Chinese Dream was articulated by Xi Jinping in 2012, shortly after taking office. 2. Digital China: Powering the Economy to Global Competitiveness. McKinsey Global Institute, December 2017, available online at https://​www​.mckinsey​.com/​global​-themes/​ china/​digital​-china​-powering​-the​-economy​-to​-global​-competitiveness. 3. The Book of Change is an ancient Chinese divination text and oldest of the Chinese classics. Its origins date to about 1000 BC in the Zhou Dynasty. 4. Bry, N. (2015), ‘Innovation in the Chinese way’ blog, 26 March, accessed 9 February 2019 at https://​nbry​.wordpress​.com/​2015/​03/​26/​innovation​-in​-the​-chinese​-way​-with​ -francois​-jullien/​. 5. Huddlestone, T. (2015), ‘Carly Fiorina says the Chinese “don’t innovate”’, TIME, accessed 9 February 2019 at http://​time​.com/​3897081/​carly​-fiorina​-china​-innovation/​. 6. State Council General Office (2016), ‘Outline of the National Informationization Development Strategy’, China Copyright and Media blog, 30 July, accessed 9 February 2019 at https://​chinacopyrightandmedia​.wordpress​.com/​2016/​07/​27/​outline​-of​-the​ -national​-informatization​-development​-strategy/​. 7. The Belt and Road Initiative refers to two ‘trade routes’ – the Maritime and the overland Silk Road. The BRI is a signature policy of Xi Jinping, an attempt to extend China’s influence. 8. ‘Zongheng Literature announced the completion of a new round of financing’, Zongheng. com, accessed May 26 2017 at http://​news​.zongheng​.com/​news/​5419​.html. 9. https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​qEpobkBO7rs. 10. CNBC (2017), ‘Alibaba founder Jack Ma just added “recording artist” to his list of accomplishments’, CNBC News, accessed 9 February 2019 at https://​www​.cnbc​.com/​ 2017/​11/​06/​alibaba​-founder​-jack​-ma​-has​-released​-a​-duet​-with​-mandopop​-singer​-faye​ -wong​.html.

312  Handbook on the geographies of creativity 11. https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​5XZarB3​-izc. 12. Statista (2017), ‘Number of monthly active WeChat users from 2nd quarter 2010 to 2nd Quarter 2017 (in millions)’, Statista 2017 accessed 9 February 2019 at https://​www​ .statista​.com/​statistics/​255778/​number​-of​-active​-wechat​-messenger​-accounts/​. 13. One translation of the Internet of Things in Chinese is 万物互联网, literally the ‘ten thousand things’. 14. The article briefly notes the Chinese ‘parent company’ Douyin. Hermann, J. (2019), ‘How Tik Tok is rewriting the world’, The New York Times, accessed 15 March 2019 at https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​2019/​03/​10/​style/​what​-is​-tik​-tok​.html.

REFERENCES Boden, M. (2016), AI: Its Nature and Future, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Chan, E. and B. Rigby (2015), ‘Alibaba plough $200 million into Snapchat in latest startup deal’, Reuters, 12 March, accessed 1 Feb 2019 at https://​ www​ .reuters​ .com/​ article/​ us​ -alibaba​-snapchat/​alibaba​-ploughs​-200​-million​-into​-snapchat​-in​-latest​-startup​-deal​-source​ -idUSKBN0M72L320150312. China Daily (2015), ‘Report on the work of the government’, China Daily, 5 March, accessed 1 Feb 2019 at http://​www​.chinadaily​.com​.cn/​china/​2015twosession/​2015​-03/​05/​content​ _19729663​.htm. Chow, C.-Y. (2016), ‘Alibaba buys South China Morning Post group’s media business and pledges to uphold editorial independence and remove pay’, South China Morning Post, August 29, accessed 1 Feb 2019 at http://​ www​ .scmp​ .com/​ business/​ companies/​ article/​ 1890060/​alibaba​-buys​-south​-china​-morning​-post​-groups​-media​-business. Christensen, C. (1997), The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, New York, NY, USA: Harvard Business Review Press. Chu, Y. (2014), ‘The politics of reception: “Made in China” and Western critique’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 17 (2), 159–73. Chua, B.-H. (2012), Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Cowen, T. (2014), The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, New York, NY, USA: Penguin Publishing Group. Frater, P. (2016), ‘Alibaba complete $4 billion takeover of Youku’, Variety, 5 April, accessed 1 Feb 2019 at http://​variety​.com/​2016/​biz/​asia/​alibaba​-completes​-youku​-tudou​-takeover​ -1201746908/​. Han, B.-C. (2017), Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, trans. P. Hurd, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Hanson, L. (2015), ‘Garena and Tencent shine a light on Southeast Asia’s booming digital games market’, Forbes, 27 March, accessed 1 Feb 2019 at https://​www​.forbes​.com/​sites/​ lisachanson/​2015/​03/​27/​garena​-and​-tencent​-shine​-a​-light​-on​-southeast​-asias​-booming​ -digital​-games​-market/​#57bf4b244779. Hong Y. (2017), Networking China: The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy, Urbana, IL, USA: University of Illinois Press. Howkins, J. (2009), Creative Ecologies: Where Thinking is a Proper Job, Brisbane, Australia: University of Queensland Press. Isaacson, W. (2011), Steve Jobs, New York, NY, USA: Simon & Schuster. Isaacson, W. (2014), The Innovators, New York, NY, USA: Simon & Schuster. Jen, G. (2013), Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self, Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press.

Cultures of creativity and innovation in Greater China  313 Jiang, B. (2012), ‘Tencent invests us$63 million into Kakao Talk, the Korean Wechat’, Technode, 17 May, accessed 1 Feb 2019 at http://​technode​.com/​2012/​05/​17/​tencent​-invests​ -us63m​-into​-kakaotalk​-the​-korean​-wechat/​. Jullien, F. (2015), The Book of Beginnings, trans. J. Gladding, New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press. Keane, M. (2007), Created in China: The Great New Leap Forward, London, UK: Routledge. Keane, M. (2013), Creative Industries in China: Art, Design, Media, London, UK: Polity. Keane, M. and Y. Chen (2017), ‘Entrepreneurial solutionism, characteristic cultural industries and the Chinese dream’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, DOI10.1080/10286632 .2017.1374382. Keane, M. and E. Zhao (2013), ‘Renegades on the frontiers of innovation’, Eurasian Journal of Economics and Culture, 53 (2), 316–30. Kong, L., C. Gibson, L.-M. Khoo and A.-L. Semple (2006), ‘Knowledges of the creative economy: towards a relational geography of diffusion and adaptation in Asia’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 47 (2), 173–94. Lee, E. (2016), ‘[Update] Sanook Online rebranded as Tencent Online’, Technode 22 December, accessed 31 March 2020 at https://​technode​.com/​2016/​12/​22/​tencent​-sanook/​. Lindtner, S. (2015), ‘Hackerspaces and the Internet of Things: how makers reinvent industrial production, innovation and the self’, in G. Yang (ed.), China’s Contested Internet, Copenhagen, Denmark: NIAS Press, pp. 44–74. Link, P. (2013), An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics, Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press. Lloyd, G.E.R. (2007), Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Lubart, T. (1999), ‘Creativity across cultures’, in R. Sternberg (ed.), The Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 339–50. Mason, P. (2015), PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, London, UK: Penguin Books. McKnight L.W., P.M. Vaaler and R.L. Katz (eds) (2001), Creative Destruction: Business Survival Strategies in the Global Internet Economy, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Merced, M. (2013), ‘Alibaba buys a stake in China’s Twitter’, The New York Times, 29 April, accessed 1 Feb 2019 at https://​dealbook​.nytimes​.com/​2013/​04/​29/​alibaba​-buys​-stake​-in​ -sina​-weibo​-a​-chinese​-answer​-to​-twitter/​. Nisbett, R.E. (2003), The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently, New York, USA: Free Press. Nowotny, H. (2016), The Cunning of Uncertainty, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Pope, R. (2005), Creativity: Theory, History, Practice, Abingdon Park, UK: Routledge. Puett, M.J. (2001), The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China, Stanford, CA, USA: Stanford University Press. Qiu, Z. (2016), ‘The remedy paradigm: Blue Books and the administration of cultural industries in China’, in M. Keane (ed.), The Handbook of Cultural Industries and Creative Industries in China, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 15–26. Reckwitz, A. (2017), The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Invention of the New, trans. S. Black, London, UK: Polity. Schumpeter, J. (1942), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London, UK: George Allen and Unwin. Su, W. (2016), China’s Encounter with Global Hollywood: Cultural Policy and the Film Industry 1994–2013, Lexington, KY, USA: University of Kentucky Press. Tan, C. (2016), ‘Understanding creativity in East Asia: insights from Confucius’ concept of junzi’, International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, 4 (1), 51–61. Tse, E. (2015), China’s Disruptors: How Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi and Other Companies are Changing the Rules of Business, New York, NY, USA: Portfolio Penguin.

314  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Wang, J. (2016a), ‘The makers are coming! China’s long tail revolution’, in M. Keane (ed.), The Handbook of the Cultural and Creative Industries in China, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 43–63. Wang, J. (2016b), The Wanda Way: The Managerial Philosophy and Values of One of China’s Largest Companies, London, UK: LID Publishing. Yeung, S.C. (2015), ‘What Alibaba–TVB tieup means for Hong Kong viewers’, Ejinsight. com, 18 June, accessed 1 Feb 2019 at http://​www​.ejinsight​.com/​20150618​-what​-alibaba​ -tvb​-tie​-means​-hk​-viewers/​.

19. From social ‘integration’ to transformation: supporting the emancipatory potential of circus arts creativity Deborah Leslie, Norma Rantisi and Jessie Smith

INTRODUCTION The creative arts have long been recognized for the transformative role they could play in communities, and community art in particular has been utilized as a means for empowering marginalized populations and improving their physical and emotional wellbeing. With the broader category of community art, social circus – the use of circus arts to promote social justice – is a field that has garnered increased attention in recent years. In this paper, we explore the social circus in Montréal, Canada. Within that context, Cirque du Soleil has been a major actor, owing to an extensive social circus programme (Cirque du Monde) that it initiated in 1995. This programme focuses on the use of circus arts as a mode of intervention for ‘at risk’ youth. A key objective is to assist individuals to become ‘active citizens’, developing skills of team working, risk management and time discipline. Such an emphasis raises questions about the use of social circus for the cultivation of neoliberal subjectivities. At the same time, as an affective art form, that is both bodily and collective, social circus has characteristics that lend it to the development of a potentially transformative space. In this paper, we explore the tensions that define the contemporary social circus and forms of support that could further develop its potential as a mode of alternative politics. Organized into five sections, our chapter first explores the contradictory nature of the arts as a tool in social and community development initiatives in an evolving policy context. Then, we chart the historical and geographical evolution of social circus and its characteristics. The third section discusses the objectives of social circus and, in particular, its goal to construct active, enterprising citizens. The fourth section unravels some of the emancipatory possibilities embedded in social circus’s creative practices, while the fifth examines the unique spatial needs of social circus and forms of support necessary to enrich its emancipatory possibilities.

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THE CONTRADICTORY NATURE OF CREATIVE PRACTICE AS SOCIAL POLICY ‘TOOL’ Culture and creative practices have long been viewed as central to social inclusion. In the 1970s and 1980s, cultural policy was oriented to social and civic agendas, with a focus on democratizing access to cultural activities and facilities, the promotion of self-expression and the building of community interaction (Bianchini, 1993; Kong, 2010; Warren and Jones, 2015). Public funds were dedicated to supporting such initiatives. By the mid-1980s, fiscal cutbacks and the deindustrialization of cities saw a new policy framing in relation to culture. Culture was increasingly viewed as a basis for inner-city property revalorization, with culture serving the ends of place-branding and economic development (Evans, 2003; Peck, 2005; Zukin, 1995). With respect to the social or political dimensions of culture and the arts, a relation was acknowledged, but the economic dimensions were increasingly privileged. Community development via the arts was still held up as a societal aim, but it was increasingly the responsibility of underfunded community organizations – or what Wolch (1990) terms ‘shadow state’ organizations. Responsibility – cast as ‘moral duty’ – also lay with individual residents, including those who were most marginalized (Grundy and Boudreau, 2008). Corporate actors were also called upon to fund arts and community projects, as part of their growing corporate social responsibility (CSR) agendas (Harvie, 2013). Today, the ‘right’ forms of creative practice, in addition to promoting economic growth, are deemed tools for enhancing social integration and civic participation, including the cultivation of practices whereby individuals (or collectives) can govern themselves (Grundy and Boudreau, 2008; Ponzini and Rossi, 2010). As highlighted in the literature on neoliberal governmentality, ‘government’ increasingly involves a reorienting of conduct (i.e. behaviour) towards self-management and enterprise, a reorientation that is attained not by coercion, but through an inculcation of values that are often centred on risk-management, cost-reduction and benefit-maximization (Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999). Beyond these calculative logics, recent literature has noted that ethical-political considerations, such as the civic goal of community cohesion, are also a motivating factor for individual engagement and responsibility (Gundry and Boudreau, 2008; Leslie and Hunt, 2013). Such calculative and ethical-political considerations are not only cultivated by official governing authorities, but increasingly by ‘shadow state’ and corporate actors (including community arts initiatives) – actors that have assumed former state responsibilities of delivering services to disadvantaged populations (Warren and Jones, 2015). Creativity and the arts now figure centrally in projects of devolution (Grundy and Boudreau, 2008; Leslie and Hunt, 2013; McLean, 2014). Why creative practice? In contrast to other forms of labour, creativity is intertwined with the production of subjectivity, as affects, beliefs and personhood are enrolled and constituted through creative practices of experimentation and redefinition. As an inherently social process that entails interaction between agents, creative practice also involves

Supporting the emancipatory potential of circus arts creativity  317 ethical and aesthetic dimensions, and can give rise to new identities and collectivities (Lazzarato, 1996). When mobilized for particular ends – such as economic competitiveness or for social development – creativity can thus lead to new modes of governance. Lazzarato (1996) foregrounds the role of ‘active subjects’ in creative practices, but cautions that the means by which engagement is solicited and structured can often take the form of ‘participative management’, a technology of power that seeks to control ‘subjective processes’. An instrumental management of creative practice thus risks limiting the potential for radical or transformative change that can emerge through the formation of new identities or future scope for action, as it closes the space (and often the time) for undirected exploration. At the same time, scholars such as Lazzarato (1996) and Hardt (1999) acknowledge that creative practices can never be fully subjected to the control of capital (or other governmental logics), since they rely on conditions of communication, which remain autonomous. In her analysis of cultural practice, Rose (1997) discusses how a non-representational ‘spatiality of action and performance’ (hence one that is open and unregulated) is the basis for a praxis that can serve as a ‘politics of resistance’ where fixed meanings, values and norms can be disrupted and new social relations forged (see also Harvie, 2013; Jeffery et al., 2016; McLean, 2017; Spiegel, 2016). In their study on social circus, Jeffery et al. (2016) draw on Rose’s conception and highlight the need for community arts workers to emphasize practice and process rather than goals and intentionality, avoiding discourses of responsibility and citizenship. We suggest broadening the conception of a non-representational ‘spatiality of action and performance’ to encompass time, as well as space, as axes shaping practice, both for individual participants in programmes and the ‘shadow state’ actors tasked with providing the conditions for creative self-actualization. These themes relate directly to the analysis here. Social circus is a field that utilizes creative practice to attain a particular set of ends, namely, empowerment and social inclusion. However, as Spiegel (2014, 2016) suggests, the challenge for social circus is to promote efforts that go beyond an insertion of individuals into existing societal structures and encourage a dialogic relationship, where structures are ‘adjusted’ so that marginalized individuals are appreciated for the qualities they possess and for who they are. This raises the question of how social circus can navigate the tension between orienting youth to new skills and modes of engagement, and creating the space and time for bottom-up forms of exploration and expression. What supports would such a space–time nexus entail? In the next section, we discuss the characteristics of social circus which lend it to use as an intervention tool.

ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE SOCIAL CIRCUS While social circus was coined in 2002 by an international group of circus organizations specializing in social work with youth (Bolton, 2004), Lavers (2014) dates the origins to the 1950s, when a Jesuit priest in Spain started a circus company in order to

318  Handbook on the geographies of creativity raise funds for a community of orphan boys who had been living on the streets. Since that time, the growth and expansion of social circus has been propelled by the contemporary (or ‘nouveau’) circus – a circus that breaks with the traditional circus by dispensing with animals and incorporating other art forms (such as dance and theatre) (Harvie and Hurley, 1999). Contemporary social circus has also been influenced by the ‘arts for social change movement’ and the Brazilian Theatre of Oppressed, which builds upon the embodied experiences of participants (Spiegel, 2014, 2016). In Canada, a key actor in the development of social circus is Cirque du Soleil. In collaboration with Jeunesse du Monde (‘Youth of the World’), the company set up Cirque du Monde (‘Circus of the World’), which began offering social circus programmes in 1995 (Interview, Cirque du Monde instructor, 2012). The programme now operates in over 80 countries around the world, including Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Burkina Faso and Cameroon. According to Cirque du Soleil, social circus can be defined as: a way of approaching social problems derived from an innovative fusion between circus arts and social intervention. Social circus aims to ensure the all around development and social inclusion of people at risk, especially youth. Precisely because it leaves room for freedom and creativity while demanding tenacity, perseverance and discipline, social circus empowers participants to use their marginality to express themselves and establish a new relationship with a society that has often excluded them. (Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011: 13–14)

Workshops typically last two to three hours in length and take place over a period of two to ten months (Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011). Participants are introduced to different circus arts, such as gymnastics, dance, juggling, acrobatics, stilts, unicycle, clowning and trampoline. There are a number of characteristics of the contemporary circus that lend it to social work. One aspect is that it is a diverse and adaptable art form. As one trainer contends, in Quebec, circus is a mix of all of the arts. It’s a crossroads between dance and theatre . . . everybody will find their interest in the circus. So if I work with kids, youth, or adults in need, in a social intervention context, maybe someone is a funny guy, so he will be a clown, maybe one is more physical, so he will be an acrobat. (Interview, Cirque du Monde trainer, 2014)

The circus draws upon a variety of skills, offering freedom to experiment. As another instructor puts it, it is useful for social workers to have a tool that is not only verbal, but also physical. It’s artistic. It’s creative. So all of that helps them create more opportunities . . . It’s the diversity of circus, so that inside of circus you have group things, individual things, physical things, motor skills, balancing things, and then you have self-expression, so theatre . . . So there is a place for. (Interview, social circus instructor, 2014)

Supporting the emancipatory potential of circus arts creativity  319 Owing to its diversity, one can master simple physical tricks relatively quickly. This gives participants a sense of accomplishment and pride (Interview, Cirque du Monde instructor, 2012). Social circus is thus a useful means of building self-esteem. Several interviewees also underscored the significance of circus’s physicality and its engagement of the body as a site for self and collective exploration. As one instructor explains, they have been homeless, so . . . they have been really hard on [their bodies] . . . It is almost as if they are no longer in their bodies. We use social circus to re-appropriate, to bring out again physical experience, touching other people. (Interview, social circus instructor, 2014)

This attention to the body and contact with other bodies in space can foster an ethic of self-care. This physicality can also aid in establishing connection to others, as teamwork is essential: the creation of relationships with youth happens very fast . . . Usually, an intervention takes time and follows the rhythm of each child . . . but with social circus you don’t have the time to get to know each other. You have to climb on top of each other. You have a foot in your face. They’re pulling you here and there . . . If I have to lift you up on my shoulders, you have to trust me and I have to trust that you aren’t going to drop me. (Interview, social worker, 2014)

In addition to forging links among performers, the circus is premised upon a close engagement with the audience. It entails a level of acceptance and humility that aids in breaking down the division between the performer and the audience (McClaren, 2010: 70). Participants often stage performances for their local community, which helps to forge connections and enhances the usefulness of social circus. There are thus many characteristics of the circus which lend themselves to community development, including the ability to build self-esteem and nurture social capital. These unique characteristics make it well suited to working with a variety of individuals that have been ‘othered’. Within social circus, there has been a focus on marginalized youth, many of whom live in disadvantaged environments or on the streets and who may suffer from histories of child abuse or drug and alcohol addiction. At Cirque du Soleil, this focus stems in part from the personal history of Guy Laliberté, one of the company founders. Once a street performer, he remains committed to helping young people (Interviews, 2012–14). To capitalize on social circus’s community development features, Cirque du Monde works in concert with agencies embedded within the community, providing them with financial and material resources (such as the donation of circus equipment) and organizational expertise (Interview, Cirque du Monde official, 2014). Cirque du Monde also sends personnel to train local instructors, as there is a belief that social problems are specific to a neighbourhood and that local community organizers, who know the needs of the youth, are best suited to delivering programmes (Interview, Cirque du Monde instructor, 2012).

320  Handbook on the geographies of creativity The Cirque du Monde model, like social circus more generally, also seeks to move away from traditional approaches in social work that are highly directed. It uses artistic practice to engage youth in a less structured way. As one social worker notes, I did street work for many years in Montréal and I realized that people were not always comfortable with the classic mode of sitting down and talking about what they were going through and your problems. People were having a hard time to express what they were feeling and so I started . . . to do activities with them and while the activity was going on, it was easier for them to open up and to talk about themselves. (Interview, social worker, 2012)

Many participants in social circus have experienced difficult relationships with figures of authority, and there is a desire for an intervention that departs from a top-down approach (Interviews). Indeed, a key concept in social circus is the ‘circle’. This refers to the fact that everyone has a right to express opinions, raise questions and make suggestions. Cirque du Monde employs a tandem approach, which involves two facilitators – a circus instructor and a community worker (Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011: 33). Each of these actors has a defined role: the model of Cirque du Monde is that an artist [instructor] will work in tandem . . . with a social worker or psychologist or a youth worker . . . We are going to work with a specialist hand-to-hand and what is very important is that each of them are not going to do only their job, they are going to do their job together. (Interview, social circus instructor, 2014)

In 2000, Cirque du Soleil also created a social circus training programme. The goal is to educate instructors and community workers in the practice of social circus. This programme was motivated by the shortage of trained instructors, and owing to its unique nature, the programme is critical to the continued viability of social circus (Interviews). Since the founding of Cirque du Monde, a variety of other organizations have emerged to provide social circus programmes in Montréal, including the non-profit organization Cirque Hors Piste (Interview, social circus instructor, 2014). Established in 2011, Cirque Hors Piste receives funding from the Cirque du Soleil, the municipal government, circus trade organization and other sources. Cirque du Soleil is also part of an International Network for Social Circus Training (INSCT), which brings together ten organizations from around the world. A range of support structures have thus emerged to support social circus and its social interventions. While social circus continues to acquire recognition and now stands as a viable, alternative intervention approach, it is not free of authority. It is still weighed down by a neoliberal instrumentalization that defines its governing logics, a theme that we explore in the next section.

Supporting the emancipatory potential of circus arts creativity  321

CIRQUE DU MONDE AS SOCIAL POLICY TOOL While historically, many community arts projects emerged from politically revolutionary movements that centred these projects in public policy (Kong, 2010), in the current period, most initiatives – including social circus – are constrained by a need to seek out funding from a mix of government, nongovernmental and increasingly corporate sources, such as Cirque du Soleil (Spiegel, 2016). As argued earlier, these sources influence the mandates of community arts projects (Grundy and Boudreau, 2008). There are a number of ethical-political objectives that underpin social circus. One goal is to help youth identify a future vocation. Social circus aims to develop the creative capacities and skill sets of youth (Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011). In some cases, participants may develop an appreciation of circus and pursue further training in a specific circus art. In those circumstances, trainers refer individuals to relevant resources, including educational programmes (Interviews, 2014). Although some participants pursue a professional career in circus, this is not the main purpose of social circus. As one trainer puts it, ‘the main goal is not to create an artist. If I work with a youth and after two months he tells me that he wants to go back to school, it’s a success’ (Interview, Cirque du Monde official, 2014). The most important objective is to build self-esteem and trust among disadvantaged youth and to encourage more active involvement in civic life (Rivard et al., 2010; Spiegel et al., 2014). According to Cirque du Monde, social circus ‘gives participants the chance to express themselves and be listened to, to realize their own potential and to make their own contribution as citizens in the world’ (Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011: 14; emphasis added). While social circus seeks to trouble traditional social work approaches centred on authority, there remains an emphasis on promoting ‘citizenship’. Citizenship is defined as a technology of self-governance, and active citizenship refers to the individual’s responsibility to take care of themselves and their community (Ponzini and Rossi, 2010; Rose, 1999). As in neoliberal forms of governance, which emphasize autonomy and self-discipline, Cirque du Monde argues that its mission is to encourage the participant to ‘internalize much of the process through self-motivation and self-regulation’ (Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011: 17–18). The goal in neoliberal governance is to remove ‘incitements to passivity and dependence’ (Rose, 1999: 144). A former social circus director argues that participation in social circus motivates youth to change their habits as well as their status from that of victim to that of protagonist, from the role of onlooker to that of artist. It gives them the opportunity to become active players in their own lives . . . and to make their contribution as citizens in the world. (quoted in Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011: 16)

There is frequent acknowledgement in social circus materials of the precarious nature of contemporary existence. One goal is to prepare youth for this instability by

322  Handbook on the geographies of creativity developing new modes of risk management to secure higher levels of integration and resilience (Grundy and Boudreau, 2008; Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011: 20; Leslie and Hunt, 2013). As noted earlier, circus involves risk-taking. Youth often assume ‘unacceptable’ risks – taking drugs for example. The goal is to get them to channel these risks in alternative ways: when we work with street kids, who do glue or drugs or whatever, they have high adrenaline all of the time, but when you teach them acrobatics and they do a backflip it gives them a similar experience. (Interview, Cirque du Monde instructor, 2012)

An instructor further summarizes the benefits in terms of ‘learning life skills through circus’, such as the ability to evaluate risk: if you want to go on a trapeze without a rig or without a rope for security, you need to be very aware of your limits . . . of your fear . . . Our goal is to make him to control and overcome that fear. (Interview, Cirque du Monde instructor, 2014)

Teamwork is one means to manage risk. Participants are encouraged to form human pyramids. These types of exercises motivate the individual to tolerate risk, but also to see themselves as part of a community (Interviews). As Rivard et al. (2010: 185) suggest, the pyramid exercise ‘goes beyond gymnastic competence to include the need for others to make the pyramid, a feeling of individual and shared success and a physical experience paradoxically combining pleasure and risk, constraint and freedom, pain and concern for others’. Soft skills, such as attendance, punctuality, scheduling and efficiency, are also centred in order to prepare participants for an institutional role. As Schwan and Lightman (2015: 21) explain: showing up on time, and staying for the duration of the workshop are thus rules that represent the practical dimension of the social goals of trust building and community solidarity, both as inherent goods and as valuable for their role in cultural survival . . . That circus can simultaneously act as an incentive to lower/eliminate drug use, as well as a replacement for drugs, as a direct result of rules relating to safety and time discipline, suggests not only the power of circus for recovery, but also the importance of time discipline for such programs.

A clear goal, therefore, is to familiarize participants with industrial rhythms and to foster time-based discipline that will lay the groundwork for participating in the school system or in the workforce (Schwan and Lightman, 2015; Spiegel, 2016). Most workshops culminate in a live performance, which is designed to develop the communicative skills required for active citizenship. As one trainer puts it, ‘taking up public space with a live performance, with staging and play, allows the youth to tell others that he exists in this space and he has something to show’ (Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011: 19). As another instructor notes, when we do a show for the community with those people, then the community starts looking at them from a different angle, because they start to see another kind of person, so

Supporting the emancipatory potential of circus arts creativity  323 we build a bridge between the community and those people and hopefully after the show they can talk. They can communicate. They are going to say, ‘I saw you juggling and how can you walk on the wire?’ . . . this is one of the examples of how we can build citizenship. (Interview, Cirque du Monde Official, 2014)

There are thus a variety of ways in which social circus attempts to manage individuals, preparing them for survival within existing social structures. Despite this instrumental orientation, there are dimensions of this artistic practice that transcend its strategic deployment. In the next section we discuss some of these dimensions.

EMANCIPATORY DIMENSIONS OF SOCIAL CIRCUS Social circus is a contradictory mode of intervention. On the one hand, programmes aim to develop skills that will help the individual to survive in a neoliberal world. On the other hand, social circus is oriented toward empowering the individual (Spiegel, 2016: 52). Although social circus attempts to ‘integrate’ marginalized groups from the outside, social circus is committed to enabling individuals and communities to take ownership of programmes over time and to participate on their own terms (Schwan and Lightman, 2015; Spiegel, 2016). Moreover, the embodied and imaginative nature of circus is conducive to an emancipatory politics. While the affective qualities (the emotional and communicative elements) of cultural production may be exploited within projects, they also provide moments of human contact, affording opportunities for challenging established hierarchies (Lazzarato, 1996). Indeed, the circus involves a kinaesthetic sociality – a mode of creating collectively – where multiple bodies and voices combine in acts of shared physical performance (Spiegel, 2016: 52; see also Rantisi and Leslie, 2015). In her research on Cirque Hors Piste, Spiegel (2016: 56) describes how many participants use the language of the circus to build powerful critiques of dominant power relations. She finds that participants articulate a desire to awaken audiences to the destructive forces impacting their communities (ibid.: 58). Themes related to violence, policing, racism and capitalist exploitation are often profiled (ibid.). Participants learn new modes of relating to one another and to audiences that may lead to broader social transformation. As Spiegel (2016: 64) argues, what is embodied in social circus is a challenge to habitual modes of relating, one that breaks with habits of thought and interaction, to open up new individual and collective horizons for future social and cultural development.

Not only does the circus foster the interaction of bodies in space, but there is also the creation of a ‘safe space’. According to Cirque du Soleil, a safe space is fun and open to experimentation, but ‘is also a space of physical and emotional safety, a space where one can express one’s culture, a social space of reconciliation and discoveries’ (Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011: 21). There are parallels here with Mary Louise Pratt’s (1991: 40) notion of the ‘safe house’. Pratt (1991: 34) describes the

324  Handbook on the geographies of creativity presence of contact zones in society, ‘where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’, and notes that ‘where there are legacies of subordination, groups need places for healing and mutual recognition, safe houses in which to construct shared understandings, knowledges, claims on the world’ (ibid.: 40; see also Catungal, 2013). These are inclusionary spaces where individuals find temporary protection from legacies of oppression, retreating from the world around them (ibid.). In such spaces, marginalized groups can examine questions of identity and share experiences in a risk-free environment. Ideas developed in safe spaces can then be brought back into the contact zone (ibid.). In Montréal, social circus tends to be dominated by white, working class youth, but there are nonetheless opportunities for challenging one’s marginality: the idea is to be able to leave whatever challenge they may be faced with in their lives – poverty and unstable housing – outside of this space or at the door. So in this space, the goal is to create and exchange with others and to permit participants to grow individually, socially and collectively. So the notion of ‘safe space’ . . . is very important. (Interview, social circus instructor, 2014)

Cirque du Monde aims to foster the creation of a space where kids can, make their marginality a force . . . This is very important for us, to offer a safe space where they can express themselves. They can be in security. They can talk to anyone and express themselves artistically. (Interview, Cirque du Monde official, 2014)

The creation of safe space not only includes an emotional space (including a sense of openness), but also a secure physical space. To this end, it is important that there are proper safety instructions and protocols, safe equipment and insurance (Lafortune and Bouchard, 2011: 29; see also Rivard et al., 2010). The ‘safe space’ feature of circus can also be linked to its association with the street (a ‘public’ space), and with carnival and transgression (Bakhtin, 1984). Its nomadic and fringe characteristics appeal to marginalized youth, as a basis for connecting with others: for street kids . . . it’s a way in for them and a way to connect with the circus. It’s like where you go is your house. (Interview, Cirque du Monde instructor, 2012)

Circus affords the opportunity to invert social relations. Like carnival, it generates a temporary liberation from dominant rules, prohibitions and codes of conduct (Bakhtin, 1984). Participants dress in costumes and masks, enabling them to explore different perspectives and identities (Interview, social circus instructor, 2012). Thus, despite the governmental deployment of circus, there are embodied possibilities for transcending this logic (Spiegel and Parent, 2017).

Supporting the emancipatory potential of circus arts creativity  325 There is thus a tension within social circus between its aim to integrate youth into existing structures, and its ability to foster alternative identities. In the next section, we highlight the spatial and policy implications of this tension. We argue that possibilities for more radical forms of intervention depend on a new social policy orientation, one that is predicated on stable funding and supportive spaces.

SUPPORTING SOCIAL CIRCUS A key problem encountered by social circus organizations in Montréal is access to stable funding. As noted earlier, cutbacks to state arts funding under neoliberalism mean that social circus, like other arts, has to rely increasingly on private sources, which tend to favour more modest, one-off events (Harvie, 2013: 184). While organizations receive some funding from government and corporate sources (such as Cirque du Soleil), the funding is short term (Interview, social circus organizer). The constant need to reapply for support – combined with the necessity to articulate requests in a neoliberal language – makes their situation precarious. It is difficult to articulate a long-range agenda, or to hire full-time staff, particularly since government priorities are constantly shifting. It is also challenging to provide predictable work for part-time staff. As a coordinator at Cirque Hors Piste notes, once in a while we will receive money and then we can increase the activities we do, so then we are really active, and then the funding is over and then we are going back to just regular activities, like the weekly workshops we do. It has a very big impact on the hours that I can do. (Interview, Cirque Hors Piste representative, 2014)

The emphasis on short-term planning thus poses a particular challenge for staffing and programming. There is also a need to foreground practice and process in social circus initiatives, rather than simply goals and outcomes, which currently dominate in an audit culture (Jeffery et al., 2016). It is important to avoid a top-down approach, and to allow participants to take control in setting their own agendas. This provides the basis for a dialogic relationship, which enables participants to explore questions of identity and critique existing power structures (Spiegel, 2016). Greater autonomy and more stable funding would help expand this potential. Social circus is committed to giving youth and indigenous communities ownership over programmes over time and these possibilities could be further developed through longer-term public funding. As social circus is a relatively new field, there is also a need to make it more visible and to legitimate it in order to attract more stable funding and participants: the idea is to support the development of social circus. It can be through collaborating on research. It can be by offering training to circus instructors in organizations. It can be by advocacy, so doing conferences. All of these actions are to reach the goal of developing social circus, because we believe that it’s a great intervention tool . . . (but) it’s still not known. (Interview, social circus instructor, 2014)

326  Handbook on the geographies of creativity In order to gain a greater presence in virtual space, Cirque du Soleil has been helping Cirque Hors Piste to create a website (Cirque Hors Piste Annual Report, 2016). As well, Cirque du Monde has been making efforts to showcase the expansion of social circus worldwide by mapping social circus initiatives. This serves not only to build awareness of the social circus landscape, but also aids in networking (http://​apps​ .cirquedusoleil​.com/​social​-circus​-map/​). A similar initiative is underway in Quebec, which sponsors conferences where practitioners can connect face-to-face (Interview, Cirque du Monde official, 2014). There is also a need to secure physical spaces. A key problem is that Cirque Hors Piste, one of the main social circus organizations in Quebec, does not have a dedicated training space. As a representative notes, our next goal is to be able to have our own place, because right now . . . we have no gym . . . We need to rent or to borrow gym space in different spaces in Montréal to do our workshops and it costs a lot of money and it takes a lot of time to transport all of the circus materials. (Interview, Cirque Hors Piste representative, 2014)

A dedicated physical space is particularly important in the circus. A representative of Cirque Hors Piste argues that such a space would bring awareness and it would also bring legitimacy, because social circus is not well known in Quebec and so most of the people see circus as a recreational tool and they don’t see the benefits and the power of the approach as a tool for intervention. (Interview, Cirque Hors Piste representative, 2014)

Physical space is critical to the creation of what Bromberg (2010: 214) terms ‘possibility spaces’. Possibility spaces are decommodified and noneconomic spaces, persisting in the cracks of a commoditized neoliberal landscape (Bromberg, 2010: 214). Possibility spaces are places apart from home, work and commerce; places that foster creative engagement with the world. Bromberg (2010) describes how such non-commodified spaces are increasingly squeezed out of a city centred on competition and market discipline. Crucial alternative spaces – such as public libraries, parks and community centres – are increasingly starved of adequate funding from public and private sources (Bromberg, 2010: 215). Yet, in possibility spaces, there is the potential to ‘reinsert unpredictability in urban places where it has been designed out of existence’ (ibid.: 224). Likewise, in their analysis of non-capitalist and collective arts spaces, Bain and McLean (2013: 107) illustrate how these sites provide a ‘disruptive materiality’ (a term borrowed from Gibson-Graham [2006: xxxiii]) that aids artists in performatively resisting neoliberal logics. Bromberg (2010) not only highlights the importance of such physical spaces for denaturalizing existing power relations, she also foregrounds the importance of material support for spaces that can allow ‘a cultural economy – of generosity and conviviality to grow and evolve’ (Bromberg, 2009: 223). In the case of Mess Hall, a community arts space in Chicago that she profiles, the space is dependent on an individual real estate owner with an appreciation for the arts, who provides the space

Supporting the emancipatory potential of circus arts creativity  327 for a token $1 a month in rent (ibid.: 219). All of this underscores the need for alternative support structures that can provide stable funding. Some funding has materialized to support the development of physical space. Along with CEDEC (the Centre Sud Plateau Mont Royal Economic Development Corporation) and Reseau d’investissement Social du Quebec (the Social Investment Network of Quebec), Cirque du Soleil has been helping Cirque Hors Piste to develop a feasibility study to help secure a permanent space in L’Ilot Sainte-Brigide-de-Kildare (Cirque Hors Piste Annual Report, 2016). As an official at Cirque Hors Piste explains, in the last year . . . they [Cirque du Soleil] . . . are participating in the idea of finding a . . . fixed space, so they added an amount of money to the regular funding . . . because the project still doesn’t have stable funding where you can have a team and pay the coordinator, one social worker, and one social circus artist full-time. (Interview, social circus instructor, 2014)

The church, L’Ilot Sainte-Brigide-de-Kildare, was constructed in 1880 and is being renovated to house Cirque Hors Piste, as well as En Piste (a circus arts trade association), a daycare, youth theatre and social housing (Anon, 2015). Particularly with aerials and juggling, a specialized facility, with high ceilings, is essential (Interviews). As a Cirque Hors Piste representative explains, a church is well suited to social circus: this is the main project that we have been working on so far, to find a space. We are one of the partners of L’Ilot St Brigide and we want to use the space in the church that’s higher up. In French we call this ‘la nef’ of the church, as this would allow us to do aerials, which would be really nice. What we need to do to get there is to get funding to renovate the space and to buy or to rent. (Interview, Cirque Hors Piste representative, 2014)

Not only is it important to have a dedicated space with high ceilings, but the space also has to be open and flexible, so it can accommodate a range of different types of activity, including costumes, offices, workshops, rehearsal space and a performance hall: we are kind of a nomadic organization ourselves, so this has been really hard for the materials, and we want to offer more activities, but each time we have to spend more money to rent the space and the right space – so if you want to do aerials, well there are not very many gyms in Montréal that offer aerials. If you want to go juggle the roof might be too low, so we can’t use the space, so to have our own space it would allow us to develop more of a sense of belonging among participants and so they might be more implicated in the space and they would be able to offer their time to work, so to be welcoming. (Interview, Cirque Hors Piste representative, 2014)

A dedicated facility is thus important so that youth can take ownership of the space. It enables the creation of a safe space, and sends a message that youth can drop by at any time. What is needed is a multi-purpose space that facilitates informal socialization, as well as formal training.

328  Handbook on the geographies of creativity The first phase of renovations in the church began in 2011. This phase involved a $10 million subsidy from the federal government. The second phase involves the construction of a new building in the former parking lot (https://​www​.cirquehorspiste​ .com/​lieudedie/​cirquehorspiste​.com/​apropos/​). This phase involves $11 million in support from the provincial government. Cirque Hors Piste is a partner in the project, but it has not yet secured the necessary funds for its space. It is important that a social circus space be connected to the community. Tohu is an exemplary model here. Tohu is a circus arts district created in 2004 through a collaboration between Cirque du Soleil, the National Circus School and a circus arts trade association, En Piste (Interviews). Government support helped to establish the complex, which contains an indoor performance pavilion, as well as space for circus training, creation and production (Leslie and Rantisi, 2012). Tohu operates according to social economy principles, as do all of its subcontractors (La Tohu, 2011). All service jobs are given to neighbourhood residents, including jobs in the parking lot, restaurant, cloakroom and performance hall. Employees are organized into worker cooperatives (La Tohu, 2006). Tohu thus contributes to employment in the neighbourhood. A similar model could be incorporated in the development of a social circus facility, whereby office and maintenance jobs could be allocated to the local community. Not only is it important to have a permanent facility, but it is also critical to ensure access to a range of public spaces, so that social circus participants can stage performances in the community. This is crucial to ensuring connections with local communities that can potentially foster social change. The city could protect and develop green spaces and parks, especially in marginalized communities for this purpose. As well, creating a social circus festival or creating increased space for social circus within the existing circus festival in Montréal, Montréal Completement Cirque, would also help to raise the visibility of social circus and give voice to participants. A range of policies are thus necessary to provide stability in staffing and programming. Support structures are also important to ensure neoliberal agendas do not dominate. Proper supports can free programmes to focus on practice and process, creating safe spaces with the potential to mobilize a transformative politics. It is in these circumstances that social circus holds the potential to create possibility spaces (Bromberg, 2010). However, these supports are unlikely to manifest in the current neoliberal regime. A form of governance that appreciates the social and cultural dimensions of the arts is needed. In the past, the Cirque du Soleil along with other actors in the field (e.g. training institutions, independent circus artists and allied arts fields) have played a central role in elevating circus as a nascent art form, convincing the state and other actors that it is worthy of support. This same set of actors could also play a role in highlighting the multi-faceted nature and benefits of social circus to reorient policy discourse and regimes in ways that acknowledge the arts’ transformative potential.

Supporting the emancipatory potential of circus arts creativity  329

CONCLUSION Within Montréal, social circus is increasingly utilized as a creative practice in the service of social change, owing largely to Cirque du Monde’s support. There is a new generation of social workers and community organizers trained in the use of social circus, who find it a valuable medium for communication, expression and collective forms of identity building. However, it is challenging to do so in ways that can adapt – rather than reinforce – existing structures, as an individualization of responsibility through ‘active citizenship’ occupies a central place in the Cirque du Monde discourse. With relatively scarce resources to expand social circus programmes and sustain the building of relations among marginalized youth, social workers and society at large, ‘active citizenship’ as a mode of inclusion becomes ascendant in practice, as well as discourse. More secure sources of funding and a dedicated social circus ‘space’ (for training, workshops, performances) are needed to counter this trend. While social circus holds transformative potential, it should not be viewed as operating in isolation of broader structural challenges. Accordingly, social circus initiatives need to be accompanied by state-funded social supports, including properly funded mental health care, addiction services, education and social assistance, to ensure youth participation. Put simply, social circus programmes cannot be viewed as substitutes for state programmes; rather they need to work in coordination with them. When viewed in this way, social circus has much to contribute to a social development agenda working to combat exclusion. As Lazzarato (1996) suggests, the communicative capacities of creative practices can be marshalled in a struggle against precarity, offering up possibilities for resistance. What is needed is a broader system of supports to nurture these possibilities and tip the balance in favour of collective, over individual, paths to social inclusion.

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PART VII CREATIVITY AS METHOD

20. Making as geographical method Janet Banfield

INTRODUCTION Rumpelstiltskin might seem like a strange character to co-opt as a geographer, but he does epitomize current concerns within the two main sub-disciplinary domains within which I work: geographies of art and non-representational geographies. The twists and turns in the disciplinary history of geography’s interest in art can be likened to the characters in this fairy tale (Grimm and Southgate, 1812 [1968]) while the pesky fellow himself might be framed as the fictional epitome of geography’s current and growing fascination with material praxis. We might consider the focus on content and meaning from iconographical work (for example, see Cosgrove, 1985; Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Daniels, 1984) akin to the king’s wonder at seeing the room full of gold in the morning. Although attending to the end state (the room full of gold) tells the king that something has happened, it reveals nothing as to what actually took place or how, suggesting the need to broaden our focus from the appearance and meaning of things to dynamic material practice. We might also conceive of collaborations between geographers and artists (see, for example, Foster and Lorimer, 2007; Hawkins, 2015) in terms of the miller’s daughter’s focussed observation of Rumpelstiltskin busy at work spinning straw into gold. However, and as the miller’s daughter discovered, careful and detailed observation is of limited use as it contributed nothing to her own ability to spin straw into gold. This suggests that while bearing witness to practices can be informative, observation of rather than engagement with material processuality potentially limits the scope of that which can be revealed. Finally, we might imagine contemporary efforts at doing geography through artistic practice (for example see Edensor, 2000; Wylie, 2005) as reflecting geography’s shifting identification less with the miller’s daughter and more with Rumpelstiltskin himself; that mischievous but masterful practitioner of material processuality. In making specific things happen Rumpelstiltskin might be considered a fairy tale forerunner to Deleuze’s (1979) prospector – one who makes matter undergo operations to invoke particular effects. However, the goal of invoking particular effects implicitly assumes that the effects resulting from the operations undertaken were known in advance and, by implication, that material prospecting is a matter of expertise, as only those with training or previous experience would be able to predict the outcome of the operations undertaken. The emphasis would consequently remain on the effects generated, simultaneously leaving underexamined the material and embodied aspects of what actually happens in the course of making and confining auto-ethnographic artistic practices to proficient or expert practitioners. 333

334  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Debates are building within the geographies of art as to the appropriateness of geographers using artistic practice as a research method if they are not trained in art (Banfield, 2016c, 2017a; Hawkins, 2015; Lafrenière and Cox, 2013; Marston and de Leeuw, 2013), with some commentators suggesting that more open-ended methods that seek to ‘see what happens’ during artistic practice might also be productive in a more interrogative, exploratory or experimental fashion (Anderson and Wylie, 2009; Banfield, 2017a, 2017b) to supplement more goal-directed research engagements through proficient artistic practice. To consider these issues briefly in relation to our fairy tale example, as much could potentially be learnt through the miller’s daughter’s unsuccessful attempts at material processuality as through Rumpelstiltskin’s more successful endeavours to spin straw into gold. What is learnt in each case might be different but both can be informative with regard to the embodied and practical aspects that arise during material engagements, which are generative of both knowledge and place. Whether novice or expert, the power of making comes from engaging with and cultivating new relations and subjectivities (Hawkins, 2015). For example, had the miller’s daughter possessed the ability to spin straw into gold, both the spatialities and subjectivities of her future would have been radically altered. This is not an instance in which there is a pre-existing, essential, true, or stable space or subjectivity that only an expert can render perceptible, but one in which different proficiencies generate different spatialities and subjectivities. The intention here is not to undermine the value of proficient practice, but it is to warn against the reification of proficiency and the associated dismissal of less-than-expert practice as a means of thinking, experiencing, and generating spatiality and subjectivity. While we might never develop Rumpelstiltskin’s particular and peculiar talents, this chapter draws on this fairy tale to suggest that there is much to be revealed in processes of material manipulation in the form of making things as a means of geographical research, whether novice or proficient, goal-directed or experimental. The developmental trajectory of geographical understandings of art, then, can be characterized in non-representational terms by an increasing emphasis on activity and practice, the broadening of consideration of senses beyond the visual to the embodied and pre-reflective, the widening definition of who can appropriately undertake geographical research through art, and the growing recognition of the mutual configuration of person, place and material in activity (Banfield, 2014, 2016b, 2018). This movement helps us to overcome three ontological assumptions, implicit within the brief disciplinary account provided above, upon which ‘geographies of art’ have traditionally been premised (Banfield, 2014, 2016a): the first is a containerized view of space, especially in relation to the art studio; the second is the primacy afforded to the representational content of the artwork; the third is an assumption of a clear ontological distinction between subject and object in which the artwork is construed as an inert object. This chapter addresses each of these in turn – spatiality, materiality, subjectivity – to explore diverse ways in which we can consider the practice of artistic making as an explicitly geographical research method. In doing so, I draw on a range of activities involving artistic practice, including my own artistic practice as a hobby, which I have maintained since childhood in the

Making as geographical method  335 absence of formal art training. My primary medium is textiles/embroidery, although as my research has progressed, I have diversified to work in paints, pastels and clay. Two specific research projects also feature in this chapter. The first is my Masters research in psychology, which involved interviewing artists and observing and recording them at work to develop a phenomenological account of artistic practice (Banfield and Burgess, 2013). Seven participants (three men, four women, aged between 34 and 74 years old) were all professionally trained but at different stages in their career, ranging from early career to post-retirement. Artistic media covered in this study included oil and water colour paints, textiles, stained glass, wood turning and pottery. This research found that artists working in two-dimensional media (such as drawing or painting) attributed control more readily to their artistic materials and equipment than those working in three-dimensional media (such as pottery or wood-turning), who articulated a greater sense of self-control over their artistic practice. My doctoral research in geography developed this work to explore the material and embodied aspects of artistic practice involving two-dimensional media, and in particular to unearth pre-reflective aspects of their practices of which participants would normally be unaware. The expanded methodology of this project involved interviewing artists about their practice, working artistically alongside participants, unsettling the site or materials of our respective practices to provide a point of comparison, recording these practice-based sessions and then reviewing the video recordings in a closing interview (Banfield, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017a, 2018). The twelve participants (all female, ranging in age from 36 to 71 years old) were involved in up to four research sessions and varied in their arts training and career status, with most being professional but a few being hobbyists. Artistic media covered in this study included oil and watercolour paints, inks, pastels, textiles and printmaking. This research highlighted the varied approaches to experimentation in artistic practice, the potential for the unsettling of customary practices to bring to conscious awareness aspects of practice that would normally remain pre-reflective, and the importance of material agency in the reformulation of subjectivity in artistic practice. A key feature and outcome of the evolution of these methods is the way in which they progressively came to apply to me as the researcher, initially incidentally but subsequently as an intentional research method, and then to me as an ongoing aspect of both my artistic and academic practice. My own hobby artistic practice continues to be experimental as I work increasingly with unfamiliar materials and techniques, while my research practice is increasingly unsettled as I work in unfamiliar cultural practices, uncertain conceptual territory and novel methodological configurations. Making as method, then, remakes the researcher as much as the researcher makes ‘art’. What emerges from the discussion of these research activities in relation to spatiality, materiality and subjectivity, is recognition that not only does artistic practice bring the potential to generate and communicate geographical knowledge and experience, but that a geographical perspective on such artistic practices brings its own respatialization of art, and furthermore that attending both to differences in profi-

336  Handbook on the geographies of creativity ciency of practice and to pre-reflective registers of experience enhances our capacity to work with images and image making both geographically and conceptually, where such concepts might themselves be explicitly geographical.

SPATIALITY While we might acknowledge that other sites of artistic making are increasingly recognized (Hawkins, 2013), the studio still reigns supreme as the focus for much work on artistic production and identity (Bain, 2004; Hawkins, 2013; Makovicky, 2010; Nelson et al., 2005). However, if we attend to the studio as the quintessential ‘space of art’, we must be careful not to shut down consideration of other artistic spatialities. To assume that the studio is a site of production, for example, risks neglecting consideration of the studio’s multifunctionality, perhaps for storage and exhibition (Bain, 2004; Crang, 2003). To assume that the studio is the sole locus of artistic activity risks the same thing with the diversity of sites of artistic production. To assume that the studio is discrete similarly risks overlooking the excessiveness of artistic practice that often refuses to be contained within a designated studio, with some artists who do have their own dedicated creative space or studio at home reporting ‘studio-creep’, whereby their artistic practice is not confined within the bounds of the studio itself, but expands beyond its walls. While previous reports have depicted the studio as a clearly demarcated spatial realm (Bain, 2004; Nelson et al., 2005) that is fiercely defended by the artist against incursion by other family members and wider responsibilities, the excessiveness of artistic practice that extends beyond its own allocated space is less well researched and documented (Banfield, 2014, 2016b). To explore this for myself I conducted my own artistic practice, paying particular attention to the micro-geography crafted by one thread in the creation of a small embroidered catkin (Banfield, 2014), shown in Figure 20.1. The first step in producing this diminutive element (13mm long) was to find and retrieve the right thread (no. 254), my scissors and needle from the sewing box in the studio (which also serves as a library, study and storeroom), and to locate the water-soluble fabric and the small wooden embroidery hoop from the crates under the art table. Once I had measured the fabric, cut it to size and secured it in the hoop to hold it steady I could settle down to work. Although the art table is ideally located in the brightest part of the studio I only use this when a flat surface of a certain size can be essential. For the bulk of my artwork I need to be able to pull the thread in any direction without banging into hard furniture, so I relocated with my paraphernalia to my usual spot on the sofa in the lounge. Here I untwined the six strands in the skein of thread to extract just one, which I threaded onto the needle. The first stitching task was to establish a lattice work of threads that would form the inner structure of the three-dimensional form. At this stage I introduced a second thread (no. 2): another visit to the sewing box. After more untwining and needle-threading, I could now start the catkin proper.

Making as geographical method  337

Source: Author.

Figure 20.1

Embroidered catkin detail (2011)

The catkin is formed by a series of bullion stitches, which involves winding the thread around the needle several times before anchoring it to the fabric to generate a long, thin stitch that projects out from the flat surface of the fabric. With several bullion stitches side by side I sewed one end of each bullion stitch to its other end, to form a cylinder. Along with the inner lattice of thread, the water-soluble fabric provides rigidity to the finished form by becoming adhesive when wet and solidifying the stitched element as it dries. The need for water is another reason for working downstairs, as the studio itself lacks a water supply. Having dunked and squeezed my catkin to dissolve the fabric I could then leave it to dry and harden. If I continued with my account, I would return to the crates to find the wire and pliers needed to attach the catkin to the artwork, and in so doing would highlight the thread-ends on the reverse of the artwork that support the work on its viewing face and the fugitive fragment that I encountered ground into the stair carpet: a rogue thread (no. 254) inadvertently transported there, presumably on my clothing. However, even this short exercise illustrates that to equate my studio with my artwork would be misleading, which speaks to ontological debates around what counts as a work of art and where the work resides (for example, the idea, the plans or the finished piece), how the artwork relates to the materials out of which it is made, and how much damage and repair it can undergo before ceasing to be considered the same work (Danto, 1964, 1981; Irvin, 2005; Lamarque, 2010). However, the overriding focus within these debates on the ‘finished’ artwork overlooks all those materials and practices that are constitutive of the finished work even though they might not be evident within it. This ‘material excess’ includes but expands upon notions discussed by Derrida and Seeley. For Derrida (1987) elements such as the frame and signature constitute the inside of an artwork as an inside, while other elements are recognized

338  Handbook on the geographies of creativity as receding from view as the work progresses, such as the canvas. For Seeley (2011) ‘biograffiti’ denotes indicators of a creative process around but not part of the work itself, such as the smudges and smears around the edge of an artwork. However, all these aspects remain within or part of the totality of the presented artwork, even if Seeley’s biograffiti is hidden by Derrida’s frame. In addition to these concepts the ‘material excess’ includes materials such as the shards of glass, clods of clay, or off-cuts of threads that participate in the production of the artwork but are not included within the final form. From such a perspective, the notion of what constitutes an artwork is broadened, along with the field of participating actants demanding recognition (Banfield, 2014, 2018). Seemingly, then, taking such a detailed material approach to recording the crafting of an artistic geography as it is made sensitizes us to the diversity of spatialities that emerge and are spliced together during this crafting. The conceptual space of the (yet to be finished) work, the dynamic taskscape that is defined only in its enactment, and the presumed distinctiveness between domestic and artistic functional zones are brought into intimate and indeterminate interpenetration by the serpentine co-ravelling of the threads in their constitution of the catkin. This brief reflexive account illustrates the spatial multiplicity and mutability of artistic practice. The making of the catkin constituted its own spatiality of artistic practice, and indicates how we can use making as a method to explore and identify these emergent spatialities. If I was to map this emergent spatiality it might look something like Figure 20.2, in which the resource hubs are the sewing box, the stacked crates and the tap, and the arenas of activity are the art table and the sofa.

Source: Author.

Figure 20.2

Practice-generated artistic spatiality (2014)

Making as geographical method  339 It might be suggested that the extended space of artistic practice in this case is due to the specific material requirements of making the catkin, or because my lack of formal art training leaves me under-concerned about doing my making in the ‘right’ or ‘appropriate’ place. However, in research with participants, too, professional practising artists describe their studios as not being big enough and needing to store their materials and make their works elsewhere (a potter, a painter) or recount instances when their art materials spill out into the rest of the house (a textile artist), or needing to convert a bedroom into a drying room at certain points in the creative process (a wood turner). It seems, then, that practitioners with different degrees of proficiency and who work across a range of artistic media experience ‘studio creep’ in numerous ways, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. Consequently, the primacy commonly attributed to the studio as a place of creative practice risks neglecting both the porous boundaries of the studio as practically inhabited and the diversity of places implicated in such practice, and thus under-represents the full complexity, fluidity and diversity of place relations enacted in artistic practice. Recognizing this, the materialities of artistic practice can impress their own spatiality upon us rather than imposing our analytically convenient yet experientially porous spatial distinctions on them (Banfield, 2014). Through this example, then, we can conceive of making as a method of attending to and mapping emergent space–times of artistic practice, and as a means of respatializing the constituents of the artwork itself.

MATERIALITY As suggested earlier in drawing a distinction between goal-directed material practices of the Deleuzian prospector (Deleuze, 1979) and more open-ended interrogative approaches (Anderson and Wylie, 2009), recent geographical research draws increasing attention to the uncertainty of anticipated outcomes during the material practice of art. Examples include the deliberately experimental approaches of artists in developing new techniques and styles, the appreciation of unanticipated effects generated by a material practice not fully under their own control, the revelatory potential of engaging with unfamiliar practices, and the deliberate unsettling of otherwise proficient practices (Banfield, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2017a, 2017b, 2018). In this section I describe my comparative use of artistic practices and the deliberate unsettling of those material practices to increase awareness of pre-reflective experience. I outline how this brings to light different spatial experiences and renderings, and suggest that such practices might also be considered to enable access to a potentially shared implicit or pre-reflective space of practice. During my doctoral research, I used artistic practice or making as a research method comparatively. In working artistically alongside participants, I aimed to enhance participants’ awareness of their own artistic practices through comparison with my own, especially in relation to aspects of their practices that they might normally overlook or take for granted (Banfield, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c). I also varied the conditions of practice for both participants and myself, to facilitate awareness of

340  Handbook on the geographies of creativity their habitual practices through comparison with unfamiliar conditions of practice. For example, for one session we would work in the participant’s own studio but for another we would work somewhere unfamiliar as a site of production. Similarly, in some sessions we used materials that we commonly used, but for others we switched to use materials that we would not normally use in our artistic practices. In essence I sought to establish what I term ‘boundary understanding’ or ‘knowing between’: understanding that arises at the boundary between different practices (Banfield, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c). By varying the conditions of practice for participants and by providing sources of comparison between practices, I sought to produce some of Thrift’s moments so that while participants practised their art differently, they might also think about their art differently (Thrift et al., 2010), bringing to awareness pre-reflective elements of their practice that would normally remain unattended to and unarticulated. Figure 20.3 is my artistic rendering of this method, indicating the diverse practices employed and the importance of comparisons between, for example, monotone and colour work, or paint and pastels.

Source: Author.

Figure 20.3

Boundary understanding (2012)

In these research sessions, participating artists and I worked together in a shared setting of artistic practice but employed different materials to each other and sometimes to those that we would normally use, with the discordance or juxtaposition between familiar and unfamiliar practices designed to generate new awareness and under-

Making as geographical method  341 standing in the space between those respective practices (Banfield, 2016a, 2016b). Two brief examples relate to issues of scale between different artistic materials, and to preferences for or tendencies towards itemized versus blended spatial renderings. A session in which I switched from my customary embroidery to pastels made it clear how accustomed I was to working on a small scale as I struggled to capture or convey any detail with the relatively chunky pastels that favour larger-scale mark-making, alerting me to my use of embroidery on a small scale to suggest detail in my work where none in fact exists: an aspect of my practice of which I had not previously been consciously aware. Another session, which took place on a tour bus as it circled the city, revealed that the participant and I had responded very differently to our mobile experience of the city. Whereas I produced a series of individual images of key sights on the route, the participant produced a blended or composite impression, incorporating the door of one building with the windows or roof from another and so on, to generate an impression of the whole rather than an itemized inventory. While this might in part be due to the greater proficiency or stylistic differences on the part of the participant compared to my own, the comparison between our respective practices revealed different ways of experiencing and responding to the bus tour. These differences had not been intentionally adopted by either of us: we simply did what we did, drawing on an implicit background of habituated practice, which came to light through comparison of our respective practices in an unsettled context of artistic practice. By varying our materials in terms of form, scale, texture, viscosity, colour and so on, or by varying the material conditions of the spaces of artistic practice in which we worked, the potential was generated for each of us to think differently by virtue of doing our respective artistic practices differently, bringing to light aspects of our practices of which we would normally be ignorant, or indicating ways in which we might develop our practices. Bringing together the idea of understanding generated between the practices of different individuals and the idea of enabling attention to and awareness of pre-reflective understanding is reminiscent of Gendlin’s notion of implicit progressions between concepts (Gendlin, 1989, 1993, 2001, 2009; also Banfield, 2016b). The implicit is Gendlin’s term that is broadly synonymous with what non-representational geographers would conventionally understand as affect, and Gendlin considers that formal or logical concepts – such as words and images – are connected not just by their logical relations but also by their implicit relations. For Gendlin, we have the capacity to generate new conceptual understanding, which he terms explicate, from this pre-reflective connectivity, and we have the capacity to track back from our conceptual understanding to our implicit understanding to refine our existing concepts, a technique called dipping (Banfield, 2016b; Gendlin, 1993, 1995, 2009). Further, for Gendlin we can cross one concept with another in order to attend to their shared implicit meaning/s, as indicated diagrammatically in Figure 20.4. It might seem something of a stretch to extend the idea of formal concepts to artistic practices but, importantly, Gendlin considers that the forming of images can aid the explication of formal linguistic understanding from implicit understanding, with the making of pictures used within Gendlin-inspired psychotherapeutic techniques

342  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

Source: Author.

Figure 20.4

Explicating implicit understanding (2017)

(Ikemi et al., 2007; Rappaport, 1988, 1998). Images in this context are both formal concept and explicatory tool, whereby it is the doing of the making of images that aids the linguistic explication (Banfield, 2016b; Gendlin, 1980). By extension, then, altering the way in which those images are created would vary the attention to and awareness of implicit understanding that is facilitated by the making of the images. Further, in becoming explicitly aware of aspects of our practices that would normally remain beyond conscious awareness through comparison with other practices (either our own or those of other people) we have a fuller conceptual understanding of our own practices from which to track back into our own implicit understanding. Consistent with conventional non-representational thinking in geography, this Gendlinian perspective unsettles any clear distinction between practice and representation and frames representation as a practice, but does so in a manner that suggests greater integration between explicit and implicit registers of understanding than is commonly supported by conventional non-representational geography, which does not consider explication from pre-reflective experience to be possible. We might consider, then, that practices as much as formal concepts are or can be connected implicitly, and in Gendlin’s terms can be crossed. This implicit progression between concepts and practices can itself be conceptualized in spatial terms, being opened up, made more accessible and more articulable by the discordant and comparative research design, both elements of which seek to facilitate access to and awareness of pre-reflective experience that normally remains beyond conscious awareness. By doing things differently we might attend to our implicit understanding differently, and therefore think (where thinking is practical) differently; by becoming explicitly aware of pre-reflective aspects of our own practices we might also think differently (where thinking is cognitive), and we might also access our implicit understanding

Making as geographical method  343 differently by doing so from a broader explicit or conceptual understanding of those practices. Through this example, then, we can again think of making as a method of generating, expressing and communicating different spatialities and spatial experiences, but also of perceiving the interplay between artistic practice and the resulting spatialities by attending to and varying the material features of that practice. We can also think of making as a method of enhancing access to and awareness of pre-reflective aspects of practices that normally go unarticulated, by opening up new implicit spaces between practices through the use of comparative and discordant elements. Consequently, not only are less-than-expert practices valorized by their generation of specific spatialities, but de-professionalizing aspects of practices can generate new implicit understanding of those practices, such that both proficiencies and the implicit understanding encountered during practice might warrant conceptualization in spatial terms.

SUBJECTIVITY The idea that a passive artwork is produced by an active artist has a long history, as encapsulated in Dewey’s (1934) proposal that the artist invests something of the person that they are into their creation, reflecting the strength of belief in the innate nature of creativity stemming from the Renaissance view of the artist (Lamarque, 2010; Sennett, 2009). In this light, artistic practice is seen as a process of externalizing the self into an enduring form (Crowther, 1993), with no allowance made for artistic practice to influence subjectivity, but only to grant it expression. Of key concern here is the challenge laid at the door of this essentialist view of subjectivity by relational ontologies in which subject(ivitie)s are derived in practice (Grosz, 2001; Thrift, 1996). While subjectivity remains a vexing issue for non-representational geographies, with questions hanging over its existence, nature and relevance (Banfield, 2016b; Rose, 2010; Thrift, 2008; Wylie, 2010), the value of a non-representational perspective on subjectivity is its emphasis on the emergence of subjectivity as a dynamic relation to the world in a state of constant processual creativity. The focus of non-representational geography is on how rather than what (Dewsbury, 2010), and the production of knowledge is now framed not in the representation of an external reality but in the doing of messy practices (Dewsbury and Naylor, 2002). The subject, too, is derived in practice (Nash, 2000; Thrift, 1996, 1997) and is therefore neither singular nor stable. Both subjectivities and representations encompass and arise from somatic entanglements and affects as much as from cognitions (Connolly, 2002) in an unreflective or unformulated practical grasp on the world (Banfield, 2014; Pile and Thrift, 1995). To explore and illustrate this, I describe below how my artistic and academic practices were interwoven through each other both intentionally and incidentally during my research. Embarking on my fieldwork I had no way of knowing the degree to which, or the productivity with which, my own experimental research

344  Handbook on the geographies of creativity methods would visit themselves back upon me. In an attempt to produce moments (Thrift et al., 2010) for participants to practice and think differently, I inadvertently generated a host of such moments of my own, with implications for my practices, both academic and artistic, the cross-fertilization between the two, and my emergent subjectivity, as illustrated artistically through Figures 20.5 to 20.7.

Source: Author.

Figure 20.5

Material and Immaterial (2012)

Figure 20.5 (Material and Immaterial) is a retrospective depiction of the research session held on a city sight-seeing tour bus, which draws upon but reworks the sketches that I produced at the time. My attempt at the realistic depiction of landmarks reflects my itemized inventory approach to the session in contrast to the participating artist, who produced an evocation of the blurred sense of the city generated on a bus tour. However, the work also incorporates something of the lived experience of the bus tour, which was designed into the work later. While my mark-making remains highly representational, the format and composition of the work responded to these empirical outcomes of the session, and in this sense constitute a presentation of research findings. The lack of a set orientation afforded by the circular format echoes the revolving route of the bus, and the verse emanating from the centre is designed to encourage viewers to spin the work, introducing an affective element through the evocation of disorientation that accompanies efforts to sketch and paint on a moving bus:

Making as geographical method  345 Gates, walls, town–gown connections Windows: vistas and reflections Cognitive, bodily and ethereal Being: material and immaterial

Although the origin of each line of this verse was rooted in my preparatory research activity, it was the cross-fertilization between the theoretical basis of the verse and the specific experiences on the bus tour that influenced the emerging artwork and subsequently the unfolding research. For each line, theory informed research practice which affected artistic practice, which then further influenced research practice (Banfield, 2014). By way of example, my original field notes referred to town– gown tensions rather than connections, reflecting my participation in the city from both gown (student) and town (a previous career in the city council) perspectives. However, I changed the wording in response to the social and spatial connectivity perceptible from the upper deck of the bus, due to the maintenance of an elevated line of sight over walls to someone entering a ‘closed’ space. This conjunction between geographical theory and artistic fieldwork practice alerted me to the passage of people between spatialities and axes of subjectification, emphasizing ephemerality and contingency in my research. Similarly, the second line both conjures up the virtuality and multiplicity of being that characterizes non-representational thinking, and reflects my own multi-temporal experience of the city during this fieldwork, replete with reminiscing as much as experiencing and anticipating. This line not only directed my visual attention to glazed features in the landscape, but also my academic attention to the simultaneous experience of jumbled and conflicted temporalities, encapsulated through vistas and reflections. In turn, the experiences of the bus tour led to the refinement of the verse and the emerging artwork and subsequently affected the unfolding research, bringing heightened sensitivities and suggesting alternative emphases with which to consider the research data. The productivity of this approach is encapsulated in Producing Moments (Figure 20.6), which starts to indicate the impact that this methodological approach to my academic practice had on my artistic practice. In this work, some of these moments are self-evident, indicating that I was still struggling to relinquish my desire for realism: for example, the window from the bus tour is a repeated feature (top left). However, the repetition of the window also refers to one participant’s love of pattern, while the layering of different fabrics reflects the ambiguous effects generated by several participants in their practices. In particular it is this attention to ambiguity, both artistic and academic, that I drew out through this work, prioritizing expression and the suggested over representation and the depicted, and allowing for multiple perspectives and responses in a way that now seems lacking in my previous artistic practice. The productivity of working artistically with theoretical and empirical material during fieldwork motivated me to produce a further three artworks alongside my formal analysis and write-up, with each one responding to a specific text with which

346  Handbook on the geographies of creativity

Source: Author.

Figure 20.6

Producing Moments (2013)

I was currently engaged. One such work is presented in Figure 20.7 (Ecstasy of Spaces). Progressing still further from my desire for realism, this work is inspired by an extract from a paper by Quoniam: ‘The art of painting represents for the geographer the search for a memory of the world in an ecstasy of spaces’ (Quoniam, 1988: 4). Ecstasy of Spaces works with the elusory nature of place and spatial memories, and draws on my own reflections on the contingency of spatial relations and practices to destabilize notions of solid and consistent spatial identities. It speaks to questions highlighted by my research and drawn out in this account, regarding the difficulties inherent in delimiting the sites and practices of geography and art, and in specifying their inter-relations. It also highlights how artistic practices can help us to engage with conceptual content on an implicit as much as an explicit level. Findings generated and presented through artistic practice drove further theoretically and empirically informed artistic practice, which subsequently informed the ongoing research, and suggests a further way of working with images conceptually. Artistic practice and research practice progressively coalesced, with no clear distinction between method and findings or between artistic and academic practices, and with implications for my subjectivity. Both my artistic and academic practices were transformed through this coalescence, with each becoming more thoroughly non-representational. Through this example, then, we can again conceive of making as a method of exploring and excavating pre-reflective registers of experience and as a method of exploring, engaging with and explicating into artistic form the myriad mutable spatio-temporalities that constitute daily life. In addition, we can consider

Making as geographical method  347

Source: Author.

Figure 20.7

Ecstasy of Spaces (2013)

making as a method of tracing the emergence of subjectivities that are contingent and fleeting, and of engaging with images conceptually as much as implicitly, and at times both simultaneously.

CONCLUSION This chapter began by suggesting that the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin characterizes some of the shifts and turns within the development of geography’s interest in art, highlighting the contemporary prominence of non-representational concerns with practice and eventfulness within this sub-disciplinary domain. I also used Rumpelstiltskin to draw out a distinction between goal-directed and more open-ended, exploratory or experimental practices to introduce growing debate concerning the need or otherwise for artistic proficiency on the part of geographers using artistic practice as a research method. While experimentalism and open-endedness are not confined to the beginner, amateur, or novice (Banfield, 2017a), generosity towards the capacity of such inexpert practices to be both informative and generative of spatialities and subjectivities that are no less valid than – albeit perhaps very different to – those arising from expert practices encourages a democratization of artistic prac-

348  Handbook on the geographies of creativity tice as a research method. In arguing for greater consideration of and engagement in practices of making, whether expert or beginner, I encourage stronger disciplinary affiliation with Rumpelstiltskin than with the king or the miller’s daughter. Specifically, I considered artistic making as method in relation to three core areas of concern for both non-representational geography and geographies of art: spatiality, materiality and subjectivity. Responding to and reinforcing existing claims as to the value of artistic practices as a geographical research tool, these examples emphasize the value of artistic making in: 1. remapping the geographies of artistic production beyond the studio (Hawkins, 2011, 2013), identifying the excessiveness of artistic practice beyond these containerized understandings of the spaces of art; 2. generating and rendering visible geographical knowledge and experience, especially as a means of evoking rather than describing such knowledge and experience (Hawkins, 2011, 2013, 2015), extending the means of communication beyond representational vehicles of communication; 3. foregrounding what is gained in the doing rather than concerning ourselves with the end result of artistic practice (Hawkins, 2011, 2015), facilitating efforts to know, think and research differently in the midst of those very processes of knowing, thinking and researching; 4. exploring and mapping the shifting of spatialities and subjectivities through material, embodied and practical relations and engagements with the world (Hawkins, 2011); 5. communicating geographical methods as well as concerns to non-specialist audiences (Hawkins, 2015). In addition, I have suggested that making as method, and the knowledges and experiences resulting from artistic making, might be considered in explicitly spatial terms, such as in: 1. crafting cartographies of emergent space–times of artistic practice, down to the minutiae of individual material actants; 2. respatializing the constituents of the artwork itself, to include its disappearing, evicted and immaterial aspects; 3. alerting us to the differential spatialities generated through habitual or customary artistic practices as compared to unfamiliar or unsettled practices, hinting at the possibility of exploring proficiency itself in spatial terms; 4. attending to and artistically explicating from pre-reflective experience, where implicit understanding can be conceptualized in spatial terms; 5. opening up new implicit spaces between practices through the use of comparative and discordant elements to engage with images and image making both implicitly and explicitly, whereby our formal geographical concepts might also become more implicitly informed.

Making as geographical method  349 Such methods both respond to calls for geographers to ‘open out new spaces of and encounters with art and art-making’ (Cant and Morris, 2006: 858), and exemplify ‘the way in which art offers the potential to think (and practice) space differently’ (Hawkins, 2011: 468) in both reflective and pre-reflective registers of experience, and to conjoin the two. In particular, these methods have the potential not only to enhance our capacity to work with images and image making conceptually, but also for this enhanced conceptual capacity to become more implicitly informed through the incorporation of Gendlin’s non-representational writings as a counterbalance to existing reliance on Deleuzian thinking (Banfield, 2016b). Not only can we consider making as method, then, but as explicitly geographical method, with the potential to contribute to specific geographical concerns and challenges, and to inform our geographical concepts and lexicon. Whether conceived as a forerunner to the goal-oriented prospector or in more open-ended, interrogative fashion, Rumpelstiltskin is ripe for co-opting as a geographer, serving as inspiration for our own material praxis as a geographical research method.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. and J. Wylie (2009), ‘On geography and materiality’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 41 (2), 318–35. Bain, A.L. (2004), ‘Female artistic identity in place: the studio’, Social & Cultural Geography, 5 (2), 171–92. Banfield, J. (2014), Towards a Non-Representational Geography of Artistic Practice, unpublished doctoral thesis, Oxford University. Banfield, J. (2016a), ‘Descriptive phenomenological analysis: practical innovations in geographies of artistic practice’, SAGE Research Methods Cases, London, UK: SAGE Publications, DOI: 10.4135/978144627305015595361. Banfield, J. (2016b), Geography Meets Gendlin: An Exploration of Disciplinary Potential Through Artistic Practice, New York, NY, USA: Palgrave Macmillan. Banfield, J. (2016c), ‘Knowing between: generating boundary understanding through discordant situations in geographic–artistic research’, Cultural Geographies, 23 (3), 459–73. Banfield, J. (2017a), ‘Amateur, professional and proto-practices: a contribution to “the proficiency debate”’, Area, DOI: 10.1111/area.12294. Banfield, J. (2017b), ‘Researching through unfamiliar practices’, Cultural Geographies, DOI: 10.1177/1474474016673069. Banfield, J. (2018), ‘Challenge in artistic flow experiences: an interdisciplinary intervention’, Qualitative Research in Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2018.1475535. Banfield, J. and M. Burgess (2013), ‘A phenomenology of artistic doing: flow as embodied knowing in 2D and 3D artists’, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 44 (1), 60–91. Cant, S.G. and N.J. Morris (2006), ‘Geographies of art and the environment’, Social and Cultural Geography, 7 (6), 857–61. Connolly, W.E. (2002), Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, Minneapolis, MN, USA and London, UK: University of Minnesota Press. Cosgrove, D. (1985), ‘Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10, 45–62. Cosgrove, D.E. and S. Daniels (1988), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

350  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Crang, M. (2003), ‘The hair in the gate: visuality and geographical knowledge’, Antipode, 35 (2), 238–43. Crowther, P. (1993), Art and Embodiment from Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Daniels, S. (1984), ‘Human geography and the art of David Cox’, Landscape Research, 9 (3), 14–19. Danto, A. (1964), ‘The artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, 61 (19), 571–84. Danto, A.C. (1981), The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, Cambridge, MA, USA and London, UK: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, G. (1979), ‘Metal, metallurgy, music, Husserl, Simondon’, Conference at Cours Vincennes, accessed on 27 March at www​.webdeleuze​.com. Derrida, J. (1987), The Truth in Painting, trans G. Bennington and I. McLeod, Chicago, IL, USA and London, UK: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1934), Art as Experience, London, UK: Allen & Unwin. Dewsbury, J. (2010), ‘Language and the event: the unthought of appearing worlds’, in B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds), Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 147–60. Dewsbury, J.D. and S. Naylor (2002), ‘Practising geographical knowledge: fields, bodies and dissemination’, Area, 34 (3), 253–60. Edensor, T. (2000), ‘Walking in the British countryside: reflexivity, embodied practices and ways to escape’, Body and Society, 6 (3–4), 81–106. Foster, K. and H. Lorimer (2007), ‘Some reflections on art–geography as collaboration’, Cultural Geographies, 14 (3), 425–32. Gendlin, E.T. (1980), ‘Imagery is more powerful with focusing: theory and practice’, in J.E. Shorr, G.E. Sobel, P. Robin and J.A. Connella (eds), Imagery. Its Many Dimensions and Applications, New York, NY, USA; London, UK: Plenum Press, pp. 65–73. Gendlin, E.T. (1989), ‘Phenomenology as non-logical steps’, in E.F. Kaelin and C.O. Schrag (eds), American Phenomenology: Origins and Developments, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, pp. 65–73. Gendlin, E.T. (1993), ‘Words can say how they work’, in R.P. Crease (ed.), Proceedings, Heidegger Conference, 1993 Stony Brook. State University of New York, accessed at http://​ www​.focusing​.org/​gendlin/​docs/​gol​_2087​.html on 07 August 2011. Gendlin, E.T. (1995), ‘Crossing and dipping: some terms for approaching the interface between natural understanding and logical formulation’, Minds and Machines, 5, 547–60. Gendlin, E.T. (2001), A Process Model, New York, NY, USA: The Focusing Institute, accessed at http://​www​.focusing​.org/​process​.html on 07 August 2011. Gendlin, E.T. (2009), ‘We can think with the implicit, as well as with fully-formed concepts’, in Leidlmair, K. (ed.), After Cognitivism: A Reassessment of Cognitive Science and Philosophy, London, UK and New York, NY, USA: Springer. Grimm, T.B. and V. Southgate (1812 [1968]), Rumpelstiltskin, London, UK: Ladybird Books. Grosz, E.A. (2001), Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Cambridge, MA, USA and London, UK: MIT Press. Hawkins, H. (2011), ‘Dialogues and doings: sketching the relationships between geography and art’, Geography Compass, 5 (7), 464–78. Hawkins, H. (2013), ‘Geography and art. An expanding field: site, the body and practice’, Progress in Human Geography, 37 (1), 52–71. Hawkins, H. (2015), ‘Creative geographic methods: knowing, representing, intervening. On composing place and page’, cultural geographies, 22 (2), 247–68. Ikemi, A., K. Yano, M. Miyake and S. Matsuoka (2007), ‘Experiential collage work: exploring meaning in collage from a focusing-oriented perspective’, Journal of Japanese Clinical Psychology, 25, 464–75, accessed at http://​www​.focusing​.org/​arts​_therapy​.html on 5 February 2014.

Making as geographical method  351 Irvin, S. (2005), ‘The artist’s sanction in contemporary art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63 (4), 315–26. Lafrenière, D. and S.M. Cox (2013), ‘“If you can call it a poem”: Toward a framework for the assessment of arts-based works’, Qualitative Research, 13 (3), 318–36. Lamarque, P. (2010), Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Makovicky, N. (2010), ‘“Something to talk about”: notation and knowledge-making among Central Slovak lace-makers’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16, S80–S99. Marston, S.A. and S. de Leeuw (2013), ‘Creativity and geography: toward a politicized intervention’, Geographical Review, 103 (2), III–XXVI. Nash, C. (2000), ‘Performativity in practice: some recent work in cultural geography’, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (4), 653–64. Nelson, N.J., K.L. Labat and G.M. Williams (2005), ‘More than “just a little hobby”: women and textile art in Ireland’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 28, 328–42. Pile, S. and N.J. Thrift (1995), Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, London, UK: Routledge. Quoniam, S. (1988), ‘A painter, geographer of Arizona’, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 6 (1), 3–14. Rappaport, L. (1988), ‘Focusing and art therapy’, The Focusing Connection, V, accessed at http://​www​.focusing​.org/​arts​_therapy​.html on 5 February 2014. Rappaport, L. (1998), ‘Focusing and art therapy: tools for working through post-traumatic stress disorder’, Focusing Folio, 17, accessed at http://​www​.focusing​.org/​arts​_therapy​.html on 5 February 2014. Rose, M. (2010), ‘Envisioning the future: ontology, time and the politics of non-representation’, in B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds), Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 341–61. Seeley, C. (2011), ‘Uncharted territory: imagining a stronger relationship between the arts and action research’, Action Research, 9 (1), 83–99. Sennett, R. (2009), The Craftsman, London, UK: Penguin. Thrift, N.J. (1996), Spatial Formations, London, UK: SAGE Publications. Thrift, N.J. (1997), ‘The still point’, in S. Pile and M. Keith (eds), Geographies of Resistance, London, UK: Routledge. Thrift, N.J. (2008), Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London, UK; New York, NY, USA: Routledge. Thrift, N.J., A. Harrison and B. Anderson (2010), ‘“The 27th letter”: an interview with Nigel Thrift’, in B. Anderson and A. Harrison (eds), Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 183–200. Wylie, J. (2005), ‘A single day’s walking: narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (2), 234–47. Wylie, J. (2010), ‘Non-representational subjects?’, in B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds), Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 99–116.

21. Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises? Charlotte Veal and Harriet Hawkins

TOWARD METHODOLOGICAL CREATIVITY: BEYOND THE CREATIVE FETISH In the thirty or so years since the emergence of a ‘new cultural geography’, geography has witnessed an unprecedented shift toward the language and practices of performance and, more recently, creativity, aesthetics and craft (Hawkins, 2016; Luckman, 2015; Straughan and Hawkins, 2016; see Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Thrift, 2008). As recently as the turn of the millennium, however, geography’s ‘methodological timidity’ (Latham, 2003: 1993) was still being observed, with Thrift lamenting ‘how narrow this range of skills still is, how wedded [cultural geographers] still are to the notion of bringing back the “data”, and then re-presenting it (nicely packaged up as a few supposedly illustrative quotations)’ (Thrift, 2000a: 3; see also Pratt, 2000). Much, it seems, has changed since then: a field once critiqued for its methodological conservatism now boasts a vibrant and diverse collective of experimental, enlivened, artful and creative methods. This includes collaborations with, and participation in, practices as diverse as sketching, drawing and art making (Hawkins, 2015; McCormack, 2012), theatre, dance and street performance (Pratt and Johnston, 2017; Rogers, 2014; Sachs Olsen and Hawkins, 2016; Veal 2017b), walking, cycling and various other methods ‘on the move’ (Macpherson, 2009; Merriman, 2014; Middleton, 2010; Spinney, 2011), alongside multi-sensual engagements with sound, video and photography (Butler, 2006; Gallagher and Prior, 2014), poetry and literary works (Cresswell, 2013; Lorimer and Wylie, 2010; Madge and Eshun, 2016), in addition to making and crafting (Mann, 2018; Miller, 2017; Patchett, 2016; Price, 2015) and more-than-human experimentations in hacklabs and laboratories (Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015; Roe et al., 2019; Smith, 2017). Indeed, whether one turns to the ‘in practice’ section of cultural geographies, the new GeoHumanities journal, or the many sessions at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and American Association of Geographers (AAG) conferences, it is evident that an early enthusiasm for creative practices has driven the methodological practices of a new generation of human geographers. Geography, it would seem, has undergone something of a creative ‘re-turn’ (Hawkins, 2013; Madge, 2014). This has included geographers taking up creative practices as research methods either alone or in collaboration; for others outputs are their focus. The latter might involve innovation within the forms of the journal article and monograph, or experimentation with painting practices, participatory art, 352

Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises?  353 or poetry books as geographic output (for summaries see Hawkins, 2011, 2013; Last, 2012). There are also increasing numbers of practitioners working in residence in geography departments, as well as practitioners, often with significant professional experience, undertaking practice-based Geography PhDs. Yet amidst this creative (re)turn, a series of important questions are circulating around ‘how exactly, and for whom, these methods are creative and critical’ (Hawkins, 2015: 247). At least three common themes crosscut this rich and variegated methodological landscape. First, those working with creative methods often do so whilst pushing at the boundaries of established social scientific methodologies and theoretical traditions (including theorists like Lefebvre, Benjamin and Rancière, radical arts movements like the Situationists, or geographical trends like time geography). The result has been the cultivation of a series of innovative hybrids and the problematizing of social scientific methods as inherently un-creative. DeSilvey (2006) and Sachs Olsen (2016), for example, have both worked at the intersection of archiving and curation to recreate hidden histories of the homestead and the city. Askins and Pain (2011) have merged participatory action methods with community art projects to explore questions of heritage, while Parr (2007) has enlisted collaborative film-making and participatory methods in research with individuals suffering from mental health issues. So, too, there has been interest in performance ethnography (Morton, 2005) and apprentice models of crafting through participant observation (Carr and Gibson, 2017; Patchett, 2016). This opening up of methodological toolkits derives from interest in less sedenterist, non-cognitive, multi-sensual ways of knowing, as well as recognition of the possibilities of diverse forms of knowledge production. Second, creative methods have offered innovative insight into and, at times, a more nuanced understanding of a range of conceptual debates across the discipline. Commonly, this concerns a micro-scale focus on the body, practices and affective/ emotive qualities across various space-times (McCormack, 2013; Veal, 2016). For others it has encompassed debates as wide ranging as: socio-political struggles over public space (Pinder, 2008; Simpson, 2012); the ethics of migration (Pratt and Johnston, 2017); geopolitics and militarization (Ingram, 2016); and consumption (Cook, 2017). Increasingly, creative methods offer a means to meet the challenges of ‘complex problems’ such as those posed by the Anthropocene, whose upending of modern divisions such as nature and culture requires experimental responses (Johnston, 2014). Third, at the heart of much methodological experimentation has been an emphasis on working beyond disciplines. Co-producing knowledge and skill alongside artists and transdisciplinary academic teams is particularly appealing, as is renewed interest in innovative collaborations with various non-specialist publics and community groups (Askins and Pain, 2011; Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015; Engelmann, 2017). Such practices intersect with wider concerns with working beyond disciplines, whether this be termed inter-, trans-, cross- or post-disciplinarily, as well as with concerns from across the creative arts with the intersection of research and practice (Barry and Born, 2013; Hawkins, 2013).

354  Handbook on the geographies of creativity It is not our purpose to trace the various strengths and limitations of these vibrant approaches, nor to provide a step-by-step guide to doing creative methods. Rather, we engage with the continued enthusiasm for creativity’s innovative and impactful potential, in order to reassert the need for critical scholarship. To deter from ‘research tourism’, a critical geography of methodological creativity must account for the various politics, aesthetics, labours and knowledges of doing creative geographical research. In short, we argue there is an empirical obligation to dig beneath the fetishized façade of creative methods, to avoid the sense that these might be an easy-to-adopt ‘fix-all’ solution, or that it is possible to ‘just-add culture and stir’. We argue for a taking seriously of the skills central to creative methods, processes and products. If the task of radical geographers was, as David Harvey (1990: 422) argued, ‘to get behind the veil, the fetishism of the market’, and given that creativity has become one of the market imperatives of the twenty-first century, this it seems is also true of critical geographers of creativity. To channel Marx (1867 [1967]) we might therefore begin to unmask creativities’ distorted appearances through tracing the social dimensions of these creative human labours. In response, this chapter mobilizes two voices from within creative geographies: one from art (Hawkins) and one from dance (Veal). Through our divergent experiences and levels of proficiency as practising artists and schooled scholars of geography and the arts, we pose a series of questions about the trials and challenges of being critically creative geographers. More specifically, we organize our discussion around three key sites in the ‘typical’ lifecycle of a research project. First, we examine the research skills and labours required on entering the field. Second, we work productively with concepts such as fieldwork and ‘the field’, adding critical nuance to debates on the writing and documenting of creative doings. Finally, we take a step back from the research in order to conceptualize the place of critical evaluation in arts-led research, including of artistic practice, product, and self.

ENTERING THE FIELD: LOVE’S LABOURS LOST Creativity is almost universally valued. Other chapters in this collection explore how creative industries are fetishized in policy discourse as drivers of economic growth and social inclusion (Hawkins, 2016; Jones and Warren, 2016), while among corporations they are lauded as capable of stripping away bureaucracy and encouraging creative thinking (O’Callaghan, 2010). Likewise, working with arts methodologies has become increasingly appealing for many geographers. For some, it offers something ‘edgy’ and distinctive; for others, it supports co-production with community groups or facilitates encounters with multi-sensuous and affective realms (Parr, 2007; Tolia-Kelly, 2007; Wylie, 2010). More recently, and against a shifting funding landscape, creativity’s potential for generating impact beyond the academy has proven increasingly alluring (Tolia-Kelly, 2012). To prevent falling into the trap of fetishizing or romanticizing these creative promises, creative geographies need to address some (sometimes) tough questions prior to entering the field. Not least,

Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises?  355 when are creative methods appropriate to use? What expertise does one need? Should one’s proficiency be pedagogic, professional, or both? What duration of training is required? When might ‘amateurism’ prove valuable? Against much excitement, we caution for respect for the ‘often hard-won sets of skills and expertise that denote these different fields’ and for geographers ‘to take seriously the political and intellectual responsibilities’ that reside within these practices (Hawkins, 2013: 246). Indeed, critical geographers of creativity recognize that to enter the field is not only a licence to improvise, experiment, create, dabble and perform. It also necessitates working productively with skill and labour across the overarching creative method, the creative process and the creative product. Methods courses have long trained undergraduate and postgraduate students in the quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection, with the overarching intention of their ‘becoming skilled’. Yet, for the emerging generation of creative geographers – who have often undergone no such geographical training in creative methods – methodological proficiency is often derived from experimentation, improvization, ‘show-and-tell’-based exchanges and time-intensive failures. While much, we argue, can be gained through a practice-driven research approach, a proclivity toward a rather too easy embrace of the ‘experimental’ and underestimating the skills central to doing arts-led research must be cautioned against. True, considerable crossovers with more conventional social scientific methods exist; collaborators need to be organized, power relations considered, ethics and risk assessment approved, while the all too familiar anxieties around research expectations materializing on entering the field need to be managed. In practising creative methods much, however, also differs. Language, process, conceptual and theoretical contexts, expectations and time scales are just some of the examples of these differences that we’ve encountered. Consequently, if we are to achieve ‘critical interdisciplinarity’ and essentially ‘become skilled’, then geography’s creative methodological toolkit must, in the earliest of stages, be engaging productively with pedagogic, professional and practice-based skills of both geographical and artistic fields. As a methodological hybrid, Charlotte’s dance-based approach with the dance company BalletBoyz required pedagogic training in the unfolding of bodies in spacetimes as pioneered by time geographers, but also conceptual engagement with dance theorist Rudolf Laban’s examination of kinesiology according to the four categories of body, effort, shape and space. It necessitated mobilizing practised experience such as participant observation and field sketching, alongside twenty years of embodied training in dance syllabi; including knowledge of formalized routines and body alignment. It also required professional language skills and knowledge of the associated codified systems of dance, particularly ballet (see Cresswell, 2006). In contrast to Charlotte’s extensive dance training, Harriet, while trained in art history, had little experience with drawing. Indeed, she was haunted by a sense of being ‘bad’ at drawing, having spent many frustrating hours as a teenager trying to capture various still lives dutifully assembled for ‘art’ homework. So when, in the midst of an artistic collaboration exploring place, a pencil and sketchbook were thrust into her hands, she was distinctly uncomfortable. Pedagogically, Harriet was well versed in thinking

356  Handbook on the geographies of creativity about place and creativity, from humanistic attentions to sensory and emotional experiences through to thinking place as pause in the midst of global flows. But to actually have to evolve those practices herself was another matter. The creative process has been well celebrated within methods literatures for its empirical emphasis on practice; attentiveness to the tactile, expressive and multi-sensual; and its promise of promoting less hierarchical relationships of power between researcher and researched (McCormack, 2013; Parr, 2007; Straughan, 2016). But what of the body in the doing and making of creativity? Labour remains one dimension critical to the creative process, whether that’s verbal or physical instruction, technical or anatomical training, mentoring through apprenticeship or imitation, or perfecting (based on the envisioned final product) through repetition. Seldom, however, are the creative labours of those researched (and when participating, researching) given primary consideration by geographers (Harvie, 2013). When labour is explored, it is often fetishized as self-fulfilment, or dismissed as labours of love. As recent scholarship on the creative economy has shown, alongside the promise of relative autonomy and artistic licence, creative workers often face insecure, low-paid, irregular hours in non-traditional and highly competitive working environments, and significant investments in emotional and aesthetic labour (see Hracs and Leslie, 2014; Reimer, 2009). Creativity should therefore be understood as a by-product of work. Read against this context, engaging productively with the creative process when entering the field is of increasing ethical and socio-political importance. Geographers of creativity must ask themselves, what does it mean to practise creative methods and to labour throughout the doings and makings of creativity? What are the conditions of labour in ‘the field’ for creative workers who might be our collaborators? In what ways might thinking of creativity as labour enable us to go beyond the fetish? When researching the dancing body, thinking of labour has been particularly problematic, as the ballerina, in particular, has long been a fetish object. On the one hand, this derives from an overt enthrallment with an explicitly feminine sexualized body. On the other hand, emphasis is placed on a series of problematic qualities, not least ethereality, masochist tendencies and ephemerality (Carter, 2000; Lepecki, 2004). Considered as such, the body is reduced to a creative product, disassociated from its embodiment. Labour, however, is central to observing and participating in dance-led methods, evidenced by the hours spent at the barre training the ‘turn out’; mundane foot exercises to enhance the lateral longitudinal arch; sustained rehearsal of segments of choreography; and the acute consideration of alignment, positioning, facings and musicality. Drawing too is a site of artistic fetish, traditionally seen as one of the primary skills of the artist. Recent scholars of drawing challenge Romantic accounts of the naturalized talented artist (Berger and Savage, 2007; Petherbridge, 2010) by situating drawing as a learnt skill with many purposes: propositional, preparatory, imaginative, factual, generative, transformative or performative. Learning to draw left Harriet feeling clumsy, uncomfortable and unsettled (resonating with other geographers’ creative learnings such as McCormack, 2013; Morton, 2005; Parr, 2007;

Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises?  357 Straughan, 2016), but these were vital parts of the process. In later collaborations, she deliberately built learning into the experience, attending and organizing workshops with experienced practitioners. While she acquired skills and confidence, these experiments were fragmented and lacked the kind of repetitive disciplining of time and practice that Charlotte describes. While for Marx repetition operates as a form of involution (in opposition to ‘authentic creation’), Osbourne (2003: 520) illustrates, through a discussion of Cézanne, how creative mastery grows with repetition and training: ‘repetition is the name not just of seeking an answer to something but of locating, deepening, embellishing a problem’. To trace human labour (emotional, affective, physical), or to reclaim it from the status of ‘wasted labour’ as Adorno understood it, is to assert the mundanities of creativity. It is to recognize the monotony of the research process; bored by the familiarity of syllabus-based exercises or drawing drills; frustrated by iterative tracings, retracings, and the tracings again of dance paths, or the continual failure to get the pencil or chalk to make the mark desired; and to seek enlightenment from minute bodily amendments. Furthermore, in the case of dance, it is to salvage the bodily aches and the blistered bleeding toes, not to indulge the Sadist imaginary, but to bring labour of researcher and researched into presence. By turning the spotlight onto labour, the embodiment driving creativity is recognized in all its extra/ ordinariness and the fundamental difficulties of the creative process are, perhaps partially, substantiated. The outcome-driven nature of funding grants, but also other aspects of the Neoliberal Academy, means that creating something tangible, concrete and ‘measurable’ – be that an installation, soundscape, play or exhibition – is often a central consideration for geographers entering the field. And yet, rarely is the creative geographer’s aim exclusively the end product or even the demonstration of professional mastery as choreographer, artist, playwright, or conductor. A plethora of skills are, as we have argued, required when considering adopting creative methods. But, to ‘not be skilled’ is not necessarily to prohibit practice. Moreover, an excessive emphasis on academic-professional proficiency might miss something important. In the case of Harriet’s drawing experiences, drawing is often considered a ‘lesser activity’ meant for private realms, yet drawing theory often emphasizes what happens in the looking. To look is to come to sense differently, to feel, smell and hear, not least due to the practice of sitting in one place to look (Hawkins, 2015). To appreciate this is to foreground what is gained in the doing, or in the course of learning to do, but also to give due consideration to how our ability to learn is enriched through improvising. It is therefore valuable to appreciate the skills of both experts and amateurs. In Charlotte’s case, entering the dance studios to study alongside Coast Salish and Black South African dancers was not an exercise in achieving performative expertise or a choreographic masterpiece. The creative product itself remained auxiliary for much of the early stages of the research. In contrast to her keen bodily cognizance, practising these regional art forms was an exercise in becoming unfamiliar, desensitized, awkward and, quite frankly, ‘bad’. She was unable to retain the rhythm of simplistic stepping combinations as the tempo increased, or body-pop and remain

358  Handbook on the geographies of creativity weighted in the earth. But much was learnt through this lack of artistic proficiency. Indeed these failures, when working alongside choreographers, instructors and fellow dancers, were the very means by which experiences were shared, hereditary stories and everyday urban challenges recounted, and the meaning and genealogy of steps revealed. The creative product (that is, dance) facilitated a choreographic and scholarly journey. Our intention here is not to romanticize the possibilities of dance or drawing, our outputs, or even collaborations, but rather to see creative practice as part of the path toward knowledge formation. In the course of learning to do, we widened our awareness of how body relationships are cultivated, contested, mediated and managed with places, landscapes and with other people and, in the case of dance, how individuals and organizations marshal the socio-political realms to produce critically reflexive and accountable choreographies. As scholars of geography, these choreographies and sensory ethnographies offered us new ways of experiencing places and of reading the city, and of examining how a particular public’s claims over it are fashioned, negotiated and represented. In short, what we both learnt was not to overlook the importance of skill and labour in the doing. Importantly, this is not somehow to patrol who can do creative geographies, nor to argue that only those highly proficient in these methods should undertake their practice. Instead, it is to find much that is productive in learning to do, in failures of proficiency and in sitting with and attuning to the labours involved. We say this mindful of the ethical issues around creative labour; mindful of the cost that creative labour can exact on its workers, and aware of the fetishized nature of the genius artist and their love for their job, and a seemingly inexhaustible desire to work for little reward in sometimes highly precarious circumstances. It seems important that creative geographies should take care not to reproduce these abusive creative labour practices toward themselves or others, or forget to guard against the art-washing tendencies of neoliberal institutions (universities included) and their easy co-option of the creative labour of ourselves and those with whom we might collaborate.

WRITING THE FIELD: THE ARTS OF FIELDWORK AND DOCUMENTING CREATIVITY/CREATIVELY Paired with the enthusiasm for creative methods is an excitement around experimental approaches to recording, representing and diagramming creative practice-led research. Spurred on by calls to exceed representational forms of knowing, coupled with desires to do justice to the multi-sensual qualities of creativity, the last decade has seen geographers from cultural, political, economic and health subfields grapple with producing novel creative ‘records’ (McCormack, 2013; Veal, 2016). Emerging from such research are contestations over binary relationships between documentation–practice, analysis–-creative doings, and representation– non-representation. Optimistic though we may be, we remain equally cautious of an

Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises?  359 uncritical and unrelenting fascination with such creative documentation techniques that, not least, fail to assert the fundamental purpose and pedagogic rationale driving enlivened approaches to writing/documenting the field (see Phillips, 2015). We place emphasis therefore on asking how we document creativity and how we document creatively, but also how and why these methodologies are valuable. Hoping to add critical nuance to debates on creative recordings, we develop two ideas that invigorate geographical conceptualizations of ‘the field’ and assert enlivened documentation formats as central to knowledge creation (methodologically, conceptually and ontologically). We begin in the field. Whether it’s a coastline or city, shopping centre or allotment, learning in ‘the field’ has remained central to geographical scholarship (Driver, 2011). No matter how well defined in space and/or time, the field often figures as a space of boundaries and, we would argue, boundary crossings. For Katz (1994: 67) this includes boundaries between ‘research’ and everyday life, ‘the field’ and ‘not the field’, and between ‘scholar’ and ‘subject’. Sometimes we encounter the field as a stranger and as a form of displacement. Other times, the field is a space where the familiar is rendered uncanny. The field is both a space of science but also of the arts, in which learning takes place through experimentation, unlearning and crossing the disciplinary boundaries of familiarity. For Harriet some of the most compelling field experiences with artists were those that located her in the midst of tensions between traditional, even romanticized, cultures of geographic fieldwork and artistic field practices. As part of a collaboration on caves she donned caving gear, crampons, helmet and harness to descend rock walls, trek across glaciers and half-walk/half-swim through tunnels. These might feel like familiar physical geography fieldwork sites, but the practices were disorientating. Sound recordings and photographs were taken and videos made, but there were no set plans: fieldwork was simply to be in place, seeing, touching, smelling, recording, following the contours of the field. This was unsettling: Harriet wanted tasks – just being present with the experience was somehow not enough, but also getting lost in the physicality of the experience felt too romantic. Later on, a visit to a series of local museums’ reoccurring displays on the visualization of glaciers as sites of science and art reminded us that field sites have long been complex, shared spaces. Working alongside dance practitioners and choreographers was also for Charlotte (Veal, 2017a) an agenda-free, improvizationally-led experience, where the contours of the field ruptured spatially and temporally. This included embracing the melting of the real and imagined space of the dance studio into a series of landscapes without boundaries. The act of choreographing in Cape Town, for example, saw the inclusion of sketches, diaries, reports and contemporary film footage documenting the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Meanwhile in Vancouver, it brought together spaces of legislation and activist events, and locales of memory and testimony of urban precarity, in both physical and virtual realms. Rather than self-contained, the field was equally created within and, in turn, transcended the minds and bodies of the dancers present when they were asked to ‘get into the zone’ or ‘be those people who suffered’. So, too, the temporalities of the field knitted together past, present

360  Handbook on the geographies of creativity and future. Histories of Apartheid intersected with contemporary tales of apartness while calls for community wellbeing returned to roots in Coast Salish ancestral tales. Neither did time in the field run linearly. It was stopped, paused and sped up through choreographic tools (including tempo and canon). It was manipulated through music and lighting, cut up and spliced together out of order, backwards and according to dance themes. And for Charlotte as researcher, it lingered in and through encounters with boredom and frustration. In reflection, such encounters demonstrate both an artistic approach to the field, but equally, an art of fieldwork. These hybrid, shared, complicated fields continue to challenge creative geographers as they think about documentation. For alongside reconceptualizing the field, interests in all things creative have shifted from concerns with representation to more expansive recording techniques. A key challenge, however, has been that many creative forms of interest, such as dance, music, installation and happenings, are historically framed as art in the present of their presentation. Thrift argued they are ‘one-time-only’ phenomena (2000b: 237), while some performance scholars emphasize how any digital representation of dance results in the loss of the ‘liveness’ – precisely the experiential, atmospheric, embodied dimensions of dance we are interested in. Such representations, moreover, ‘filter out exactly the entity that makes performance unique – the temporal immediacy’ (Dirksmeier and Helbrecht, 2008: 2). We are warned, however, against conceiving of performance as happening only once by those writings that challenge the taints of ‘authenticity’ and the ‘originary’ (Phelan, 1993). Dance offers lessons here. Principally, it encourages scholars to go beyond documenting only creative outputs (final pieces) and instead to foreground experimenting with documenting the traced, the repeated, the liminal and the interactive moments that inform the creative process. These techniques of diagramming promote a recognition of creativity as multi-layered encounters in space and time (drawing inspiration from different cultures, artworlds, time periods, jotting notes down, adding to them, erasing, re-drawing). Geographers have subsequently drawn lines, sketched bodies moving in spacetimes, traced pathways and produced collages/scrapbooks and deep maps, amongst other forms. Rarely, however, are the discipline-specific, aesthetic sets of theories that go into the making of creative work – of producing, editing and choreographing – drawn upon in our own ‘doings’. What does it mean to gain ‘recording’ expertise in various creative contexts? How might greater knowledge of these techniques affect how we record/interpret creativity? What might recording creatively mean for knowledge transferral? Furthermore, such dance-based approaches to documentation foreground a growing interest in conceiving of documentation as part of the process of creating. This has potentially radical implications for enabling the act of creating to extend beyond the studio. This ruptures the complex divide between creativity and archive, but also reframes the creative product and enables it to be experienced in innovative ways. Whilst in the field Charlotte developed, blended, copied and amalgamated various techniques of recording movement from across geography and dance in her ‘choreographic notebook’; including time–space–body graphs, a movement material index,

Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises?  361 cue scores and dance notation (Veal, 2016). Collectively they told her something about the experimental process of creating, developing, refining, improving and discarding movement; that is, the aesthetic theories of choreography. But what purpose did it serve for her analysis, or her PhD examiners? Take the example of dance notation. Soliciting Labanotation (devised by Rudolf Laban for recording and analysing human movement) was not driven by a desire to provide her geographical audience with a written language through which they could bring to life the various allegro or adage enchaînments as they materialized in the studio. Rather, the purpose of experimenting with creative forms of recording was twofold. First, Labanotation challenged critiques by Thrift and others that movement is inherently non-representational; dance has its own written language. Second, it offered an ontological argument by disrupting long-held beliefs of the ephemerality of the dancing body. For Harriet, ideas of documentation and creativity came together around thinking about sketchbooks. The sketch is a spatio-temporal composite; an aide-memoire rather than a public commodity, sketchbooks are valued for their denial of their own presence, standing in for the scene once seen, or the artwork yet to come (Gunn, 2009; Taussig, 2011). For Harriet, documentation is the primary function of sketchbooks, but they are also a site for the practical evolution of her thinking on creative geographies. Finding inspiration in her collaborators’ sketchbooks, Harriet’s notebooks diversified in content: sketches appeared alongside writings, as well as visual and textual material clipped from various print sources, whilst bits and bobs gleaned from field sites were stuffed between pages. Harriet’s evolving sketchbooks resonate with the histories of this private form, from their role as technical training manuals collecting copies of famous artwork (akin to written notes and quotes); to their status as spaces to record observations from real life, together with sites at which future plans could be thought through. Evolving in the midst of debates about realism and representation, expression and documentation, sketchbooks have long been a site of artistic mediation of identity, exploring professional and personal roles and for cultivating a ‘visual voice’ (Byerly, 1999), and in the case of Harriet’s sketchbooks were sites for the evolution of her practices as a creative geographer.

EVALUATION Evaluation remains one of the most open of the questions creative practitioners face; whether concerning their own work or its evaluation by others within and without the discipline. As in previous sections, we are concerned with the fetish of creativity that seems to persist in evaluation, at least within Geography. Two examples illustrate this. The first comes from a student who brings her training as a successful fine artist to her practice-based PhD with Harriet in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University of London. During an annual review she reflected on being a practitioner based in Geography. She observed the value of the conversations she had with geographers around theory and ideas, but worried that in their critical commentary on the artwork and its aesthetic elements she never received questions

362  Handbook on the geographies of creativity like ‘why was it that size, what about making it bigger?’ Nor was she challenged as to whether it ‘did’ what she claimed it did. From her perspective, Geography’s enthusiasm for creative practices prevented important questions being asked about the quality of the artwork, thus compromising the evolution of her research and practice. Our second example comes from a published panel on Landscape, Place and Mobilities at the 2007 Royal Geographical Society Conference. Tim Cresswell (in Merriman et al., 2008) mused on the growth of creative writing practices within geographical scholarship on landscape. He observed; I find it very hard to intervene in texts that are written in poetic form like that. With a traditional social science structure there are a series of points, making it easier to intervene (if not so enjoyable to read or listen to!). When you have a poetic expression, one’s engagement is different. I think ‘I really enjoyed that’, but the poetry of some current landscape writing can make it very hard to intervene in the text. Articles can be almost hermetically sealed, beautifully written stories, but how do you intervene? Do you intervene aesthetically? Or do you intervene in another way?

It was worth quoting this passage at length as it articulates questions that continue to challenge creative geographies, those of us who supervise and assess practice-based PhDs, edit and review journal articles, as well as assess job and promotion applications. It is the aesthetic challenge that draws our attention here: how do you assess a piece whose force is aesthetic and expressive and to which responses might seem primarily expressive? One answer to these questions lies within the critical disciplines variously associated with these practices; such as art history, and literary and dance criticism. Interestingly, geographers tend to overlook the provision of such resources when it comes to evaluating creative geographies. This might be down to training; creative geographers, like some creative practitioners, are not necessarily trained in the traditions of critique associated with their practice. It might also be attributed to the challenge posed by creative geographies’ hybrid form – as both research and creative practice. To explore getting beyond the fetish within evaluation we pursue three lines of enquiry: firstly, we ask what to evaluate; secondly, we query how to evaluate excellence; and thirdly, we explore creative and innovative output forms. For many geographers using creative research methods, the output is not necessarily going to be a creative form; just because you make photographs as a researcher does not mean you think of these images as ‘outputs’. To question what to evaluate is also then a question of when. Many arts evaluation processes, focused on audience effects, foreground evaluation ‘at the end’ (Belfiore and Bennett, 2010). By contrast, our experience of creative research methods suggests that like all research methods, they require ongoing evaluation to ensure the effective evolution of methods in the field. What does it mean, though, to be trying to evaluate creative methods? Questions to ask of social science and arts and humanities-based methods might take in concerns with rigour, with reproducibility, with scalability and with sample size. These are not always appropriate questions to ask of creative methods. What does it mean then to ask, are these methods working, are they any ‘good’?

Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises?  363 In the case of Harriet’s drawing, this involved her moving past ‘being bad’ at representative drawing, to focus instead on drawing as sensory attunement. For a while this felt like an excuse, but drawing theory helped her make sense of this not as a failure but as part of the process. For Charlotte, it was less about professional recognition, including according choreographers various awards. Rather it was about questioning how and in what ways dance might facilitate dialogue and politicize participants about debates such as gang culture, gender violence, urban disabilities and revanchist policing. In both cases we wonder whether more self-reflection and evaluation was needed. Using methods different from those we were used to, we lacked a formalized structure within which to situate them. Our experiences also suggested a need to conceptualize failure and ‘not working’ more carefully. We also wonder whether the lack of formal structure and experience of these skills – both individually in the case of drawing for Harriet, but also in broader disciplinary terms – meant we were less able to improvise ‘in the field’, when things unfolded in unexpected ways. Some of the answers we found in the practices themselves. To take failure, choreographing is, more often than not, shaped through improvisation; a process which necessitates and even encourages failure. In such contexts, working out what works and what doesn’t, and even what it means ‘to work’, is integral to creative doings. Thus, one important feature of these methods, we believe, is that the role of self-evaluation during creative research, rather than only at the end, is a crucial part of evolving these practices. Evaluation is a watchword across the arts sector, justifying and securing grants, and shaping best practices. The institutionalization of creative practices, whether in museums and galleries or in academic institutions, has intensified these processes of evaluation and also brought about their professionalization. Yet as the Creative Value Report commissioned by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council made clear, cultural value, and the methods by which we might understand it, are still little understood (Crossick and Kaszynska, 2015). Given that the arts sector as a whole is challenged by finding methods to move beyond enumerating visitors, their socio-cultural categorizations and any immediate reactions they might have to work, so too must creative geographies look elsewhere for evaluation methods. What is creative excellence, and what is excellent in creative practice-based/led research, are different, but important, questions. They are of relevance to individual practitioners as well as to the wider disciplinary infrastructure (journal editors, grant assessors, Heads of Department and so on). What could be assessed is perhaps less creative practice per se, but creative practice as research – and these are different things. The ‘experts’ on the UK Research Excellence Framework panel tasked to ‘assess’ the quality of research submission from Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts observed the need to distinguish ‘excellent professional practice from practice with a clear research dimension’ (p. 100).1 The assessment panel were less interested in audience figures and collated press clippings of reviews than they were in evidence of the work’s research imperative, including clear aims and methods. Elsewhere creative outputs were valued for their ‘impact’ on their public audiences (see Hawkins, 2019). There is much to reflect on as we develop a discipli-

364  Handbook on the geographies of creativity nary infrastructure to explore creative research excellence. We need to get beyond our fetishization of creative outputs and draw on existing resources to help shape our evaluation practices. Finally, to turn to publication. Many geographers are in the thrall of creativity and the diverse outputs it can enable and, while excited by this, we want to keep our focus on publication. We have three key observations to make here. Our first concerns publication and career progression. For whilst other forms of output do count, creative geographers are usually still hired, promoted and otherwise evaluated within geography departments, and not all geography departments, or all staff, recognize the value of creative outputs. This not only reflects the challenges of evaluation discussed above, but also the constitution of geography departments, where social scientists sit alongside scientists, and arts and humanities scholars (let alone practitioners) are in the minority. It is not a surprise, therefore, that for many creative geographers publication remains a key output. Yet there are numerous examples of how such ‘standard’ output forms can be critically and creatively inhabited. Our second point therefore concerns how creative geographers are thinking hard about how to critically inhabit publication forms, challenging and remaking the textual forms of the journal article, the book chapter, the monograph, and so on. Both of us in different ways have confronted the challenges of experimenting with the form and layout of text and images on the article page. In Harriet’s case, experimentation was a response to questioning (with artist-geographer Sachs Olsen, 2016) how to evolve a textual form that reproduced their experiences (as participant and artist, respectively) of a performative exploration of urban space. In Charlotte’s case (Veal, 2016) she explored how her work with Labanotation could be made present in a journal article and be used to support empirical analysis. Such experiments sit within the long history of geographers using image and text layouts to develop the space of the page for conceptual ends (Olsson, 1980; Pred, 1995) as well as the recent evolving geographical essay format (MacDonald, 2013). Our third observation then is that even when geographers do stay with the text form, many have been inspired by the twentieth century’s experimental literary practices. Cutler’s (2013) chapbooks of forest poetry are a good example here, as too are Bagelman and Bagelman’s (2016) zine-making work with students and community groups. Varied textual forms offer conceptual and political possibilities, including challenging the normative economies of academic publishing. In short, creative geographies’ plethora of output possibilities should not cause us to overlook creative possibilities within more standard publication forms, not least because these forms are practically important for career promotion and progression, as well as pedagogically relevant for colleagues more comfortable with reading and more trusting of the ‘authority’ of a journal article.

Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises?  365

CONCLUSION Geography is not the only discipline undergoing a creative turn. Indeed, looking to history, archaeology and sociology, we find an evolving interest in creative research methods. So, while our discussions have been lensed through our own experiences as geographers, our reflections across the life cycle of a research project might find interesting resonance, but also productive tensions, when set in other disciplinary contexts. Rather than try to reach any definitive conclusions or offer prescriptions, we have sought to use three sites within dance and art research processes as loci for asking questions that might pertain to all creative research projects, namely: reflections on skill and practice before you enter the field, the doings in the field itself, and then evaluation and dissemination during and after fieldwork. The examples we give are intended here as prompts to thought and invitations to encourage readerly reflection on practice, rather than definitive examples of forms or exemplary guidance. We raise concerns with getting beyond creativity’s fetish not to dampen enthusiasm, but rather to caution geographers and other researchers seeking value in creative research practices, to practice mindful research, to reflect on creative practices as research methods and do their due diligence. We urge geographers not to get caught up in the novelty and fashionability of creative practices, and frankly in the fun they often are to learn and undertake, offering refreshing alternatives to normative practices, but to enjoy these practices with the due care and attention that they would give to other scholarly approaches. These questions are all the more important as creative research methods are cited as ideal interdisciplinary responses to key contemporary issues around environmental change and development.

NOTE 1.

Panel D overview report available from http://​www​.ref​.ac​.uk/​2014/​panels/​panel​over​view​ reports/​. Last accessed 27/1/2018.

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368  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Phillips, R. (2015), ‘Playful and multi-sensory fieldwork: seeing, hearing and touching New York’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 39 (4), 617–29. Pinder, D. (2008), ‘Urban interventions: art, politics and pedagogy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (3), 730–36. Pratt, G. (2000), ‘Research performances’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18, 639–51. Pratt, G. and C. Johnston (2017), ‘Crossing oceans: testimonial theatre, Filipina migrant labor, empathy, and engagement’, GeoHumanities, 3 (2), 1–13. Pred, A. (1995), Recognising European Modernities: A Montage of the Present, London, UK: Routledge. Price, L. (2015), ‘Knitting and the city’, Geography Compass, 9 (2), 81–95. Reimer, S. (2009), ‘Geographies of production II: fashion, creativity and fragmented labour’, Progress in Human Geography, 33 (1), 65–73. Roe, E., C. Veal and P. Hurley (2019), ‘Mapping microbial stories: creative microbial aesthetic and cross-disciplinary intervention in understanding nurses’ infection prevention practices’, GEO: Geography and Environment, 6 (1), 1–20. Rogers, A. (2014), ‘Thinking through intercultural spatialities on Imelda: a new musical’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 35 (1), 53–73. Sachs Olsen, C. (2016), ‘Performing urban archives – a starting point for exploration’, cultural geographies, 23 (3), 511–15. Sachs Olsen, C. and H. Hawkins (2016), ‘Archiving and urban exploration – Mr Nice Guy, cooking oil drums, sterile blister packs and uncanny bikinis’, cultural geographies, 23 (3), 531–43. Simpson, P. (2012), ‘Apprehending everyday rhythms: rhythmanalysis, time-lapse photography, and the space-times of street performance’, cultural geographies, 19 (4), 423–45. Smith, T. (2017), ‘Of makerspaces and hacklabs: emergence, experiment and ontological theatre at the Edinburgh Hacklab, Scotland’, Scottish Geographical Journal, 133 (2), 130–54. Spinney, J. (2011), ‘A chance to catch a breath: using mobile video ethnography in cycling research’, Mobilities, 6 (2), 161–82. Straughan, E. (2016), Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters, London, UK: Routledge. Straughan, E. and H. Hawkins (2016), Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters, London, UK: Routledge. Taussig, M. (2011), I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own, Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press. Thrift, N. (2000a), ‘Dead or alive?’ in I. Cook, D. Crouch, S. Naylor and J. Ryan (eds), Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns: Perspectives on Cultural Geography, Harlow Essex, UK: Prentice-Hall, pp. 1–6. Thrift, N. (2000b), ‘Afterwords’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (2), pp. 213–55. Thrift, N. (2008), Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Tolia-Kelly, D. (2007), ‘Fear in paradise: the affective registers of the English Lake District landscape re-visited’, The Senses and Society, 2 (3), 329–51. Tolia-Kelly, D. (2012), ‘The geographies of cultural geography II: visual culture’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (1), 135–42. Veal, C. (2016), ‘A choreographic notebook: methodological developments in qualitative geographical research’, cultural geographies, 23 (2), 221–45. Veal, C. (2017a), ‘Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s “a healthy city for all”’, Geoforum, 81, 11–21.

Creativity as method: exploring challenges and fulfilling promises?  369 Veal, C. (2017b), ‘Micro-bodily mobilities: choreographing a geographies and mobilities of dance and disability’, Area, DOI: 10.1111/area.12377. Wylie, J. (2010), ‘Non-representational subjects’, in B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds), Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 99–116.

Index

authenticity, crafting 162–77

100 Resilient Cities (100RC) programme 115–23 aboriginal dancing 105 Adorno, T. 55, 60 aesthetic resilience 117, 119–24 Against Creativity 1 Aguilar, Filomeno V. 153, 156 Ahmed, S. 266, 276 Akin Collective 90 Alacovska, A. 144, 157 Aleron choir 148–51 Alice Springs 173–4 Allison, S.T. 185, 195 alterity, performing 282–97 Ambient Commons 250 ambient culture 10, 249–62 measuring and making sense 252–3 Americanization 18 Amsterdam 39, 46, 47 amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) 184 Anderson, K. 259 Anthropocene 353 anti-racist arts activism 275 Antonsich, M. 219 Appadurai, Arjun 17–19, 21, 31 Aronica, L. 203 art galleries 234 art museums 28 ArtFund Museum 239 artificial culture 301–2 artificial intelligence 301–2 artistic media 335 artists 118–19 arts 75, 111–25 of fieldwork 358–61 see also individual entries arts-based methodologies 268 arts creativity 315–29 artworks 118–19 Asian Financial Crisis 20 Asian Tigers 16, 17, 20 Askins, K. 353 Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) 254 Australian creative workplace topologies 100

Back, L. 238, 245 Badiou, A. 27 Bærenholdt, J.O. 133, 138, 139 Bagelman, C. 364 Bagelman, J. 364 Baillie, P. 202 Bain, A. 189, 192, 326 Bandung 25, 28 Bandung Creative City Forum (BCCF) 25, 26 Banks, M. 166, 183, 185 Barikin, Amelia 251 Barnham, Elizabeth 170, 171 Bauman, Zygmunt 129 Beck, U. 185 Bekerman, Z. 239 benign modernization 4, 17, 30 Benjamin, W. 60, 66 Bennett, D. 182, 184, 205, 206 Bennett, Tony 249 Berry, C. 134 Big hART 171 Bill C-36 275 Bilton, C. 194 Bishop, Claire 262 Black History Month 244 Boltanski, L. 22, 26 The Book of Beginnings 303 The Book of Change 303 Bourdieu, P. 96, 131, 237 Braslow, L. 85 Brennan, Kate 260, 261 Brennan-Horley, C. 99 Bréville, Benoît 41 BRICS 17, 20 British Council 23, 25 Bromberg, A. 326 Brook, Daniel 45 Brook, O. 1 Buck-Morss, Susan 32 Calhoun, L.G. 184 Cambodia, dance and nationality 220–23 Campbell, J. 181, 185, 190, 192, 193, 195 capital 136–7

370

Index  371 see also individual entries capitalism 60 career development, hero’s journey 180–81 career lifecycle 204–11 breaking in stage 205–7 denouement stage 209–10 moving on stage 210–11 peak period 207–8 pre-career stage 204–5 career transition 212 Catungal, J.P. 274 Central Australia 173–4 centrifugal forces 96, 129–40 CEPA as 136 Hong Kong motion picture industry 134–9 centripetal forces 96, 129–40 CEPA as 138–9 Hong Kong motion picture industry 134–9 Ceylan, R. 241, 244 Chakrabarty, D. 101 Chiapello, E. 22, 26 China 29 see also Greater China China’s Disruptors 305 Chinese disruptors 307–10 Ching Cheong 295 Christensen, Clayton 299 Chumvan Sodhachivy’s YouTube page 217–31 Cirque du Monde 320, 324 Cirque du Soleil 318–20, 323, 328 Cirque Hors Piste 325–8 City of Melbourne 115 clever rebranding 84 Closer Economic Partnership Agreement 7 Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) 135 as centrifugal forces 136 as centripetal forces 138–9 Clusters of Last Resort 99–101 Coffman, D. 206 cognitive-cultural capitalism 131 collective action 283 collective groups 204 commercial leases 89 commercial rent control 90 commercialization 32 commoditization 18 commodity culture 234 community engagement programmes 239

community music 106 Connie Yan-wai Lo 293–6 consumption 29 contemporary Australian craft industry 7 contemporary Cambodian dance 217–31 commercial sites of performance 223–5 and NGO sector 225–7 contingent creativities 103–5 corporate creative industries 81 corporate social responsibility (CSR) 316 Cosgrove, D. 237 Cowan, T.L. 269 Cowen, Tyler 310 craft and design-led creative economies 162 craft ‘terroir’ 169 Crang, M. 235–6 creative and cultural industries (CCI) 144, 153 creative careers 200 performing arts 200–213 stages 200–213 creative cities 37–51, 57 fallacy 63–5 creative-cities policies 44, 48 creative-cities policy fix 40 creative-cities syndrome 38 creative class 21 creative economy 56 creative fetish 352–4 creative imaginary 15–33 new spirit 26–30 provincializing global 16–19 creative ‘industrialization’ 162 creative industries 15, 20, 21, 26, 54–69, 302 ambiguities and opacities 57–8 Big International Players 62 clarifying theory 65–7 culture and creativity, inattention and neglect 59–60 culture and social (e)quality 63 defining and scoping 57–8 economic benefits, challenges and uncertainties 58–9 local SMEs 62 rethinking policy 67–8 ‘creative labour,’ utopianization of 61 creative mobilities of cultural identity 144–59 ‘evidently Filipino’ 151–4 of performing arts 146–8 creative practice 282–97 contradictory nature of 316–17 creative problem-solving 185

372  Handbook on the geographies of creativity creative thinking 185 creative tourists 18 creative turn, problems with 57–65 Creative Value Report 363 creative work, leadership in 180–96 creative workers approach 186–7 creative workforce mobilities of 130–33 mobility of 129–40 creativity 1, 94, 217–19, 268–72 as culture 9–10 documenting 358–61 evaluation 361–4 as imaginary 4–5 for innovation and economy 63 interrogating assumptions of 2–4 as intervention 10–11 intervention 302–7 as labour 8–9 as locality 5–7, 74–90 love’s labours lost 354–8 as method 12, 352–65 as mobility 7–8 negotiating, periphery 105–6 network topologies 97–9 and placemaking 111–25 universalizing 20–22 see also individual entries creativity bundle 22–6 creativity fix 49 creativity index 44 creativity-led modernization 4, 17 creativity-oriented practices 6 creativity scholarship 2 creativity strategy 45 creativity’s turns, mapping 1–13 Cresswell, Tim 362 critical performance Mclean and Toby Sharp 272–7 potentialities and pitfalls 272–7 cultural actors 22 cultural-artistic identities 151–4 cultural ‘authenticity’ 44 cultural-economic governance 38 cultural economy 56 cultural entrepreneurship 4 cultural globalization 230 cultural industries 54–69 cultural-political elites 23 cultural-professional reputations 154–7 cultural revolution 26 cultural work 66

cultural workers 61 culturalization 27 culture club 37–51 ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ 55 Culture is Bad For You 1 cultures 20, 63, 111–25, 217–19, 234–45 commodification of 60 of creativity and innovation 299–312 and difference 236–9 see also individual entries Cutler, A. 364 Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) 307 Daloy dance company 148–51 dance films 220 Darchen, Sebastien 97 De Leeuw, Sarah 266 decision-making 180 Deleuze, G. 333 democracy 19, 285–9 democratic modernity 25 Deng Xiaoping 299 Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) 57–60 DePillis, L. 46 Derrida, J. 337 DeSilvey, C. 353 Desmond, J.C. 225, 226 Dewey, J. 343 Dik, B.J. 181, 185 Dinner with Master To promotional video 290–93 Dirty Plotz 267, 273, 274, 277 disidentification 269 disruption 299, 300 Dobrow, S. 205–6 Donnelly, H. 116 Du Bois, W.B. 235 Dudrah, R.K. 238 Dungin 122 Duvivier, C. 97 Dweck, C.S. 184, 193 Ebberwin, C. 212 economic benefits 58–9 economic-development policy 44 economic embeddedness 171 economic impetus 60 economization 27 Ecstasy of Spaces 346, 347

Index  373 Edensor, T. 218, 238 Elden, S. 132 elite classical singers 202, 211 elitism 20 embroidered catkin detail 337 Emergency Management Victoria 116 Emerging Makers 164 Emperor Entertainment Group (EEG) 137 employment locational data 98 employment statistics 98 enlightenment institutions 22 entrepreneurialism 39 epistemic community 131 epistemological ethnocentrism 144 Established Makers 164, 165 ethno-religious spaces 239–43 Eudaimonia 32 Evans, Graeme 107 everyday space 227–9 Evitt, R. 105 exhibition spaces 83 Fair Share Fare 118, 119 Faruqi, N. 238 fast-policy 21, 37–51 culture 37–40 Federation Square 261 open space 253–60 feminist artistic geographers 266–8 film 219 Five Year Plan 302 Florida, Richard 37–40, 43, 44, 46, 50, 51, 57, 64, 75, 130 Florida-style intervention 49 Foord, Jo 97 Franco, Z.E. 182–3 Frankl, V.E. 194 Friedman, Thomas 37, 38 gay index 42 Gendlin, E.T. 341 gentrification 3, 85, 87 ‘Gen X’ habitus 25 geographical method 333–49 materiality 339–43 spatiality 336–9 Gibson, C. 76, 105 Giddens, A. 185 Gill, R. 144, 157 Glaeser, Edward 50 global cosmopolitanism 167–74 global cultural economy 17

Global Financial Crisis 28 Global North 19, 21, 24 global policy 18 global ‘policyscapes’ 18 Global South 17, 21, 30 globalization 31 Goethals, G.R. 185, 195 Goffman, E. 260 Goldstein, L.S. 185 governmental funds 48 governmobility 129 Granovetter, M. 131 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 299 Great Wall Movie Enterprise 139 Greater China 299–312 Green, J. 194 growth signs 306 Guangzhou 29 Habermas, Jürgen 260 Hall, D. 207 Hall, Stuart 18, 236, 244 Hallman, R.J. 201 Hanh, Thich Naht 190 Hardt, M. 134 Harris, A. 241 Hartley, John 15, 16, 22 Harvey, David 354 Harwood, Gwen 189 Hegel, Haiti and Universal History 32 hegemonic masculinity 63 Helarfest annual festival 26 Heller, D. 205–6 Hennekam, S. 182 Heppner, M. 212 Her First Sunday 228 heroic creativity 180–96 heroic imagination, creative work 181–6 heroic leadership in creative work 181–6 ecological 182 energizing 182 epistemic 182 inspiration 188–9 inspiration and social connectedness 186 lifelong learning 186, 191 metaphor 190–91 metaphors 185 mindfulness 184, 191 paradox 185–6, 189 post-traumatic growth 184, 192–4 risk 185, 191–2

374  Handbook on the geographies of creativity transrational 185, 190 travel and sense of place 184, 188 hierarchies, inverting 101–6 Higgins, L. 206 high-risk art 192 Hoagie Hub project 273 homo creativus 41 homo economicus 156 homogenization 18 Hong, Yu 306 Hong Kong motion picture industry 134–9 history of 134–6 Hong Kong Spidie 282–5, 296 Horkheimer, M. 55, 60 Howkins, J. 56 Human Generator 57 118 Hutton, Will 22, 23 ideoscape 18 indigenous people 271 industrial heritage 84 inequality 3 Information Flood 118, 119 innovation 299–312 intangible Aboriginal heritage 122 interviews 74 Ito, M. 259 Jackson, P. 237 Jeffery, G. 317 Jeffri, J. 202 Jen, Gish 303 Jervis, John 251 Jessop, Bob 15 Jianlin, Wang 309 Johnnie To 290–93 ‘Johnnie To x John Tsang’ 290 Jones, C. 206–8 Jullien, François 303 Junction Flea Market 80 Junction Gardens Business Improvement Area 80 Junction/Junction Triangle 74, 77–81 precarious siting, arts hub 84–7 social and material dimensions 81–4 junzi 303 Katz, C. 359 kbach 224 Khmer Rouge 221, 230 Kim-Cohen, S. 251, 252 King, M. 272

Kingfisher, Catherine 38 knowledge economy 21, 22, 37 Kong, L. 103, 129 Korean modernity 25 Kotkin 64 Krätke, S. 64 labour market developments 195 Landry, Charles 26 Last, A. 270 Latourian figurations 18 Lavers, K. 317 Lazzarato, M. 317, 329 Le Monde Diplomatique 41 Leadbeater, C. 104 leadership, creative work 180–96 Leempeeyt Weeyn 255 Leung, C.Y. 293 liberal democracy 19 liberalism 41 The Light in Winter festival 255, 257 Lightman, E. 322 Link, Perry 299 Lion Rock 282–5, 296 Living Cement 226 Lloyd, R. 76 Lo, C. 295 locality 74–90 deconstructing 6 muse, and market 163–7 locational terminology 94 Loft Living 59 low rents 89 Lubart, T. 304 Luminato festival 273, 274 MacBride Commission 19 Macdonald, Sharon 245 Malanga, Steven 64 Manchester 235 Mao Zedong 299 Markus, H. 182 Marshall, Alfred 131 Marx, K. 354 Mason, Paul 30 material authenticity 175–6 materiality 339–43 McCullough, Malcolm 250, 251, 259 McLean, H. 267, 272–7, 326 McQuire, Scott 251 McRobbie, Angela 26 media-rich cities 250

Index  375 Meghji, A. 242 methodological creativity 352–4 Métis 270 Miège, B. 60, 66 Miller, T. 133 Millington, S. 238 Mitchell, Audre 271, 277 mobile creative class 129 mobilities of capital 131–2, 136–7 and creative ideas 130–31 of creative workforce 130–33 new technology of governance 132–3 of screen labour 137–8 modernity 16 Montgomery, Lucy 22 Morris, Meaghan 283 Moss Side 242 Mouffe, C. 293 Mould, O. 1 Mukherjee, A. 103 Muñoz, J. 269 Murdoch, J. 133 Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) 81, 85 museums 243 identities 235 social inclusion role of 235 spaces 239–43 music cultures 167 music studies 167 Muslim Lifestyle Expo 240–42 Nagar, R. 276 nation 217–19 national culture 217–31 The Nature and Art of Workmanship 175 Negri, A. 134 Negus, K. 284, 292 Nelson, R. 227, 228 neo-bohemian 21, 25 neoliberal ‘audit culture’ 271 neo-liberalism 15, 19, 27, 31 neo-liberalization 24 neoliberalization 131 Nest 123 network topologies, creativity 97–9 new symbolic order 37–51 The New Urban Crisis 37, 51 niche authenticities 7 Nisbett, R.E. 303 Nishnaabeg 270 ‘non-creative’ actors 3

non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 222, 225–7 non-human actors 76 Nowotny, Helga 306 Nurius, P. 182 Nussbaum, Martha 32 Nyong’o, T. 269 Oakland, J. 209, 212 Oakley, K. 104 Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) movement 285, 286 O’Connor, J. 62 Odena, O. 205 Okabe, D. 259 Olma, Seb 16 Olsen, Sachs 353 Operation Snatch 269, 274 Orientalism 237 Osbourne, T. 357 Osland, J.S. 184, 185 over-valorization 61 Pain, R. 353 Pallasmaa, J. 252 ‘Pan-Asia’ regional strategy 135 Pangestu, Mari Elka 25 Papastergiadis, N. 251, 258 Parker, B. 63 Parr, H. 353 Patraka, Vivian 295 Peck, J. 18, 57, 63, 130 performance art 272 performative metaphors 217 personal memory 294 Peucker, M. 241, 244 Philippine, transnational tours 144–59 Philippine/Filipino choirs 149, 154–7 Pickering, M. 284, 292 place 121 placemaking 111–25 place-marketing agents 25 Plancke, C. 218, 224 Plath, Sylvia 189 ‘plug-and-play’ communities 41 Pokémon Go 262 Polanyi, Karl 171 policy framings 103 policy migration 17 ‘policy mobility’ literature 18 policy shift 56 political leadership 24

376  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Pope, R. 304 portfolio careers 61 postcolonial cultural politics 282–97 post-Westphalian capitalism 17 poverty 78 practice-based approaches 4 practice-generated artistic spatiality 338 Pratt, A. 113, 114 Pratt, Mary Louise 323 precarity 86 of labour 61 negotiating 87–9 professional dancing bodies 219 professional singers 200–213 career lifecycle 204–11 deep identity, performer 203–4 embodied creativity 202–3 impetus for creativity 201 performing arts 202–3 property market displacements 99–101 proximity 75 public funds 316 public museums 234 public spaces, renegotiating attention 257–60 attentive 257–8 blocking out 259–60 uninterested 258–9 putative ‘theory’ 41 Pye, David 175 qualitative mapping techniques 98 quasi-authoritarianism 286 Quoniam, S. 346 radical change, en/acting 266–79 Rae, Jen 118, 121 Rainbow Mountain 228 Rancière, Jacques 286 reality 302 Realpolitik projects 42, 47 Reckwitz, A. 304 Redtory 29 REFUGE event 111, 115–24 relational thinking 95 Renshaw, P. 210 rentism 30 resilience, representational (artistic) aesthetics 114 resilience-as-dividend 112–13, 123 resilient cities 111–25 responsibility 3

revenge of culture 31 Richardson, L. 218 Riot Games 309 The Rise of the Creative Class 37, 38, 42, 46, 57, 75, 130 Rivard, J. 322 Robinson, K. 203 Roose, J. 241 Rose, G. 317 Rumpelstiltskin 333, 348, 349 Russian Revolution 32 Said, Edward 236, 244 Schiller 16 Schwan, K.J. 322 Scott, A.J. 75, 131 Scott, Allen 37, 104, 107 screendance 227–9 screen labour 137–8 Seeley, C. 338 semi-structured interviews 163 Sen, Amartya 32 Sennett, Richard 149 Seoul 24, 28 Shan Lung Lee 118 Sheila 188 Shing, Albert Yeung Sau 137 short-term travel 158 Siegel 64 Sil-Metropole Organization 139 ‘Silver Bell,’ dance troupe 223 Silverstone, Roger 283, 287 Simosi, M. 180 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 270 Sinha, S. 238, 245 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) 62 Smart City 28 SME economy 23, 28 social circus 317 defined 318 emancipatory dimensions of 323–5 origin and nature of 317–20 supporting 325–8 social critique 26 social equality 63 social ‘integration’ 315–29 social-liberal compensations 42 social networks 26, 74 social policy tool 316–17 Cirque du Monde 321–3 social resilience 119–23

Index  377 social ties 89 social transformation 315–29 socioeconomic inequalities 42 soft interventions 47 soft knowledge 22 ‘soft neoliberal’ moment 37 Southbank Arts 253, 254 spatiality 336–9 spatial proximity 75 Spiegel, J. 323 spieltrieb 16 Spruce, G. 205 state-directed socialism 21 Steiner, R. 182 Sternberg, R. 288, 289, 292 Streek, Wolfgang 31 Sulan, Kate 119 Sydney, Australia 99, 101 symbolic knowledge 75 tacit knowledge 96, 251 Tai, Benny 285–9 talent 40 Tasmania 171–3 Taumoepeau, Latai 118, 120 technology 40 techno-Utopia 310–11 Tedeschi, R.G. 184 temporary employment 61 Theodore, N. 18 Therborn, G. 31 Therborn, Goran 30 ‘third world’ actors 19 Throsby, D. 202, 206 Throw Down 290 Tigchelaar, Alex 269 Tiger Bell 226 Tik Tok 311 Tjanpi Desert Weavers 166 Toby Sharp 272–7 Todd, Z. 270, 278 tolerance 40 Tolia-Kelly, D.P. 235, 236 Toms, M. 185 Toronto creative district 74–90 Toronto Hydro 80 Toronto Star article 88 tower automotive building 80 Towse, R. 207 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade 359 transformative creativity 31 transition, neighbourhood 77–81

transition fantasies 96 translocalism 167–74 transnational production, motion pictures 133–4 transnational shame 156 Trubek, A.B. 162, 169–71 Tsang, J. 291 Tse, Edward 305, 307 Tsing, Anna 134 Umbrella Movement (UM) 282 under-provision 61 UNESCO 19, 20 United Kingdom 130 urban ‘buzz’ 94, 96 urban clusters 96 urban creative clusters 97 urban-creativity policies 50 urban gentrification 24 urban leaders 44 urban resilience 111, 123 Urry, John 133 utopianization 61 Vanished Archives 293–6 Veal, C. 219 vernacular creativity 238 Vertovec, Steven 241 visual aesthetics 229 visual art 84 Waitt, G. 105 The Wanda Way 309 Wang, Jing 306 Warren, A. 105 Washington consensus 19, 20 Watson, A. 77 Wayfinding and Communications 118 Weleski, Dawn 118, 121 Wenger, Étienne 145 Whitworth Art Gallery and Park 242–3 Whitworth Young Contemporaries (WYC) 242, 243 Whyte, M. 89 Williams, C. 181, 185, 191, 193 Williams, Raymond 234 ‘win–win’ 16 working-class housing 77 The World Is Flat’ 38 Wynne-Jones, Angharad 115 Xin, G. 62

378  Handbook on the geographies of creativity Yi Jing 303 Young, John 293 YouTube 217–31 Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang 25 Yudice, G. 24

Yue, A. 262 Zednick, A. 206 Zimbardo, P.G. 182–3 Zukin, S. 59, 85