Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
proportion of the urban population and has limited impact on overall regeneration
strategies, particularly in the former rustbelt cities. This led Florida to admit that the
clustering of talented people in a few cities did not lead to trickle down benefits for
the poorer people; the highly skilled professionals were the ones to gain.
10.5.4
The Politics of Urban Restructuring
One of the other powerful critiques stems from the relationship between Creative
City policies and city governance. Peck ( 2005 ) suggested that the creative strate-
gies could be described as state-sponsored gentrification because of the actions of
the local state in promoting consumption lifestyles and the agenda of a particular
social class. Because of the initially positive discourse around the Creative City
concept, the local state has been enabled to adopt certain policies that may oth-
erwise be more questionable, as they are enacted on the premise or promise of
achieving broader economic growth. The manner in which policy is developed and
implemented has also been the subject of concern, as new agents become privileged
and some pre-existing ones become ever more powerful. This has been particularly
true in the case of Baltimore where Ponzini and Rossi ( 2010 ) argue that the freedom
from certain responsibilities brought about by neoliberalism has enabled the local
state to become newly powerful and this has benefited certain political elites. They
described how Creative Class strategies have been used to enact network politics
within the city that is directly controlled by the Mayor. By creating a new 'macro-
actor' structure within the city, made up of a range of groups brought together under
the Creative Class banner, a politically manageable core has been created that sup-
ports their interests. This means that support for other urban policies has been effec-
tively neutralised. Issues such as socio-spatial justice become buried in support for
the arts and cultural agenda. They suggest that Baltimore provides a classic example
of how neo-liberalism becomes legitimised through a veneer of cultural policy and
has resulted in a complete political re-ordering within the city (Ponzini and Rossi
2010 ). The dependency that has emerged between creative and political actors has
also been clearly identified by Montgomery ( 2005 , p. 343), who noted that
the key figures in all of this are the visionary political leaders and the artists, inventors and
entrepreneurs, the former creating the conditions for the latter to invest and prosper.
Related to this point is the fact that the Creative City debate as promoted by Rich-
ard Florida has also posed new questions on the scale at which urban restructuring
takes place. Given his opinion that Creative Cities cannot be planned from above,
cities are given new agency, so the local municipal state becomes heavily privi-
leged, as in the example of Baltimore above. Within the context of a wide-ranging
theoretical debate within geography and other disciplines on the role and power
of the state, Florida's arguments, and those of his critics, support those who sug-
gest that state power is not declining, rather it is actually being transformed. We
are increasingly witnessing more, not less, government intervention as a result of
neoliberal policies (Ward 2003 ). Indeed this discussion has shown that the local
Search WWH ::




Custom Search