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The self-culturalisation of the city:

On the transformation of modern urbanity in the “creative city”

Andreas Reckwitz

The expression creative city is on everyone‟s lips. If there has been talk of a

„Renaissance in cities‟ since the 1990s, then at the interface of political, media and

social science debates, this is regularly linked with the concept of the „creative city‟.

From the widely discussed revitalisation of Berlin‟s new Mitte district, through the

marked interest in western European medium-sized cities such as Barcelona,

Amsterdam and Copenhagen with their new urban districts, their focus points of

cultural industrial and city tourism, and the cultural-economic rebirth of New York after

2001, through to the phenomenon – widely publicised by the media – of Dubai‟s

development into a cultural city in the desert: everywhere, the urbanism of a European

cast, which had been called extinct under the influence of suburbanisation, appears to be

re-establishing itself, and everywhere „creativity‟ and „culture‟ appear to play a leading

role here.1

Naturally from a sociological and critical perspective, the suspicion immediately

arises that this is a phenomenon of media manipulation and alleged neoliberal political

ideology, a cultural superstructure, a façade, “behind” which lurk quite different, very

familiar structures of inequality and economisation. If one follows Mike Davies, the

popular author of the multi-faceted history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz,2 what results

is a characteristic dual structure of post-modern urbanity of surface and deep structure:

at the visible surface one finds the urban celebration of the aesthetic signs and symbols,

whilst in the deep structure, by contrast, one finds that capitalism which in the post-

modern world makes use of the dimension of symbolic goods, which however actually

encourages a massive urban spatial segregation of different classes. In actual fact the

1 Cf. just Christiane Harriehausen: “Startbahn frei für moderne Stadtkonzepte”, in: Frankfurter

Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 14.09.2008, no. 37, pp. V15; Gerald Traufetter: “Coole Boomtowns”,

in: SPIEGEL special 4/2008, pp. 66; Alex Rühle: “New York. Kreative Stadt der Zukunft”, in

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 07.06.2008; Jörg Buber: “Berlin. Kaputt, dreckig und voller Ideen”, in: DIE

ZEIT, 22.01.2004, no. 5.

2 Cf. Mike Davies: City of Quartz. Ausgrabungen der Zukunft in Los Angeles und neuere Aufsätze,

Berlin etc. 1994.

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monstrously slum-ridden megacities of the Third World, long deprived of any political

control, the „shrinking cities‟ of central and eastern Europe and the former industrial

centres of western Europe and north America, as well as the ghetto clusters – frequently

characterised by migrants – at the edge of the cultural cities that flourish in the centre,

all provide familiar phenomena which, together with the creative cities, overall yield an

irritating ensemble of global urban development and post-modern society which to date

hardly seems to fit an overall pattern.

So what are creative cities all about? In the following, I am assuming that the

concept of creative cities and the phenomena which the term suggests point towards a

very real transformation of Western and global city structures since the 1990s – and to a

certain extent even since the 1970s. However, the concept is capable of grasping exactly

what characterises this transformation in its heterogeneity only in outline. This

fundamental change can rather be described as a self-culturalisation of the city. The

cities – by which we mean their dominant inhabitant milieu, their political institutions,

their economic organisations and their media scene-setters – increasingly see

themselves in terms of „culture‟, as a phenomenon of the cultural. „Culture‟ is here not

just an observer category of social and cultural studies analysis in the sense of the

cultural turn, i.e. of external culturalisation – which it certainly also is –, but a pattern

which the social reality, in this case the reality of the city, in its different groups of

protagonists, applies to itself. This self-culturalisation does not remain limited to a

supposedly consequence-free (or even obscuring) discourse phenomenon, but massively

structures those social practices and materialities – of urban development, architecture

etc. –, which constitute the city. Paradoxically, the self-culturalisation itself has a

material character; it relates to the changing materiality of the urban, its traffic routes,

residential districts and consumer districts and industrial estates. The media debate

surrounding creative cities must now both focus on the dimensions of this self-

culturalisation as well as miss them. For the discussion about creative cities is

essentially an emphatic as well as empathic participant discourse of those political-

academic institutions which vehemently operate this self-culturalisation and presuppose

it as a desirable normative objective.

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1. The model of the creative city: The culture-oriented governmentality of the city

The diagnosis of creative cities has come across since the mid-1990s, initially in a

British and American context. The work of Charles Landry and Richard Florida

initiated this discourse. Right from the start, this is not a straightforward description, but

always also the normative demand for a development and spread of creative cities, and

thus of a corresponding reorientation of urban policy: the creative city is the objective,

the non-creative city is what is to be avoided, and what is outdated. Both Landry and

Florida have corresponding policy advisory roles at national and local levels. Both of

them participate in the development of a more comprehensive semantic field around the

social and cultural model concept of „creativity‟, which extends from the creative

industries through to the creative class.

Creativity as the ability to create something new and to leave the stability of what

has been handed down behind us, an ability which presupposes in particular an

experimentalisation of perception as well as a virtuoso combinatorial way of dealing

with the patterns of the past, has been promoted since the beginning of the 1990s as a

subjective and collective objective in a multifaceted discourse, in the broadest sense

humanities-based, but in part also political and economic.3 It includes educational

theory (education for creativity) as well as psychology (creative techniques, creativity

as an aim in life), organisational consultancy (creative business), the representation of

career paths and lifestyle options (of the creative, the creative occupations), town

planning or the development of personal relationships. The semantics of creativity is

thus the subject matter of a routinisation and social normalisation. When it arose at the

beginning of the culture of the modern age, namely in the context of Romanticism, it

was essentially still restricted to the field of the aesthetic and of art: the artist appears as

the heroic figure of subjective creativity, inventiveness and imagination, of

experimentation in perceptions and of the creative urge of an expressive, unique

individuality.4 The artist subject as the carrier of creative potentials is here himself

3 For just a few examples, cf. Robert J. Sternberg: Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge etc. 1999; Peter

Spillmann/Marion von Osten (eds.): Be Creative! – Der kreative Imperativ, Zurich 2002; Andreas

Reckwitz: “Die Erfindung des Kreativsubjekts. Zur kulturellen Konstruktion von Kreativität”, in:

ibid., Unscharfe Grenzen, Bielefeld 2008, pp. 235-257.

4 Cf. Wolfgang Ruppert: Der moderne Künstler. Zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der kreativen

Individualität in der kulturellen Moderne im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt/M. 1998.

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extraordinary.5 The normalisation of creativity as a generally desirable goal for

everyone and in every area, even the premise that such a creativity is present in

everyone as a potential, more or less naturally, and that non-creativity even represents a

kind of pathology, thus reverses this extraordinariness of the creative into the ordinary,

and makes it the goal of a normative programme.6

But what then is the „creative city‟? Richard Florida develops the concept in

connection with his socio-structural diagnosis of the formation and cultural dominance

of a creative class.7 This is thus not about creativity as a subjective competence, but

primarily about a vocational catalogue of requirements, which furthermore characterises

a whole lifestyle and finds itself massed in a particular milieu. According to his

argumentation, the socio-structural, economic and cultural change in contemporary

society leads to the formation of a culturally hegemonial „new class‟ which is composed

of those professions which Robert Reich calls the symbol analysts.8 These are

professions which concern not just services or knowledge, but rather a creative way of

dealing with symbolisations and the creation of „the new‟ – in the advertising industry

and in design, in research and development and in the finance sector, in consultancy and

in the software industry, and also in the classic activities of art and the culture industry.

The foundation of the creative class is thus an economic-professional one, but its

lifestyle extends far beyond that. Its „creative ethos‟ also relates to its demands in

leisure time, in family life, even in politics: “openness to diversity of all kinds” and

“high-quality experiences”9 are central objectives here.

Florida‟s socio-statistical material on the change in occupational segments and their

cultural attitudes is exact, but his definition of the creative ethos and of the creative

professions remains vague. However, the conclusions that he draws about urban space

appear to be central: the participants in the creative class do not occur evenly across the

regions, but are concentrated in a selection of particular cities, namely those creative

5 Cf. Eckhard Neumann: Künstlermythen. Eine psycho-historische Studie über Kreativität,

Frankfurt/M./New York 1986.

6 Cf. Ulrich Bröckling: Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform,

Frankfurt/M. 2007.

7 Richard Florida: The Rise of the Creative Class and How It‟s Transforming Work, Leisure,

Community and Everyday Life New York 2002; ibid.: Cities and the Creative Class, New York etc.

2005.

8 Cf. Robert B. Reich: Work of Nations. Preparing Ourselves for 21st-century Capitalism, New York

1991.

9 R. Florida: Cities and the Creative Class.

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cities which in the USA include for example San Francisco, Seattle or Boston. These

cities offer the potential of relevant workers for the creative professions, and conversely

turn out to be attractive in their quality of life for those interested in the creative

professions. They provide – as Florida puts it, in the inimitable plasticity of the policy

adviser – „the three Ts‟: technology, talent, tolerance, i.e. on the one hand the

technologies required for the advance cultural economies; on the other hand, and

independently of that, they also have competent workers for creative professions

(talent); and finally a liberal tolerance and diversity which draws this group to the cities.

Florida continually switches from a descriptive to a normative/advisory register here: if

a city wants to become a creative city, then it must provide corresponding offers of

cultural diversity, of enhanced consumption of experience etc. The key element here is

an economic consideration: under present-day conditions in the west, a city or an entire

economy can be successful only as a centre of the advanced creative economy.

Charles Landry‟s starting point is similar to start with, albeit more specifically

related to the development of the cities and in the first instance focused on Great

Britain. The concept of the creative city arises for the first time in 1990, in his study on

the example of Glasgow; in The Creative City. A Toolkit For Urban Innovators (2000)

he intensifies his central idea of urban policy further.10

The policy strategy of the

Labour government, which from 1997 onwards aimed at promoting the so-called

creative industries, stands in close proximity to this work in terms of discourse.

However, Landry would not like to see the creative cities reduced to just a location for

the creative industries. Rather, the actual specific feature of this new urban model

consists in what he calls cultural planning and the systematic and inventive exploitation

of its cultural resources, which in turn presuppose diverse creative milieus. Just what is

meant by cultural planning is never systematically developed in Landry, but is

exemplified on the basis of a wealth of examples from practical consultancy. It is

always a matter of city starting to define and develop its particular characteristics, its

“local distinctiveness”11

. This presupposes a self-observation of the city as a cultural

construct, i.e. as a carrier of specific symbols, signs and practices, and in fact as distinct

from other cities. In this self-observation, everything can become culturally relevant,

including phenomena that have hitherto appeared banal or even problematic, or what

10 Charles Landry: The Creative City: A Toolkit For Urban Innovators, London 2000.

11 Ibid., pp. 43.

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had been regarded as a matter of course: features of the natural environment, industrial

monuments, local customs, former city inhabitants of thoroughly doubtful renown etc. It

is possible and desirable that this self-observation of the „cultural resources‟ turns into a

targeted further development of these distinctive features of the city. The cultural stakes

thus in turn become economic advantages – at the level of businesses settling there as

well as tourism promotion –, but the cultural identity and quality of life of the city too

can be promoted.

Florida and Landry thus provide the two outstanding examples of the political

objectives of what one can call a culture-oriented, cultural governmentality of the city.

The creative city is viewed here essentially from the top-down perspective of the

institutions of political control; it is a discursive model of planning. If governmentality

in Foucault‟s sense is to be understood as a specific form of control, a „government of

self-government‟,12

then culture-oriented town planning in the sense of Florida and

Landry ultimately follows the governmental pattern. This is to be distinguished from a

classic, pre-governmental form of town planning, as it begins at the end of the 19th

century – for example in Hausmann‟s Paris or in the vision of Howard‟s garden city –,

culminates in the 1920s in the planners‟ visions of LeCorbusier and Wright, and from

then until into the 1970s is manifested in both western and state-socialist urban

development. This was a planning regime that wanted to build up the city afresh „from

the bottom up‟, which planned its infrastructure, its urban districts and finally,

according to the idea, also planned how it would be used, the praxis of its inhabitants.

To a certain extent there is first-order control, in which what is to be planned has a

purely passive object status.13

By contrast, the culture-oriented planning of the city in

the manner of the creative city follows the pattern of second-order control, as Foucault

summarises it under the concept of governmentality and views as characteristic of

advanced liberal forms of government. Instead of the mechanistic vision of fresh

planning in an empty space, we have the idea that what is to be planned is already

irreducibly present and has a considerable dynamic of its own; that it already controls

12 Cf. Michel Foucault: Geschichte der Gouvernementalität I: Sicherheit, Territorium, Bevölkerung.

Vorlesung am Collège de France 1977-1978, Frankfurt/M. 2004; ibid.: Geschichte der

Gouvernementalität II: Die Geburt der Biopolitik. Vorlesung am Collège de France 1978-1979,

Frankfurt/M. 2004.

13 On this control-theory concept and the distinction between first-order and second-order control,

control of „trivial machines‟ and of complex systems, cf. Helmut Willke: Systemtheorie II:

Interventionstheorie. Grundzüge einer Theorie der Intervention in komplexe Systeme, Stuttgart 1999.

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itself in an unpredictable way. The external control then always sits on top of an

existing self-control, and takes the form of „incentives‟ and „deterrents‟, of regulation of

the given instead of input/output processes.

This „given‟, which becomes the subject of governmental planning and control, can

now however in principle be observed quite differently, depending on historic-specific

discourses: as individuals with interests, as processes of nature in the mechanistic or

organicistic sense, as an economic market, as milieus of the social – or just as „culture‟

in the sense of an ensemble of practices, symbols and subject forms. What is

characteristic of the governmentality form of the creative city is precisely this

observation in terms of culture: the city is itself already „cultural‟ and develops on this

level with its own momentum – for Florida, in the sense of an agglomeration of

subjective, creative talents and the practices and symbols of urban tolerance, for Landry

as a place of cultural heritage and cultural resources. A conscious shaping, an

enhancement and inhibition of these already existing cultural processes (which however

are not necessarily aware of their own culturality), is now the aim of the culture-

oriented governmentality of the city. This cultural governmentality thus does not

correspond to that „neoliberal‟ governmentality which has particularly interested

governmentality studies following on from Foucault (even if the two overlap).14

If there

the object of society is thought of in terms of self-interested individuals and

constellations of the market as a competition for goods in short supply, then it is here as

an essentially cultural ensemble of signs, practices and subjective competencies.

2. The reality of the city: Materialities, practices, discourses

How can the culture-oriented governmentality of the city be categorised in the general

structural transformation which western cities have already been experiencing since the

1970s? The problem of the perspectives which Florida and Landry show lies in the fact

that, as carriers of the normative discourse of the creative city, they represent

participants in that culture-oriented governmentality which itself represents just one

element of that more complex transformation of spatial materiality, social practices and

14 Cf. Ulrich Bröckling/Susanne Krassmann/Thomas Lemke (eds.): Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart.

Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen, Frankfurt/M. 2000.

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discourses which forms the culture-oriented city. As a social/cultural/spatial construct,

the city is more than its actual planning; indeed, it opts out of precisely this planning.

What is a city? What are the characteristics that come into view when one describes

and examines cities? In the context of the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s,

which was central to the sociological understanding of the city, Louis Wirth defines it

via three formal features:15

via the size of its population, the social density, and the

social heterogeneity. In the city, the most varied milieus, with a high number of

participants, gather together in the smallest space. Density and heterogeneity have

effects on the form of interaction of the urban and its urban personality: in contrast to

the countryside, in the city anonymity and indifference hold sway, in which as a rule the

individuals encounter one another in a de-emotionalised manner and in civil interaction

in the form of social roles – a constellation which simultaneously encourages

individualisation and anomie. For the more strictly sociological perspective on the city,

which starts with the Chicago School, it is characteristic that it is interested in particular

in the phenomenon of social heterogeneity, and above all in the form of social

segregation, the spatial separation of social and also of ethnic milieus. Urban sociology

is then presented at its core as an extension of social inequality research: at its core, the

city appears as a residential district of people, and in fact as one with unequal living

conditions.16

Generally, classical urban sociology and urban geography can be accused of having

been fixated too heavily on social segregation on the one hand, and on political

planning on the other hand, and thereby having skipped the fundamental materiality and

culturality of urban spaces. The structure and transformation of cities in the modern era

(and going back historically beyond that) can be examined above all on three levels

which must be distinguished analytically from one another, and which in real terms are

interwoven with one another:

a) As spatially arranged materialities: On a first level, cities are not just

agglomerations of inhabitants, but specific structures of material artefacts which not

only exist „in space‟, but form specific spatial structures and continually form anew:

15 Cf. Louis Wirth: “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, in: American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938), pp. 1-

24.

16 On this direction of research, cf. for example Hartmut Häußermann/Walter Siebel: Stadtsoziologie.

Eine Einführung, Frankfurt/M. 2004.

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buildings in their exterior and interior architecture, traffic routes, designed „nature‟

(parks etc.), energy infrastructure (water and sewage, electricity etc.). That cities are

„social‟ phenomena with „social‟ density then means that they are represented in an

extended meaning of sociality, such as propounded by Latour, consist of subjects as

well as objects, of complex arrangements of people and things, which should be

investigated in detail. That cities are to be reconstructed as specific spatial phenomena

does not mean, in the sense of a container model of space, that they fill an empty, pre-

existing space, but that they themselves produce spaces through the specific

arrangement of material things and people.17

b) As social practices: The urban materialities and their spatial structure influence

which practices are possible in them, but they are simultaneously produced and shaped

by such practices of the users and inhabitants. In his text “Walking in the City”, Michel

de Certeau has given a cultural studies focus to the apparent banality of everyday

behaviour „in the city‟, such as it had already had with Simmel and Benjamin.18

In

general, the city consists of its utilisation, of the specific routines of dealing with it,

which in turn structure and mark the space in the sense of a spacing. The users – or

rather: certain user groups – „make‟ their city in a routinised as well as changeable way.

The relates not only to the public space of streets and squares, but also to the semi-

public space of shopping malls and department stores, offices and factories, venues of

high culture as well as clubs and scenes, ultimately to the private sphere of municipal

apartments. These practices of dealing with the city have a simultaneously material and

cultural character. On the one hand, there are solid, observable movements of human

bodies in and with the space, but at the same time, they are closely related to an implicit

knowledge on the part of these users of how one must deal with the city, which places

have which connotations, what can be achieved where etc.

c) As discourses and representational systems: The practices in which cities maintain

their existence thereby process those specific signs, cognitive maps, images and

discourses of the urban in which the city first attains a specific meaning. This ranges

from the everyday semiosis of the city – as discussed by Roland Barthes in “Semiotik

17 Cf. Martina Löw: Raumsoziologie, Frankfurt/M. 2007.

18 Michel de Certeau: “Gehen in der Stadt”, in: ibid., Kunst des Handelns, Berlin 1988, pp. 179-208;

Georg Simmel: “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben”, in: Georg Kramme (ed.): Gesamtausgabe vol.

7, Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901-1908, Frankfurt/M. 1995, pp. 116-131; Walter Benjamin: “Paris,

die Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts”, in: ibid., Illuminationen, Frankfurt/M. 1969, pp. 185-200.

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und Urbanismus” (1967) and Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City (1960) –,19

in which

particular milieus adopt their specific symbolic geography of the city, through to the

intellectual-artistic, media, architectonic, ultimately political-planning urban discourses,

the visions of successful urbanity as well as the demarcation from the riskiness of the

Moloch of the metropolis.

3. The transformation of the modern city: Bourgeois city, functional city, post-modern

city

Cities are thus to be understood not just places of social segregation and political

planning, but as structures of stable as well as destabilising materialities, practices and

representational forms. This applies also for creative cities, the culture-oriented cities of

the present-day. Against this background, the transformation of the city in the modern

era can be traced as an historical sequence of three material-cultural formations that

replace one another, which – as is shown from today‟s perspective – no longer follow

the simple pattern of „modernisation‟, but stand in a discontinuous relation to one

another: the classic bourgeois city; the functional city of the organised modern era;

finally a complex global constellation of the urban, in which the culture-oriented city

presents itself as a new, post-modern intersection.

The later formations of the urban appear in their initial phase as reactions to the crisis

of what has preceded them in each case. Thus the bourgeois city in the second half of

the 19th

century enters a fundamental crisis of legitimisation, and the functional city

offers an answer to that. The same applies for the crisis of the functional city in the

1960s to 1980s and the response function of the post-modern cultural city. In actual

fact, it is not so much a case of the historical sequence of three city constellations as of

their respective struggle of rise and fall. The bourgeois city, the functional city and the

culture-oriented city here are not just material realities, but in each case they embody, in

the contemporary context too, a normative model of ideal urbanism. The three types of

city thus present themselves as centres of praxis of the three overlapping forms of

genuine modern sociality, of the bourgeois modern era, of the organised modern era and

19 Cf. Roland Barthes: “Semiotik und Urbanismus”, in: Alessandro Carlini (ed.), Die Stadt als Text,

Tübingen 1976, pp. 33-42; Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City, Cambridge (Mass.) 1970.

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of the post-modern.20

However, the relationship between them should not be thought of

as that of a simple succession: elements of the older city forms remain preserved in the

later ones, and to some extent are also actively adopted (thus the citation of the

bourgeois city in the post-modern cultural city). The culture-oriented city of the post-

modern era only becomes comprehensible through its specific historic importance as a

response to the crisis of the functional city and in its importance within the overall

transformational sequence of the urban.

To what extent the bourgeois modern era, the modern era of bourgeoisie and of

bourgeois society in its long genesis in the early modern age, relies on the city in the

sense of the classic type of the „European city‟, and finds its first place of manifestation

there, has been examined by Max Weber in “Die Stadt”.21

For the bourgeois European

city of the 17th

to 19th

century, the strict dualism between city and countryside is just as

fundamental as the distinction between public and private space as two complementary

spheres of bourgeois life, ultimately its economic basis in commercial capitalism, in the

context of which the city is not so much a place of production as a goods turnover site.

The materiality of the bourgeois city is characterised by a concentration of the central

functional locations of bourgeois life in its geographical centre, i.e. a concentration of

the political (town hall, city council), economic (branches, firms) and cultural (theatre,

opera, university) functional locations. This urban centre presents itself simultaneously

as a space of public movements, of a public appropriation and encounter.22

The

normative bourgeois city discourse perceives the city as a place of genuine modern

forms of traffic: of trade, enlightenment and education of individuals, of the political

self-determination of the „citizen‟, who is at the same time a „commoner‟. The

migration to the city appears as an emancipatory process of the individual as well as of

the whole country. There is a corresponding demarcation of the cultural and economic

inferiority of rural life, which is most readily seen as serving to supply raw materials

and recuperation for citizens.

20 On this distinction, cf. Andreas Reckwitz: Das hybride Subjekt. Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von

der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne, Weilerswist 2006.

21 Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft V: Die Stadt, Tübingen 2000. Cf. also Peter Schöber:

“Frühbürgerliche Gesellschaft und Stadtgemeinde im souveränen Macht- und Handelsstaat – die

frühbürgerliche Stadt”, in: ibid., Wirtschaft, Stadt und Staat. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart,

Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2000, pp. 124-150; Hartmut Boockmann: Die Stadt im späten Mittelalter,

Munich 1986.

22 Cf. Richard Sennett: Verfall und Ende des öffentlichen Lebens. Die Tyrannei der Intimität,

Frankfurt/M. 1998.

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The bourgeois city will attain a new model status in a very specific interpretation

within the framework of the „Renaissance of the urban‟ of the post-modern / culture-

oriented city at the end of the 20th

century,23

but in the second half of the 19th

century,

for good reasons however – this is frequently forgotten in the face of its current

Renaissance – it is put greatly on the defensive. The main cause of this gradual

undermining of reality and of the model of bourgeois European urbanity is, for one

thing, to be found in the unplanned consequences of industrialisation and flight from the

countryside. The European and north American cities become places of an expanding

proletariat which as a rule lives in segregated districts of the city and is in no way

capable of participating in bourgeois public life – an impoverishment that Friedrich

Engels describes suggestively in relation to Manchester in The Condition of the

Working Class in England in 1844.24

Accordingly, the city advances to become an

object of social criticism and of concern to the social reformers.

For another thing, as a result of its actual transformation from the trading and

administrative city to the „metropolis‟ at the end of the 19th

century, the bourgeois city

is also put on the defensive at the level of cultural representation. The aesthetic avant-

garde movements engage in a new glorification of the urban, but this urban is no longer

that of bourgeois public life, but relates to an urbanity of aestheticised spaces. The

public life of the city here is not one of civil/communicative dealings, but that of the

publicly visible, of the visuality that can be experienced aesthetically.25

The pace of big

city traffic, the late bourgeois palaces of consumption, the spectacle of the incipient

popular forms of entertainment, the visibility of the masses, the presence of

unpredictable and dubious districts of the city – all this contributes, from the avant-

garde point of view (for example amongst the surrealists or in Baudelaire‟s and

Benjamin‟s concept of the flâneur [idler]26

), to the aesthetic appeal of metropolises. It is

exemplified in Paris, London, Berlin and New York. In a dual, unplanned process in

23 Cf. on this Wolfgang Kaschuba: “Urbane Identität: Einheit der Widersprüche?”, in: Vittorio Magnago

Lampugnani (ed.), Urbanität und Identität zeitgenössischer europäischer Städte, Zurich 2005, pp. 8-

28.

24 Friedrich Engels: Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England. Nach eigner Anschauung und

authentischen Quellen, Stuttgart 1892 [1845].

25 Cf. John Jervis: “Street People. The City as Experience, Dream and Nightmare”, in: ibid., Exploring

the Modern. Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization, Oxford etc. 1998, pp. 65-90; Raymond

Williams, “When Was Modernism? Metropolitan Perceptions and The Emergence of Modernism”, in:

ibid., The Politics of Modernism, London 1989, pp. 37-48.

26 Cf. W. Benjamin: Paris, die Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts, pp. 185-200.

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which the „metropolis‟ and the proletarian industrial city are superimposed on the

bourgeois city, it thus advances to become an object of triple reinterpretation, in which

it loses its bourgeois legitimisation at the beginning of the 20th century: in the socio-

critical interpretation of the city as a place of uncontrolled impoverishment; in the

contrary avant-garde interpretation of the metropolis as a place of aesthetic attraction;

thirdly, and finally, in the conservative, culturally-critical interpretation of the city in

which what appears appealing to the avant-gardists is condemned in an anti-urbanistic

way: urbanity as a place of moral decay and the breakdown of order.

The response to the reality and the model of the bourgeois city is the „functional

city‟, which from the 1920s through to the 1970s not only dominates the discourse

around urban planning in the west as well as in the new socialist societies, but also – at

least in part – is implemented in a new urban reality.27

The functional city provides the

spatial-material counterpart to the „organised modern era‟, of a modern era of technical-

social organisation of production processes in large corporations and of mass

consumerism of the new middle classes of employees and workers.28

Economically, the

functional city is not one of commercial capitalism, but an industrial and administrative

city. The fundamental problem, to which the functional city sees itself as a radical

modern answer, relates to the organisation of working and living for large masses of

people, and thus the new creation of urban order, of which the bourgeois city in the end

no longer appeared capable. The central principle of the functional city is the separation

of the spheres of working and living, the latter as a rule in the periphery, the former

either in the centre or also in the periphery. In this concept, the standard of living and

the quality of life for the masses – which here means bearable or comfortable living

conditions – require a strict spatial shifting of housing and living – including leisure

activities – out of the inner city. With this, however, the regulation of traffic – as public

transport or as individual car traffic – becomes a central design problem of the

functional city.

The functionalist town planning ideal is that of the „series‟, i.e. the reproduction of a

prototype, whether this is in an apartment block, a detached house and its aesthetic

27 Cf. Thilo Hilpert: Die funktionelle Stadt. LeCorbusiers Stadtvision – Bedingungen, Motive,

Hintergründe, Braunschweig 1978, pp. 14-20, 39-57.

28 On organised modernity, cf. Peter Wagner: A Sociology of Modernity. Liberty and Discipline, New

York/London 1993.

14

principle of an anti-ornamental purism which runs through to the design of interior

architecture of „machines for living‟. The functional city occurs in two different

versions here: the European one of concentrations of populations in multi-unit

residential blocks with their own city districts, and the US one of suburbanism. In the

urban planning model, LeCorbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright represent these two

versions: LeCorbusier‟s vision of a “Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants”

(1922) with geometrically delineated, highly condensed new city districts, and Wright‟s

vision “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan”, which consists of suburban houses

and in which American individualism and the latest technology are to enter into a

symbiosis.29

The material reality of the functional city is still just as present in today‟s western

cities as that of the bourgeois city. However, just like the bourgeois city at the end of

the 19th

century, in the 1970s the functional city too falls into a crisis of legitimisation.

Once again, two factors independent of one another cross here. One unintended

consequence of the establishment of residential suburbs, above all in the form of

American suburbanisation, is the decline of the inner cities, in which a new – frequently

also ethnically structured – ghettoisation takes place, a decline which now allows

precisely that to occur which the functional city wanted to overcome and avoid: social

disintegration.30

This social disintegration can also be found in the collective „machines

for living‟ of the European type, whose social praxis could not be directed as intended

by the functionalist town planning. The second line of delegitimisation results from a

critical urban discourse and a counter-cultural occupation of the inner cities which begin

in the 1960s and 1970s, including in connection with the student movement and the

counter-culture, and which interestingly adopt elements of the emphatic discourse on

urbanity amongst the avant-gardists of the turn of the century. In a critical urban

discourse which reaches from Mitscherlich to Jane Jacobs, the functional city appears as

an inhospitable, creativity-killing control machine, and living urbanity appears as an

inner-city praxis of the combination of living and working, a space which opts out of

29 Cf. LeCorbusier: “A Contemporary City”, in: LeCorbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning,

London 1987 (1929), pp. 163ff.; Frank Lloyd Wright: “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan” in:

Architectural Record 4 (1935), pp. 243-254.

30 On suburbanisation, cf. Kenneth Jackson: The Crabgrass Frontier. The Suburbanization of the United

States, New York 1985; Robert Fishman: Bourgeois Utopias. Rise and Fall of Suburbia, New York

1987.

15

social control just as it establishes new collective neighbourhoods. This critical

urbanism is implemented very practically in the movement of homesteading and the

house squats of the 1970s from Brooklyn to Zurich.31

The culture-oriented creative city, as it has taken shape since the 1980s, in many

respects represents a response to the crisis of legitimisation of the functional city. It is

also the result here of an undermining of its economic and socio-cultural foundations:

the functional city, with its separation of working and living, and its vision of building

in „series‟, was very closely linked to an industrial-society Fordism and a dominance of

a middle class and petit-bourgeois working class with standardised leisure and

consumer habits. Since the 1970s however, precisely in many urban centres it has been

possible to observe a transformation from an industrial societal to a post-industrial

basis, in which services, knowledge work and cultural symbol production are accorded a

new importance, a development which the social sciences have made visible with the

aid of various concepts – flexible specialisation, post-Fordism, service-based society

etc.32

As a rule, the respective sociological studies have not however concerned

themselves much here with the spatial preconditions and consequences of these

transformations, and to some extent have even explicitly assumed a loss of significance

of spatial categories for post-modern sociality overall. However, many of these late

modern forms of work no longer take place in large corporations, and are rather reliant

either on spatial networking or face-to-face client contact – and thus on spatial

concentration. Added to this is the fact that the demands made by the new academic,

„post-materialist‟ middle classes on the living and working environment have developed

in a direction which makes suburbanisation appear inadequate and the restored inner

cities attractive.33

The aesthetic appeals of urbanity are, for these groups, just as relevant

as the facilitation of the organisation of an everyday life that is heavily reliant on

services provided close to the home, such as are becoming important for ways of life

beyond the classic suburban housewife marriage (i.e. dual earners with and without

children, single men and women). Whereas the reality and model of the functional city

31 Cf. Manuel Castells: The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social

Movements Berkeley 1983; Jane Jacobs: Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York 1961;

Alexander Mitscherlich: Die Unwirtlichkeit der Städte. Anstiftung zum Unfrieden, Frankfurt/M. 1965.

32 Cf. Micheal J. Piore/Charles F. Sabel: The Second Industrial Divide. Possibilities for Prosperity, New

York 1984; Scott Lash/John Urry: The End of Organized Capitalism, Madison 1987.

33 On the cultural and socio-economic format of these middle classes, cf. Mike Featherstone: Consumer

Culture and Postmodernism, London 1991.

16

perceived concentration in the centre as a risk – as a problem of social anomie and

metropolitan unpredictability – and accordingly backed spatial relocation, in exactly the

opposite way the culture-oriented city turns to the densification of the spatial centre, and

in fact in a combination of economic reasons – of spatial networking of the creative

industries as well as of the densification of consumption of experience – and a new

cultural desire for an urbanity which is perceived in taking up the metropolis discourse

of the avant-gardists as a place of „vitality‟ and „aesthetic attractions‟. Characteristic of

the vision of a „new urbanism‟ put forward here is the 1987 urban development

manifesto “Toward an Urban Design Manifesto” by Jacobs and Appleyard. Here,

urbanity is understood as urban experience.34

4. Six elements of the culture-oriented city

The culture-oriented city is a complex object that cannot be reduced to a single buzz-

word – aestheticisation, gentrification, Renaissance of the inner cities etc. –, but

combines several elements and phenomena with one another, between which to some

extent a relationship of tension results. What is decisive here is that different institutions

and groups are involved in each of these phenomena, which all force the culturalisation

and which at the same time find themselves in a conflict of definition about what

culturalisation is supposed to mean exactly and in what praxis it is realised. This

concerns above all four collective agnets: the economic interest on the production side

and on the consumption side in the development of a functional and profitable symbolic

economy; the political/state interest of a cultural governmentality; finally the interest of

the post-materialist middle classes as well as of the aesthetic subcultures – which must

in turn be distinguished from one another – in a culturalisation of the urban space. What

is central is that the culturalisation of the city cannot be reduced to the activities of a

single one of these agents, that it does not go out solely bottom up from the post-

materialist middle classes or the subcultures or top down from the post-Fordist economy

or from the state cultural governmentality, but the culturalisation of the city was able to

achieve such dominance precisely because it is forced by the rectangle of these different

collective agents acting in the same direction at the same time. Six phenomena above all

34 Jane Jacobs/Donald Appleyard “Toward an Urban Design Manifesto”, in: R. T. LeGates/F. Stout

(eds.), The City Reader, pp. 456-466, here: pp. 458.c

17

present themselves as constituents of culture-oriented cities, as has been observed since

the 1980s:

a) Establishment of the art scene: The bourgeois city too was a place of art

production, and in fact for both a middle class public as well as for aristocratic buyers,

and was at least in part – classically, the Paris of the 19th

century – also the location of

an art-oriented counter-culture, of bohemians. In the functional city, these art scenes had

lost their location and were rather an underground phenomenon. For the culture-

oriented cities, artistic scenes proved to be constitutive, i.e. spatially focused ways of

living and working, above all in the areas of fine art and music, but also in a wider field

of activities that move between art and craft work / design as well as art and events

culture.35

The artistic activities of the participants in the post-modern art scene are thus

considerably more broad-based than was the case for classical bourgeois art, and they

also extend beyond Adorno‟s culture industry. They are furthermore clearly more

strongly orientated towards the creation of visible products or products that can be

experienced, which have a „performative‟ character of public representation. The

participants in the art scenes see themselves as „neo-bohemians‟ who keep a distance

from the middle classes and open up their „own‟ city districts in the culture-oriented

city, which enables a linking in terms of lifestyle and work. This has already been

examined classically by Sharon Zukin in relation to the New York loft apartments in the

Soho of the 1970s, and more recently by Richard Lloyd in relation to Chicago‟s Wicker

Park, who in this connection also introduced the concept of neo-bohemia.36

The fact

that such urban districts, close to the inner city, frequently formerly socially

disadvantaged or dilapidated and now restored – and also subject to certain economic

trends – advance to become the living and working space of an art scene, presents itself

– by contrast to the bourgeois city – not just as a marginal detail, but as a fundamental

feature of the culture-oriented city.

b) Creative industries: The culture-oriented city is the primary location of those

expanding occupations and enterprises which essentially engage in symbol production,

35 Cf. for more detail Bastian Lange: Die Räume der Kreativszenen. Culturepreneurs und ihre Orte in

Berlin, Bielefeld 2007.

36 Cf. Sharon Zukin: Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, New Brunswick 1989; Richard

D. Lloyd: Neo-Bohemia. Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, London/New York 2005.

18

the creative industries.37

This field includes old and new media, finance, consultancy,

advertising, research and development, tourism, design, fashion and the higher

segments of gastronomy. The symbol-producing economy provides the economic basis

of the culturalised city. In contrast to the model of the large corporation of the organised

modern era, the symbol-producing economy also extends to more strongly non-

hierarchical organisational forms, not least also (even if by no means exclusively) to

project-oriented ways of working and new self-employed people.38

These are not artistic

professions in the narrower sense, although at the margins – for example in design and

events culture – the boundaries are fluid. The creative industries are the primary

occupational field of the post-materialist middle classes, and the enticement of the

creative industries into the city is – as Florida aptly describes it and engages in it – a

central objective of municipal cultural governmentality. The British Labour government

of 1997 to 2010 had a pioneering role here.39

The spatial anchoring of the creative

industries within the city can present itself in very different ways: often, it is once again

the restored districts close to the inner city in which the creative industries concentrate –

together with the art scenes or in a contest of displacement. As Martina Heßler shows in

relation to Munich, it is precisely those branches of the creative industries which one

can sum up as the technologically-oriented knowledge economy which can however

also be settled in the suburbs.40

In general however, the creative industries appear, in

spite of all the opportunities of communicative/digital networking, to be reliant on their

spatial concentration in the culturalised city. They cannot base themselves at just any

locations but benefit in their production of ideas and symbols from the face-to-face

contacts between the sectors, to the clients, as well as from relationships to the other

elements of the culture-oriented city.

c) Consumer culture: The fact that the post-functional city is characterised by a

differentiation and aestheticisation of consumption opportunities has already been

shown at the start of the 1980s in connection with the sociological debate of the post-

37 Cf. Sharon Zukin: Cultures of Cities, Cambridge etc. 1997; Scott Lash/John Urry: Economies of Signs

and Space, London etc. 1994; Jeremy Rifkin: The Age of Access: The New Culture of

Hypercapitalism, Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience, New York 2000; Thomas Frank: The

Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago

1997.

38 Cf. È. Chiapello/L. Boltanski: Der neue Geist des Kapitalismus.

39 Cf. A. McRobbie: „Jeder ist kreativ‟.

40 Cf. Martina Heßler: Die kreative Stadt. Zur Neuerfindung eines Topos, Bielefeld 2007.

19

modern era.41

The fact that cities present themselves as primary places of the

presentation and acquisition of „incredible accumulation of goods‟ of the capitalist

economy, now also applies for the bourgeois as well as the functional city.

Characteristic of the culture-oriented city of the post-modern era is however the

offensive reshaping of the city centres into showcases of consumer opulence –

paradigmatically in the shopping malls –, in which the act of buying goods and the

presentation of the goods as carriers of particular aesthetic styles become a constituent

part of an experience economy, and shopping itself becomes a characteristically urban,

public leisure activity.42

. In the experience economy of the culture-oriented city, the

presentation of material goods is combined with experience-oriented services such as

gastronomy and cultural „events‟. The consumer-related range offered in the culture-

oriented city furthermore becomes an incentive factor in post-modern urban tourism.

d) Musealisation / eventification of high culture: In the centre of the bourgeois city

one found places of bourgeois high culture (theatre, opera, museums). The post-modern,

culture-oriented city now reaches back, in what seems at first sight a surprising way, to

the bourgeois high culture which, in the course of the mass-society „culture industries‟

during of the 20th

century, seemed to have been placed irreversibly on the defensive, but

in doing so it transforms it in a specific direction. A constituent part of the new cultural

orientation is an expansion also of the „classic‟ cultural events of high culture, of

theatre, dance, concerts, literary readings and – not least, of museums. Musealisation

provides a characteristic example here.43

In the 1980s, a boom in musealisation began,

which focused in the cities on creating new museums for fine art, but beyond that,

created a wealth of museums for and about local specialities – museums of industry and

technology, historical museums, museums in relation to prominent people, above all

artists, museums focusing on particular cultural groups that appear „interesting‟,

museums of design and craft. A culturalisation takes place here in the sense that the

sphere of what is suitable for museums – and that means what appears important

41 Cf. M. Featherstone: Consumer Culture and Postmodernism; here, particularly: “City Cultures and

Postmodern Lifestyles”, pp. 95-111.

42 Cf. Joseph Pine/James Gilmore: The Experience Economy. Work is Theatre and Every Business a

Stage, Cambridge (Mass.) 1999; Rob Shields: Lifestyle Shopping. The Subject of Consumption,

London/New York 1992. 43 Cf. on this Michael Müller: “Die ausgestellte Stadt”, in: Reiner Matzker/Michael Müller (eds.),

Medienwissenschaft – Kommunikation, Kunst und Kultur, Bern/Berlin, 2002, pp. 165-176; Gerda

Breuer (ed.): Neue Stadträume zwischen Musealisierung, Medialisierung und Gestaltlosigkeit,

Frankfurt/M. 1998.

20

enough in order to have an effect is massively extended, in its symbolic quality, beyond

itself and to become an object to look at. For all cultural provisions, it is characteristic

that they – in contrast to the constancy of classical bourgeois high culture, with its

permanent collections, repertoire theatres etc. – now frequently take place in the form of

temporary and therefore changing events, for example festivals or special exhibitions,

which ensure a constant change of attractions and ever fresh attentiveness.44

The

cultural offerings of the expanded high culture are directed here at city tourists as well

as at their inhabitants, who cultivate a tourist gaze (Urry) in relation to their own city.

e) Aestheticised districts of the city: The Renaissance of the inner cities of the

creative cities covers not only the creative industries that settle there, the locations of

the old and new cultural provision as well as the art scenes, but also and specifically the

districts that are close to the inner city, as aesthetically developed residential districts

for the post-materialist middle classes. Already in the mid-1960s, this process could be

observed in parts of London and New York, and early on it was summed up by the

suggestive term gentrification.45

This describes a multi-stage transformation, the first

step of which is a partial settlement of hitherto dilapidated districts close to the inner

city – frequently with a high proportion of old buildings – by „alternative‟ inhabitants –

artists, students, members of the subculture, young academics – who at the same time

renovate the building stock. At the end of gentrification stands a complete exchange of

population, so that well-to-do middle classes inhabit the districts and often buy

residential property there.

The concept of gentrification remains very selective, however, since – in the tradition

of classical sociology which is interested in social integration and segregation – it

foregrounds the element of population exchange and gain in social prestige. But also of

importance here is the transformation of the materiality of the corresponding urban

districts, of their symbolic content and their utilisation practices beyond living

behaviour. The restoration of old buildings can be understood only against the

background of a change in the aesthetic sensitivity of functionalist modernism to a post-

modern aesthetics of the everyday. Jameson still aptly defines this with the terms of

44 On this, cf. Regina Bittner (ed.): Die Stadt als Event. Zur Konstruktion urbaner Erlebnisräume,

Frankfurt/M. 2002.

45 Cf. Loretta Lees/Tom Slater/Elvin Wyly: Gentrification, London 2007.

21

nostalgic „mode rétro‟ and historicising „pastiche‟.46

For their users, the gentrified urban

districts are city districts that have been aestheticised, to an extent that was no longer

conceivable for the functional, semiotically comparatively „thin‟ and explicitly „anti-

ornamental‟ urban landscape. Of central importance for the aestheticised inner-city

districts is thus precisely that they do not form purely residential districts, but at the

same time are districts with expanding leisure and shopping opportunities, and in part

also with work locations of the art scenes and of the creative industries. To this extent,

in the sense of a de-differentiation of living, working and leisure, they stand in clear

contradiction to the separation of living and working in the functional city.

f) Solitaire architecture: The architecture of the bourgeois city was primarily

architecture that represented the public bourgeois institutions, and also the private

bourgeois houses, as a rule constructed in a uniform classicised style. At the centre of

the architecture of the functional city stood the extremely concentrated residential

districts, and besides them the traffic technologies, once again as a rule in a uniform,

modernist style. For the culture-oriented city it is characteristic that since the 1990s, it

has backed spectacular individual edifices, which each follow an individual style, as

„distinctive‟ as possible, to a certain extent solitaire architecture47

. The so-called „post-

modernist‟ architecture of the 1970s, with its main characteristic of combining various

historic and geographic architectural clichés, has by no means come to an end here,48

but, quite the reverse, it is only since the 1990s that it has supplied, on a broad front, the

stylistic background for a wealth of urban solitaire architecture. The functions of the

houses are secondary here; opera houses or libraries are just as much the subject of

solitaire architects as shops or houses. Solitaire architecture is promoted both by city

policy and by private sponsors, and aims once again at increasing the non-

interchangeability of the perception of the individual city or individual building.

Solitaire architecture is then (as is also the preservation of the stock of bourgeois

architecture, which contrasts with the far-reaching discrediting of functionalist

46 Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham 1991. On the

„gentrification aesthetic‟ cf. also Michael Jager: “Class Definition and the Aesthetics of

Gentrification: Victoriana in Melbourne”, in: Neil Smith/Peter Williams (eds.), Gentrification of the

City, Boston 1986, pp. 78-91. In terms of discourse history, aestheticisation can refer back to Camillo

Sitte (Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, Vienna 1889).

47 Cf. as examples Philip Jodidio (ed.): Architecture Now! vol. I-V Cologne etc. 2001-2007; Larry R.

Ford: “World Cities and Global Change. Observations on Monumentality in Urban Design”, in:

Eurasian Geography and Economics 3 (2008), pp. 237-262.

48 Cf. Charles Jencks: Was ist Postmoderne?, Zurich etc., 1990.

22

architecture) itself a „cultural resource‟ of the city, which also meets with an enhanced

aesthetic sensitivity on the part of the middle class public.

5. The culturalisation of the urban and its outside

The six processes mentioned here combine with one another, and together contribute to

urban self-culturalisation. If in this context, culture presents itself as an ensemble of

meanings, of signs and symbols, then here the aforementioned processes agree in that

they establish the individual city as a specific space of production, circulation and

reception of meanings, symbols and signs:49

as a place of the production of those signs

– aesthetic in the widest sense – which come out of the art scenes and are launched into

the world by high culture; as a place of those more profane meanings and symbolic

products which the creative industries bring forth and which are received in the

ubiquitous consumer culture; and finally as a place of those signs and symbols of which

the aestheticised urban districts and solitaire architecture present themselves as carriers.

In this way, the individual city – and also the individual city district, even the individual

building – can itself be perceived as a non-interchangeable sign, as a fixed point of a

particular symbolic content – and this meaning ascription in relation to urban space can

itself become an objective of cultural governmentality and of its place branding, just as

it can become an objective of advertising strategies of the private economy. It is

possible to observe here a characteristic orientation towards difference of cultural

governmentality (which accords with a corresponding orientation of post-modern self-

technologies), an interest in the production of „individuality‟ qua distinction, which

contrasts sharply with the planning of the functional city which is oriented on collective,

homogenous patterns. The city works towards being and becoming distinguishable,

distinguishing itself clearly and visibly as a place from other places, claiming special

characteristics as its own which other cities do not share. In a way that similarly endows

meaning, this difference orientation is directed inwards, at the inhabitants (and is

continued by them themselves, for example in the representation of the individual city

districts as „good‟ or „bad‟, „hip‟ or „square‟ districts) as well as outwards, at potential

incomers, city tourists, mobile enterprises, potential consumers of goods specific to the

49 On this cultural concept, cf. Andreas Reckwitz: Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien. Zur

Entwicklung eines Theorieprogramms, Weilerswist 2000.

23

city. The self-culturalising city is however anything but unambiguous in the

understanding of this culturalisation. Whilst it is true that the symbolic economy, the

cultural governmentality of the state, the post-materialist middle classes (as inhabitants,

visitors and employees) as well as the counter-cultural scenes together drive the city in

this direction, its definitions and teleologies of successful culturalisation differ in the

rectangle between the marketing interests of signs and experiences in the symbolic

economy, the interests in maintaining the economic and social substance of the city on

the part of state control, the very specific living, leisure and quality of life interests of

the new middle classes, and the interests in maintaining distinct scenes on the part of the

alternative milieus.

But what is the Outside, the constitutive outside of the self-culturalising city?50

Is

there, beyond the subtle differences, the fine distinctions between the individual self-

culturalising cities, between Copenhagen and Stockholm, between Frankfurt and

Stuttgart, between Seattle and San Francisco as well as the definitional differences

between the different culturalisation institutions, a fundamental difference, from which

the culture-oriented cities as a whole demarcate themselves? This Other is evidently the

non-cultural, i.e. that which does not see itself as cultural or for which culturalisation is

(in the first instance) not accessible. For indeed under present conditions not all cities

are culture-oriented cities and not all city districts within them are so. The constellation

of urbanity is, admittedly, currently normatively centred on the culture-oriented cities,

but it also includes their specific peripheries. In contrast to the case of the bourgeois and

the functional city, in which the central difference was that in relation to the rural, for

the post-modern constellation the fundamental difference now turns out to be from

those – quantitatively considerable – non-cultural cities and city districts. This involves

above all two groups: in the western societies this relates above all to industrial cities

from the phase of the late bourgeois or of the organised modern era which – so far – had

not been subjected to a successful cultural governmentality, cities in the north-west of

the USA, in the north of England, in Wallonia, in eastern Germany etc., which

frequently are also labelled shrinking cities on account of their decline in population.51

50 On the concept of the constitutive outside, cf. Ernesto Laclau/Chantal Mouffe: Hegemonie und

radikale Demokratie. Zur Dekonstruktion des Marxismus, Vienna 1991.

51 Cf. Philipp Oswalt (ed.): Schrumpfende Städte, vol. 1: Internationale Untersuchung, Ostfildern-Ruit

2004, therein in particular Klaus Müller: “Globale Geografie”, pp. 34-41; Walter Prigge:

“Schrumpfungspfade”, pp. 42-49.

24

Outside the west, it relates to those megacities of Asia, Africa or Latin America which

were never themselves functional or bourgeois cities, which lack the four

aforementioned carrier institutions of the culturalisation of the city, and which rather

experience unplanned growth which are not subject to town planning.52

Representatives of cultural planning such as Florida and Landry propagate the idea

that potentially any city can become a creative city, that it must learn to exploit its

cultural resources. One could however rather suppose that the effectiveness of the real

creative cities is based not only on the fact that they demarcate themselves from one

another, but more fundamentally that they distinguish themselves against a broad

background of cities that are not creative cities.53

The constellation of the cities is

probably to be understood in a similar way here to how it presents itself for an

apparently quite different area, that of the post-modern governmentality of the

subjective self: this too is urged towards a self-culturalisation which moreover it

frequently actively aims at, a self-culturalisation as a „creative subject‟ which sees itself

as an individual carrier of certain personal characteristics and of a personal „style‟, and

attempts to actively drive it forward, in order to shape itself as a non-interchangeable

individual and to represent itself outwardly as such. If the imperative of „being special‟

is also directed at everyone and suggests that the central differences between the

subjects were accordingly in their respective individual form of stylisation, the actual

difference however turns out to be that between the subjects stylising themselves –

diversely – as individuals on the one hand, and on the other hand those who fail to

achieve a harmonious stylisation, who do not develop and demonstrate any special

feature, or at least none that is socially valued. The situation of the post-modern urban

landscape appears analogous here: the actual difference in the global landscape of

urbanity lies between the culture-oriented cities with their successful culture-oriented

governmentality and those for which this self-culturalisation appears beyond their

options: the urban wastelands, the shrinking cities, the industrial ruins and their

inhabitants, who in American slang are referred to as „white trash‟; finally the invisible

cities of the south, above all in Africa and parts of Asia, which hardly every appear on

52 Cf. Aseem Inam: Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities, New York

2005.

53 The same applies for example for the post-modern imperative of mobility to the subject: mobility is

only practicable if many people remain immobile, cf. È. Chiapello/L. Boltanski: Der neue Geist des

Kapitalismus, pp. 379ff.

25

the media screen of the creative cities of Europe, America or East Asia. The model of

the self-culturalising city lays a claim to generalisability in society which it is hardly

capable of ever redeeming. The social objective of becoming a creative city will – at

least in the west – not be halted by this partial futility.