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News & ArtsThursday, July 22, 2010
City / Visual Art When Creativity and Sustainability Are "Creativity" and "Sustainability"
Posted by Jen Graves on Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:51 AM
Read this. From it:
Rather, critique is a process that is at the very heart of the urbanization of everyday life. In fact, pushed farther, critique can be proposed as a return to life through the attempt to “open a path to the possible” by an investigation of what negates the possible. ...These two powerful themes of our times are sustainability and creativity. When these themes are not grounded in equity and justice, they become programs for the city and extensions of the new spirit of capitalism’s answer to the artistic critique of urban life. That is, worse than policy fixes dropped down from above, shined up at “stake-holder” discussions, and then implemented in the grandest modernist fashion (and setting off uneven development within cities between the creative sectors and the working-class sectors or the sustainable areas and the inefficient and often more-affordable areas), these terms signal a startling reversal of powerful points of critique.
1
Interesting comments on Russia.
But we have to consider the motives of the writer, and the intended audience, when considering anything written about urbanism and the impact on the working class (aka "targets" in Republicanspeak) and the middle class (aka "gullible serfs" in Republicanspeak).
What does Charles K think of this piece?
But we have to consider the motives of the writer, and the intended audience, when considering anything written about urbanism and the impact on the working class (aka "targets" in Republicanspeak) and the middle class (aka "gullible serfs" in Republicanspeak).
What does Charles K think of this piece?
2
@1: Will, the writer's motives are a critical argument on the Floridian thesis on the so-called new "creativity" as a marker of only economic fuel. The intended audience are urban scholars, planners, critics, economists, and even public sector leadership. The Rise of the Creative Class from its start has been fraught with sloppy holes in Florida's critical analysis of what "creativity" means now.
He used a reductionist lens to argue that only certain people were privileged with the empowerment of "creativity" in the post-factory, post-manufacturing urban economies in North America (and in other selected, G8-located cities). What his argument did was trivialize the meaning of "creativity" and rarefied it artificially so that if you worked anything other than a "creative class job" — city or not — you could only, at most, touch creativity but never possess it.
The "old" model, writ large, was the creative potential of the human spirit generally, in that it could come from anywhere and anyone, regardless their background. Now, in the Floridian model, a stuffy, two-bit lawyer advertising on the backs of bus-stop benches (think Barry Zuckerkorn) is a "creative" while a local sculptor who holds down two hourly wage jobs and then spends weekends arc-welding together works found in scrap yards is somehow not — not any longer. In effect, that devalues human creativity for the creativity afforded by a privileged level of economic class.
He used a reductionist lens to argue that only certain people were privileged with the empowerment of "creativity" in the post-factory, post-manufacturing urban economies in North America (and in other selected, G8-located cities). What his argument did was trivialize the meaning of "creativity" and rarefied it artificially so that if you worked anything other than a "creative class job" — city or not — you could only, at most, touch creativity but never possess it.
The "old" model, writ large, was the creative potential of the human spirit generally, in that it could come from anywhere and anyone, regardless their background. Now, in the Floridian model, a stuffy, two-bit lawyer advertising on the backs of bus-stop benches (think Barry Zuckerkorn) is a "creative" while a local sculptor who holds down two hourly wage jobs and then spends weekends arc-welding together works found in scrap yards is somehow not — not any longer. In effect, that devalues human creativity for the creativity afforded by a privileged level of economic class.
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