Sounding Board – Managing the unmanageable

Increasingly, cultural quarters are being incorporated into city planning, yet the deliberate clustering of creative businesses does not always have the same effect as organically evolving cultural communities. Vaughan Allen looks at the difficulties involved in planning for culture.

Richard Floridas work has become required reading for city planners. The notion that the future economic success of a city is founded on the citys creative base is increasingly accepted across the developed world. Yet, Floridas work has a central piece missing. While he talks of the need to support local creative companies, local creative initiatives, independent music, fashion and bar scenes, he fails to explain how this can be done by planners interested in regeneration. How can a city create a zone allowing the organic growth of creative businesses? How does one support that growth without effectively institutionalising it?

Florida is rightly critical of city fathers throwing money at huge development projects in the hope of encouraging creative growth. As he puts it, we need more independent bars and fewer sports stadiums (though to have Manchester or Liverpool without new football stadiums would hardly be supporting the rebirth of those cities). Likewise, investing money in major arts development projects may not build the long-term creative infrastructure that will eventually produce economic benefit to the city. Yes, theres a tourist-dollar benefit, and, as Gateshead has shown, a lifestyle effect, in improving the quality of life in an area (thereby attracting more graduates and ABC1s), but these are as likely to be accountants as artists. Does building a signature venue for the arts create or support creative endeavours? Or does it even stultify an artistic scene in progress?

Price rises

As much of a problem is the tendency of any creative scene (think Hoxton and Shoreditch) to be born organically, through cheap renting of old buildings, where artists can gather, independent shops can open, and non-chain bars and clubs operate the bohemian scene that Florida trumpets. Yet, as soon as the scene becomes popular and trendy, in move the property developers and whatever it is that yuppies are called nowadays, forcing up the prices of retail space, and buying up the redundant factory space used as studios to turn into top-of-the-range loft apartments.

Here, the quality-of-life strategy may actually militate against the creation of a local creative scene. More art galleries attracts more professionals in search of a lifestyle, which drives out the local creatives. Dublins Temple Bar demonstrates the typical path, with artists colonising an area marked for demolition, becoming an important central part of the local scene, and then becoming so expensive that the local artists were driven out.

And its not just about the finances. As places get re-developed, they lose that feeling of independence, of threat, and of potential that attracts creatives. Its where the creative industries might come into conflict with the creative independents that form their source material. Just how do cities support artistic hubs without creating the very conditions that will destroy them?

In Manchester, this dilemma is at the heart of the challenges facing Urbis. As a £30m building, it was created to mark the new Manchester: a classic signature building strategy. Focusing on making sense of the contemporary city, it needs to reflect and examine the interesting developments in both creative industry and creative individual spheres. Autumn 2006 sees, for instance, a major exhibition on the newest developments in the creative industries of Beijing, The China Show, developed with the University of Manchester. Dealing with the contemporary city and contemporary city cultures almost requires the place to be covering the cutting-edge and challenging. Yet, how can a building essentially funded by and representative of the establishment ever be either of those things?

Threats

Urbis is not just about bringing the world to Manchester, however. It should have a vital role in supporting the creative and artistic scenes within the city. It is built on the edge of Manchesters Northern Quarter, home to independent record and clothing shops, bars and restaurants, where the fashion warehouses of South Asian immigrants sit side-by-side with small design and new media companies. The Northern Quarter has classically been created by the creatives themselves, thanks to low-rent and available warehouse space. The threat of Temple Bar-like gentrification is increasing, however, as developers convert more and more of the area to expensive flats. The Council faces the Florida-dilemma described above: how to support a creative scene that is likely to lead to considerable economic benefit in the future, but which is self-created, and easily subject to threat.

Navigating this difficult water is a task for Urbis in Manchester, and for arts centres elsewhere in the country; created deliberately, but having to accept and support emergent and transient developments in the arts without imposition. A major task is to engage properly and on a level with the scenes that already exist. Providing a venue for exhibition and promotion can help build the local scene, where perhaps bringing only internationally known artists to a venue might be great for prestige, but does little to support whats already happening.

But getting over an understandable suspicion of council initiatives takes more than a few exhibitions every year, however good and open. The challenge is finding ways to play a role in supporting artistic hubs, working with creatives and artists to interweave the changing fabric of their work and influences with the structure of the establishment venue. And its not simply about work on walls or fanzines sold in shops. Just as important are the ways the venue café and bars relate to the local creative scene. Shutting early, or not hosting local musicians, poets, or performance is a sure way of continuing to be seen as only representative of the establishment.

Creating opportunity

New venues and initiatives need to take on board this notion from the beginning; they cant simply be built (usually with considerable amounts of public money) and then ignore whats happening around them. They need the local environment, and need it to have ownership of the building and venue. Of course, none of this helps where there is yet to be a local scene. Its the attitude Florida attacks building a signature venue and expecting it to have an impact on the surrounding environment.

Again, though, ownership is the key. As debates around the nature of communities move forward, the inclusion of the arts can be a key factor. But, rather than the huge projects that are seen as impositions on the local environment, smaller, more organic, venues and projects, developed with the local community, must be the way forward. Supporting mixed areas that offer the opportunity for the entry of artists looking for low-rent workspaces, and for independent shops, while encouraging the involvement of the indigenous population can lead to the first glimmerings of a creative scene. Its about planning to create an environment out of which solutions might emerge.