Community and Nostalgia in Urban Revitalisation: a Critique of Urban Village and Creative Class Strategies As Remedies for Social ‘Problems’
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Australian Geographer, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 335Á354, November 2006 Community and Nostalgia in Urban Revitalisation: a critique of urban village and creative class strategies as remedies for social ‘problems’ KENDALL BARNES, GORDON WAITT, NICHOLAS GILL & CHRIS GIBSON, University of Wollongong, Australia ABSTRACT We examine how normative constructions of ‘the creative city’ have entered into Australian planning discourses. Although welcoming a place-based approach, critical consideration is given to how the misappropriation of ‘place making’ in creative city revitalisation plans may enhance rather than address processes of social marginalisation. A Foucauldian framework is employed, exploring the notion of the social production of power through discourse. We draw on a case study of Wentworth Street, a key urban space in Port Kembla, the industrialised district of Wollongong, New South Wales. The study focuses on various ideas of a common place-making theme of the ‘urban village’ evoked by planners, the media and a targeted local resident group (here elderly Macedonians) for a street positioned in ‘crisis’ because of declining infrastructure, services and its association with crime, drugs and prostitution. The case study demonstrates that marginalisation and exclusions are products of creative city strategies and wider, more oppressive urban discourses. But we also demonstrate that despite becoming normative in the texts of planning policies, discourses of place and identity always remain multiple, negotiated, and contradictory. KEY WORDS Urban village; creative city; social exclusion; Wollongong; discourse analysis. Introduction Since the 1990s, city spaces of older industrialised countries are increasingly being refashioned following the downsizing or closure of manufacturing industries. Informed by entrepreneurial policies of the so-called ‘new urban governance’, image, creativity and competitiveness have become the buzzwords of city councils’ corporate plans (Hall & Hubbard 1996). As a result, the focus of many city councils has shifted from helping city residents in establishing and maintaining their everyday lives (through provision of basic services and welfare) to place making and marketing. Key to this is a desire to attract new investors and Florida’s (2002) ISSN 0004-9182 print/ISSN 1465-3311 online/06/030335-20 # 2006 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc. DOI: 10.1080/00049180600954773 336 K. Barnes et al. so-called ‘creative class’ residents, particularly into fashioned urban quarters or ‘urban villages’. Equally, the corporatisation of urban planning has seen the reshaping of urban governance through the distribution of responsibilities across government spheres and increased interventions of the private sector, including the planning consultant (Hall & Hubbard 1996). This paper examines the effects of these corporate shifts in urban governance and the refashioning of cities into distinct quarters through the idea of the ‘urban village’, drawing on research conducted in the suburb of Port Kembla, in Wollongong, New South Wales. In doing so the paper helps fill the gap in the literature identified by Gibson and Klocker (2005) of the lack of empirical examples that illustrate how creative urban planning polices are played out in local contexts, and contributes to broader discussions about the creative economy (Peck 2005). We begin by discussing the theoretical context for the study, and then familiarise the reader with the case study location. Next, we turn to investigate Wollongong City Council’s response to neoliberal ideas of entrepreneurial planning and specifically the concept of urban villages, employed as part of marketing campaigns in order to compete with other places in attracting urban professionals. We demonstrate how a consultancy report helped circulate normative ideas of the ‘urban village’ to revitalise Wentworth Street, Port Kembla, and discuss the response to these ideas amongst Wollongong City Council planners and the local print media. We then consider why the ideas of the urban village had limited resonance with some local residents. We conclude by summarising our argument and suggesting another conceptual framework that incorporates alternative creativities in urban revitalisation plans. Entrepreneurial planning and urban villages To examine effects of the urban village as a revitalisation strategy, we employ a Foucauldian notion of the social production of power/knowledge (Mills 1997; Tonkiss 1998). In this approach, power is seen as productive and not absolute, in the sense of power being forever negotiated between differentially positioned actors, rather than exercised by the powerful in a unidirectional manner over the powerless. Power is enacted through discourse*that is the representations, texts and practices through which knowledges and meanings are produced and contest- ed*which in a dialectical fashion shapes the material, physical objects of that discourse. Our exploration of planning strategies in this sense is in concordance with Kerkin’s (2004, p. 185) call for research that reveals ‘how influential discourses are in the re-orderings of urban space’, especially with a focus on the productive capacity for discourse to create material transformations in city environments. Where urban ‘problems’ are identified by governments, discourses about them create their own ‘regimes of truth’*the acceptable formulation of problems and solutions to those problems’ (Lees 2004, p. 103), which in turn can have tangible, often harmful, outcomes. In adopting a discursive approach to an analysis of planning strategies, we are therefore not so much concerned with seeing policy as something to be tested for success or failure against certain outcomes or measurables, and nor are we keen to interrogate policy discourses for the sake of the critique itself. Rather, policy is capable of being critiqued as a situated example of the practice of power, as a type of administration through which citizens are governed and through which material spaces are created, contested and reoriented. Community and Nostalgia in Urban Revitalisation 337 More specifically, in this article we discuss aspects of a particular type of governance characteristic of cities in Western countries. Entrepreneurial planning has become commonplace in the UK, USA and Australia, where authorities at the metropolitan or provincial scale have redirected public policy away from the provision of utilities, infrastructure and ‘safety net’ services, towards various corporate activities, such as redevelopment schemes intended to ‘clean up’ deteriorated inner-city and industrial spaces, and ‘place-branding’ exercises aimed at attracting mobile investment capital and tourists (Hall & Hubbard 1996). Entrepreneurial governance rests on a reconfigured role for the private sector and for the state, including the formation of ‘development coalitions’ of public institutions, private individuals and business leaders, and a foregrounding of the role of consultants and paid experts. Government ...become[s] a consummate agent of*rather than a regulator of*the market, [as] the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. (Smith 2002, p. 427) This reconfiguration of the state in the city masks a deeper moral imperative underpinning the entrepreneurial turn in planning: one that downplays citizenship and collective identities, and in turn emphasises capitalist ideologies, encourages people to become entrepreneurial, commercially minded subjects, and which promotes private-sector solutions to social problems. Most relevant to our article, entrepreneurial governance has frequently led to urban revitalisation as a key strategy to ‘turn around’ areas abandoned by manufacturing capital throughout Australia, Europe, North America, and else- where. Harvey (1989), Gleeson and Low (2000) and McGuirk and O’Neill (2002) discuss the rise of entrepreneurial urban governance in terms of the emergence of the global economy and the deregulatory agenda of neoliberal ideology. Gleeson and Low (2000) point out in their critique of the Australian Commonwealth’s policy ‘Building Better Cities’ that, rather than prioritising the well-being of residents, entrepreneurial policies recast cities as players in attracting highly mobile capital. The now popular ideas of Florida (2002) build on this trajectory of neoliberal planning discourse, recasting cities not only in terms of their capacity to attract mobile investment capital but also their capacity to attract new kinds of migrants as residents. His theory of the ‘rise of the creative class’ (which has become canonical amongst local government strategic policy makers in Australia) rests on the observation that members of a ‘new’ upwardly mobile social class exercise their spatial and career mobility, to seek employment in places where the arts and creative industries are strong; and where there is vibrant nightlife, interesting architecture, cafe´ culture, ethnic diversity and arts precincts. The policy message is that places that have suffered industrial decline ought to aggressively plan for, and compete to attract, members of this new ‘creative class’. In the UK and USA places have favoured creative city strategies centred on promoting creative industries (such as film, multimedia and music*see Brown et al. 2000; Newman & Smith 2000). Whereas in Australia it has been more