Professor Sharon Zukin Broeklundian Professor of Sociology, Brooklyn College, City University of New York I want to express my thanks

to the Central Policy Unit and to the people of Hong Kong and its Government, for inviting me as their guest to speak with you today. It is a great honour for me to be here. I understand that the subject of our discussion is what I prefer to call the symbolic economy. Loosely speaking, the symbolic economy is defined by three points: it is urban; it is based on the production of symbols as basic commodities; and third, it is based on the production, in a very self-conscious way, of spaces as both sites and symbols of the city and of culture. The symbolic economy has become a subject of interest in cities around the world since the 1970s. That was an auspicious era, both in Hong Kong and in the United States as well as in Western Europe, because of the decline and relocation of manufacturing facilities, which left a gap in many traditional industrial economies. The gap, to a small degree, was filled by the rise of the so-called knowledge-based industries and activities that placed design and innovation at the forefront of production. Another factor that made the symbolic economy economically important is the rise of flexibility in organization, in production and in specialization, which gave primacy to the bright, the quick and the innovative, whether they are firms, cities or individuals. From the 1980s three additional factors made attention to the symbolic economy more important in cities. First, the rise of consumer product industries and multi-media industries. Second, the development of the global market place with its geographical dispersion and dis-aggregation of production and aggregation of consumption. These various changes in industrial organization led to a greater standardization of products and a replication of the same sorts of facilities all over the world, whether these were industrial facilities or cultural facilities. But the competition between these facilities and the organizations that support them required these organizations to develop more differentiation, which they did and continue to do, in cultural terms - in terms of design, in terms of symbolic production. In various regions around the world, therefore, government policies have gradually come to focus on the support of culture in a different way from governmental policies in the past. In the United States, governmental support of culture is seen as a less costly subsidy to the economy than a subsidy to business. Second, government support of culture promises to improve the quality of life for all people in the population. Of course, that is the promise; it remains to be seen whether that promise is kept. And third, governmental support of culture is seen as a way of enhancing the reputation of specific places. That, of course, brings us to the subject of todays conference, The Cultures of World Cities, with a significance for both business and quality of life. So, culture, in the large sense, becomes the product of the symbolic economy and reverses the historical meaning of culture and the historical position of culture, in the great cities of the world. Culture used to be a by-product of wealth. Now, culture is

seen as a generator of wealth. And therefore, governments, businesses and various organizations pursue culture in a much more determined and ambitious way than they have in previous generations. By the same token, the very term World Cities, which I believe is a 20th century term although the phenomenon, as Professor Chang says, is an ancient one - the term World Cities, as a 20th century term, binds together business and culture. Patrick Geddes, the British urbanist, wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, that world cities are cities where a disproportionate amount of the worlds business is conducted. Closer to our time, in the 1960s, another British urbanist, Peter Hall, wrote about world cities as places where we find the greatest concentration of political power, trade, rich people and entertainment facilities. In a more recent book, in the 1990s, Peter Hall added cultural creativity to the definition of world cities. John Friedeman and Gertz Wolfe in the 1980s, wrote about world cities as places where there is a disproportionate amount of capital accumulation again, emphasizing the role of financial institutions in the development of culture. And Saskia Sassen, in a book on The Global City at the beginning of the 1990s, also concentrated on world cities as centres for the co-ordination of finance. So there seems to be, for 100 years at least, a strong merger of culture and business in the symbolic economy of world cities. If we break down the merger of culture and business in world cities we find three main points. First, an assumption that culture attracts business. Second, as I suggested earlier, we find a suggestion that culture strengthens a citys reputation for innovation. Third, in more crudely economic terms, we find an assumption that culture enables a city to establish a monopoly on uniqueness, a monopoly on identity, and this monopoly enables various institutions in the private sector to charge monopoly prices. But the situation in world cities in the 21st century is more complex than it used to be. I simplify for the purposes of a diagram and I speak, of course, from the perspective of the development of the United States. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the old industrial paradigm of spaces in world cities was relatively simple. There were people who moved between their homes and their work places. There were also important intermediate spaces that I would call ethnic spaces in the sense of being traditional cultural spaces, based on language, based on common popular traditions, and based on common religion. In the 21st century, the spaces in which people move in world cities, and in all large cities, indeed are more complex. First of all, people are more mobile than ever before, both in their daily patterns and in their occasional trips to other regions of the world. Second, communications and interactions between people are more dependent on media. We would say, relations between people are more mediated than direct. Third, there are more fluid boundaries between different institutional and organizations spheres, so that people, as well as symbols, move more easily between their places of origin, whether their places of origin are geographical or institutional. This mobility, this degree of mobility, makes it much more significant than ever before to construct images to construct images of cities in what I would call the urban imaginary; to attract people, to draw them in; to improve the life of the public sphere.

But the construction of the urban imaginary is not just a deliberate effort by government or by business or by the media. Branding, for example as interesting as it may be and as commercially rewarding as it has been for many businesses branding is only one small part of the urban imaginary. The urban imaginary is made up of ordinary people walking everyday in the streets, ordinary people talking, wearing clothes, cooking food, and developing the sense of excitement that we find in world cities. The urban imaginary also includes the struggle between forces of social control and forces that try to break loose from social control. In culture that struggle is particularly important because as people have become mobile, access to the means of cultural production has become more democratic and the influence on culture from below has become much more significant, in terms of both personal meaning and commercial profit. From popular music to clothing, there has been much more of an emphasis on style that emerges democratically from young people, from the streets, from new people who start out without resources but develop on the basis of their new ideas. And yet, here we come to a paradox: as style, as access to the means of cultural expression becomes more democratic, centralized monopolies try to maintain control over the production of symbols, whether those symbols are art museums or culture industries. I know that we have many examples from the business world: the suppression of NAPSTA on the Internet, for example, is a recent example of an established monopoly trying to prevent a more democratic access to cultural commodities. But I see this paradox as a permanent paradox, a paradox between centralized monopolies that attempts to control cultural production, and the new ideas that require democratic access to the means of cultural expression in order to create new styles, new fashions, new ideas, new ways of life. How is this paradox acted-out in the spaces of the city? It is acted-out in two major ways. In the first way, the paradox between cultural monopolies and democratic expression is acted-out by people trying to challenge symbolic languages of inclusion and entitlement to central public spaces. One important central public space, even when land is scarce as in Hong Kong, is the street itself, and park space, open space, where people may meet, where they may gather, where they may express themselves individually and collectively. A second area in which the paradox between centralized monopolies and democratic access is acted-out is in residential space. Where property values are high and housing prices are also high, there is always a struggle for new people and people without resources to gain living space and work space, and for cultural groups, often performance space. In New York City, as well as other large cities of the world, over the past 40 years, small pockets of central spaces have been carved out through gentrification, through the insertion of artists, cultural producers and cultural consumers into areas that otherwise would be demolished, destroyed, torn down and rebuilt as higher-value commercial facilities. So that the insertion of artists and cultural producers into central spaces of the city for living and for work, as well as for rehearsal and performance, for studio space as we say in New York City, has been a very important site of conflict between those who wish democratic access of the means of cultural production and those who would impose or retain centralized monopolies, whether those monopolies
3

are commercial monopolies or governmental monopolies. A third area in which the struggle between democratic access and centralized monopolies is acted-out is in specific performance spaces and specific practice spaces, which cultural producers require at low rents in order to stay as part of the urban economy. Someone told me in one of my meetings yesterday, about an oil-depot, in North Point I believe, that was given temporarily to some cultural producers for workspace. But, as often happens in big cities, in the United States as well as in Hong Kong, when a more profitable use of that space opened up, the artists had to move. This, again, is a recurrent acting-out of the struggle between those who need democratic access to the means of cultural production and those centralized monopolies that keep control of the production of symbols. Another area in which there is always a struggle between the two opposing forces is in the actual content of exhibitions and performance, and even in the architectural programme of cultural facilities, so that in every city around the world the property developers and government officials create a new convention centre, a new art museum and other monumental buildings that bring the public in, but under controlled conditions. In the United States, of course, there is a constant struggle that is expressed quite openly in politics, between those who want to devote more resources to building monumental buildings and those who want to devote more resources to subsidizing the small infill, small pocket spaces that cultural producers need. And finally, of course, there is always the conflict between those people who would rather go to see kung fu action movies at least in New York City and those who would rather use the central areas of the city to erect more monumental spaces in the forms of opera houses and museums. No one can resolve this struggle, this is one of the permanent paradoxes of having a world city. There have been changes, also, in the way we experience the spaces of cities, the morphology of cities, the relation between spaces of cities, the built environment in terms of architecture and the general sensory or sensual - visual, as well as tactile and smell and audio experience of cities - over the past 100 years as culture has become a more important and a more self-conscious part of city planning. The paradigm of city spaces in the early 20th century was drawn by the Chicago school of urban sociologists from the University of Chicago, but their diagram has relevance to our understanding of how the central spaces of the city have been opened up by new cultural forms over the past 50 years. In the early 20th century, cities had a historic centre that contained a relatively small high-culture core. This area was surrounded by zones that were inhabited by low-income groups, often different ethnic groups, who concentrated together in factory spaces, in the home as well as in separate factory buildings, and these areas were often considered closed to others from outside the ethnic group or the social class. They were considered dirty by those who enjoyed the high-culture facilities of the centre. Every city had these areas of the city until quite recently. The area of Soho, in Lower Manhattan, was called, until the late 1960s, Hells

Hundred Acres, because it was such a closed area with so many garment manufacturers, particularly at the low-end of garment manufacturing, that the firefighters hated to go in there to try to put out fires. Wanchai probably has a similar reputation or had a similar reputation, for different reasons. Usually, the areas around central bus terminals and central train stations have that reputation for being dirty and closed. In the 1970s however, the conversion of old manufacturing facilities, in American cities, supported new cultural facilities the workspaces, the performance spaces of artists, new restaurants, small entrepreneurial organizations that did not necessarily operate for a profit but did try to build up cultural value in the old districts of cities. The population was divided, some people continued to see these districts as being dirty, derelict, abandoned, but other people, particularly young people and portions of the middle-class, were attracted to these quarters. And through cultural performances and cultural consumption of other sorts, new people were brought in who found these quarters of the city open rather than closed, and clean rather than dirty. By the same token, in American cities rents in these quarters remained low, so that they became incubators - as the urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote of them around 1960 - they became incubators of new cultural industries. During the 1960s, a change of mentality in the United States enhanced the building up of cultural value in these quarters. There was a sense that modernization had moved so fast we lost the old world of aesthetic values that people find in low-rise buildings, in old materials, in less monumental spaces. And the pressure by more educated people at first, and then by various community groups, resulted in the development of laws to preserve the historic fabric of old sections of buildings. So that in the United States, lofts hence the term loftliving lofts or old manufacturing spaces became spaces of cultural value, spaces that people appreciated for their sensory qualities, as well as for the possibilities they opened for cultural production of various types. People began to live in lofts, people began to open art galleries in lofts, whole sections of New York City where loft buildings were preserved, became the generators of new commercial districts and eventually touristic districts. The disadvantage of that sort of development, of course, is that property values rose over a period of time, so that the original artists and cultural producers often had to move elsewhere. In New York City, where I live, the transformation of Soho from an arts district to a place where you find branches of upscale shops from Chanel to Hermes, has been one of the more surprising transformations of the past 20 years. The arts character of a district then moves on to another district, but without some support, in terms of the use of land and the protection of buildings on the part of the government, these old quarters never have a chance to assume cultural value. By our time, now, there is much more mobility among spaces with old cultural capital and new cultural capital than there ever was before. The revitalization of old streets and buildings by design shops, as well as restaurants, art galleries and performance spaces, proceeds so that there is a constant flow of people among different districts. The presence of young artists who create a sense of style, of cool, of new ideas, benefits not only the artists themselves but also benefits the art museums and opera houses that operate at a different level of the production chain and culture. But the presence of young artists and cool stylists and designers also benefits the financial institutions that
5

want to provide a better quality of life for the people who work in them. A better quality of life for people today often means a more interesting quality of life. By the same token, you notice the reappearance of ethnic spaces here on my diagram, and the ethnic spaces are recognized today as being greater contributors to the cultural capital of world cities than they were recognized for the past few generations. New immigrants to world cities are considered as contributing not only labour but also symbolic products that go into the mix of the general production of culture in world cities. The mass media, particularly those parts of the media that concentrate on urban lifestyle, have been very important in accentuating the cultural value as well as the financial value of new immigrants cultural products. When they produce and publish entertainment guides and shopping guides, they acknowledge the importance of cultural products of new immigrants in ways that those products have not been recognized before. The aesthetic and sensual qualities of new cultural producers and new immigrants cannot be satisfied by building more venues of standardized cultural consumption, like shopping malls. In American cities we have been lucky to be able to preserve old buildings, old quarters and the life of the street in which new immigrants and new cultural producers add their mix. By the same token, there are disadvantages and paradoxes to the new recognition of the economic significance of new immigrants cultural products. Ethnic cultures in the United States are often commodified so that those products become the profit-making lines of new corporations. I dont know whether on television in Hong Kong you have seen the American programme The Sopranos. It is a series on American Cable Television that makes a drama, a sort of soap opera, out of the life of Italian-American gangsters. I dont watch this very often but I have watched a couple of episodes of this programme and I was intrigued by one humorous line that a character says. Two of these Italian-American gangsters are standing in a caf that looks like Starbucks and one of them says to another, You know, we Italians invented espresso but now everyone else is profiting from it. So one of the dangers of acknowledging the economic value of immigrants cultural products is that those products become detached from the original ethnic cultures and become commodities, rootless commodities I would say, just like any other commodities. By the same token, another paradox of this development of adding financial value to the cultural value of certain products, is that artists themselves become more entrepreneurial. Many want to come to world cities to be more visible. In contrast, perhaps, to artists who wanted to move to world cities in the early 20 th century and in earlier centuries because they wanted to be invisible, they wanted to remove themselves from the scrutiny of society. And in the early 1980s there was a very interesting movement of artists in the East Village of Manhattan who both protested their commercial viability and enjoyed the buzz, the publicity that they achieved for their products and their cultural community. So that when you think of the cultural districts of world cities, you really can think not only of social networks of people and specific products that come from these districts, but you can think of these districts as regional industrial districts in which the basic commodity is culture.

I have used the word downtown with reference to American cities because these cultural districts are usually found in the centre of cities which we call, as you know, downtown. And I want to call your attention only to the general economic processes as well as cultural processes that make these cultural districts very much like any industrial district that is successful. First, there are flows of labour as well as capital; there are clusters or concentrations of people and institutions; and then there are networks of people in different institutional spheres who work together. World cities depend on a constant replenishment of the cultural labour supply. They depend on new artists moving into the city continually. World cities depend on new gallery owners coming from other countries, from other regions, and opening up their venues and their quarters to new consumers of culture. Clusters or concentrations of cultural producers are extremely important. I dont know what the concentrations might look like in Hong Kong but in New York there are and have been for some years, certain districts that are known for artists cafes, artists residences and artists studies, whether those are performing artists or conceptual artists or visual artists. By 1960 and that is 40 years ago by 1960 more than two-thirds of American artists were living in New York City, so that when you talk about the building of a world city on the basis of culture, you really have to go back a long time. I am not saying you have to go back centuries, but you do have to go back a number of decades. And then that large concentration of artists in a city must be permitted to break down into clusters in specific quarters. They must have the spaces to create their own communities and their own products. By the same token, property developers have not been left behind in the development of New York City as a world city since 1960. One of New Yorks big property developers, Donald Trump, emphasized recently that the importance of being in New York City for a property developer is not just an importance of making a large profit but an importance of being surrounded by clusters of people. When he was interviewed by Fortune Magazine in an article that found New York City to be one of the best cities for business in the year 2000, Donald Trump said, Everyones here, so you dont really have to leave. A business owner said, New York City is a place where youre taken seriously, so that there is a subjective value to operating as either a business person or an artist in a world city. Again, the media are very important to encouraging the socializing among different institutional groups in cities, and the media are important in publicizing the work of cultural producers as well as financial institutions and property developers. The idea of buzz, in other words the idea of publicity, of excitement, of talk, of news, is common to all three of these spheres culture, property development and finance. The American architect, Hugh Hardy, was quoted in the New York Times the other day as saying that he prefers to build in New York City, not, unfortunately, for any qualities of the people or any qualities of the city, but for the quality of publicity that you find in New York City. And Hardy said, When youre talked about here in New York City, it registers everywhere, its like a great big trumpet.
7

I want to bring up one final point which appears to be a paradox and thats the paradox between the ability of world cities to charge monopoly prices on the basis of their reputation and the idea of competition among cities to become world cities. I think competition is good. I think competition keeps different cities ambitiously pursuing vitality, buzz, and excitement. I think without competition cultural producers would not receive the degree of support they have received for the past few decades. Yet, competition is frightening, whether the cities that are competing are New York and Los Angeles or Shanghai and Hong Kong or Madrid and Barcelona. Recently, the Mayor of Seattle, in Washington in the United States, said in an interview in the magazine, Fast Company, that he would like Seattle to become the Geneva of the Pacific. Now, I found that very puzzling. Most people in the United States do not refer to the city of Geneva in Switzerland at all, so why was the Mayor of Seattle saying he would like Seattle to be the Geneva of the Pacific Ocean. He meant that he wanted Seattle to be the place or a place where international ideas can be exchanged. He said, We want to be the place where the most choices bang against each other, where sparks fly. To that effect, he and the business leaders and the cultural leaders of Seattle were building more monumental spaces a new central library, as you have here in Hong Kong, they were building a new art museum, as you have here in Hong Kong, and they were also building, however, incubator spaces for new artists, both in traditional media and in multimedia. And it is this incubator idea that is again just as important as building the monumental spaces. Finally, I want to close by quoting a fashion journalist from New York City who recently compared New York to Paris and said, proudly, if not arrogantly, that New York had not only surpassed Paris as a generator of style but is likely to continue to surpass Paris as a generator of style. This journalist said New York has three qualities that are essential to be a culture capital of the world. First, New York City has moxie this is a slang word in America, not everybody knows this word - moxie means courage, energy, audacity and nerve. It is, of course, a quality of all big cities, but particularly a quality of New York City. The second quality the journalist mentioned was what I would call ethnic culture. The journalist said New York has a broad racial dispersion. But I would suggest it is this ethnic diversity that is closely related to the fusion culture for which world cities have always been known. The third quality the journalist mentioned is an unquenchable thirst for the new. And this I think we would all agree, is the essential quality of a world city the thirst for the new, in every sense. Finally, I might point out that in New York City, the civil society of a world city is often very uncivil. The city is dirty, the city is often chaotic Im sure it is much more chaotic than Hong Kong in many ways - but even more than that, civil society in the United States, and especially in New York City, is often an oppositional sort of culture in which people frankly speak of their differences and openly speak of their struggles. I would suggest that world cities remember this that a civil society is often uncivil. But perhaps that is the secret of the eternal life of a world city.