Professional Documents
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Article history:
Received 2 September 2010
Accepted 11 January 2011
Keywords:
Creative city
Art walks
Urban entrepreneurialism
Revitalization
Gentrication
Berlin
a b s t r a c t
Recent urban development policies have put much emphasis on the establishment of creative cities. The
creative city promises to be a new city, a transformative shift from the existing and conventional ways of
urbanization to one that includes creativity and livability for all. Yet, this goal is often not achieved nor is
it even necessarily pursued. The dominant creative city policies are not different from the current system
of urban entrepreneurialism and growth-driven urban development. The paper presents the development of Kolonie Wedding in Berlin as an example of the promise and limitations of creative city initiatives. Here, guided art walks were introduced to revitalize the local economy and property market and
re-imagine the neighborhood as creative and lively. However, the initiative reinforces social and ethnical
boundaries, enhances exclusion and advocates for gentrication instead of challenging these practices.
The paper calls for an overhaul and revision of the creative city model in which equality, and not growth
and centrality, stand at its center. Such an approach includes the enactment of creativity not as an urban
development strategy but as a human right.
2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Address: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Communication Studies, CB #3285, Bingham Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3285, USA.
E-mail addresses: djakob@email.unc.edu, doreen.jakob@metropolitanstudies.de
1877-9166/$ - see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ccs.2011.01.005
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that it can benet? (Landry, 2008: xvii). The authors advocate for a more holistic understanding of creativity that also
includes social and political reform in addition to artistic
and technological innovation. In practice, however, the real
creativity of the creative city model tends to be its ability
to reframe and repackage an entrepreneurial model of urban governance and development geared towards attracting highly mobile capital and professional elites with
environments to live and work in as well as to consume
and invest into that are lively yet safe, diverse yet controlled, and artistic yet prot-driven (cf. Catungal, Leslie,
& Hii, 2009). The examples and descriptions of urban entrepreneurialism provided by Harvey (1989) more than two
decades ago are in their essence no different from the more
contemporary policies and practices of creative city making
as, for instance, Evans (2003) shows. In other words, the
reality is that city leaders [. . .] are embracing creativity
strategies not as alternatives to extant market-, consumption- and property-led development strategies, but as
low-cost, feel-good complements to them. Creativity plans
do not disrupt these established approaches to urban
entrepreneurialism and consumption-oriented place promotion, they extend them (Peck, 2005: 761).
Contrary to the progressive claim of social and political
change for the betterment of all (Landry, 2008), the creative
city model tends to be enacted with a narrow focus on the
display and promotion of rather than the foundational sustenance for arts and culture and technological innovation.
For instance, Pratt (2010) identies four types of creative
city policies within the UK: innovation and network initiatives, cultural agship developments, single event mega
projects, and social and cultural community engagement
practices. He nds that the majority of the policies favor
instrumentalist approaches to the production of culture
rather than their direct and intrinsic support. Moreover,
the political interest in the transformational qualities of
more inclusionary urban development is usually limited.
One example for this shortcoming is the development of
research and science parks, industrial clusters and incubators for new, innovative or creative industries. Although
there is an argument to be made that local production networks serve and foster new ways of organizing production
and labor and stimulate innovative thinking (cf. Scott,
2000), these new clusters are simultaneously offspring
and materializations of prot-driven economic development policies and speculative growth by seeking capital
from venture capitalists (cf. Indergaard, 2004). Another
popular strategy of creative city development is the construction of cultural amenities in forms of agship museums, concert halls, cultural mega events and spectacular
city architecture. Again, these developments in and of
themselves are noble achievements if they serve the public
good and are universally accessible. Often, however, they
are rather exclusionary places and events of supervised
conspicuous consumption such as Potsdamer Platz and
the Sony Center in Berlin including the Berlinale lm festival hosted there that reinforce social boundaries instead of
overcoming them and are guided by prot-driven principles. Flagship developments like the Guggenheim Museum
in Bilbao tend to be mere investments into a hard infrastructure that, once inaugurated, lack the long-term funding and sustenance of their cultural content (Evans, 2003;
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The rst art walk in Berlin, Zentrale Moabit, in the Berlin neighborhood of Moabit and organized by the local
neighborhood management organization, featured the display of artwork in windows and storefronts in combination
with guided walking tours. Its goal was the revitalization of
abandoned retail spaces. The project was nanced with
public money but ended once those two years of funding
expired. However, it induced a development scheme of
entertaining art consumption for the re-imagination and
redevelopment of socially and economically disadvantaged
areas that has since been applied in nearly all Berlin neighborhood revitalization plans.
Yet, similar to metropolitan policies, this kind of promotion and support of arts and culture actually has little to do
with a genuine interest in artistic creativity and opportunities of creative expression for the local population but
rather a revitalization of underused properties. This dynamic was made clear by the manager of a former neighborhood management organization in Berlin that
embraced arts-led revitalization:
Heaven knows we had no disposition for creativity. That
was for sure not the thought behind it. [. . .] We dont do
that because we like artists so much. We dont do art and
cultural support but we want to enliven those stores.
Because in those stores, that is totally clear, no one will
buy sugar and our anymore (02/07).
Kolonie Wedding is a similar such initiative where
neighborhood-based organizations promote artistic creative activities to revitalize and re-imagine their locale by
organizing monthly art walks.
Kolonie Wedding
Kolonie Wedding was founded in 2001 by the Quartiersmanagement (QM) Soldiner Kiez, a neighborhood management organization in Berlin-Wedding appointed by the city
government to serve an area with special development
needs (Gebiete mit besonderem Entwicklungsbedarf) and
modeled after Zentrale Moabit. It was established as a
place-based network of project rooms that organizes
monthly arts event walking tours and through that redevelops and re-imagines the neighborhood from a state of neglect and abandonment to an area of creativity,
activities, life and ambience.
The observation and analysis of Kolonie Wedding was
part of a larger study that investigated emerging placebased creative industries networks in Berlin and New York
City and included 200 qualitative interviews with members
of the creative industries as well as local policy makers,
neighborhood organizations, real estate owners and developers and a 3-year participatory observation (20052007)
of four neighborhoods in Berlin and New York City (Friedrichshain and Wedding in Berlin, Long Island City and the
South Bronx in New York City). All four case studies were
selected due to the recent development of numerous
place-based creative industries networks in the respective
neighborhoods including six different art walk initiatives
(for further details about the overall study, its ndings
and methodology see Jakob (2009)). Kolonie Wedding is selected here as a showing example due to the extensive
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the basis of mixture (09/07). Apart from being extremely ethnically and socially discriminatory, this process
underlines that the ultimate goal of DEGEWO is to critically enhance the value of its housing stock and acquire
control over its market by catering to the demand of a
culture-curios middle class and limiting supply to other
social groups.
Moreover, there is little to no interaction between
Kolonie Wedding artists and the local population apart
from few exceptions. As the artists see their participation in the art walks as a step towards metropolitan recognition and fame, direct involvement in local affairs is
rare. Nor are local residents particularly invited to participate in such events. According to the interviewed
Kolonie Wedding artists, the large population of local
immigrant residents, often Turkish, has no perception
of and appreciation for art. Immigrants tend not to visit
the exhibition spaces and if so, then they are often
young people trying to vandalize. As Kolonie Wedding
artists usually do not live in the area but only come
there to organize their exhibitions, they are isolated
from the everyday life of the neighborhood. They have
created a separate and elite socio-spatial enclave for
themselves that is detached from the actual neighborhood in which they are located. Thus, instead of breaking ethnic or social boundaries, Kolonie Wedding
actually reinforce exclusion.
None of these discriminatory and exclusionary methods
are compatible with the creative city model nor is there
anything new or transformative about them. Instead, they
are further expressions of an urban entrepreneurialism that
puts property and growth-driven development at its center. They are developments that value public perception
and illusionary images of creativity over inclusion and
equality. They are not alternatives but extensions of the
current system of growth via the consumption of culture
and place. Kolonie Wedding stands as an example that reveals how creative city planning is being used to further
prots and status.
The creative neighborhood but for all?
The creative city is, if true to the denition of creativity
(cf. Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), a new city. As a policy and
planning model, it advocates for a progressive change that
enables all city residents to be creative (Landry, 2008). It
promotes equality, livability and personal advancement
via harnessing peoples imagination and talent. However,
the example of Kolonie Wedding shows that the inauguration of art walks as a strategy to develop a creative neighborhood can miss that goal. Change is proclaimed via the
introduction of new hope and optimism, new arts activities
and media and visitor interests. Yet the majority of the local population is frequently excluded from these developments. And although none of the participating artists is
allowed to operate commercially, the nal goal of the Kolonie Wedding initiative is the development of a protable
local property market.
Hall (2000) describes creative cities as locales where
outsiders be they young, foreign, excluded or all of the
above induce change via the communication of new ideas
and a support thereof. Therefore, the attraction of artists to
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2
For further ideas and practices see e.g.: Center for an Urban Future (2002) The
Creative Engine: How Arts and Culture is Fueling Economic Growth in New York City
Neighborhoods. Center for an Urban Future, New York, Center for an Urban Future
(2010) Time to be creative. Center for an Urban Future, New York.