THE LIMITS TO ARTIST-LED REGENERATION: Creative Brownfields in the Cities of High Culture

Despite the burgeoning literature on creative cities, seldom explored is the context of cities rich in cultural capital but more orthodox in their approach to preserving the auton omy of culture. This article discusses the status of artistic spaces occupying aban­ doned industrial premises (‘creative brownfields’) in historic cities that traditionally shape their policies around prestigious cultural institutions (‘cities of high culture’). Based on comparative insights from St Petersburg and Lausanne, the article explores the relations and tensions between mainstream cultural governance and creative brownfields. While there is no lack of creative brownfields in these cities, their wider urban impact is found to be marginal; moreover, these sites represent dispersed instances of temporary occu­ pations rather than situated clusters of creative actors. More than coincidental, this (lack of ) spatialization is argued to result from a particular governmentality––that of high culture––which disregards, rather than promotes, spaces of alternative cultural govern­ ance. The article conceptualizes creative brownfields in cities of high culture as the ‘soft infrastructure’ of cultural production, in contrast with those in ‘creative cities’ as the ‘hard infrastructure’ of urban production. The article also calls for a recognition of the local context of regulation and accumulation in understanding the cultural/urban interplay. Introduction Recent decades have witnessed a surge of academic interest in exploring how artist-led projects interact with and transform urban environments, including the emergence of trendy creative spaces and quarters in previously declining areas (e.g. Cole, 1987; Ley, 2003; Currid, 2009; Colomb, 2012). The role of urban governance and policies has been subject to particular scrutiny. Indeed, following the establishment of the ‘creative cities’ thesis supported by Richard Florida (2002) and Charles Landry (2000; 2006), there has been no lack of associated policy initiatives worldwide offering a fertile soil for a critique of the application, variations, implications and limitations of such policies. Of course, not all cities have embraced the creative city thesis equally enthusiastically, but what emerges from extant urban studies is a sense that creative activities represent a spatialized phenomenon that at least produces important material changes to the urban fabric. In this article, we want to problematize the concept of ‘creative cities’ as it is applied in cities which have built their urban strategies around notions of high culture. ‘Cities of high culture’––or established ‘cultural historic cities’––are cities where urban governance is ‘closely aligned with traditional cultural policy that seeks to defend and fence from the market a particular local definition of high culture’ (Pratt, 2010: 15). Such cities are renowned for their high spec and diverse cultural offerings––prestigious museums, fine arts galleries, theatres, operas, concert halls––combined with a heritage of ‘grand architecture’ (Pratt and Hutton, 2013). So far, the relationships between grassroots/alternative artistic initiatives, settled in former industrial sites, and urban change in these cities, as well as relations and tensions between high-culture gov ernance strategies and creative place-making activities, have barely been explored. Rather, debates in the context of such cities, as pointed out by Pratt and Hutton (2013: 91), We would like to thank the anonymous IJURR reviewers for their extremely useful comments as well as the University of Birmingham and the POPSU (Plate-forme d’observation des projets et stratégies urbaines) for supporting, in different ways, the collection of the data used in this article. ANDRES AND GOLUBCHIKOV 758 have focused ‘on the role of heritage in attracting tourism and tourist income to cities; especially through the promotion of the niche “cultural tourism” which targets upper income groups’. By positioning high-culture cities within the creative city dis course, this article provides an understanding of the extent to which what we call ‘creative brownfields’ can actually have an impact on urban change in what is a very different cultural governance context from that of the other categories of creative cities. ‘Creative brownfields’ can be defined as aesthetically distinct, derelict and flexible industrial premises attracting artistic communities and playing a significant role in youth (sub)culture, and in the development of so-called ‘cultural quarters’ (Pratt, 2009). As noted by Hutton (2006: 1839), ‘the distinctive spaces and built environment of some inner-city districts have been conducive to the revival of specialized industrial production, as well as to a (re)creation of spectacle, consumption, and entertainment’. Promi nent examples from cities like New York (Zukin, 1988), London (Hutton, 2006; Pratt, 2009) or Berlin (Shaw, 2005; Colomb, 2012) demonstrate how formerly residual brown fields can experience artist-led gentrification. With the creative turn in urban govern ance, however, ‘creative brownfields’ are no longer autonomous with respect to the institutions of power, but can instead become singled out as the breeding places of crea tivity, and even encouraged to emerge as vehicles for area-based regeneration (Evans, 2009; Peck, 2012). In such a context, creative brownfields can be seen as constituting an ‘iconic cultural infrastructure’ (O’Connor and Shaw, 2014: 166), participating not only in the experience economy focused on consumption (Pine and Gilmore, 1999), but also in the attraction of human capital: Florida’s (2002) ‘creative class’. Such spaces can then be seen as the ‘hard infrastructures’ of creative governance, with a strong spatial anchor for place-making activities that bring about structural changes at both neighbourhood and city level. We will demonstrate, however, that in high-culture cities creative brownfields instead actually remain ‘soft infrastructures’, providing a transient shelter for a range of cultural and creative actors, rather than place-based commitments, or seeds, either material or discursive, for cultural or artist-led regeneration. Drawing, then, on an interrogation of what ‘high culture creative cities’ are, the development of the concept of the soft infrastructure of cultural production will allow us to deepen the debate launched by O’Connor and Shaw (2014: 167) on the new approaches to the creative city and the nature of ‘non-instrumental, hybrid public–private, market/non-market policy space’. Creative brownfields as spaces of alternative cultural governance, not of cultural policy, do not blend easily with, nor are subsumed by, the mainstream regimes governing the cultural, economic, and spatial development of these cities. We organize our argument as follows. We begin by further developing the hypoth esis that the dynamics encountered by creative brownfields differ in the con text of high-culture cities. We then continue with the empirical basis for the article, which comes from exploring the post-industrial contexts of St Petersburg, Russia and Laus anne, Switzerland. These serve as excellent examples of two high-culture cities which have a range of prestigious cultural facilities and events that act as long-established sources of income and expenditure, and which form key components of these cities’ identities and raisons d’être. We then provide a detailed analysis of two creative brownfields––the Mesto creative space in St Petersburg and Lausanne’s Flon District, both of which could have left a significant footprint on the urban creative landscape, but did not. We finally discuss wider lessons that can be drawn from the role of creative brownfields as soft infrastructures, and what this means for the study of ‘high culture creative cities’. Creative brownfields: artistic activities in post-industrial spaces Former industrial spaces have long been perceived by artists as attractive, having few maintenance constraints but offering large studio spaces in which they can work, perform, and often live. Often conveniently located in central locations, such THE LIMITS TO ARTIST-LED REGENERATION 759 spaces are easily accessible to their users and customers. Artists ‘rich in cultural capital but poor in economic capital’ (Ley, 1996: 301) are happy to rent such spaces cheaply and use their sweat equity to renovate them to suit their particular needs. Property owners authorizing these uses aim to minimize property management costs, and regard such tenants as an interim solution to prevent vandalism and property devaluation. However, creative brownfields are prone to tension with other stakeholders–– local authorities, landowners, developers, neighbourhoods and others (Andres, 2013). Such tensions may erupt into conflicts when the size of a creative cluster reaches a thresh old beyond which it is thought to require some form of institutionalization, or when the property is intended to be converted into a different use or faces redevelop ment. However, even if property owners might hope to eventually reach a stage of site transition to a more valorized format or degree of gentrification at the time they allow artists in, creative brownfields can instead be driven towards a self-perpetu ating sense of identity where the tenants collectively develop a strong ‘place bond ing’ and become willing to engage in defensive strategies to oppose their displacement. This may entail the space transforming into a more lasting, even if more regulated, form. As Andres and Grésillon (2013: 53) observe, the transformation path of such spaces can take one of two directions: an adaptive process moving towards a more conventional and less conflictual space which is progressively included in more holistic urban policy and politics; or its disappearance as a spatial entity as a result of the incapacity to respond to and cope with the external economic, cultural and political pressures. But distinctive place-based identities may, under the conditions of postmodernity, benefit rather than hamper the local property interests (Shaw, 2005). As noted by Currid (2009: 368), ‘artists have long been thought of as agents of revitalization who transform warehouse districts and blighted neighbourhoods into bohemian enclaves that become destinations for the well-heeled, simultaneously bringing redev elopment and reinvestment’ (also Zukin, 1988; Lloyd, 2005). Furthermore, with the Florida-inspired cultural turn in urban governance, creative brownfields began playing a key role in the ‘creative city-economy’ (O’Connor and Shaw, 2014), which privi leges clusters of multiple creative producers as a desirable urban form (Evans, 2009; Stern and Seifert, 2010). Such policies may directly encourage creative commu nities in particular locales destined for urban regeneration. Against this background, creative brownfields are increasingly exploited, rather than confronted, by entrepre neurial strategies which seek to capitalize on their ‘creative’ aura. This evolution draws upon the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1999), and hence on con sumption and branding. Creative brownfields contribute to place distinctiveness and the promotion of ‘alternative’ neigh bourhoods. Artists here become, willingly or unwill ingly, coopted agents playing a role in the transformation of brownfields––although this may itself become a source of con flict between creative communities and creative-growth coalitions, leading to ‘not-in-my-name’ movements of creative producers in some cities (e.g. Novy and Colomb, 2013). Anyhow, such mechanisms position creative brownfields as the hard infrastructures of creative cities, used as key vehicles for urban regeneration and economic development, and which are also highly embedded in cultural development policy. The nature of creative brownfields as spaces of policy is nevertheless challenged in the context of cities of high culture, as the next section will demonstrate. Creative brownfields in high-culture cities? While there has been no explicit definition of ‘cities of high culture’, such cities are arguably characterized by the strong heritage of cultural institutions held in the highest esteem across the world and requiring intensive investment in both human ANDRES AND GOLUBCHIKOV 760 capital and cultural infrastructure. High-culture cites are also characterized by their wide and diverse resources of formal cultural facilities and events. They represent a niche market of cultural production and consumption, and one of their core economic sectors is tourism. Thanks to a very selective level of high-cultural production and consumption, led by internationally known creators, they valorize difference and quality in their branding strategy. This high-spec cultural offering allows these cities to maintain their distinctiveness in a context where ‘all cities build galleries and concert halls to attract investors’ (Pratt, 2010: 15). The key notion for high-culture cities is therefore their reputation, constructed via historic longevity and consistency (heritage), akin to monarchies (Urde et al., 2007). However, the literature on cultural development has barely touched upon the concept of heritage as a non-price-based competitive advantage (Tokatli, 2013). High-culture cities are therefore by essence elitist, both with regard to the audience of their high arts establishment but also in the way they are governed. They rest upon a strong cultural management ensuring their coordination, functioning and protection, as well as the financial viability of their cultural facilities. As such, in line with what Pratt and Hutton (2013: 91) note when discussing culturalhistoric cities, they ‘seek to represent the legitimacy as well as power for local author ities acting on behalf of the citizens to protect local and national heritage and values’. And yet, as with any other cities, high-culture cities may have, amongst their urban portfolio, a range of derelict buildings which attract creators. The question then arises: can creative brownfields in such contexts be seen as part of the hard infrastructure of urban policy? As we shall argue, the high-culture narrative creates obstacles to this, mediated through the local strategies as to what kind of culture should be prioritized in general, and what kind of culture should be articulated through urban development in particular. While the cultural tradition of such places does attract other forms of culture beyond ‘high arts’, the role given to the local state, and particularly its vested responsibility towards the protection and reproduction of the heritage of ‘high culture’, de facto compromises the opportunities for promoting more fluid and bottom-up cultural governance initiatives. We can say that creative brownfields in the cities of high culture remain the soft infrastructure of creativity as spaces of alternative governance: these urban spaces are certainly used, as in other cities, as a breeding locus for the creativity of grassroots creators, but these groups’ engagement with these spaces is momentary and operational, not lasting and strategic. The embeddedness of creative brownfields within the wider cultural and urban policy is limited, being little regarded, if not bluntly restrained, by the core pillars of the highculture branding. In other words, creative brownfield space is not converted into the hard infrastructure of the ‘creative city’ as a space of policy. But what, then, is the exact nature of the relationships between authentic producers and urban spaces in the absence of the deliberate governmentality of creative spatializing? Edensor et al. (2010: 15) call for theorists to ‘develop a more open understanding of the transitory and fluid nature of creative practice’ and to consider ‘networks as a more appropriate spatial context within which creative projects can be practiced’. Rather than seeing bounded places as ones where clusters of creativity emerge and get grounded, they emphasize the chains of relationality through which creativity is redistributed: the creative currents that flow through networks thus increase the potential for new and emergent forms of activity across a range of sites and locales, as inter-scalar flows, relations and social dynamics connect local practices to wider networks of cultural and economic activity (ibid.: 15). THE LIMITS TO ARTIST-LED REGENERATION 761 Indeed, lasting place-bounded forms seem to be only minor phenomena vis à vis the practices of more fluid, transient and open engagements of creativity with space, given those forms’ loosely aggregated stance, low capital and fixed costs. Although the urban geography of these distributed forms of creativity is less salient than that of more spatially stable forms of ‘clustering’, the former are actually more widespread, and thus demand a more thorough analysis to understand the various ways in which creative communities interplay with urban geography (Boren and Young, 2013). Attention can be drawn to the convoluted ecologies of such communities: the constellations of actors, and their relationships with both internal and external networks, including the role of (transient) space in their dynamics. Methodology To substantiate and further develop the arguments above, we draw on our empirical material gathered from fieldwork in two high-culture cities, St Petersburg and Lausanne. Neither has received significant attention in the literature on cultural historic cities, yet both are excellent examples of how (high) culture has historically influenced urban, cultural and economic development. Despite all their differences in size, tradition, politics and so on, St Petersburg and Lausanne display interesting similarities with regard to their cultural governmentality and the existence of a very strong local state leadership protecting high culture. They therefore represent a fruitful ground for related comparative conceptualizations (Robinson, 2011). Further, the two cities have also had a range of industrial neighbourhoods awaiting socio-economic transformation, including transformation into creative brownfields. Mesto and Flon––two former industrial sites––are characteristic of creative brownfields in their respective cities. However, despite having had a noticeable effect on each city’s cultural life due to their alternative character, these sites, like many other similar brownfield sites in St Petersburg and Lausanne, have actually made no lasting impact on the cultural and urban development of the cities. Considering the underlying factors behind this in light of the discourses in the dominant literature suggesting that the converse would be true was the starting point of our research hypothesis, and led to the distinction we propose between hard and soft infrastructures. As Comunian (2011: 1167) observes: ‘Literature on “creative cities” and “urban regeneration” does not consider all the possible outcomes in an evolving urban context’. Our cases demonstrate that such ‘alternative’ outcomes––although different in context, scale and form––help to identify some parallels between the various institutional philosophies circumscribing the role of creative spaces in cities of high culture. We conducted around 60 interviews in Lausanne and over 20 in St Petersburg with creative users, policymakers, planning officers and business tenants, as well as community groups, journalists and academic experts. Those interviews concerned both the overall cultural policy and urban landscape of the cities, as well as the development of Mesto and Flon. Interview data were complemented by secondary sources–– newspaper articles, policy documents, academic reports and official websites. Data were analysed using a two-scale analysis (city/neighbourhood) looking at economic, social and cultural components, policy visions and strategies, the nature and evolution of grass roots initiatives, governance arrangements, and forms of power relationships among the range of stakeholders. All translations are by the authors. Cultural and creative spaces in St Petersburg Home to five million people, St Petersburg is richly endowed with cultural resources. As the capital of the Russian empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the city was one of the major political and industrial centres in Europe. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, it preserved its status as Russia’s symbolic ‘cultural ANDRES AND GOLUBCHIKOV 762 capital’. Its former royal and aristocratic palaces and private art collections were converted into some of the world’s richest public museums and galleries, including those placed under the auspices of the Hermitage and the Russian Museum. The imperial tradition of the performing arts flourished during the Soviet period, centred particularly on the Mariinsky Theatre. Furthermore, the whole historic centre of St Petersburg is entered on the UNESCO World Heritage List, including its most famous cultural venues. The city’s cultural inheritance is actively used by the city and by national elites to claim a world city status for St Petersburg (Golubchikov, 2010). Huge public funds from the federal budget go into supporting its cultural venues and events, making it a hotspot for ad hoc federal spending with regard to the urban scale in Russia––levels of spending which have only been matched by high-status megaprojects like the Sochi Winter Olympics (Golubchikov and Slepukhina, 2014). St Petersburg’s high-culture heritage is consequently an important factor in the city’s economic development. But the role of its cultural heritage is much more than economic. It underpins a certain missionary narrative in the city’s tradition with respect to protecting, developing and popularizing high culture––also circumscribing the city’s broader governance rhythms. For example, the Strategy for Economic and Social Development of St Petersburg until 2030, adopted in 2014 (Government of St Petersburg, 2014), includes the following ‘mission and function’ for St Petersburg: St Petersburg is a city that bears a special mission thanks to its distinguished cultural-historic heritage, worldwide reputation, and dynamic contemporary developments ... St Petersburg is an important centre of education and training in the field of culture and arts. The city is one of the most popular destinations for both internal and international tourism, offering millions of its guests access to the richest cultural heritage and contributing to the popularisation of Russia’s historic-cultural heritage. The city’s cultural and tourist functions are backbone ones, their significance must and will only increase. Among the priorities in the city’s cultural policy, the strategy highlights the following top three: protecting and restoring the city’s cultural heritage; providing equal access to cultural assets for all social groups; and popularizing the city’s cultural heritage among the locals and tourists along with increasing their personal participation in the city’s cultural life. St Petersburg’s status as a city of high culture significantly dominates its cultural landscape (O’Connor, 2004). Trumbull (2014), reflecting on the nexus of cultural venues and urban development in St Petersburg, demonstrates the state-led instit utionalization of, and control over, the city’s cultural landscape. For example, one of the city’s flagship megaprojects has been the half-billion-euros construction of the second stage of the Mariinsky Theatre in 2004–13. As Trumbull (2014: 18) observes: cultural policy among policymakers in the city is still based on an understanding of culture as an exclusive domain that refers to high culture, whose functions rarely reach beyond cultural production and by no means include broad cultural activities for the public and city neighbourhoods. Yet the city government is not in fact antagonistic to smaller and non-traditional creators, but does support many of them through seedcorn funds, opportunities to perform in existing public venues, event funding and so on: many of our interviewees with St Petersburg creative communities, and especially those who have professional qualifications and networks, acknowledged that they had benefited from public assistance. However, first, this support is far from being a priority of the city’s cultural policy; THE LIMITS TO ARTIST-LED REGENERATION 763 and second, this support remains a compartmentalized part of the city’s cultural policy that in no way interplays with any spatially oriented or urban strategy. As acknowledged in our interview with the Deputy Head of St Petersburg Government’s Committee for Culture: The Committee for Culture has a budget called ‘subsidies for projects’ and, in principle, any creative organization, irrespective of its (non-public) ownership form, can apply with their projects. And we participate in such a project ... This is nevertheless against the backdrop that St Petersburg is positioned in the first place as a city of traditional arts––naturally, the traditional cultural heritage is