Creative Spaces-1英文版.pdfVIP

Part I Governing and practising creativity 2 Creative spaces and the art of urban living Graeme Evans Introduction This chapter offers a critical perspective on the instrumental use of arts and crea- tive practices for the purposes of urban regeneration, in contrast to vernacular and everyday culture and exchange. Opening with the dialectical perspectives of Raymond Williams (‘community culture’) and Richard Florida (‘creative class’), the move from community arts to social inclusion, and from cultural to creative industries is charted in the context of British urban and cultural policy regimes. Within this discussion, challenges to vernacular creative practices and places are presented, with examples of how culture is treated in flagship developments. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the forms of resistance by artists and others to the commodification of the everyday and the perils of co-optation by the regen- eration process. [Richard] Florida treats the Toronto Arts scene as a souvenir … he doesn’t get it (Anon, Ottawa, 28 April 2008) [W]hen Marxists say we are living in a dying culture, and that the masses are ignorant, I have to ask them … where on earth they have lived. A dying culture and ignorant masses are not what I have known and see. (Raymond Williams: 1958b) These two observations could be said to be a world, if not at least an era, apart. Richard Florida, proponent of the ‘creative class’ (2002), in his latest incarnation at the University of Toronto, and the late Raymond Williams, author of the seminal Culture and Society and Culture is Ordinary. Williams had been a champion of vernacular, working-class or at least non-elitist cultural expression and experi- ence, but one that was not bound simply by