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Re-imagining Creative Cities
in Twenty-First Century Asia
Edited by
Xin Gu · Michael Kho Lim · Justin O’Connor
Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Twenty-First
Century Asia
Xin Gu • Michael Kho Lim
Justin O’Connor
Editors
Re-Imagining Creative
Cities in Twenty-First
Century Asia
Editors
Xin Gu Michael Kho Lim
School of Media, Film and Journalism School of Journalism, Media
Monash University and Culture
Caulfield East, VIC, Australia Cardiff University
Cardiff, UK
Justin O’Connor
School of Creative Industries
University of South Australia
Adelaide, SA, Australia
Department of Cultural Industry and
Management
Shanghai Jiaotong University
Shanghai, China
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Lucy Batrouney from Palgrave Macmillan for her
enthusiasm for this book project. We are grateful for Bryony Burns and
Mala Sanghera-Warren at Palgrave Macmillan for their support and guid-
ance for seeing the book through to publication. We also thank colleagues
at our respective institutions: School of Media, Film and Journalism at
Monash University, School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff
University, and the Faculty of Creative Industries at the University of
South Australia for providing intellectual support. The anonymous review-
ers helped ensure the quality of the publication.
v
Contents
vii
viii Contents
Index303
Notes on Contributors
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
Fig. 7.1 A Gallery turned into a sit-in site, September 5 and December
9, 2015. ‘Stop Psy” and “Stop Gentrification” in English
Roman scripts are clear. Photograph by Hyunjoon Shin 96
Fig. 7.2 A day in the life at an alley of Itaewon in 2016. Photograph by
Hyunjoon Shin 107
Fig. 8.1 The building compound of Hin Bus Depot (inside yellow line)
as seen in this aerial view during day and night, it is a home for
several creative collectives in George Town since 2014 117
Fig. 8.2 Culture on display in the city: the state-commissioned public
sign in Penang International Airport and the diorama in a
private-owned museum 118
Fig. 8.3 The façade in the back side of Hin Bus Depot compound 121
Fig. 8.4 Tourism boost: the state-commissioned street arts projects and
commercial initiatives by hotels and other service industries in
George Town 121
Fig. 8.5 The creative collectives make their own murals in a few hidden
corners of the city 122
Fig. 8.6 Hin’s family: the place, the people and the activities inside 125
Fig. 9.1 A blueprint artwork on Hai’an Road 133
Fig. 9.2 Artworks alongside Hai’an Road 135
Fig. 10.1 DMC © Junmin Song, 2014 152
Fig. 12.1 Keelery, Published by Sandhya, and Jul 7. “India - Box Office
Contribution by Language 2019.” Statista, July 7, 2020.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/948615/india-regional-
box-office-contribution-by-language/ Share of regional box
office contribution across India as of May 2018, by language
xix
xx List of Figures
The idea of the Creative City is a product of the 1990s. Of course, the
idea has long roots in a Euro-American narrative of the city as a primary
site for commercial and industrial development or ‘modernisation’, and as
a locus for a certain quality of experience we call ‘modern’. The Creative
City involved a reframing of this narrative at a moment when the
X. Gu (*)
School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University,
Caulfield East, VIC, Australia
e-mail: Xin.gu@monash.edu
M. K. Lim
School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University,
Cardiff, UK
e-mail: LimM2@cardiff.ac.uk
J. O’Connor
School of Creative Industries, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Department of Cultural Industry and Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University,
Shanghai, China
e-mail: justin.oconnor@unisa.edu.au
talent’ but with economic metrics and analytics, benchmarks and indexes
to back it up. Florida’s account focused on cultural infrastructure but more
in terms of up-market, trendy leisure amenities and the kinds of ‘lifestyle
districts’ that had proliferated in cities across the globe—celebrated in
newspaper travel sections and in-flight magazines. Florida embraced the
vibrancy of urban living—gays, bohemians, multi-ethnicity—but the urban
community it explicitly targeted was a professional-managerial class,
expanded to include artists, but in which ‘blue-collar’ workers (threats to
tolerance and creativity) were not so welcome. Finally, though Florida
eulogized the ‘soft infrastructure’ of creative urban landscapes, the creative
class would require housing, leisure and entertainment amenities, up-mar-
ket hospitality and retail, perhaps a gallery or two—and this required capi-
tal investment and development green-lights. These were enthusiastically
forthcoming, as witnessed by the tsunami of global capital-led urban trans-
formation over the last two decades, whose sheer scale and reach has now
outgrown the quaint term ‘gentrification’. In short, Florida’s ‘creative
class’—socially exclusive, consumption-oriented, capital- intensive, top-
down, and justified entirely by hard economic metrics—helped deliver
almost the exact opposite of that promised in the Creative City imaginary.
Developing new forms of cultural production able to take the place of
the old industries was a more difficult challenge; despite it being presented
as part of the Creative City package it tended to develop in a different
space. Of course, investing in a city’s cultural infrastructure, alongside the
lifestyle zones of the creative class, was essential for any creative industries
strategy; in practice such a strategy required more detailed research and
long-term investment than many cities were capable of providing. Cities
were privileged sites for the creative industries, as these worked within
agglomeration economies and complex ecosystems, where cultural con-
sumption and production would ideally form a virtuous circle. In practice,
however, the returns on consumption were quicker and bigger than those
gained from investing in a set of creative micro-businesses. Up-market
apartments and hospitality ventures drove out creative workspace and
affordable housing. In any event, in the age of neoliberal austerity, few
cities had the capacity for any forward-thinking long-term industrial strat-
egy. A de facto creative industry recipe emerged, which combined ele-
ments of Landry’s creative city and Florida’s creative class with the
‘start-up’ entrepreneurial ethos that now animated much of creative
industries thinking. This is what we call the ‘creativity bundle’.
The ‘creativity bundle’ has three aspects. First, the ‘creative entrepre-
neur’, based on long-standing images of the free creative artist, able to act
4 X. GU ET AL.
more one sought to approach, the more it receded into the distance. So
too the well-worn problems of identity—of what ‘creative’ could mean in
the context of an ‘Asia’ that represented a long-standing binary with ‘the
West’ but was also multiple, distributed and diverse. And for many cities
the familiar problem of resources—infrastructure, capital, knowledge,
technology. Were Asian cities to be pulled finally into orbit of Western
modernity, their cities replicated non-places of global consumption? Or
would we see another set of half-finished projects, the semi-ruins of
another failed modernity? Maybe some cities could take it and make it
their own, transform it in their image; or perfect it, run it higher and faster
than any western city had previously imaged?
Was the Creative City, then, about ‘elite dreaming’ (Ong 2011: 17),
local development coalitions seeking to tap into the global modern, or did
it speak to local communities about a new kind of involvement and valida-
tion, a new empowerment? Was ‘creative’ a further iteration of Euro-
American modernism or could it encompass the very different aesthetics
and cultures of Asia, embedded in cities with a very distinct historical tra-
jectory from that of the Western mythos? How were these fault-lines—
some old, some new—to be negotiated at a time when the Global North
itself is in some sort of disarray?
The chapters in this book cannot address all these questions, but will
mostly touch them obliquely through case studies. At the same time, their
Asian location necessarily introduces a new dimension to the Creative City
by locating them within the debates of globalization and cosmopolitan-
ism—both of these mediated by those ‘ubiquitous technologies’ increas-
ingly seen as a necessity in developing creative cities. However, the
tendency of the Creative City discourse to be dominated by economic
rationality and technology-led development cannot simply be equated to
the ‘neo-liberal’ approaches common in Western discourse. This book
suggests a ‘civic’ dimension be added. Many Asian cities are certainly
undergoing top-down planned culture-led urban regeneration, but this is
also developed in many cases via public and private partnerships, setting
new examples for developments in other cultural and creative sectors pre-
viously closed off from public participation. The creative city is an invita-
tion for citizens to renew their cosmopolitan imaginary, facilitated by the
emergence of embedded ubiquitous technologies: this need not always
break in favour of global corporations and authoritarian government, new
possibilies, new sites of contestation and imagination may also emerge.
As opposed to debates in the West on ‘third spaces’ or the ‘public
sphere’, the Asian creative city can be viewed as a new development phase,
6 X. GU ET AL.
breaking down. Michael Kho Lim looks at the relationship between the
Creative City and branding strategy, using an ‘imaginary’ global city in the
Philippines as a case study. He argues that the effective application of city
branding to Bonifacio Global City has transformed this space—an imag-
ined global city into something real. It has created an image and public
perception that it is indeed a city by projecting and acting as one when in
fact, this multi-hectare property does not hold a city status and is but a
financial and lifestyle district that forms a small part of a ‘real’ city. Xin Gu
looks at the shift from ‘creative cities’ to ‘media cities’, driven by city gov-
ernments and developers seeking high returns on investment. The shift
not only narrows the scope of the creative imaginary but results in highly
unequal, socially and economically unsustainable development. Gu
observes a tendency towards ‘technological utopianism’ or technology
solutionism in urban cultural policy. Exploring the evolution of new buzz-
words of media cities, smart cities and intelligent cities through the cre-
ative cities’ lens, this chapter is concerned with the acceleration of
neo-liberal governmentality in Asia. Finally, Deborah Stevenson’s chapter
considers the recent statements and initiatives of the UCCN and asks us to
rethink the creative city models in Asia. She suggests that the decision to
affiliate the UCCN directly with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
is posing a number of challenges for the Network and its member cities,
including those of Asia, not least of which is determining what sustain-
ability might mean for a scheme that implicitly encourages inter-city com-
petition and was formed primarily to support and showcase creativity and
the creative economy.
In Part II, Resisting Creative Cities, we look at one of the key fault-lines
of the Creative City, where the aspiration of the local development coali-
tion encounters the aspirations and anxieties of local communities. Janine
Santos questions the legitimacy of Creative City discourse as a ‘rhetorical
architecture’, as members of the Philippines’ formal and informal cultural
sectors negotiate the discourse given the urban landscapes’ material and
socio-economic conditions. Using the case of Baguio City, Santos explores
how urban poverty and the ‘crisis of values’ have to be considered in the
country’s creative cities re-imagination. Hyunjoon Shin’s chapter enriches
this discussion by challenging another key concept within the creative cit-
ies discourse, that of ‘creative class’. This chapter asks us to pay attention
to the different economic and social status of the creative class rather than
falling into a romanticisation trap of creative place making. Several papers
speak to this point. Zaki Habibi’s chapter offers an interesting case study
of a community-run creative collectives in George Town, Malaysia. The
8 X. GU ET AL.
References
Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books.
———. 2005. Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge.
Jacob, Jane. 1985. Cities and the Wealth of Nations. New York: Vintage.
Jessop, Bob, and Stijin Oosterlynck. 2008. Cultural Political Economy: On
Making the Cultural Turn without Falling into Soft Economic Sociology.
Geoforum 39 (3): 1155–1169.
Kong, Lily. 2014. Transnational Mobilities and the Making of Creative Cities.
Theory, Culture and Society 31 (7/8): 273–289.
Landry, Charles, and Franco Bianchini. 1995. The Creative City. London: Demos.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1992. The Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Ong, Aihwa. 2011. Introduction. In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the
Art of Being Global, ed. Roy Ananya and Aihwa Ong, 1–26. London: Blackwell.
Peck, Jamie. 2005. Struggling with the Creative Class. International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 29 (4): 740–770.
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