Is making stuff creative?

There was a well-read article published in Wednesday’s Guardian asking ‘Why doesn’t Britain make things anymore?’. It’s an interesting attempt at explaining Britain’s de-industrialisation since the 1970s.

The celebration of Richard Florida’s ‘creative class’ comes in for a bashing, with Florida’s influential ideas seen as contributing to the decline of manufacturing. If post-industrial cities and regions can only succeed by  nurturing and attracting a group of ‘super-creatives’ then older industries that ‘make stuff’ are side-lined in favour of a new type of ‘knowledge economy’.

While Florida’s idea of creativity is so broad to include occupations like IT support staff, it is also narrowly conceived to exclude occupations like factory workers where people physically ‘make stuff’. From the article:

what really stuck out was how Florida fenced off creative work. You were either a knowledge worker or a factory worker – as if the other stuff didn’t require brains. And running through a lot of the knowledge-economy talk was a carelessness, bordering on contempt, for what people did.

If ‘making stuff’ has had its day in Britain then ‘creativity’ becomes not about ‘making’ thing, but about branding, marketing, conceptualising, and designing objects that are then manufactured in China.

There’s something unsettling about this celebration of ‘white collar creativity’ while at the same time skilled craftspeople and factory-workers are laid off and manufacturing industries move offshore.

The new creatives appropriation of old factory buildings appears to almost spite the declining industries. Embracing a post-industrial grittiness, graphic design firms and marketing agencies fill these buildings with the white noise of macbooks and clicking mice, replacing the polishing, sanding and hammering that once signalled the working day.

In thinking about opportunities for once again making things in Britain how can we join the strengths of the now well-developed ‘creative class’ with industries of physical manufacture? There’s reasons to think that there are still advantages to be had in both designing, branding and manufacturing goods in London (or Newcastle or Manchester). Can we expand Florida’s idea of creativity to  also include manufacturing?

It might not be ships we build, but there’s plenty of scope for small-scale manufacturing producing ordinary goods for local markets; furniture, bicycles, kitchenware, and clothing. Urban-based industries are closer to their consumer markets and so more responsive to changing trends and needs. With people developing making and crafting skills, there are opportunities for further invention and innovation across the manufacturing sector.

At the higher-tech end, there’s also synergies to be had in closing the distance between design and manufacture. We might speed up processes of innovation by having design, making, marketing and retailing in close proximity. These ‘craft-like’ workshop producers might not be part of Florida’s celebrated class, but perhaps they’re the real creatives of the future.

More mixed ‘mixed use’

Including productive industrial functions alongside the retail and consumption activities that are conventionally part of ‘mixed-use’ urban development might offer an alternative to upscale, and socially-exclusive inner-city regeneration.

Jane Jacobs is a dependable starting point for conversations about cities. Her ideas remain remarkably prescient and continue to inspire debate fifty years after the publication of her Death and Life of Great American Cities. Is her urban ideal a vaguely conservative, motherhood and apple pie prescription for cities that might be contrasted with a ‘Walhol-cool’ urban vision? Or is she a true subversive that breaks with convention:

“The manifesto set out in Death and Life is far from being an orthodoxy in need of retirement or even reform: it’s still an insurgency, fighting to be realised in cities across the world. Jane Jacobs is still the agitator in the square”

I’m generally in accord with John Houghton’s recent defence of the continuing radical nature of Jacobs’ thinking. Despite new urbanism, most of us are still not living in a Jane Jacobs-inspired city. Jacobs has, nevertheless been influential, and her ideas form the basis of the urban aesthetic celebrated by the likes of Monocle, and realised in the renaissance of downtowns throughout the wealthy world.

Sharon Zukin has, since the 1980s, offered a critical take on this inner-city revival. In her most recent book, Naked City she takes issue with Jacobs’ ideas which she sees as being co-opted by moneyed interests to justify sterile upscale development that destroys the ‘authentic’ city.

Image credit: Flick user La Citta Vitta

For Zukin, Jacobs’ thinking has become the new orthodoxy, with mixed use neighbourhoods and the idea of the ‘urban village’ now the new normal. She argues that despite mixed use, small blocks, mixes of old and new buildings – all the things that Jacobs argued for – we’re still not getting good urbanism.

I’m not going to do Zukin’s sophisticated argument justice here, but the gist is that the authentic city (she’s referring specifically to New York), is being lost in the conversion to chain stores, middle-class cappuccino culture and lofts. What she calls ‘authentic’ is an urban mix of social groups and classes; neighbourhoods where residents of diverse incomes and backgrounds can put down roots, start small businesses and remain in place.

Zukin’s problem with Jacob’s vision of the good city is that it “encourages mixed uses but not a mixed population”. While I agree that recent upscale inner-city development has displaced a previously more mixed population, I don’t think the solution lies in abandoning Jacobs’ mixed use ideal. Perhaps instead, we need to take Jacob’s manifesto one step further.

Most of what passes as ‘mixed use’ today is residential apartments, commercial offices and ground floor retail, restaurants, cafes and hotels. What is missing, and what Jacobs might insist on, are spaces of productive industry. The problem is not mixed use, but that conventional mixed use isn’t really mixed enough. If we put offices and cafes together with car repair shops and sign writers, kitchen joinery workshops and furniture factories next to hotels and restaurants, perhaps then we’d also get the social mix that Zukin calls for.

While advocating inner-city industry might easily result in boutique craft production and little real social mix, smart planning policies and suitable built form could ensure a more complex diversity of productive activities on inner-city streets.

It’s not difficult to imagine a more socially-mixed version of mixed use; one where white-collar and blue-collar jobs sit side by side. At present, mixed use is often exclusively high end; offices of well-paid ‘knowledge workers’ with restaurants and shops downstairs.

Zukin’s ‘authenticity’ might be realised not by blaming the urban village ideal, but by understanding that this ideal needs a mix of production activities alongside housing and consumption functions. This means bringing back the often hidden activities of material industrial work into the prime spaces of the inner-city.