La planta G(s) del sistema de la figura es de primer orden, por lo que:

Notwithstanding these critiques, however, there are significant and under-represented problems with how the paradigm positions artists and culture more generally, with implications for how the discourse is used in cultural circles to legitimate cultural activity. One of the key criticisms of artists in relation to the creative city is their association with, if not links to, regeneration initiatives (Zukin, 1988; Rosler, 2010).

The link between artists and regeneration has led some to focus their ire on artists as much as Florida, in claims that cultural workers have little connection to economic development or job creation, but a lot to do with gentrification, driving up the cost of living, furnishing “bobo-friendly⁴⁹ amenities” (Malanga, 2004, n.p.), softening up the neighbourhood for capital development and diverting funding away from more deserving community funding, with the effect of polarising cultural and community groups (Atkinson and Easthope, 2009, p 71).

Similarly, criticisms of the role of creative workers in helping to develop and prop up new strains of capitalism have grown over the past decades (Zukin, 1988; Rosler, 2010), and are exemplified in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2002). These authors argue that it was partly the precarity or economic vulnerability of artists or cultural workers willing to support their own artistic

49 Bobo refers to bourgeois bohemian or bohemian bourgeois, made popular by David Brooks in 2000 to refer to liberal, tolerant and corporate groups, that reconcile “the Protestant work ethic and the bohemian ethic” (McGuigan, 2009, p. 293).

production, and demanding more flexible models of labour, which led to the “New Spirit of Capitalism” (ibid.). This movement was characterised by self-inscribed autonomy, self-regulation and entrepreneurialism, represented by the precarious model of creative labour of the “super-creative” classes (Florida, 2002, p. 9). The result of this was a social transformation and new “connexionist” or “network” variant of capital (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2002, p. 9), constituting a “third form of capitalism” (ibid., p.

4). This variant of capitalism, via the creative city, depends on precarity to make a profit, and produces and champions this model as a “justificatory regime” for its (capitalism’s) continued existence (ibid., p. 7).

Nevertheless, as suggested above, though artists have supported the creative city concept (Oakley, 2009a, p. 4), were active in the development of the New York loft movement and consequently the displacement of tenants in the 1970s (Zukin, 1988), have often been “pressed into service” by governments (Fanning, 2011, n.p.) and have even “produced according to command” (Rosler, 2010, p. 10), the exception is more typically the case. This was demonstrated in Hamburg and Toronto through anti-Florida urban development groups respectively called Not in Our Name and Creative Class Struggle as Chapter One outlined, comprising artists and other workers protesting at socially inequitable regeneration initiatives and the symbolic harnessing of the creative brand to advance a fundamentally private sector and exclusive initiative. As such, some have pointed out that artists themselves are caught up in and more adversely affected by the rises in living costs associated with “gentrification” (Rosler, 2010, p. 6) and are rarely the beneficiaries of such urban strategies (Rosler, 2010); that “being conscripted to the creative class has not yielded to artists the economic privilege that their presence is said to breed” (Daly, 2004, n.p.); that “arts trophy-focused expenditures and

strategies” place artists at the centre of key government and municipal decision-making, ascribing them far greater power than they in reality possess, but that equally that they are “unwitting, individualized dupes” of neoliberal competitive cities (Markusen, 2006, pp. 1935-1936); and conversely, that “artists and art businesses do have the ability to enhance local economies and transform neighbourhoods” without compromising communities but need the right “regulatory practices to address market forces”

(Stewart, 2008, p. 125).

Other problems with Florida’s creative classes are the circular logic of positing that

“artists are included in the creative class, as those to be attracted, but they're also positioned as the bait to attract themselves as part of that class” (Daly, 2004, n.p.); the professional disparity of the creative classes (as indicated by precarity versus stability);

and Florida’s lack of acknowledgment of the creative class’s potential to lead urban and social transformation rather than merely signify it (Markusen, 2006). Ironically, research also suggests the super-creative classes in the US “disproportionately work and live in suburbs” rather than cities, further undermining Florida’s core argument (ibid., p.

1923).

Despite criticisms of the relationship between the creative city and simulacra and spectacle (Harvey, 1990), the exclusivity of the creative classes (McGuigan, 2009) and the complicity of artists and designers in private developments in relation to gentrification and regeneration (Zukin, 1988; Rosler, 2010), however, little critical attention has been paid to Florida’s attitude to culture and cultural practitioners within the creative city. Florida harbours a negative romanticism towards artists, of whom by his own admission, he lacks understanding (Florida, 2007, p. 41). This is demonstrated

by his view of artists as essentially uninterested in money, mainly wanting to “hone their skills and do their art” and “if they can make money in the process, that’s wonderful” (Florida, 2002, p. 201). Essentially, this shows how Florida is “content to imagine that artists just want to practice, without much aspiration toward a living wage”

(Daly, 2004, n.p.), emphasising again the financially-disparate nature of the creative class.⁵⁰ More critically, this factor points to Florida’s lack of interest in the sustainability of creativity, i.e., how artists actually make a living and how a place can be creative without providing professional opportunities for creatives. Additionally, by focusing on the outcome rather than production or process of creativity, this approach lacks interest in the process of cultural production. As such, while it has been claimed that Florida is not “motivated at all by the usual concerns of cultural policy”

(McGuigan, 2009, p. 295), it is not clear that the usual concerns of cultural policy are so different from Florida’s work. This has implications for culture which will be further discussed in Chapter Seven.