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Glasgow’s Merchant City:
An Artist Led Property Strategy
Neil Gray
“Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural
and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development towards
absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into
its own peculiar décor.”
Guy Debord1
In Ian Sinclair’s ‘Downriver’, early indications of the gentrification
of London’s Docklands arrived with the wave of bohemians, squatters, and
artists who descended on the area to take advantage of the spacious, dilapidated
buildings and cheap rents: “When artists walk through a wilderness in epiphanous ‘bliss-out’,
fiddling with polaroids, grim estate agents dog their footsteps. And when the
first gay squatters arrive, bearing futons…the agents smile, and reach for
their cheque books. The visionary reclaims the ground of his nightmares only
to present it, framed in Perspex, to the Docklands Development Board”2.
Last year, from the window of my flat in the Gallowgate (Glasgow’s near
east end), I looked on as a group of artists moved into a disused, shuttered
shop to set up a temporary gallery for the duration of the Glasgow International
Festival of Contemporary Visual Art (Gi). When I asked one of the artists how
they had ‘found’ the space, she replied that a representative from
Glasgow City Council had led the artists on a tour of disused shops in the ‘edge
of success’ area around Trongate and the Gallowgate offering free leases
for the duration of the festival. The Gi brochure alluded to this process – as
well as borrowing carelessly from urban frontier language3 – by suggesting
gallery visitors embark on a ‘cultural safari’ in both celebrated arts
venues, and, “in ‘found’ or temporary locations throughout the
city”. From a situation where artists and squatters had once led gentrification,
albeit unconsciously, an instrumental policy framework is now firmly in place
whereby city officials do the leading as they seek to enhance property values
through the cultural capital of artists and the creation of a ‘creative
cluster’ in the area now re-branded as the ‘Merchant City’.
As Neil Smith, and many other critical urban theorists, have noted, the ad-hoc,
almost accidental nature of gentrification that Ruth Glass had in mind when she
first coined the term in 19644 has now been replaced by gentrification as a global
urban phenomenon; a (once) productive pillar of investment capitalism,
that weaves together global financial markets with a phalanx of real-estate developers,
local merchants, property agents and brand name retailers – all lubricated
by generous state subsidy5. As Sinclair has observed, the potential of ‘the
arts’ to rehabilitate ‘unproductive’ urban space, and stimulate
the property market has long been established by gimlet-eyed developers. In this
context it should come as no surprise that Gi are preparing for re-location to ‘Trongate
103’ – a much-vaunted proposed ‘hub’ for the diverse arts
community in the Merchant City area – alongside a host of other arts organisations
in the area. Trongate 103 (which names itself to let us know it is a place)
is a symbolic marker of city boosters’ attempts to foster a ‘cultural
quarter’ in the Merchant City; a city centre area which has seen significant
gentrification and displacement since the ’60s, when clothing manufacture,
warehousing and the regional fruit market were the main activities. Despite the
failed promises of cultural quarters in London6, Dublin7 and Liverpool8, the
area has now been designated as the prime site to ‘pump-prime’ Glasgow’s
creative industries9 and bolster the city’s ‘Glasgow: Scotland With
Style’ marketing strategy. The policy of subsidising arts space must be
seen in the context of an overall strategy by the City Council to revalorise
property values and land rents in the Merchant City area through the City Council’s
unambiguous ‘Artist Led Property Strategy’10.
‘The Merchant City Five Year Action Plan 2007-12’, the strategic document
for the development of the Merchant City area, inevitably pays homage to Richard
Florida and his ubiquitous, but increasingly shopworn ‘creative city’ thesis11.
Florida, a self-confessed product of the ’60s, who always liked to consider
himself “a bit edgy or cool”12, is responsible for much of the hyperbole
surrounding the potential of the ‘creative industries’ to ‘regenerate’ the
post-industrial city. Florida’s thesis, outlined in detail later in this
article, is that regional economic growth is powered by creative people. These
creative people prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and open to new ideas. Place in
this matrix is thus the ‘central organising unit’ of the economy, the
key lever in attracting talented and creative people to a city region. The task
of the city region is then to increase its place-attractiveness (understood through
such measures as ‘gay’ and ‘bohemian’ indexes) so that it
can compete for the services of the ‘creative classes’, who will then
generate economic value through their creativity, thus ensuring the city
will achieve ‘winner’ status in something called the ‘creative
economy’.
As urban geographer Jamie Peck has noted, the Florida thesis, despite its ‘sophomore
sociology’ has provoked a reaction that has bordered on the ecstatic in
urban policymaking communities around the world13. It is hardly revelatory that
Glasgow’s city development agencies reference what Peck calls Florida’s “creativity
fix”; Florida’s thesis, as Peck notes, has been artfully crafted for
the contemporary political-economic landscape: “In this neo-liberalised
urban terrain, a receptive and wide audience has effectively been pre-constituted
for the kinds of market-reinforcing, property- and promotion-based, growth-oriented,
and gentrification-friendly policies that have been repackaged under the creativity
rubric”14. Despite increasing skepticism around the hyperbolic claims of
Florida, the creative city policy framework is still being applied by countless
slow-learning global cities worldwide. Florida himself acknowledges the ‘creative
classes’ as the vanguard of gentrification, displacement and inequality – depending
as they do on an “extensive venture capital system” on the one hand,
and on the other, an increasingly impoverished and insecure service class as
their “supporting infrastructure”15, yet Glasgow City Council seem
oblivious, or unconcerned. However, rather than have us submit to boosterist
overstatement, Peck usefully contextualises the competitive creative economy
mantra as the afterbirth of a wave of self-defeating entrepreneurial urban strategies
which preceded it.
The Production Of ‘Place’: An Economy Of Appearances.
Peck’s materially-grounded critical analysis emerges from theoretical foundations
laid down by David Harvey, particularly his seminal analysis of the paradigmatic
shift from a managerial mode of urban government – nominally associated
with ‘thick’ government, redistribution, and the provision of services
and amenities to local citizens – to an entrepreneurial market-led
mode of governance, firmly pre-occupied with facilitating economic growth for
capital16. The broad context for this shift is the transition from ‘Fordist-Keynesian’ modes
of accumulation to new rounds of what Harvey characterised as ‘flexible
accumulation’ – a ‘spatial fix’, engineered in response to
the early ’70s crisis of over-accumulation, characteristised by de-industrialisation,
de-unionsiation, accelerated international capital flows (globalisation), privatisation,
and the exploitation of an increasingly ‘flexible’ and geographically
diverse labour market. In this formation, space is annihilated by time, and economies
of scope vanquish economies of scale. As neo-liberal modes of flexible
accumulation have gained hegemonic status over the collective bargaining powers
of nation-states, so the matter of inward investment has increasingly taken the
form of negotiations between international finance capital and local city powers.
Lacking the power derived from large-scale, planned state investment in regional
economies, inter-city competition for global investment capital has intensified
in parallel. As a consequence of this, city governments are increasingly obliged
to take an entrepreneurial turn, and act as active state partners in an
attempt to lubricate capitalist investment in the city.
In a fiercely competitive inter-urban environment, rather than service the needs
of its citizens on a universal basis, the key issue for the entrepreneurial city
is the provision of “a good business climate”17. In order to obtain
this business-friendly regime, cities are forced into a highly competitive “race
to the bottom”; a “zero-sum” game routing scarce public resources
(land and assets), and driving down labour conditions, so that increasingly benevolent
measures can be offered to entice investment capital. Unsurprisingly, these booster
activities only accentuate and diversify the geographical mobility and flexibility
of capital, forcing urban governments to produce ever more competitive policy
cocktails, and subsuming policy ever more within the groove of uneven capitalist
development: “Indeed, to the degree that inter-urban competition becomes
more potent, it will almost certainly operate as an external coercive power over
individual cities to bring them closer into line with the discipline and logic
of capitalist development”18. Ultimately, the end game is capitulation to
market forces: under the “external coercive power” of neo-liberalism,
even the most resolute of city governments, “find themselves, in the end,
playing the capitalist game and performing as agents of discipline for the very
processes they are trying to resist”19.
The discriminatory deployment by the nation-state of nominally Keynesian measures,
has led the entrepreneurial city to concentrate on the political economy of place rather
than territory. By territory, Harvey means the type of economic and infrastructural
projects (housing, education, etc.) designed to improve the universal conditions
of living and working in a particular jurisdiction. The construction of place,
however (shopping malls, sports stadia, conference centres, iconic buildings, ‘cultural
quarters’, etc.) is cultivated through public-private partnership, and designed,
in large part, to enhance and upgrade the image of the city – primarily
for the investor and the tourist. In this model, city branding, place marketing,
and the production of urban spectacle take precedence over the amelioration of
general, structural conditions in the wider terrain. Despite thoroughly discredited
promises of Thatcherite ‘trickle-down’, urban spectacle and an uneven
and limited focus on place, typically functions to divert attention from broader
problems in the overall economy and to mask the brutal demarcations between winners
and losers, and the included and excluded in the neo-liberal city. As Peck argues,
it is precisely in this unequal policy nexus that Florida’s feel-good ‘creativity
fix’ has found a willing audience amongst urban policy makers.
Moving Up The Value Chain? The Art Of Gentrification
A “key policy message” from the Glasgow Economic Forum (a partnership
body between Scottish Enterprise Glasgow and Glasgow City Council responsible
for overseeing economic regeneration and development in the city) is that cities
and city regions are the key drivers of economic growth, and that investment
must be located in priority locations and industries within the metropolitan
core. Glossing over the debilitating national and regional context outlined in
Harvey’s thesis, and neglecting to offer any real challenge to the hegemony
of neoliberalism, the Forum instead, in typical booster form, talks up the “positive
policy environment” for entrepreneurial cities20. With an emphasis on place-specific,
inevitably competitive inter-urban policy, a stated ambition of the Forum is
to attract tourist revenue and to attain ‘Top UK destination status’.
In a typical formulation from the Florida-inspired creative city handbook, the
Forum aspires to “develop, retain and attract people and talent” by “building
on Glasgow’s distinctive diversity and city ‘buzz’, increasing
its place attractiveness, and developing the city’s cultural and leisure
offer”21. Thus, one of the key themes in the Forum’s ‘A Step Change
For Glasgow: Action Plan To 2013’ is to develop the city center as a retail
and cultural environment. A key component of this plan is to develop the Merchant
City as a ‘cultural quarter’ through the ‘Merchant City Action
Plan 2007-2012’ and an ‘Arts Property Strategy’22.
The Merchant City Initiative (whose key partners are also Scottish Enterprise
Glasgow and Glasgow City Council) is the agency charged with delivering the Merchant
City Five Year Action Plan and overseeing the distribution of a programme of
grants to renovate the built environment in the area through the Townscape Heritage
Initiative (THI) – funded by Glasgow City Council, Scottish Enterprise Glasgow,
and the Heritage Lottery Fund (£3 million of subsidy grants have been targeted
at owners of historic buildings within the Merchant City). The plan’s manifesto
is a Floridian utopia: “To create an area of design and inspirational excellence,
individuality and style – a unique urban quarter where the cultural and
artistic can mix with retail and residential to generate energy, where quality
architecture re-enforces the sense of place and creates activity and where boldness
and innovation is positively encouraged at the expense of mediocrity”23.
Ten million pounds of ‘public realm’ beautification works have already
been committed by Glasgow City Council to help encourage this project, with a
list of sixty-five physical developments either committed, proposed or in discussion
at 200624. The ultimate aim is to make the Merchant City (through strategic marketing
and pump-priming investment strategies), “Glasgow’s foremost mixed-use,
creative, cultural, business and residential quarter”25. The mantra is ‘Glasgow:
Scotland with Style’…ad infintum.
Central to plans for lifting the Merchant City and Glasgow “indisputably
into a UK league of creative cities”26, is the creation of a ‘creative
cluster’ around the Trongate area: “The economic and social impact
of the presence of the arts community and the cluster effect of a successful ‘arts
quarter’ is one of the central tenets of the Council’s recent Five
Year Action Plan for the regeneration of the Merchant City, Trongate and Glasgow
Cross area”27. By “harnessing” Glasgow’s creative and cultural
energy, the initiative aims to position the area as the ‘natural’ home
for these “new explorative and innovative developments in technology and
attitude”28. Key to these plans are the proposed creation of a “business
centre for cultural and creative industries” at the City Council’s
cleansing Depot on Bell Street, or in King Street (South Block); the establishment
of an artists studio/gallery ‘hub’ at ‘Trongate 103’ in King
Street (North Block); and the renovation of the Briggait building as the new
home for the Glasgow Sculpture Studios and Workers And Artists Studio Provision
Scotland (WASPS). These developments are designed to consolidate the ‘arts
quarter’, alongside current institutions such as The Tron Theatre, The Ramshorn
Theatre, St.Andrews In The Square and The Gallery Of Modern Art (GoMA), and proposed
developments such as the Bathhouse project. The £8.5 million Trongate 103,
perhaps the centrepiece of the strategy, will ‘consolidate’ several
arts organisations currently housed in City Council property nearby, including
Glasgow Independent Studio, Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow Media Access centre
(GMAC), Sharmanka, Project Ability, Street Level Photoworks, Transmission Gallery,
and the Russian Cultural Center. Gi will take up residence in June this year.
The long-term rationale for the ‘Artist Led Property Strategy’ is made
perfectly clear in the City Council’s ‘Housing the Visual Arts in Glasgow’s
Merchant City’ strategy report. By consolidating arts organisations in single
premises, the City Council hopes to capitalise on the assumed ability of the
arts to thrive in “edge of success” urban areas like the Trongate and
Glasgow Cross. The arts are seen as a potentially “major regenerative tool” for
the raising of general perceptions and confidence in the area’s future potential.
Whose confidence needs to be raised, and what kind of ‘future potential’ is
envisioned, are of course key questions – the consolidation of a “strategic
partnership for the arts” is considered central to the raising of “external
investment confidence” for the proposed development of the adjacent St.Enoch
East car park site into a cinema complex, incorporating car parking, by Stannifer
Developments.29 Meanwhile, the pursuit of an arts strategy that consolidates
different organisations chimes with the increasingly instrumental face
of National Lottery funding. The Lottery has intimated that it will not entertain
large capital funding for Glasgow-based arts organisations unless the city produces
a strategic plan for housing the visual arts30.
Further, in light of the austere and worsening fiscal climate, and the collapse
of commercial property markets in particular, and in line with Glasgow City Council’s
policy to generate revenue from the sale of publicly held land and assets, the
Council and the Merchant City Initiative intend to promote the area’s ‘renewal’ through
the refurbishment and pro-active marketing of a number of City Council properties
in the Merchant City. Stephen Purcell, leader of the City Council, recently clarified
the City’s position when he made clear at the State of the City economy
conference that ‘Team Glasgow’ was still very much open for business: “The
first thing that all public bodies, including my own Council, must do, is to
examine where we can help business by being more flexible and willing to do things
differently. This is no time for unnecessary rules and processes; this is a time
to do everything we can to help”31. As part of this ‘flexible’ approach,
Purcell ensured the business community that it can expect more “slack” from
the Council in terms of ‘land disposal’ and leasing of Council property.
Thus, the Merchant City Initiative website (in its ‘Trade into Trongate’ section)
assures readers and investors that these “freshly shelled out retail spaces” will
have very “flexible” and “attractive” lease terms32. A large
percentage of the arts organisations included in the creative cluster rubric
are currently housed in separate council-owned buildings, which are leased at
what were considered “below market values”; by pulling these groups
together, the City Council intend to capitalize on the vacant properties, or,
as they put it, to “rationalise property aspirations with available space”.
Agglomerating these varied arts and cultural groups into one space will also
assist the “freeing up of other surplus property for re-use and potential
conversion/sale, thus increasing Capital receipts to the Council and removing
property from its portfolio which has ceased to perform in an economic manner”33
[my emphasis].
The transition from use value, which may not perform ‘in an economic manner’,
to exchange value, which by definition must add economic ‘value’, is
of course a central imperative of growth-orientated capitalism – an imperative,
which by its very nature leads to monopoly. While the Housing The Visual Arts
Strategy, talks up the benefits of a sustainable, secure, ‘arts quarter’,
the effects of the ‘arts led property strategy’ are manifested throughout
the Merchant City. A look through Glasgow City Council’s inventory of physical
developments in the Merchant City area, dated 2006, shows an overwhelming preponderance
of high-grade private residential, retail and office developments34. Despite
oft-cited Floridian claims for plurality and diversity in the residential make
up of ‘creative cities’, the Merchant City, is already geared towards
the retail and housing consumption demands of middle-class taste – this
strategy is likely to be intensified rather than mitigated in the coming years.
Out of sixty-five proposed or confirmed developments, only two proposals involve
social housing organisations (both of them in Duke Street it should be noted,
far away from the ‘arts quarter’ epicentre). Meanwhile, arts organisations
and the ‘cultural quarter’, concentrated in the newly branded ‘lower
east side’ of the Merchant City, despite the hyperbole, play a very small,
increasingly agglomerated, and place-specific part in the development of the
Merchant City overall. Indeed, only five of the new developments could be said
to involve arts or cultural organisations, and two of these developments are
dedicated to rationalising a diverse mix of existing cultural organisations into
single premises.
The Art Of Rent: The Manhattan Model
“Certainly artists are only the forerunners of high-income, youngish, non-minority
residents. But after the artists, a rising tide of high-rents and condominium
conversions seems unstoppable.”
Sharon Zukin, 198235
Artists have been used for some time now as ‘urban pioneers’ for
canny developers in the property market. David Panos of ‘The London Particular’ (an
artists group charting the gentrification of Shoreditch and the east end of London
through film-making and urban theory) has observed how the London Development
Agency (LDA) in its ‘Creative London’ programme had formalised, through ‘The
Creative Space Agency’36, what had often been an ad-hoc relationship between
artists and developers, whereby space was leased to artists at rent-free or peppercorn
rents for prescribed periods. The Creative Space Agency now acts as a pro-active broker
between artists and landlords whose property lies empty. As Panos acknowledges,
this strategy is always likely to appeal to artists in search of cheap and spacious
premises. But for the developers and city agencies the agenda is quite different.
Attracting seemingly upwardly mobile artists to ‘edge of success’ urban
areas simultaneously helps rehabilitate and increase the property values of ‘uneconomic’ premises
and changes the perception of ‘run down’ areas. Meanwhile, as Panos
notes, government intervention aids a ‘soft’ policing and regulation
of space, discouraging squatters (in the London context) and vandalism, as the
artists, in effect, act as “free security guards” for the properties.
Moreover, with increasing state intervention, arts projects can be “vetted,
behaviour regulated, and the process brought under centralised control”37.
For Panos, The Creative Space Agency makes clear the exceptional, instrumental role
of art in the gentrification-led economy. But if the celebrated example of Shoreditch
is anything to go by, the fostering of a ‘creative hub’in the Merchant
City will only have a negative effect on local, working-class residents. The
net effect of Shoreditch’s transformation into a cultural hub, according
to Panos, “has been to escalate property prices out of the reach of all
but a privileged minority, and drive up the overall cost of living”38.
The Shoreditch example, has an exemplary precursor in the artist led gentrification
of Lower east Manhattan. Sharon Zukin’s ‘Loft Living: Culture and Capital
in Urban Change’ (1988), captured how New York City became “both the
harbinger and the model of loft living”39. By charting the conversion of
industrial and light industrial manufacturing units to spacious ‘loft-living’ style
residential apartments, the book proved seminal in marking the transition from
a manufacturing to a ‘post-industrial’ service economy in Manhattan.
For artists in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, Manhattan lofts were
often merely a question of marginal utility: cheap rooms and plenty of space.
Yet these lofts, and the arts production that took place within them, played
a crucial role, both symbolically and materially, in an embryonic arts led property
market. Zukin argued, convincingly as it turned out, that the concern for loft
style apartments as objects of consumption reflected changes in patterns of consumption
in the ’60s: a more active appreciation of the arts; and a nostalgia for
the aesthetic of the industrial machine age. As Manhattan-based artists such
as Robert Rauschenberg began to hit it big their celebrity increasingly attracted
the attention of the mainstream – as did the way they lived. On the one
hand, artist’s lofts were vicariously identified with a sense of adventure
or bohemian ambience. On the other hand, the massive ‘raw’ spaces of
the industrial lofts began to exert a powerful aesthetic appeal. By choosing
a return to an industrial aesthetic, the return to the city was a return to the
industrial past, but this time a more manageable past. Lofts thus became
both the site and symbol of the transition to a service sector economy, concretising
the process of de-industrialisation: “Lofts that are converted to residential
use can no longer be used as machine-shops, printing plants, dress factories,
or die-cutting operations. The residential conversion of manufacturing lofts
confirms and symbolises the death of the urban manufacturing centre”40.
In Manhattan, the arts’ presence was crucial in helping to destabilise existing
uses and redefine the terrain for new markets of middle-class consumption – “as
patrons, public, and, ultimately tenants”41. As the art market developed
around the bohemian atmosphere of the lofts, and art institutions sprang up to
support the market (making art both a career and an investment opportunity) an
appreciation of ‘the arts’, and historic preservation, went hand in
hand to preserve loft apartments and the artists within them. State subsidies
for artists in New York during the ’60s and ’70s allowed artists to
become major producers in the emerging arts economy. But by attracting a new
vanguard of middle-class art consumers, and those ‘enchanted’ by the
raw (but now domesticated) spaces of the industrial past, arts producers unwittingly
enhanced property values to such an extent that those people who tried to live
off artwork or performance were effectively priced out of the market through
gentrification. The succession of uses and users over time is directly analogous
with typical processes of gentrification: “A market of small manufacturers
slowly yields to demand for space by artists and artisans and middle- to upper
middle-class residents. The sequence of users converts loft space to increasingly ‘better’ use
and, in so doing, alters the quintessential form in which that space is used”42.
The concentration of artists and a bohemian ‘artistic community’ offered
middle- and upper-middle class consumers ready made ‘cultural capital’,
and made it possible for developers to charge escalating rates for housing in ‘edgy’ areas
like SoHo. Up until this point, artists, benefiting from subsidy, had little
reason to interfere in market forces, but sooner or later, as Zukin has pointed
out, a contradiction arises between the production of art, and developing higher-rent
uses: “At this point real estate development reasserts its dominance over
the arts economy”43. After the arts’ presence revalorised property
prices in areas of the city like SoHo to the extent that artists could no longer
afford to live there, they simply moved on to another ‘run-down’ area
to establish the same process of gentrification and displacement elsewhere. Subsidy
for the arts in NY, as Zukin pointed out, soon became, by proxy, a subsidy for
the property market: “Regarded in the short run as a bonanza for creative
and performing artists, production subsidies for arts infrastructure proved,
in the long run, to be a cornucopia for housing developers”44.
Gentrification may appear – and be represented as – a visible sign
of economic growth by local state officials, tourists, and business elites, but,
as Zukin argued, what is really at stake is “…the reconquest of the
downtown for high-class users and high-rent uses”45. Manhattan was not only
the harbinger of ‘loft living’ and industrial conversion, it was also
a seminal precursor of artist-led gentrification – now writ large as global
urban strategy. By the 1990s, according to Zukin, no matter how restricted the
definition of art that was implied, or how few artists were included, or how
little the benefits extended to all social groups, “making a place for art
in the city”, went along with establishing a “marketable identity” for
the city as a whole46.
The Creative Classes, Or, Middle Class Masquerade?
“In essence, Florida’s advice is what savvy consultants might tell
a brand trying to boost market share: Attract lots of young people, project an
image of authenticity, and generate buzz. It works for TV networks, soft drinks
and cars. Why not cities?”
Adweek47
Richard Florida argues that place is now the “central organising unit” of
the so-called creative economy. In contrast, to those who argue that people travel
and migrate in search of jobs, not places, Florida argues that the gathering
of people, companies and resources into particular places with particular qualities
generates economic growth: “Places provide the ‘thick’ and fluid
labor markets that help match people to jobs. Places support the ‘mating
markets’ that enable people to find life partners. Places provide the ecosystems
that harness human creativity and turn it into economic value”48. Believing
that the somewhat nebulously defined ‘creative classes’ are the prime
movers in this new economy, Florida’s theory decrees that regional economic
growth is driven by the location choices of creative people – the holders
of creative capital – who prefer places that reflect their own supposedly
open, diverse and pluralistic values. Members of the creative class, come in
all shapes, sizes, colours and lifestyles. Therefore, to be truly successful,
cities and regions, if they are to obtain a significant ‘edge’ in the
new economy, must create and foster places which will attract their diverse
and divergent lifestyle needs. This, after all, is a class whose economic function,
Florida breathlessly declares, makes them “the natural – indeed the
only possible – leaders of twenty-first-century society”49.
Florida’s ‘big story’ is that the creative class is “the
great emerging class of our time”50. Broadly agreeing with Peter Drucker’s ‘knowledge
economy’ thesis (which argues that knowledge is the basic human resource),
Florida claims to make an advance on Drucker by arguing that creativity – and
the creation of ‘useful’ new forms derived from knowledge – is
the key driver of the economy. The philosophical background for Florida’s
thesis emerges from a right-wing school of economic thought called ‘New
Growth Theory’. The theory, as espoused by Paul Romer, whom Florida approvingly
cites in ‘The Rise Of The Creative Classes’, assigns a central role
to creativity or ‘idea generation’ as a means for creating economic
surplus value: “We are not used to thinking of ideas as economic goods […]
but they are surely the most significant ones that we produce. The only way for
us to produce more economic value – and thereby generate economic growth – is
to find ever more valuable ways to make use of the objects available to us”51.
Romer argues that ideas are especially “potent goods” because a good
idea can be used over and over, and in fact grows in value the more it is used,
offering increasing returns. Florida, being a good entrepreneurial type, accepts
Romer’s instrumentalist, and thoroughly market-orientated conflation of
ideas and economic growth, but gives it a feel-good creativity spin: the
creative class, as defined by Florida, is made up of people who “add economic
value through their creativity”52. With creativity now instrumentally wedded
to productivity and growth, and with place as the ‘key organising unit’ of
the economy, Florida argues, those cities and regions that attract and retain
the creative class are most likely to be the ‘economic winners’ in
a framework of inter-urban competition for talent and growth.
But was this ever true? And who are the creative classes, anyway? The creative
class is made up of a ‘creative core’, according to Florida’s
classification, which is comprised of scientists, engineers, university professors,
poets, novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers and architects, as
well as the ‘thought leadership’ of our society, including non-fiction
writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts and other
opinion-makers. The creative-core group is supported by a phalanx of ‘creative
professionals’ who work in a diverse range of ‘knowledge intensive’ industries
such as high-tech, financial services, the legal and health care professions,
and business management. While Marx understood class in terms of conflicting
class interests dominated by uneven power relations, Florida, a keen supporter
of growth-based free market economics, is keen to stress that the creative classes
will work with rather than against the prevailing economic system: “The
Creative Class has made certain symbols of non-conformity acceptable – even
conformist. It is in this sense that they represent not an alternative group
but a new and increasingly norm-setting mainstream of society”53. In this
sense Florida argues capitalism has pulled off a major coup, ‘capturing’ people
who would have been seen as “bizarre mavericks” operating on the fringes
of bohemia, and “setting them at the very heart of the process of innovation
and growth”54.
Florida’s claim that the so-called creative class make up the ‘mainstream’ of
society is deeply contentious. In Glasgow, for instance, around nine out of ten
of the city’s jobs are in the service sector, which as the Glasgow City
Council Plan (2008-2011) acknowledges, is characterised by a preponderance of
lower paid and lower skilled services. Meanwhile, about a quarter of Glasgow’s
working age population are on benefits and outside the workforce altogether.
There is no point in arguing either that Glasgow’s benefit claimants and
low-paid service sector workers can be rescued by “the leaders of twenty-first-century
society”; for beneath Florida’s hyperbole a disturbing acknowledgement
is made: “There is a strong correlation between inequality and creativity:
the more creative a region is, the more inequality you will find there”55.
As Florida admits, this inequality has “insidious dimensions”. The
service economy ultimately operates as the “support infrastructure” of
the creative age: “Members of the Creative Class, because they are well
compensated and work long and unpredictable hours, require a growing pool of
low end service workers to take care of them and do their chores”56
[my italics]. Florida himself suggests that the growth of this burgeoning, increasingly
precarious service class must be understood alongside the rise of the
creative class. Moreover, another troubling element arises in Florida’s
thesis. In his tabulation of the classes (which includes ‘the agricultural
class’, ‘the service class’, ‘the working class’, ‘the
creative class’, and a subset, ‘the super-creative core’) traditional
class actors – the middle and upper classes – are entirely absent.
Could it be that their new homes are in the upper echelons of the ‘creative
class’ and the ‘super-creative core’?
Like the ideologues of New Labour, the creative classes are a class that believes
in the ‘values’ of meritocracy: work hard, be rewarded; Arbecht
Macht Frei. In interviews that Florida conducted with the ‘creative
class’, he came across people, “who no longer defined themselves mainly
by the amount of money they make or their position in a financially delineated
order”; rather, they were “…valiantly trying to defy an economic
class into which they were born”57. This is particularly true of the young
descendants of the truly wealthy, says Florida, “who frequently describe
themselves as just ‘ordinary’ creative people…”58. Like the
Blairite myth of a classless society, however, disavowal stalks the narrative.
As Terry Eagleton, paraphrasing Marx, has tellingly observed, the division of
labour between mental and manual labour marks the first point of ideology: “Now
thought can begin to fantasize that it is outside of material reality, just because
there is a material sense in which it actually is”59. Yet Florida himself,
frequently acknowledges his own complicity – and the complicity of the creative
classes as a whole – in uneven power relations: “I have, in short,
just about all the servants of an English Lord except that they’re not mine,
and they don’t live below stairs; they are part-time and distributed in
the local area”. He admits that meritocracy has its ‘dark side’: “By
papering over the cause of cultural and educational advantage, meritocracy may
subtly perpetuate the very prejudices it claims to renounce”60. Moreover,
he concedes that the influx of affluent creative class types into working class
areas doesn’t necessarily create more opportunities for local residents: “Instead,
all it usually does is raise their rents and perhaps create more low end service
jobs for waiters, house-cleaners and the like”61. The creative class may wish for
diversity in lifestyle choices and social classes, but as Florida admits: “to
some degree it is a diversity of elites, limited to highly educated, creative
people”62. Florida, in fact, always seems to be falling behind the ramifications
of his own theory – that any growth in the ‘creative class’ is
far outstripped by the concomitant growth of an increasingly insecure service
class.
Governing Through Crime: Managing ‘The Dark Side’
“The city-as-landscape does not encourage the formation of community or
of urbanism as a way of life; rather it encourages the maintenance of surfaces,
the promotion of order at the expense of lived social relations, and the ability
to look past distress, destruction, and marginalisation to see only the good
life (for some) and to turn a blind eye towards what that life is constructed
out of”.
D Mitchell63
Florida states the obvious when he acknowledges a ‘dark side’ to
the ‘meritocracy’ script of the creative class. The cultures of cities,
as Zukin points out, are always framed within a symbolic language of exclusion
and entitlement: “The look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what – and
who – should be visible and what should not, on the concepts of order and
disorder, and on the use of aesthetic power. In this primal sense, the city has
always had a symbolic economy.”64. Despite Florida-style references to “Glasgow’s
distinctive diversity and city ‘buzz’”, the Merchant City is a
characteristically punitive, selective and heavily policed neo-liberal urban
terrain. As urban theorist Mike Davis commented in the context of ‘fortress
LA’, while architects and city planners may be oblivious to how the built
environment contributes to segregation – designated pariah groups read the
meaning immediately65. The Merchant City, as part of the heavily surveilled city
center, has accessed the full panoply of human, physical and technological methods
to regulate behaviour on its streets. These measures include the City Centre
Enhanced Policing plan, Strathclyde Police’s ‘Stop and Search’ policy
which saw 129,563 searches last year. While figures for the Merchant City in
particular are difficult to disaggregate from city center figures generally,
I personally witnessed an excessive spate of stop and search incidents, targeting
beggars and the homeless, in the ‘edge of success’ frontier area around
Glasgow Cross and the Trongate last year. Meanwhile, nine CCTV cameras at a cost
of £300,000 were recently installed in the Merchant City to add to over
300 security cameras Glasgow-wide (in an indication of the converging agendas
of ‘public safety’ and the business community; the city’s CCTV
system is jointly funded by Glasgow Community and Safety Services and Scottish
Entererprise Glasgow – Scotland’s main economic, enterprise, innovation
and investment agency66).
The major crucible in the Merchant City for all these regulatory, policing mechanisms
has been the raid on Paddy’s Market which lies in Shipbank Lane on the southern
fringes of the Merchant City near the river Clyde. The market – whose name
is derived from the high number of Irish traders, many of whom were migrants
from the Irish famine – is the oldest in the city with origins dating back
to the 1820s. The market has been in Shipbank lane since 1935, and has been popular
for decades with Glaswegians in search of bargains. A petition set up to save
the market gives a positive account of its place in local history: “Initially
a second-hand clothes market for the city’s poor and dispossessed, its traders
now sell a wider range of secondhand and new goods to a wider community. More
importantly, it is a city landmark, a tourist attraction and, at heart, simply
a place for locals to meet and work together”67. However, in August 2007,
Councillor Gordon Matheson brought negative media attention to Paddy’s Market
by describing it as “crime-ridden midden”, and arguing for the closure
of the Glasgow institution: “The days when Paddy’s Market made a contribution
to the city are over, it has changed, and in my opinion it should be closed down”68.
No doubt Councillor Matheson (as chair of Merchant City Tourism and Marketing
Co-op Ltd) was aware of what was coming. In November last year, the market was
raided by over 100 police officers accompanied by a phalanx of trading, customs
and rail officials – and the blaze of media flashlights. As part of the
investigation – codenamed ‘Operation Bazaar’ – fake CDs and
DVDs, as well as counterfeit cigarettes and toys, some of which were allegedly
smuggled into the country, were confiscated by the police. The investigation
also led to eight men being arrested on suspicion of dealing class ‘A’ drugs.
Superintendent Tom Doran, said of the operation: “My priority is to make
sure the people who live, work and visit this side of the city, can go about
their everyday business without fear or intimidation”. Meanwhile, a Glasgow
City Council Spokesman explained the rationale for the raid: “High levels
of crime, anti-social behaviour have increasingly become a significant problem
in Shipbank Lane. They have had a detrimental impact on residents and visitors
and on the efforts to improve the Merchant City”69 [sic].
On October 28th 2008, the decision to close down Paddy’s Market was called-in
by the City Council. Permission was granted to proceed with discussions to re-develop
the market for “a combination of uses and sub-leases to business and arts
organisations”70. The city council are in discussions with site-owners Network
Rail to take over the lease. After the deal is complete, the council intend to
create a ‘mini-Camden Market’ on the site. Councillor George Ryan,
the City Council’s regeneration convener explained the plans last year: “We
will be able to lift the whole area. What we want is to create a mini-Camden
Market in Glasgow city centre. We see this as a tourist destination, an arts
and crafts market and a cultural venue. Other cities in Europe would bite your
hand off for this type of opportunity. It’s near the Clyde and all the regeneration
in St Enoch and the Merchant City”. Councillor Ryan continued: “Glasgow
has moved on and we will not be dragged down by a blight which detracts from
our efforts to regenerate the city. We present ourselves quite rightly as a vibrant
and cultural city, which is a good place to live and work and visit. Paddy’s
Market does not fit with that ambition”71.
Traders, understandably, were disgusted by the language deployed by senior City
Council officials, and by the chronic lack of tolerance for the people who shop
and trade at Paddy’s Market: “It is important as part of Glasgow’s
history,” said Hazel McGeachin, “but what’s more important is
that it’s needed. A lot of my customers are pensioners, asylum seekers,
foreign workers. They need a place as cheap as this”72. Michael Burns, meanwhile,
said the council are turning their back on Glasgow’s working class heritage.
Many traders, according to the Scotland on Sunday, believed that what
was going on was ‘yuppification’ ahead of the Commonwealth Games, while
many linked the situation with recent protests about land use in Pollok Park
and the Botanic Gardens73. Brian Daly, a spokesman for the Paddy’s market
committee, said the Market played a vital role in providing affordable second-hand
goods, as well as having a particular community role: “You can’t create
a community like this, it just grows. It would be a shame to lose this unique
piece of Glasgow’s heritage for the sake of creating a sterile precinct”74.
While criminality, especially drug dealing, has been cited as the main reason
to close the market down, traders have accused the City Council of stigmatising
the market instead of dealing with the wider context of social polarisation in
the area. In December, the Sunday Herald reported that a city centre task
force set up to monitor the area had acknowledged that that the main catalyst
for crime was Hope House (a homeless hostel adjacent to the market). Strathclyde
Police stressed that it wasn’t the traders of Paddy’s Market who were
the main causes of crime: Hope House was seen as “a major crime generator”,
due to the large amount of homeless drug-addicts it houses, and thus the inevitable
presence of dealers to service the addiction. Moreover, traders complained that
the vast majority of crime in the market area takes place in the evenings when
the market area effectively becomes a public lane. Market traders, however, close
up by 2pm every day75. The debate then, has been constructed not only about the
viability of Paddy’s Market, but of criminality in the area per se,
and of its unsuitability for the new types of economic activity to be associated
with the cultural quarter and the Merchant City overall. The City’s regeneration
convener, Councillor Ryan, expressed the intended message quite brutally: “It
is the death-knell for the anti-social element. We want to move all that out.
We want to up the bar of what we expect of a market right in the heart of the
city. We want to bring in a better class of retail there”76.
Entrepreneurial Statecraft
The highly disproportionate reaction to, and policing of, Paddy’s Market,
can be seen as a form of entrepreneurial statecraft. In an excellent study by
Roy Coleman, Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte77, they show how an emphasis on selective ‘crime
and disorder’ issues reinforces a narrow sense of harm and danger in the
city and forecloses scrutiny of the city-building process itself. They label
this process ‘governing through crime’, but ask: what kinds of crime
are cities and citizens being governed through? With the expansion of public
private partnerships in the city, and business ever more entrenched in increasingly
corporatised ‘regeneration’ processes, the ‘moral capital’ of
business ideology has attained hegemonic status within regeneration discourses: “private
enterprise, entrepreneurship, the pursuit of wealth and something called the ‘market’ have
all become valorised as ends in themselves”78. This elevation of business
influence, the authors argue, has led to an over-regulation of the poor
and marginalised who dare to interrupt the fetishised surface of the commodity
realm, and an under-regulation of ‘hidden’ corporate crime and
harm.
While the authors applaud efforts to critically scrutinise all those regulatory
and disciplinary modes and discourses of governance like CCTV networks, targeting
of beggars and the homeless, and policing ‘hotspots’, they argue for
a shift of emphasis away from analysis of the heavily regulated spaces of consumption,
to the underregulated spaces of production. The report usefully places the emphasis
on corporate crime or harm, which has a catastrophic economic,
physical and social cost, yet remains almost entirely absent from crime and disorder
debates. The concept of corporate ‘harm’ is reserved for those acts
of omissions which produce degradation of natural and physical environments and
injuries to and exploitation of workers and consumers, but which do not violate
any legal code. Here, the authors note that those regulatory frameworks that
impinge on, or, disrupt flows of production or consumption are routinely removed
from dominant definitions of crime and disorder by a complex nexus of social
and legal procedures. The authors point in particular at the UK wide deregulation
of occupational safety and health, and breaches of consumer and environmental
protection. For instance, the services sector, so central to the functioning
of the consumption-led neoliberal city (with its tourism, cafes, bars and restaurants),
is regulated largely by Environment Health Officers (EHOs), yet in a time of
proliferating expansion in the industry, the authors cite a UK-wide 50% drop
in full-time officials between 1996/7 and 2000/1, while half of all local authorities
failed to lay one single prosecution in 2000/1. Another example is road traffic.
The increase of commercial activity in cities is primarily dependent on the circulation
of commodities by road transport: deadly air pollution, and a host of other negative
social and environmental impacts are a concomitant by-product of this process79.
While the study makes an important intervention in debates around crime and harm
discourses, they may have left the most compelling crimes out of their research
field. In 1991, Frederic Jameson felt compelled to remind his readers of an obvious
but frequently repressed fact: “…namely, that this whole global, yet
American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of
a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the
world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is
blood, torture, death, and terror”80. Recent revelations about Primark’s
(Argyle Street) ‘cheap-enough-to-chuck’ clothing being manufactured
by sub-contracted child labour in India81, and Tesco’s (Argyle Street) continued
abuse of its monopoly power through the exploitation of labour in China, India,
Sri Lanka and Bangladesh82, merely hint at the full-scale of global, not to say
local, exploitation that underpins the spectacular commodity realm. Glasgow’s
frequently boasted about position as one of the major retail shopping centers
in Britain, masks and disavows a devastating trail of labour and environmental
harm on a global scale. Yet, the trajectory of pro-business, entrepreneurial
urbanism has led to a “stabilization of opportunity structures for corporate
crimes and harms”, whilst the relatively powerless and weak are further
exposed to the “punitive gaze of extended surveillance capacity”83.
While the stick is delivered to the traders of Paddy’s Market, Tesco Metro,
that most potent exemplar of monopoly capitalism, middle-class consumption tastes
and gentrification, is offered the carrot of ‘competitive’ lease rates
to steal further up Argyle Street – an accomplished private-public corporate
partner in the pioneering of new urban frontiers.
This Dull Rented World
In the context of Glasgow’s wider redevelopment and
regeneration ambitions, the location of the cultural quarter in the Merchant
City is far from accidental. It is hoped that the ‘arts led property strategy’ will
act as a ‘regenerative tool’ for property development in the area,
thereby increasing ‘external investment confidence’ in the enormous
gap site at St.Enoch car park and the ‘unproductive’ buildings and
land at the Bridgegate by the River Clyde. City support for a ‘cultural
quarter’, and the extremely heavy-handed and selective policing of the Merchant
City, especially Paddy’s Market, can be seen as parallel strategies of boosterism
and stigmatization: on the one hand, to encourage gentrification, on the other
to legitimise it. Developers’ plans to explore the potential for a mixed-use
redevelopment of the Union Railway bridge and the Hope House homeless hostel
adjacent to Paddy’s Market84, reflect City Council and Scottish Enterprise
Glasgow plans to extend the Merchant City down to the River Clyde as part of
the delivery of the enormous 13-mile, £5.6 billion Clyde Waterfront development
project85. ‘The Step Change for Glasgow Action Plan To 2013’ makes
clear that the ‘redevelopment’ of Paddy’s Market is a central
part of the ‘Arts Led Property Strategy’: a key ‘indicative output’ for
growing the metropolitan core.
As part of the same ‘Step Change’ plan to move Glasgow up “the
value chain”, the removal of “barriers to growth and success” is
seen as prerequisite for economic expansion. For the city center elite, backed
by a whole panoply of civilising and criminal discourses, the solution to the
problems of poverty, homelessness and drug addiction seem to be simple: removal
and disavowal. In this potentially problematic context, the ‘creativity
fix’ comes into its own as a ‘soft policy’ legitimation tool: “A
creative strategy is easily bolted on to business-as-usual urban-development
policies, while providing additional ideological cover for market-driven or state-assisted
programs of gentrification. Inner-city embourgeoisement, in the creativity script,
is represented as a necessary prerequisite for economic development: hey presto,
thorny political problem becomes competitive asset!”86.
The Creativity Fix is most insidious when it assumes that every city can
win in the battle for talent and growth. Creativity scripts, however, are better
understood as “zero-sum” urban strategies constituted within the context
of uneven urban growth patterns in an increasingly polarized framework of inter-city
competition. Intercity competition, as Harvey observed, has come to act as an
external coercive power over urban governments, forcing them to adopt increasingly ‘flexible’,
pro-business urban strategies that tend to enhance rather than constrict the
mobility and ‘external coercive power’ of global finance capital. Cities
are thus compelled to become collaborators in their own subordination to capital
accumulation strategies. The result of these entrepreneurial strategies, Peck
reminds us, has been the weak emulation of “winning” formulas, “quickly
stacking the odds against even the most enthusiastic of converts”87.
As Peck astutely observes, the ‘creativity fix’ is less a solution
to these problems and more a response to them. For all its aesthetic pretensions
the ‘creative economy’, as Florida happily acknowledges, is underpinned
by predatory venture capital: “Venture capital and the broader system that
surrounds it provide a powerful catalyst to the chain of creativity and an even
more powerful mechanism for bringing its fruits to the commercial market”88.
Glasgow’s adherence to the creativity script is merely another soft policy
option for compliant forms of corporate welfare, regressive social redistribution
and ‘trickle-up’ economics. In fact, precisely the same forms of compliance
that has allowed neo-liberal forms of capitalism to lead us into the deepest
global recession since the 1930s.
This is the third part of a trilogy on Glasgow’s gentrification for Variant: ‘The
Clyde Gateway: A New Urban Frontier’, Variant, issue 33, Winter 2008; ‘Constructing
Neoliberal Glasgow: The Privatisation Of Space’, Variant, issue 25,
Spring 2006
Notes
1. Debord, Guy, ‘The Society Of The Spectacle’,
Zone Books, 1994, First Published, 1967.
2. Sinclair, Iain, ‘Downriver’, Paladin, 1992.
3. See http://www.variant.randomstate.org/33texts/3_V33gray.html for the link
between frontier language and gentrification in Glasgow.
4. One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded
by the middle-classes—upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two
rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired,
and have become elegant, expensive residences [...]. Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts
in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class
occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification
5. Smith, Neil. ‘New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification As Global Urban
Strategy’, in ‘Spaces Of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring In North
America And western Europe’, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002, p.96.
6. Seymour, Ben, ‘Shoreditch and the creative destruction of the inner city’,
2004, http://thelondonparticular.org/items/creativedestruction.html
7. McCarthy, John, ‘Dublin’s Temple Bar: A Case Study of Culture-Led
Regeneration’, European Planning Studies; Jun ‘98, Vol 6 Issue
3, p271, 11p.
8. http://www.metamute.org/en/content/liverpool_culture_of_capital
9. ‘Housing The Visual Arts in Glasgow’s Merchant City: A Strategy
Report’, Glasgow City Council Development And Regeneration Services Committee
report, 2002.
10. Ibid.
11. “It is said that a city without its old buildings is like a person without
memory; by the same token it may be said that a city without culture is a place
without imagination. The well publicised Richard Florida report supports this
and argues that successful cities are those that embrace the diversity, tolerance
and non-conformist elements of an artistic community to rise above everyday challenge
and inertia”. The Merchant City Action Plan, 2007-2012, p.9.
12. Florida, Richard, ‘The Rise of The Creative Class...And How Its Transforming,
Work, Leisure, Community, And Everyday Life’, Basic Books, 2004, p.300.
13. Peck, Jamie, ‘The Creativity Fix’, Eurozine. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-28-peck-en.html
14. Ibid,
15. Florida, Richard. ‘The Rise Of The Creative Class...And How It’s
Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, And Everyday Life’, Basic Books,
2004.
16. Harvey, David, ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation
in Urban Governance in late Capitalism’, Geografiska Annaller, Vol.71,
No.1, p3-17.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. ‘A Step Change For Glasgow: Glasgow’s Ten Year Economic Strategy’,
2006.
21. Ibid.
22. ‘A Step Change For Glasgow: Action Plan To 2013’, 2008.
23. ‘Merchant City Five Year Action Plan: 2007-2012’.
24. http://www.glasgowmerchantcity.net/devmap.pdf
25. ‘Merchant City Five Year Action Plan: 2007-2012’.
26. Ibid.
27. ‘Housing The Visual Arts In Glasgow’s Merchant City: A Strategy
Report’, Glasgow City Council Development And Regeneration Services Committee
report, 2002.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/en/News/Archives/2008/November/stateofthecityeconomy2008.htm
32. http://www.glasgowmerchantcity.net/tradeinto.htm
33. ‘Housing The Visual Arts In Glasgow’s Merchant City: A Strategy
Report’, Glasgow City Council Development And Regeneration Services Committee
report, 2002.
34. http://www.glasgowmerchantcity.net/devmap.pdf
35. Zukin, Sharon, ‘Loft living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change’, Radius,
1988, p.199
36. http://www.creativespaceagency.co.uk/
37. Panos, David, ‘Creative Clusters and Creative London’, 2004, http://thelondonparticular.org/items/creativeclusters.html
38. Ibid.
39. Zukin, Sharon, ‘Loft living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change’, Radius,
1988, p.3.
40. Ibid, p.3.
41. Ibid, p.124.
42. Ibid, p.173.
43. Ibid, p.121.
44. Ibid, p.118.
45. Zukin, Sharon, ‘Loft living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change’, Radius,
1988, Ibid, p.149.
46. Zukin, Sharon, ‘The Cultures Of Cities, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000,
p.23.
47. From the blurbs, in, Florida, Richard. ‘The Rise Of The Creative Class...And
How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, And Everyday Life’,
Basic Books, 2004.
48. Ibid, p.xix.
49. Ibid, p.315.
50. Ibid, p.9.
51. Cited in, Florida, Richard, ‘The Rise Of The Creative Class...And How
It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, And Everyday Life’, Basic
Books, 2004.p.36.
52. Ibid, p.68
53. Ibid, p.82
54. Ibid, p.6.
55. Ibid, p.35.
56. Ibid, 71.
57. Ibid, p.78.
58. Ibid.
59. Eagleton, Terry, ‘Marx’, Phoenix, 1997, p.7.
60. Florida, Richard. ‘The Rise Of The Creative Class...And How It’s
Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, And Everyday Life’, Basic Books,
2004, p.78.
61 Ibid, 325.
62. Ibid, p.79.
63. Cited in, MacLeod, Gordon, ‘From Urban Entrepreneurialism to a “Revanchist
City”? On the Spatial Injustices of Glasgow’s Renaissance’, in ‘Spaces
Of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring In North America And western Europe’,
Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002, p.267.
64. Zukin, Sharon, ‘The Cultures Of Cities, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000,
p.7.
65. Davis, Mike, ‘City Of Quartz: Excavating The Future Of Los Angeles’,
Pimlico, 1998, p.226.
66. http://merchantcity.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/300000-cctv-scheme-on-way-for-merchant-city.html
67. http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-glasgows-paddys-market.html
68. http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.1593773.0.0.php
69. http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.2471454.0.video_lets_stop_dealers.php
70. Minutes of Glasgow City Council, Print 5, 2008-2009, http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/694FD6F9-42D1-4C41-A10B-E4899653BF64/0/PRINT5200809.pdf
71. Lundy, Ian, ‘Paddy’s Market to be transformed’, Evening
News, 14th March, 2008.
72. http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/comment/Peter-Ross-Priceless-Paddys-Market.3976683.jp
73. Ibid.
74. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7404650.stm
75. http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2463275.0.council_accused_of_using_paddys_market_as_crime_scapegoat.php
76. http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.2119904.0.0.php
77. Coleman, R; Tombs, S; Whyte, D. ‘Capital, Crime Control and Statecraft
in the Entrepreneurial City’, Urban Studies, Vol.42, No,13, 2511-2530,
December 2005.
78. Ibid.
79. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/03/20752/53467
80. ‘Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism’, Verso,
1991, p.5.
81. http://www.labourbehindthelabel.org/campaigns/primarkmainpage
82. http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=252
83. Coleman, R; Tombs, S; Whyte, D. ‘Capital, Crime Control and Statecraft
in the Entrepreneurial City’, Urban Studies, Vol.42, No, 13, 2511-2530,
December 2005.
84. ‘Physical Developments In The Merchant City: August 2006’, Glasgow
City Council.
85. ‘A Step Change For Glasgow: Action Plan To 2013’, 2008.
86. Peck, Jamie, ‘The Creativity Fix’, Eurozine. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-28-peck-en.html
87. Ibid.
88. Florida, Richard. ‘The Rise Of The Creative Class...And How It’s
Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, And Everyday Life’, Basic Books,
2004, p.52. |