Soho Inc.: Artistic practices, urban development and the myth of the creative city. Anette Baldauf

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1 Soho Inc.: Artistic practices, urban development and the myth of the creative city. Anette Baldauf In 2002, Richard Florida published his national bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class, and the book immediately became a reference point in the discussion on the future of Western cities. Florida argued that creativity was now the major force driving the U.S. economy and that it was now the creative class that provided the economic and political engine for social transformation. He also claimed that the cluster of professions called creative class produced a steadily rising Gross National Product and that this growth was distributed unevenly. It was concentrated in so-called creative cities, meaning: cities with a high proportion of members of the creative class. Hence, Florida searched for a means to measure, and eventually rank, what he considered necessary conditions in the making of a creative city. Florida highlighted three variables that make an area attractive to the creative class: Technology, talent and tolerance. With the first two Ts being standard features of any postindustrial city profile, it is the third feature, tolerance, that Florida claimed as his contribution to the engineering of future postindustrial cities. Cities and region flourish, Florida predicted, if they are open to artists, to foreign-born residents and to gays. Reconstructing the development of Soho and the Lower East Side in New York, I argue that it was not tolerance, but in fact in-tolerance or, to be more precise: zero tolerance, which turned these neighborhoods into landscapes of corporate consumption. Soho, the area south of Houston, is generally seen as the heart and soul of New York City, and it is also seen as a guiding blueprint for the survival of industrial cities. In the second half of the 19 th century, Soho was New York s production center of fabrics, glass and china, but when the prestigious businesses moved uptown, sweatshop production took over and Soho was known as hell s hundred acres. It was in the late fifties, around the time, when New York claimed to be the cultural capital of the world, that artists started to appropriate the area, living and working illegally in empty factory spaces. In 1964, artists and the city negotiated what the sociologist Sharon Zukin called a historic compromise between culture and capital, setting the foundation for a city development driven by artistic practices. 1 The city of New York passed an amendment that entitled artists and their families to rent Soho s lofts and commercial space for combined living and studio use. Hundreds of artists moved to Soho, and within a short period of time, gallery spaces followed. In the early 1970s, local interest groups composed largely of artists mobilized for declaring Soho a historic landmark based on its heritage of cast iron buildings and cobblestone streets. 2 In alliance with bankers, realtors, media moguls and the emerging professional-managerial class, artists promoted the radical transformation of the urban landscape of production into a landscape of consumption. In the course of this spatial preservation and cosmetic aesthetization, the loft was branded as an insignia of a bohemian way of life. The dream of loft living mobilized the signs of industrialism as nostalgically transfigured décor for the ostentatious staging of a safe and clean postindustrialism. In the late 70s, artistic production in Soho became increasingly corporate, and real estate prices were booming. In 1986, Soho residents pushed for a more formal regulation of the amendment passed in the mid 60s, asking now that Soho s residents had to prove their artistic status to the Department of Cultural Affairs. The law was passed but 1 Sharon Zukin, Loft Living. Rutgers University Press Charles R. Simpson, SoHo: The Artist in the City. University of Chicago Press

2 never put in practice. It was too late, and too much was at stake now. In the 1980s, prestigious fashion boutiques started to move into Soho. In 1982, Comme des Garçon reproduced the aesthetics of a gallery space, exhibiting clothes. A few years later, Helmut Lang presented minimalist fashion items along with artwork of Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgois and Richard Serra. In the mid nineties, while Soho was successively turning into a more and more homogenious, mall-like commercial corridor, that many New Yorkers started to raise the question: Is Soho over? Where is the new frontier? Already in the late 1970s, artists in search of cheap places or a more subculturally identified art scene, started to migrate east into the Lower East Side. In New York s poorest neighborhoods, where more than forty percent of the total population was considered living in poverty, they found cheap rent that allowed them to organize experimental shows in their own or their friends apartment. In 1981, to mention one example, the underground actress Patti Astor and Bill Stelling opened a place called Fun Gallery in an unheated commercial space on East 10 th Street. Their most prestigious artists: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. One of gallery s major achievements was to bring uptown artists downtown and thereby transfer graffiti art from the street onto the canvas. This shift made street art consumable even for a white audience that would have never dared to visit the streets of Harlem. Learning from Soho, city officials courted the newcomers with the promise of providing and rehabilitating city owned properties. In addition, a new zoning law provided the legal basis to rent out commercial property to artists based on five-year contracts that did not provide rent stabilization. By 1984, over 70 commercial galleries were located in the space of fourteen blocks, and the East Village art scene was fully integrated into the workings of the New York art world. The media celebrated the new art scene with an aggressive rhetoric of liberation and renewal. In Artforum the critic Rene Ricard situated his ideal artist in the Lower East Side: I want my soldiers, I mean artists, to be young and strong, with tireless energy performing impossible feats of cunning and bravura. 3 The East Village art boomed and images of the debilitating tenements and trash littered sidewalks circulated widely in national and international media. As the images were related to the cultural cachet of the artist production, a subtle process of resignification was initiated: the evaluation of the images shifted from fear and repulsion to curiosity and desire. By the late 1980s, the creative boom was a bust, and most of the art spaces were closed. Historians generally contribute the rapid growth and decline of the art space to an international wave of art speculation that was fueled by profits from the finance and service sector. 4 But the mental and physical reproduction of the Lower East Side was already taking its own course. Rent prices increased by 400 and 600 percent, even before the five-year contracts expired. A violent battle emerged between real estate agents, old tenants and the new ones moving into the neighborhood. The process escalated in August of 1988, when New York police forces cleared what many people considered the heart of the East Village, Tompkins Square Park, and turned it into a bloody bloody warbattle zone. 3 Deutsche and Ryan Mele Christopher, Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate and Resistance in New. York. Univ. of Minnesota Press 2

3 The term gentrification was introduced by the Ruth Glass in the 1960s, when she described how the lower gentry was returning to London s city center. 5 Neil Smith built on Glass insight in order to make sense of the processes that occurred in and around Tompkins Square Park, and he called them a predatory class and race war. 6 For Smith gentrification is the spatial manifestation of a revanchist city; but within the popular neoliberal ideology, the transformation of the city is described as a natural course of a city moving from industrial to postindustrial modes of production, necessitating the retrofitting of the spaces of industrialism and, consequently, the displacement of the working class population. The widespread rhetoric of revitalization and renaissance suggested that neighborhoods like the Lower East Side were somehow dead, without live before the artists intervention. Already in 1989, David Harvey warned that urban governance was switching from a redistributive to an entrepreneurial mode of governing: Municipalities started to cut back public services, and major administrative responsibilities of city government were handed over to private-public partnerships, which then mimicked city services like street cleaning, garbage pick-up or police patrols, which had steadily fallen victim to the governmental budget cuts. Harvey defines neoliberalism as a means of capital accumulation through the dispossession of the rights, resources, and wealth of others. 7 In their analysis of actually existing neoliberalism, Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore point at massive flows of capital and speculative movements of finances. For them, neoliberalism produced market-oriented economic growth and elitist consumer practices, while at the same time it secured order and control upon the so-called underclass. 8 Increasingly, neoliberal restructuring and its rescaling tool, gentrification, was accompanied by the militarization of city streets. In 1993, Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor on the promise to offer a better quality of life for conventional members of society. When one year later William J. Bratton was appointed as the head of the NYPD, the urban policy program initiated had a name: Zero Tolerance. The concept came out of federal drug enforcement policies in the 80s, and it referred to a policy of allocating additional law enforcement resources to areas where some form of crime was considered to be endemic. 9 The approach was legitimized with reference to so-called Broken Window Theory, a criminological theory that claimed in the 1980s that ignoring the little problems graffiti, litter, shattered glass creates a sense of irreversible decline that leads people to abandon the community or to stay away Ruth Glass, London: Aspects of Change. Macgibbon & Kee 1964, Neil Smith, The Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the Revanchist City. Routledge 1996, Harvey David, The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press 2003; Harvey David, Neo-Liberalism as Creative Destruction. In: Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 88 (2006), Neil Brenner und Nik Theodore, Cities and the geographies of 'actually existing neoliberalism. In: Antipode 34/3 (2002), Incite (Women of Color against Violence), Quality of Life 10 George Kelling and James Willson, Broken Window. In: Atlantic Monthly March 3

4 In his pursuit of a radical reinvention of New York City, Giuliani introduced an aggressive quality of life policing, which focused on a number of normally non-criminal activities such as standing, congregating, jumping a turnstile, sleeping, eating and/or drinking in public spaces, as well as minor offenses such as graffiti, public urination, panhandling, littering, and unlicensed street vending. Zero tolerance encouraged increased police presence on the streets, and in effect, arrests and incarceration rates increased rapidly. Soon became obvious that zero tolerance policies and laws carried the signature of distinct racial profiling. Critics claimed that when in the 1980s the US had faced a major depression, the new lean government policy had taken money away from supporting public services that educated, trained, treated, housed and also nourished the population, especially the children of the poor. With the closing down of after-school programs for minority youth, to mention one example, more people spent time on the streets. But many white people took the presence of unsupervised African-American boys hanging out on the street as a sign of danger. In effect, many states changed their approaches to juvenile justice to make the cities appear safer (for white people). Between 1985 and 2000 the prison population grew from 744,206 to 2.0 million. 11 In New York, the economy started to recover in the mid-1990s mostly due to the emerging dot-com-bubble. New York was again a popular tourist destination. Gentrification accelerated and diffused into neighborhoods bypassed by previous waves of the process, raising real estate prices to unknown heights and introducing new geographies of inequality, exclusion and displacement. While on the street level police violence continued to pervail in the name of awar on drugs, the main weapon in the displacement of the poor was now the speculative real estate market: The working class poor and ethnic minority population of the city was driven away by sky-rocketing rental prices and terminated rental contracts. In some cases, their apartments and homes were set on fire to speed up their evictions. Artists moved to Williamsburg, New Jersey, Queens and Upstate and a few years later, Richard Florida published a book on the creative city and its commitment to technology, talent and tolerance. In Florida s theory, New York s transformation briefly sketched out here resembles a model redevelopment for cities in search for a postindustrial identity. At the same time, Florida argued that cities like Detroit won t stand a chance unless they can become a magnet for the new class. Playing Soho in New York, central Austin and central San Francisco against the city of Detroit suggests that there might be an unstated premise at the center of Florida s thesis. Contrary to his theory of the creative city, it can just as convincingly be argued that Detroit has in fact been one of US-Americas most creative cities in history. The booming capital of Fordism has given rise to cultural phenomena like Motown, Techno, House, Electronica rythms, which have not only conquered universal dance halls but also, in Florida s logic of the argumentation, sustained entire music industries for several decades. While the dire circumstances in Detroit, or the South Bronx, to mention another, related example, obviously gave rise to a host of artistic practices, the racial and working class demographic of these places prevent them from being considered an engine of America s economy. Florida acknowledges that African-Americans do not appear well-represented in his concept of creative cities, but he obviously does not see any reason to revise his theory this. This is why, my conclusion is the following: His concept of a creative class is not about art, and it is not about creativity. It is an attempt to privilege in public policy the aspirations of capital and the making of an urban landscape of corporate 11 Henry Giroux, Racial injustice and disposable youth in the age of zero tolerance. Qualitiative Studies in Education 16/4, 4

5 consumption. Just a few years ago, Jane Jakobs understood this dynamic: when asked about the effects of escalating real estate prices in New York City, she said, When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave. 5