Back to the Future of the Creative City: Amsterdam’s Creative Redevelopment and the Art of Deception

Merijn Oudenampsen
February 2007

« Continued from page 1

The Artificial Organic of Real Estate

In a recent article in Real Estate Magazine(18) we can read more about the strange collusion between the arts and real estate. It reads: ‘The concept of the Creative City is on the rise. Sometimes planned, sometimes organic, but up till now always thanks to real estate developers’. The article describes a round table discussion by real estate entrepreneurs on the Creative City, organised by René Hoogendoorn. She is the director of ‘Strategic Projects’ at ING Real Estate, the real estate branch of one of the biggest banking conglomerates of the Netherlands. ‘Strategic Projects’ means according to Hoogendoorn that she initiates the development of projects that need ‘soul’, in this case de Zuid As and the new development in the Northern docklands, Overhoeks. She combines this function with the advisory board of the Rietveld Art Academy, the spatial planning department of the employers federation and being one of the driving members of the Amsterdam Creativity Exchange, a club subsidised by the Creative City policy that according to its own words ‘provides an environment in which business and creativity meet’(19).  Thus it is no coincidence that the last meeting of the Creativity Exchange took place in the old Shell offices of the strategic Overhoeks terrain, in that way providing already a taste of the much needed ‘soul’(20). Hoogendoorn explains that ING Real Estate invests in art and culture up to the point that it increases the value of real estate surrounding it. Interesting examples are ING Real Estate funding Platform 21, the Design museum at the Zuid As, and the sponsoring of the post squatter performance festival Robodock on the northern docklands. Hogendoorn and other real estate developers are still struggling with the question ‘how to assess up-front the net cash value of the future added value of culture’. Which shows there is still some way to go for the colonisation of culture.

Another interesting announcement in the article is that real estate developers have now come to realise the importance of ‘software’ for the successful realisation of real estate ‘hardware’. Cultural institutions and temporary art projects create ‘traffic’, and allow developers to slowly bring property ‘up to flavour’: ‘It’s about creating space! The thing not to do is to publicly announce you’re going to haul in artists; instead, give them the feeling they’ve thought of it themselves. If it arises organically, levels will rise organically’(21).

The distinction between urban ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ was initially coined as an architectural term by the pop-art architecture group Archigram, to champion the use of soft and flexible materials like the inflatable bubble in stead of modernist ‘hardware’ realised with steel and cement. Together with contemporaries such as the Italian group Archizoom and publications such as Raban’s Soft City(22), Archigram levelled a critique against deadpan modernism, putting forward a more organic conception of the city as a living organism. Urban software thus acquired its present day computer analogy, where software is the ‘programming’ of the city and hardware its ‘infrastructure’. Much like the SI - experimenting with the bottom up software approach through psycho-geography and the dérive – subjective, organic and bottom-up approaches became a focus point for utopian urbanism(23).

The recuperation of the utopian language of the sixties into neo-functionalism by real estate entrepreneurs is tragically appropriate. In the SI’s ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, Ivan Chtcheglov argues for a city where everyone could live in their ‘personal cathedral’. He proposed a city with districts corresponding to their inhabitants’ emotional life: Bizarre Quarter, Happy Quarter, Noble and Tragic Quarter, Historical Quarter, Useful Quarter, Sinister Quarter etc.(24) In a similar but very different vein, the present restructuring of the Dutch housing market has seen the arrival of a ‘differentiated living milieus’ fashion where planners partition existing neighbourhoods into theme areas, accompanied by a discourse of ‘consumer choice’. In the Westelijke Tuinsteden, the biggest redevelopment of social housing in Amsterdam, planners ‘re-imagined’ the entire neighbourhood into different consumer identities such as ‘dreamer’, ‘doer’, ‘urbanite’, ‘networker’, ‘villager’ etc. When consumer demand from outside of the neighbourhood failed to materialise, however, the planners had to readapt their visions, reluctantly returning to a half-hearted focus on the needs of the local population.(25)

Thus the hardware-software dialectic has become an intrinsic part of the current urban development approach. To turn to an example of entrepreneurial city hardware, we could look at the new mega development, the business district Zuid-As, and the North South metro line that will connect it to the city (together good for a few billions of public investment). A good example of software would be the new media conference Picnic ’06, that was granted almost half a million by both the city council and the national government and still managed to ask an entrance fee of 750 euros for a three day conference. Creative City schemes thus become an attempt to build competitive ‘urban software packages’; or to ‘program’ space, an expression of French urbanist Lefebvre to denote the top down organisation of space.(26) To continue with the computer analogy, the first problem with these top down approaches is that their ‘source code’ is undisclosed. Public planning and citizen participation in as well the Zuid As, the North South metro line and the redevelopment of the Westelijke Tuinsteden has been problematic, with most of the decisions being taken behind closed doors, to later be publicly legitimised by false arguments or financial ‘miscalculations’. Only when we can break that code, we can truly asses additional problems, such as the curtailment of the public sphere or social polarisation.

Multiple Personality (Dis)order

The subject of the Creative City is not Homo Ludens as imagined by Constant, but the entrepreneur in all its guises, for the creative city is an entrepreneurial city. Accordingly, in the cultural field the artist is being converted into a cultural entrepreneur. An illustrative example is the conversion of the Artist Allowance, a state scheme that before its current transformation was just a monthly allowance, but has now been made conditional on a yearly growing profit. Each year, artists have to earn more to be able to apply to the WWIK. The new Art Plan and other Creative City initiatives attempt to infuse a entrepreneurial mindset into the artist by giving them courses on administration and entrepreneurial strategies. Cultural Funding is increasingly geared to cross-over projects between the arts and the economy. Of course the great threat of competition is again invoked: “Despite big investments of the council and the national government, the cultural significance of Amsterdam, and accordingly the international position of Dutch culture, is under pressure”.(27)

A battlefield is staged in Negri & Hardt’s Empire between a creative, communicative and productive multitude and parasitic capital. In the Entrepreneurial City this opposition becomes a permanent psychological state, a multiple personality disorder. The Creative Class is at once Homo Ludens and Homo Economicus, it incorporates the drive to create, produce and socialise with the drive to appropriate those powers and passions. If we use Marx’s words, if capital is a social relation; then the entrepreneurial mindset is the interface of that relation.

Paradoxically, the consequence of Amsterdam conversion into cultural knowledge economy is that we are more and more economical with creativity. Universities await the introduction of a voucher system, a ticket system comparable to the food stamps in crisis times. Popular but not economically successful educations on the polytechnic schools will have to lower their student nr’s. An entire bureaucracy has been set up that forces teachers and students into streamlined submission to quota’s and efficiency concerns. (Dutch students, unconsciously, have already grasped that studying is now nothing more than unpaid labour, by working as little as possible).

What does it mean the Amsterdam Creative City is predominantly a branding project, a thin layer of varnish, under which resides banal economic strive? There is a Dutch expression, ‘de wens is de moeder van de gedachte’, which literally means ‘the wish is the mother of  the thought’, a pseudo Freudian folk wisdom that relates well to the reality of the Creative City.

According to the marketing experts at city hall, Amsterdam is engaged in ‘a form of communicative warfare’(28) in an international competitive field of Creative Cities. As Sun Tzu stated in the Art of War: ‘All warfare is based on deception’. So here it is, Amsterdam, a city where 70% of the young population can only complete the lowest level of education, the VMBO, which is on top of that suffering from record amounts of drop outs, labelling itself as a Creative City for all.

Maybe Paolo Virno’s take on post-Fordism is better at identifying creativity beyond the Creative Class, even if it proves to be not as rewarding for everyone:

Post-Fordism certainly cannot be reduced to a set of particular professional figures characterized by intellectual refinement or ‘creative’ gifts. It is obvious that workers in the media, researchers, engineers, ecological operators, and so on, are and will be only a minority. By ‘post-Fordism,’ I mean instead a set of characteristics that are related to the entire contemporary workforce, including fruit pickers and the poorest of immigrants. Here are some of them: the ability to react in a timely manner to the continual innovations in techniques and organizational models, a remarkable ‘opportunism’ in negotiating among the different possibilities offered by the job market, familiarity with what is possible and unforeseeable, that minimal entrepreneurial attitude that makes it possible to decide what is the ‘right thing’ to do within a nonlinear productive fluctuation, a certain familiarity with the web of communications and information.(29)

Not far removed - albeit from a different political perspective - is an interesting statement from Florida that creativity according to his theory ‘is a fundamental and intrinsic human capacity’. According to Florida, in the end all human beings are creative, and all are potentially part of the creative class, but just a small part is so lucky to get paid for it(30). Here is where the precarity comes in, since the entrepreneur is precarious by definition. The investments made are speculative and risk taking is the central requirement. Thus not only the artist but the entire city turns precarious, its income dependent on the flows of de-territorialised creativity. Social nets of old, like social housing and unemployment subsidies are being slowly deconstructed. For the free lance entrepreneur social protection is market distortion, and unionisation is infringement on cartel legislation. Amsterdam’s metamorphosis towards an entrepreneurial city has worrying social consequences, while the city looks outside for investments and talent, the local population that is not productive or cannot market its creativity sufficiently becomes redundant. This surplus population is slowly displaced by the urban renewal offensive towards the region. The ‘urban facelift’ revolves around the removal of social tissue just as the physical one removes fatty tissue. The environment of the Creative City becomes a highly segregated one.

According to the French urbanist Lefebvre ‘the right of the city signifies the right of citizens and city dwellers, (...), to appear on all the networks and circuits of communication, information and exchange.’ We need to re-imagine what a real Creative City would look like. Let the first condition be that its ‘software’ runs on programming that is ‘open source’.

References

Byvanck, Valentyn (ed.). Superstudio: The Middelburg Lectures, Middelburg: Zeeuws Museum, 2005.

Chtcheglov, Ivan. ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, trans. Ken Knabb, Interactivist Info Exchange, August 2006, http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/08/25/191240&mode=nested&tid=9

Florida, Richard. ‘The Rise of the Creative Class. Why Cities Without Gays and Rock Bands Are Losing the Economic Development Race’. Washington Monthly, 2 May, 2002, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html.

________. ‘Cities and the Creative Class’, City & Community, 2.1 (2003): 3-19.

Gemeente Amsterdam: Amsterdam Topstad: Metropool. Economische Zaken Amsterdam (14 July 2006), Amsterdam, http://www.amsterdam.nl/ondernemen?ActItmIdt=12153.

________.  Amsterdam Creatieve Stad, Kunstenplan 2005 – 2008, (2004), Amsterdam,
http://www.amsterdam.nl/gemeente/documenten?ActItmIdt=4750

_______. Choosing Amsterdam; Brand, Concept and Organisation of the City Marketing. (2003) Amsterdam, http://www.amsterdam.nl/aspx/download.aspx?file=/contents/pages/4629/d69_citymarket_samen.pdf

Hall, Tim and Phil Hubbard (eds). The Entrepreneurial City. Geographies of Politics, Regimes and Representation. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.

Harvey, David. ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’. Geografiska Annaler 71.1 (1989): pp. 3-17.

Hellinga, Helma. Onrust in Park en Stad. Stedelijke Vernieuwing in de Westelijke Tuinsteden, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2005.

Joseph, Branden W. and Virno, Paolo. ‘Interview with Paolo Virno’, trans. Alessia Ricciardi, Grey Room 21 (Fall, 2005): 32, http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/GR21_026-037_Joseph.pdf.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nichelson Smith, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991.

Marx , Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology, 1845-46, New York, International Publishers edition, 1970.

Nieuwenhuys, Constant and Simon Vinkenoog. New Babylon : Ten Lithographs, Amsterdam: Galerie d’Eendt 1963.

Nieuwenhuys, Constant. ‘Opkomst en Ondergang van de Avant-Garde’. In: Randstad 8 (1964), pp 6-35.

Oudenampsen, Merijn. ‘Extreme Makeover’. Mute Magazine Vol 2. Issue 4, 2006. Available online at http://www.metamute.org/en/Extreme-Makeover

Peck, Jamie. ‘Struggling with the Creative Class’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29.4 (2005), pp 740-770.

Raban, Jonathan. Soft City, London: Hamilton, 1974.

Ratingen, Bart van. ‘Ik Zie Ik Zie Wat Jij Niet Ziet, Vijf Ontwikkelaars over de “Creatieve Stad”, haar Mogelijkheden en haar Beperkingen’, Real Estate Magazine, May 2006.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Sützl, Wolfgang and Christine Mayer (eds). World-Information.org IP City Edition, Vienna: Institute for New Culture Technologies, 2005. Available online at: http://static.world-information.org/infopaper/wi_ipcityedition.pdf.

Uitermark, Justus. ‘De omarming van subversiviteit’. Agora 24.3, (2004): pp 32-35. Also available from: http://squat.net/studenten/kraken-is-terug.pdf.

Footnotes

1. Even though according to a recent investigation the creative economy in Amsterdam is experiencing decline in stead of growth, the City Council still expresses its confidence in the strategic importance of the creative sector. “ It’s beyond numbers”, according to alderman Asscher  of Economic Affairs.
   ‘Creatieve Industrie Slinkt’, Het Parool, 25 January, 2007, http://www.parool.nl/nieuws/2007/JAN/25/eco2.html
2. Richard Florida, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class. Why Cities Without Gays and Rock Bands Are Losing the Economic Development Race’. Washington Monthly, 2 May, 2002, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html.
3. Speech delivered by Cohen at the Creative Capital Conference, 17-18 March 2005, Amsterdam. See: http://www.creativecapital.nl/
4. Constant Nieuwenhuys and Simon Vinkenoog, New Babylon : Ten Lithographs, Amsterdam: Galerie d’Eendt 1963: 10.
5. Constant Nieuwenhuys, ‘Opkomst en Ondergang van de Avant-Garde’. In: Randstad 8 (1964), pp 6-35.
6. Not Bored, http://www.notbored.org/tomorrow.html
7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 1845-46, New York, International Publishers edition, 1970:  p 109.
8. Het broedplaatsenbeleid (lit. incubator policy) is a city policy whereby subsidies are allocated to house artists below the going market rates in especially  redeveloped buildings (a significant part of the policy has been targeted at legalising squats) . Like the baby chickens, the idea behind the policy is that cultural activity needs to be sheltered from the market in its initial phase; when chick finally turns into chicken, it should support itself.  It is a controversial policy, also because the artists benefiting from it complain about the strict bureaucratic requirements.
   Justus Uitermark, ‘De omarming van subversiviteit’. Agora 24.3, (2004): pp 32-35. Also available from: http://squat.net/studenten/kraken-is-terug.pdf.
9. Folker Fröbel et al., ‘The New International Division of Labour’. Social Science Information 17.1 (1978), pp. 123-142.
10. Saskia Sassen, The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
11. ‘Kachels op Terras gaan aan’. Front page article in Het Parool, 23 January 2007.
    http://www.parool.nl/nieuws/2007/JAN/23/p2.html.
12. David Harvey, ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’. Geografiska Annaler 71.1 (1989): pp. 3-17.
    Tim Hall and Phil Hubbard (eds) The Entrepreneurial City. Geographies of Politics, Regimes and Representation. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
13. Gemeente Amsterdam, Amsterdam Topstad: Metropool. Economische Zaken Amsterdam (14 July 2006), Amsterdam, http://www.amsterdam.nl/ondernemen?ActItmIdt=12153.
14. Jamie Peck, ‘Struggling with the Creative Class’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29.4 (2005), pp 740-770.
15. Merijn Oudenampsen, ‘Extreme Makeover’. Mute Magazine Vol 2. Issue 4, 2006. Available online at http://www.metamute.org/en/Extreme-Makeover
16. Artvertising, http://www.sandberg.nl:106080/artvertising
17. Adbust at the Sandberg Institute, 22 December 2006, http://indymedia.nl/nl/2006/12/41476.shtml
18. Bart van Ratingen, ‘Ik Zie Ik Zie Wat Jij Niet Ziet, Vijf Ontwikkelaars over de “Creatieve Stad”, haar Mogelijkheden en haar Beperkingen’, Real Estate Magazine, May 2006.
19. Amsterdam Creativity Exchange, http://www.acx.nu.
20. Website Overhoeks Development, http://www.overhoeks.nl/template4.php?c=209
21. Ratingen, ‘Ik Zie Ik Zie Wat Jij Niet Ziet’ Real Estate Magazine, May 2006, my translation.
22. Jonathan Raban, Soft City, London: Hamilton, 1974.
    For a good introduction to Archizoom, see:
    Valentijn Byvanck (ed.) Superstudio: The Middelburg Lectures, Middelburg: Zeeuws Museum, 2005.
23. See also the World-Information.org IP City Edition, for a relation between the utopian urbanism of the sixties and the present struggle against copyrights:
    Wolfgang Sützl and Christine Mayer (eds), World-Information.org IP City Edition, Vienna: Institute for New Culture Technologies, 2005, http://static.world-information.org/infopaper/wi_ipcityedition.pdf
24. Ivan Chtcheglov, ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, trans. Ken Knabb, Interactivist Info Exchange, August 2006, http://info.interactivist.net/…
25. Helma Hellinga, Onrust in Park en Stad. Stedelijke Vernieuwing in de Westelijke Tuinsteden, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2005: pp 143-154.
26. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nichelson Smith, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991.
27. Gemeente Amsterdam, Amsterdam Creatieve Stad, Kunstenplan 2005 – 2008, (2004), Amsterdam,
    http://www.amsterdam.nl/gemeente/documenten?ActItmIdt=4750
28. ‘What should brand carriers comply with? An intrinsic descriptive name is recognisable yet less distinctive and specific for the brand it refers to: there are several artistic cities in the world so “Amsterdam city of art” or “Amsterdam the metropolis” is not quite unique and distinctive when it comes to the communication war between cities.’
    Gemeente Amsterdam, Choosing Amsterdam; Brand, Concept and Organisation of the City Marketing. (2003) Amsterdam: 23. http://www.amsterdam.nl/…/d69_citymarket_samen.pdf
    Another interesting detail is that the present alderman of culture, Caroline Gherels has come from the ‘I Amsterdam’ marketing team.
29. Branden W. Joseph and Paolo Virno, ‘Interview with Paolo Virno’, trans. Alessia Ricciardi, Grey Room 21 (Fall, 2005): 32, http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/GR21_026-037_Joseph.pdf.
30. Richard Florida, ‘Cities and the Creative Class’, City & Community, 2.1 (2003): 8

Radical Urban Theory thanks Merijn Oudenampsen for permission to publish this article (July 2008).