The art of the good life: culture and sustainable prosperity

Abstract

The creative economy has seen cultural policy swallowed up by a narrow vision of economic growth, its impacts on the urban fabric captured by property developers, and its promises of meaningful activity challenged by the exploitation and inequities of cultural labour markets. So it needs to be abandoned and rethought ; but on what basis? This paper analyses the potential for cultural work to encourage alternative visions of the 'good life', in particular, how it might encourage a kind of 'sustainable prosperity' wherein human flourishing is not linked to high levels of material consumption but rather the capabilities to engage with cultural and creative practices and communities. We critically explore these ideas in three locations: a London borough, a deindustrialized city in England's midlands, and a rural town on the Welsh/English border. Across these diverse landscapes and socioeconomic contexts, we look at different versions of the good life and at the possibilities and constraints of cultural activity as a way of achieving kinds of sustainable prosperity.

De-westernizing creative labour studies: The informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective

“…In recent times, however, distinct efforts have been made to ‘provincialize’ and ‘de-centralize’ creative geographies of major cities with ‘tales from the margins’ (Gibson, 2010). Acutely aware of the predominance of the super-metropolis as a site of empirical work, some scholars exercise ‘epistemic resistance’ (Willems, 2014) by refusing to ‘go metropolitan’ and so turning the investigative lens on physically and symbolically ‘remote places’, such as ‘the tropical-savannah’ city of Darwin (Gibson et al, 2010), Hay-on-Wye, a small town on the Welsh/English border, and Stoke-on-Trent in the deindustrialized Midlands (Oakley and Ward, 2018), or ‘the traumatized’ New Orleans (Mayer, 2011). Some scholars even suggest remedying ‘the urban bias’ in CCI literature by eschewing the empirical focus on inner-city spatialities such as cafés, refurbished warehouses or hip clubs (Gibson, 2010: 3) and concentrating instead on rural and ‘countryside creativity’ (Luckman, 2012) as well as the ‘creative suburbia’ (Flew, 2012).…”

Creative economies of tomorrow? Limits to growth and the uncertain future

“…The use of the term prosperityrather than growthis deliberate and instructive in that it seeks to disassociate human well-being from purely economistic formulas. A recent strand of work designed to re-imagine creative economy in this conceptual context comes from Kate Oakley and Ward (2018) and Oakley, Ball, and Cunningham (2018) who have helped open up the question of what is meant by growth and prosperity in the cultural industries, and the creative economy which they are imagined to serve. There is some contrast with proponents of inclusive growth, and Richard Florida, both of whom tend to presume the primacy of the economic and then assume an auxiliary or supplementary role for the social, alongside a somewhat "business as usual" presumption about the guaranteed supply of natural and physical resources, and only a limited notion of the more radical potential of the cultural imagination.…”

‘Thriving instead of surviving’: A capability approach to geographical career transitions in the creative industries

“…In addition, our study contributes to the burgeoning literature on work in the creative industries. The majority of current creative career studies focus on examining career entry while neglecting career transitions (Allen and Hollingworth, 2013; Oakley and Ward, 2018). Digital technologies have been found to alter the spatial-clustering of creative industries by dispersing the corporate, physical and social infrastructure formerly concentrated in large urban hubs (Hracs et al, 2011), thereby giving rise to alternative spatial forms of work organization such as ‘digital nomadism’ (Makimoto and Manners, 1997) and teleworking (Gregg, 2011).…”