There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years in Toronto about the gentrification of formerly “ethnic” and low-income neighbourhoods in west-central Toronto, such as Kensington Market, College Street and Queen Street West. In many cases, the process starts with “bohemianization” — the areas are first infiltrated by hip independent stores and art galleries that are oriented towards “creative” types. With this in mind, a recent satirical story in The Onion which sends up this whole process, “Sometimes I Feel Like I’m The Only One Trying To Gentrify This Neighborhood,” seems like it was made for Toronto.
The story is also a clever send-up of a big idea that has been making the rounds, the “Creative Cities” concept championed by urban guru Richard Florida in his book The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida argues that creative people in business, technology and the arts will be the driving force of economic growth in the new century, and that they are attracted to cities that have a lively “bohemian” arts scene. The report on Toronto as a creative city released this summer, “Imagine Toronto … Strategies for a Creative City” was very much a product of these ideas.
3 comments
Strategies for a creative city was pretty disappointing in my mind – it really missed out on a lot of what we are trying to tell them.
Another thing that is unsurprisingly missing from the discussion on creative cities is entertainment options. The creative class likes nightlife. A lot. Cities should be doing everything they can to promote their nightlife scene, but instead we see local governments imposing excessive police enforcement in New York by padlocking clubs, fining venue owners and refusing to repeal the Cabaret Laws.
Toronto tourism never promotes our megaclubs even though we have some of the world’s finest dance music DJ’s come through our nightspots, attracting tens of thousands from the GTA but never from outside.
The reason I moved to Toronto from New York was for the rave scene, honestly, and I know I am not the only one. And it bothers me that this has never registered with anybody: we like fun. Make it easier to have!
It’s my view that the most creative cities are supported by a lot of people who don’t think of themselves as part of the ‘creative class’. These people drive our buses, teach our children, and clean our garbage. And yet, they attend public festivals and nightclubs and buy (and sometimes write) books and talk about hockey, just like us ‘creative’ types do.
I think Toronto is made a lot more creative by ‘ordinary’ people who grow vegetables in their front gardens, hang colourful tapestries from their apartment balconies, pass on cultural mythologies from home and away, and rebuild their garages from scrap lumber than by aspiring poets who slum in Kensington Market or Parkdale until they can move to the Beach(es), accumulate a brace of exotic dogs and write about the rise of the creative class.
Culture lives in people and places. The difficulty is that by trying to capture a piece of a neighbourhood’s authenticity, we often risk destroying its essence. This is the challenge at the heart of gentrification. The parallel difficulty is that nobody wants to admit being part of the problem. it’s always ‘condo developers’ and ‘real estate moguls’ at some distant end of the spectrum. Never us ‘creative types’ who trample neighbourhoods in our rapacious quest for another load of artisanal bread and an expensive afternoon coffee to take to our ‘funky’ flat that most locals can’t afford.
“we like fun. Make it easier to have!”
Wow. Is this what now passes for political activism?
Amy, your critique of “creative class” theory is well put. The best discussion of this that I’ve read is Paul Maliszewski’s “Flexbility and Its Discontents,” in the last issue of The Baffler (#16, 2003, unfortunately not avaliable online). It gives Richard Florida a pretty thorough drubbing.