Creative Urbanity. Emanuela Guano
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German philosopher Walter Benjamin deprecated how the commercial phantasmagorias of consumer capitalism had transformed the flâneur into the badaud: the gaper as a passive consumer of images whose observation skills had gone stagnant (Benjamin 1973). Benjamin’s critique became immensely influential for urban studies across disciplinary boundaries. Resonating with the Marxist suspicion of consumption as well as with the elitist disdain for the tastes of the masses and the masculinist contempt for shopping as a female practice (Featherstone 1998; Morris 1993), in the late twentieth century the condemnation of the intensely aesthetic commercial enchantment of the contemporary “voodoo” or “fantasy” city (Dicks 2004; Hannigan 1998; Harvey 1988; Ritzer 2010; Zukin 1996) became synonymous with the allegedly mindless “enjoyment without consequences” (Welsch 1998: 3) of the crowds. While ranging considerably in disciplinary paradigm, methodological approach, and level of empiricism, these studies share a critical focus on the all-powerful role of corporate capitals in shaping the urban everyday. Their core argument is that what ensues from the commercial aestheticization of the urban experience disempowers city dwellers, seducing them into surrendering to the material and ideological might of corporate capitals.
Yet, while much of North Atlantic scholarship indicts consumer capitalism for the loss of truly democratic public space (Mitchell 2003; Harvey 1991; Zukin 1991, 1996), it bears remembering that not all revitalized cityscapes around the world are organized along the lines of the same social, spatial, and above all capitalist criteria as U.S. cities (Soja 1996; Feather-stone 1998). In distancing herself from the political economy paradigm that has long been hegemonic in the study of cities, Aihwa Ong (2011: 2) recently argued that the attempt to posit global capitalism as the singular causality of all urban dynamics worldwide inevitably reduces remarkably different cities to the role of manifestations of the same, and globally homogeneous, economic template. Drawing on Michel de Certeau (1984: 159), one may also argue that such analyses are at least partly concocted through an observation of the “concept city”: a view from “above” that is enabled by focusing on a “finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnecting properties” while neglecting the intricacies of the city’s everyday. The view from “down below” (de Certeau 1984: 158), instead, allows for an ethno-graphically inflected approach to the varieties of urban practice that can help produce more nuanced analyses of how urban worlds are made both through the top-down intervention of states and capitals and through the bottom-up creative practice of city dwellers. The latter, as this book suggests, may use their skills not only to navigate and consume the city (Richards 2011: 1229), but also to shape the kind of experiences that punctuate its quotidian. Instead of reducing urban aestheticization to a crass consumerist spectacle engineered by corporations, here I seek to offer a more nuanced exploration of forms of production of highly symbolic and experiential goods that are both material and intangible (Featherstone 1998: 916), and that are designed and commodified by the very same city dwellers who are also adept at consuming them in the first place. As the “artist who doesn’t paint” and the “writer who will one day write a book” (Featherstone 1998: 913), Baudelaire’s flâneur limited himself to a close exploration of urban life that was fundamentally unproductive; soon enough he became a gaper trapped in a commercialized urban space (Benjamin 1973). Even though they are themselves adept at consuming various aspects of city life, the protagonists of this book, instead, are neither idle voyeurs nor are they passive gapers. Rather, they are both purposeful explorers of the urban experience and creators of a range of material and immaterial cultural goods and services capable of enacting an aestheticization of the city that is largely independent from corporate dynamics.
Urban Anthropology and the Middle Classes
The contemporary, purposeful, and creative flâneuses and flâneurs portrayed in this book are mostly members of the urban middle classes whom social scientists have consistently classified as the predominant consumers of revitalized cityscapes and of their cultural products (Richards 2006: 266; Smith 1996; Zukin 1989, 1996). As such, they are uneasy subjects of anthropological inquiry. On the basis of the implicit division of scholarly labor that assigned the study of modernity to sociologists and the investigation of traditional cultures to anthropologists (Wolf 1982: 12–13), for a long time the latter eschewed the issue of class. When they began expanding their horizons to urban societies, most anthropologists still limited themselves to studying down, thus focusing their attention exclusively on the marginal and the downtrodden. It is only in recent years that anthropologists have overcome the “Marxist ‘embarrassment’ of the middle class” (Wright 1989: 3, in Heiman, Liechty, and Freeman 2010: 11) to pay an increasing attention to these social groups. Recent ethnographies of middle-class life range from the former Soviet Union (Patico 2008; Richardson 2008) to India (Dickey 2012; Srivastava 2014) and Nepal (Liechty 2003); from Vietnam (Leshkowich 2014) to China (Hoffman 2010; Zhang 2010); from the United States (Heiman 2015; Low 2003; Newman 1999; Ortner 2003) to Italy (Cole 1997; Mole 2011; Muehlebach 2012) and Egypt (de Koning 2009), and from Barbados (Freeman 2000, 2014) to Brazil (Caldeira 2001; O’Dougherty 2002) and Argentina (Guano 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2004). And yet, influenced by the Marxist paradigm (Ong 2011) as well as by anthropology’s traditional emphasis on the “other,” the vast majority of ethnographies with an explicitly urban agenda still focus on the plight of the poor and the disenfranchised. While such scholarship has the merit of shedding light on dynamics of downright oppression and resistance, it also reiterates the anthropological invisibility of the middle classes—almost as if, as Nick Dines (2012: 18) put it, these often remarkably large social groups “did not require investigation or were simply not anthropologically interesting.”
While it would be incorrect to claim that urban anthropologists have consistently disregarded the role of the middle classes in the production of urban space worldwide (see, e.g., Low 2003; Caldeira 2001; Guano 2002, 2007; de Koning 2009; Richardson 2008), several of the exceptions zero in on these social groups’ known urge to reinforce social boundaries (Bourdieu 1984; Liechty 2003; Ortner 2006), thus highlighting middle-class contributions to the spatialization of prejudice and social fear (Caldeira 2001; Guano 2003a, 2003b; Heiman 2015; Low 2003; Srivastava 2014).1 Taking a somewhat germane stance, geographic scholarship portrays the middle classes as agents of gentrification and the displacement of urban working classes. Even though they may differ on whether the urban middle classes operate on the basis of culture and taste or whether they are simply the dupes of top-down capitalist dynamics, such approaches classify these social groups along a continuum that ranges from the limited agency of marginal gentrifiers (Beauregard 1986; Rose 1984) and the contradictions intrinsic to liberal middle-class subjectivities (Ley 1996) to the downright racist and classist revanchism of yuppies (Smith 1996).
Suggesting a strikingly different perspective, in 2002 urban theorist Richard Florida targeted an audience of urban administrators and policymakers with his argument that cities experience growth only when they are successful in attracting highly educated and creative people—a feat at which they can only succeed by fostering an atmosphere of diversity and tolerance set against the backdrop of easily available advanced technology. Florida’s thesis drew a considerable amount of criticism for its hyperbolic advocacy (Peck 2005: 741) as well as for its elitism (Gornostaeva and Campbell 2012) and its tendency to obscure the potential implication of the “creative class” in exclusionary forms of urbanism (Markusen 2006; Peck 2005). On the other hand, a cautious reading of Florida’s work calls for a reflection on the urban life of social groups that have often been neglected by anthropological inquiry. Utilized as an analytical category rather than as a tool for social engineering, Florida’s notion of the “creative class” helps sharpen the focus on the role of middle-class individuals not just as consumers, but rather and above all as producers and marketers of goods and services (see also Freeman 2014; Hoffman 2010; Leshkowich 2014). As such, it invites a reflection on how mid-level processes of cultural production participate in urban revitalization by intervening at a capillary level in a city’s everyday. This agency is precisely what, in recent years, anthropologists have called “poiesis” (Calhoun, Sennett, and Shapira 2013) or “worlding” (Ong 2011) as ways of making the city through a quotidian practice that may unfold against the backdrop of large-scale interventions on the cityscape.
Placing an explicitly Marxist emphasis on class struggle, anthropological analyses have frequently cast the dichotomy of structure and agency as one of domination and resistance (Ortner