Cultural economy and urban development in Shanghai

Cultural development is one of the most recent and distinctive models of Chinese modernization. In the West, cultural development entails a strong relationship between the regeneration of post-industrial cities and the development of cultural/ creative industries through place branding and local economic development. Central to the Chinese claim on this is the development of creative clusters. This includes the authorization of the use of inner city spaces by creative industries and to use this as a model to regenerate other parts of the city. As a result, in less than a decade, a city like Shanghai has gone from small-scale cultural production scattered in warehouses and factories to large, concentrated clusters of creative industries spread right across the city. However, the role of culture in rejuvenating urban decay in the context of Chinese socialist market reforms has to be mediated by the state. The transformation of creative clusters in Shanghai is metaphoric to a reconfiguration of the relationship between culture, market and policy in China. The conceptual and empirical debates about culture and development in China have taken a distinctive form. In Shanghai, for instance, the change of term from ‘cultural industries’ to ‘creative industries’ has been justified in much more directly economic terms than has been the case in western cities. It has been explicitly linked to a range of economic outcomes and driven primarily by economic actors. The emergence of cultural economy in the form of the creative industries and creative clusters in Shanghai can thus be examined as a set of economic actions. Such creative industries as economic process is highly contentious in the western context. This situation is exacerbated further when the discourses, institutions and practices involved encounter a context in which none of these can be taken for granted. When a city such as Shanghai begins to promote the ‘cultural economy’, it is faced with the question of aesthetics, cultural freedom, identity and individual creativity. At the same time, the relationships between the state, economy and everyday life have to be constantly negotiated at all levels. None of these conform to a ‘Euro-centric’ model of modernization. Shanghai has used culture to propel itself to global city status. However, the results have been mixed. On the one hand there have been high-levels of return for real estate developers and for the city’s global image capital; on the other the development of a ‘cultural economy’ in a socialist market has presented limited space for addressing cultural values that aren’t part of the globalized circulation of capital. If Shanghai is going to represent a new global cultural capital, questions such as what kind of culture we are envisaging, and what kind of city, have to be answered.