Taming the genius loci? Contesting post-socialist creative industries in the case of Brno's former prison

Highlights

• The creative city is not a neutral and natural strategy for urban regeneration.

• Making a city creative is just one possible framing of a place.

• The creative city imperative is a political process, not a mere planning decision.

• Dynamics of conflict can shape mechanisms of creative city-making.

• Instrumentalization of historical memory challenges the creative city thesis.

Abstract

In the increasingly tight race of inter-urban competition, the idea that cities have to be made creative has gripped the imagination of urban planners and scholars alike. This process is imagined as straightforward, readily exportable and devoid of conflict. The paper uses the perspective of relational place-making to reveal the creative city imperative as a political process. This is carried out through the medium of conflict, which brings about two contrasting place frames, which progressively reveal each other's political connections. We use the case of a former central-European prison, located in Brno, the Czech Republic, to show how making a city creative is just one possible framing of a place, how making cities attractive to creative individuals engenders resistance and how historical memory summons the powerful genius loci, that is nevertheless relational and contingent. The results illustrate in detail how the conflict between development and preservation unfolds around six axes of opposition that define the two frames (e.g. future vs. past, part vs. whole etc.) and how these axes are themselves linked to various concepts of place and time.

Introduction

The idea that cities have to be made creative has gripped the imagination of urban planners throughout the Western world. This interest has also taken hold in some Central and European cities, as suggested by projects (e.g. EUKN, 2012) and publications (e.g. Aspen Review, 2015). However, little is known about how this process might unfold outside the core of North American and Western European metropolises. Since the original creative city thesis makes quite a bit of the qualities of locality and of local heritage (Landry & Bianchini, 1995), it is worth asking whether the particular contexts of central European cities, with their fractured histories under Nazism, Soviet socialism and post-socialism, may pose a different set of challenges compared to those in Western Europe. The conflict surrounding the Brno prison, proposed by some to be a regional epicentre of creative industries but resisted by others interested in its preservation, reveals how the urban cultural and creative industries have been drawn into a highly contentious space, mobilized around political memory. By describing in detail this process we reveal the important but little recognized role of memory as a form of political resistance to the creative city.

The paper also contributes to the literature on place-making (Koopmans, Keech, Sovová, & Reed, 2017; Lyons, Carothers, & Reedy, 2016; Pierce, Martin, & Murphy, 2011) by linking the generic process of relational place-making to the emerging interest for the cultural and creative industries in Central and Eastern Europe. It documents how historical memory has become a crucial vehicle for challenging the creative city drive. Interestingly, this challenge does not reside in an ideological critique of the creative city, as it has been formulated in Western countries either from the left or the right (cf. Peck, 2005). Instead, historical memory as political vehicle is constructed as an interlocking set of historical frames at urban, national and international levels. We therefore ask: how is memory mobilized in contesting creative industries in post-socialist cities and, more generally, wherever places are intertwined with memory politics? We thus contribute to the growing interest in exploring the conflicting implications of the creative city (e.g. Novy & Colomb, 2013; Zebracki, 2018) by focussing on resistance mediated through the politics of memory and illustrate this through a very rich case study from a contested post-totalitarian urban space in Central and Eastern Europe.

The theoretical challenges posed by the creative city and its conflicting entanglements in Central and Eastern Europe are discussed below. This is followed by the presentation of the case study and of the data collection methods and analysis. The main analytical section of the article consists of six axes of opposition along which the creative city is set in contrast with a political interpretation of the genius loci, as articulated by its opponents, around a revived politics of memory. The six thematic axes allow a fine-grained distinction between two place-frames, labelled developmentalist and preservationist, and can be described in terms of: monument versus subsidy, sooner versus at the right time, future versus past, part versus unit, respect versus attraction, mixing versus purification. They reveal how resistance to the creative city emerges and is organized around a politics of memory.