The natural but unfortunate reaction to the collapse of a value distinction is a rear-guard action. As fauxhemians move in to gentrify an area, generating Starbucks franchises and Pottery Barn outlets, driving property values up and grotty art galleries down, the “real” bohemians, about to lose their studios, lofts, and self-image, rise up in protest. Claims of authenticity are made, ever more emphatically and frantically, in an attempt to ward off the threat by force of magic. Justin Davidson, on the blog of the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, wrote with some dismay about the new concert hall planned for Hamburg, Germany, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, which adds a complex billowing of glass sails to an existing harbourfront warehouse. This latest example of repurposing industrial buildings as cultural venues joins the Tate Modern reconstruction in London (also by Herzog & de Meuron) to the creepy extermination camp vibe of Toronto’s own Distillery District project.
Davidson summed up the central point this way: “I have to admit to some queasiness about the current enthusiasm for fitting out power plants, factories and warehouses as post-industrial pleasure domes. Isn’t there something inherently decadent about taking the means of production and transforming [it] into the means of consumption for the bourgeoisie?” These repurposed downtown workhorses, while clearly a good idea in an age of unbridled sprawl, rubbed the authenticity types the wrong way, stirring a vague unease.
The simplest reason the boho reaction cannot succeed, however, is that bohemian authenticity, like coolness more generally, is part of a spectral economy. In Thorstein Veblen’s terms, it is a positional good; that is, it depends for its value on the ability to differentiate one person from another. Like all positional goods, absent the relevant other person — otherwise known as social context — a good loses value. In the case of boho authenticity, as with cool, a good itself is not even a thing, so when the context shifts you are left with nothing except a disgruntled memory. Music that, once cool, is rendered uncool by mainstream success — the ever-familiar cycle — is still music. You can still listen to it, maybe even enjoy it “ironically,” possibly phase it back into cool somewhere down the fashion line. But authenticity is nothing without the inauthentic comparator.
When aesthetically inclined people with money choose to look and act, live and talk just like poor artists, the poor artists cannot win, because the rules of the game have changed. Indeed, the game is over; there is no game. And authenticity, together with its identity-defining properties, disappears in a puff of self-referential smoke.
A respondent to Davidson, musicologist Phil Ford, noted that he used to think of the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis — a converted brick warehouse — as “a rec center for bobos.” He counselled a sort of uneasy, or maybe defeated, acceptance of the value collapse. “The unpalatable truth of the arts world in America is that you have to learn to love bobos,” Ford said. “Or at least not long to see them hanging from the lampposts of some post-revolutionary Artsylvania. Because, let’s face it, if you’re working in the arts, you’re not too different from the clientele. Hate on the bobos and you’re just hating on yourself. And middle-class self-loathing is so cliché.”
Well, who cares? What impact, if any, does all this have on a city’s life, let alone its level of justice?
For many people, none at all. This is a tempest in an artsy teapot. The rearguard actions will run their futile course, creating lots of unhappy bohemians, but the rest of the town has no stake, hence no interest, in the endgame. To them, this is indeed two kinds of privileged types having a pointless struggle over their narcissistic identities. But the Florida/Brooks idea — also, in fact, the more humane Jane Jacobs idea that precedes both — is that creative-class success has a trickle-down effect on a city’s prosperity, not just its appeal. Mixed-use neighbourhoods and human-scale buildings create street life, lower crime rates, and encourage civility. The more art galleries, restaurants, jazz clubs, theatre companies, and great architecture a city can boast, the thicker its tax base and the livelier its economic growth. Given the background presupposition that a rising tide floats all boats, or merely that tax wealth translates into redistributed benefits, the bottom-line claim is that we’re all better off living in a Big Fusion city. But are we?
This question is never easy to answer. Jacobs’ own optimism about neighbourhoods is predicated on a specific normative position, derived negatively as an objection to what she mocks as the Radiant Garden City Beautiful school of suburban growth. The inner-city alternative she proposes is just as top-down, however — a fact that makes her argument against “prescriptive” urban planning prima facie contradictory. For Jacobites, prescriptive planning is fine, as long as they get to do the prescribing: thou shalt not build tall; thou shalt not make condos available to shallow wealthy people.
Comments (16 comments)
Quinn: Kingwell is clearly in command of the literature, writing in a style of "I am so smart I don't need to explain all these details". No doubt, I buy the argument—-it's persuasive and interesting. The story could go other ways though. The (obvious) story arc of the flâneur relies on Veblen, who relies on Whitehead's processes philosophy. I could see Deleuze's assemblages retaining the vitalism of the flânerie, but without the homogeneity that Kingwell inevitably espouses. What if we are only flâneur's in our own backyard—-that shit ghetto which results from hard work and systematic oppression? December 13, 2007 11:57 EST
IfL: What's that, Mark Kingwell? I can't quite hear you from the top of your ivory tower. December 15, 2007 09:23 EST
RGCB: Dear Dr. Kingwell,
I'm having trouble with the section of your essay that begins with "Well, who cares?". What question is never easy to answer? Is it 'what impact does the bohemian vs. bobo conflict have on a city's level of justice?' or is it 'are we all better off living in a Big Fusion city?'?
Also, I feel that in this section you've misinterpreted Jacobs' work. First, what she mocks (as Radiant Garden City Beautiful) is NOT suburban growth, but urban redevelopment. Secondly, she does NOT argue against urban planning (prescriptive, top-down, or otherwise) per se. Rather, she argues that the urban planning of the time (and I would argue still today) was dangerously wrong-headed, fundamentally misunderstanding 'the kind of problem a city is'.
Finally, I feel that you have not credited Jacobs for the idea that urban success can self-destruct due to its very success - that the rising rents due to the economic vibrancy created by urban diversity eventually kill-off much of the very diversity that sustained that vibrancy. Please re-read Chapter 13 (The self-destruction of diversity) of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in it she suggests that the fundamental problem is not so much that 'success breeds success, then failure', but that there are so few successful areas at any one time; you should also note that in that chapter she describes the 'annexation by "inauthentic" moneyed-types' already occurring in the West Village when she was writing. December 19, 2007 12:41 EST
Staff: cpf - your comment was deleted at our editorial discretion; you are welcome to post again minus the personal attacks December 20, 2007 09:42 EST
SB: the last few sentences of the second-last paragraph look like they got garbled in the uploading stage. December 28, 2007 18:25 EST
SB: sorry — the fourth-to-last is the one that's garbled at the end, starting after the Chesterton quote. December 29, 2007 13:47 EST
Mark Bourrie: Kingwell's argument is beautifully written but self-defeating. Toronto may have more writers, artists and other deep thinkers than it had in 1980, but it has no Innis, Frye or McLuhan. What was once a centre of great quality is now swamped in quantity. The city is twice as large as it was in 1980, but the Globe is only half as good and that's sort of the norm for its institutions. Toronto has very much that's pseudo and very little that's authentic. It reminds me of some punk who has come into easy money, bought a 6,000 square foot monster house and stuffed its library with 5,000 beautiful hardcover books, all un-cracked. People in Toronto try hard to pretend they are more than money-grubbers and high-end wage serfs, but few truly good books come out of the place these days — certainly no grand ideas of the caliber of Innis, Frye or even McLuhan, its artists are still pushing the boho schtick they had in the late 1970s, and even its museum can no longer connect with any sort of real intellectual purpose.
January 07, 2008 17:18 EST
Anonymous:
but isn't it refreshing—like a mint drink on a summer Sunday—to have somebody inspire the idea of a Just City?
I look forward to the book. January 08, 2008 06:04 EST
Flone: Toronto culture. Really interesting to Torontonians, who go on about it at inordinate length. Not at all interesting to anyone else. This article is 4 pages too long. January 10, 2008 17:50 EST
Anonymous: Yawn. Toronto is such an incredibly boring city, which makes its self-importance so utterly amusing. I moved away from Toronto (gasp! Leave a World Class City?) and haven't looked back since. The only people who think that Toronto is indeed a World Class City are the trapped residents who wished they lived in New York or London. This article is 5 pages too long. January 10, 2008 18:59 EST
Vancouver Jane: The disease of disinterest is not unique to Toronto, or Canada. I moved west from Hamilton years ago, in part expecting to find a more dynamic exciting place where I could part of a new community and culture. What I found is an apple skin shallow identity of "west" built from pictures of mountains and big tex cowboy hats. Out here, we drive SUVs made in Ontario, eat food invented in Halifax, attend plays written in Winnipeg, listen to music from Montreal, and watch movies from the states. January 10, 2008 23:08 EST
Ken Hunt: A wonderfully written article, worthy of any great magazine in the world. Erudite, funny, hip. I despair for the day, and it will surely come, that we lose Mr. Kingwell to The New Yorker. Gladwell, Gopnik, Kingwell... man, that would be a murderers row of magazine writers. January 11, 2008 01:58 EST
Glen Stone: So, let's see —
- The most diverse city on Earth with more than 200 ethnic groups and 180 languages
- The third largest theatre city on Earth, behind only New York and London
- Home to the best-educated workforce in the G-8 (some 57% of workers with a post-secondary degree)
- The safest large city in North America, despite the GTA being the fourth-largest urban region
- More than 100,000 immigrants a year from all over the world
- More major business clusters than you can shake a stick at ... 2nd largest in NA for automotive and financial, 3rd for IT and advanced manufacturing, etc.
- Regularly in the top handful of global cities in studies on the best places to live, work and do business
Gosh, what are we doing wrong?
Okay, so I work for the Toronto Board of Trade and we have Richard Florida speaking at our Annual Dinner January 28, so you can call me biased.
But the above facts are facts. Toronto IS a great global city. Yes, we have challenges and our economy and quality of life can always be improved, but we should be proud of this great city.
January 11, 2008 10:27 EST
Anonymous: So... is the injustice that Richard Florida is more influential? Is that what we're talking about here?
I'll never understand why anyone would want to suck on a sour grape! January 13, 2008 20:58 EST
Roland: To say that Toronto is a "potentially great city" is to admit that it is not one. The reason Torontonians do not look each other in the face is that they are ashamed: ashamed that they were not born somewhere better, ashamed that their immigrant parents brought them here rather than to New York or London—imprisoned them with Canadian citizenship and limited horizons.
Many Torontonians see themselves as between cities in the way that the people at unemployment centres see themselves as between jobs, and men in porno shops see themselves as between girlfriends. Just moving through; no need to drink in the shame in each other's eyes. Far better to close them and dream of better days.
January 23, 2008 11:59 EST
cw: what is your cliché, though, of gazing into the stranger's eyes? acknowledge the windows to the soul, etc. not only a tired prescription but a lousy assumption in the first place—we keep our heads bowed, blah, we're so callous, blah. do we actually, are we actually? on queen street? in richmond hill? at yonge/bloor station? come now, it's petty. you betray your own complexity: first you give us—quite beautifully—your tellingly fragmented experience as a journalist then you recede into the apparently homogeneous and removed perspective of the professor. awe and multiplicity turns into pure judgement, into the singular thesis. which is itself a cliché. now this is a shame, and does us no justice. April 04, 2008 17:36 EST