[My-ci] *S*P*A*M* Beyond the Ruins of the Creative City

[Heur B (van) (VKS)]

Well now, for a moment I actually thought this text was about Berlin - "Berlin's Factory of Culture..."

Instead, what we have here is another text that claims to say something about Berlin - the best excuse to visit the city, right? - but ends up with a list of empirical clichés found on the net: from Damien Hirst to Detroit techno to Google and Facebook. The two examples from Berlin - Media Spree and the Skulpturenpark project - are awarded one paragraph and remain under-analyzed. For example, one of the main rationales behind the Skulpturenpark project was not so much to "question the controversial role of artists in relation to urban space" (a statement so general it explains virtually nothing), but to engage with the fact that this vacant area is fragmented into app. 60 privately owned lots (illustrating indeed speculative investment and its failure) and the difficulties this caused in trying to get any project organized on this space - since one had to deal with so many owners. Also, the Skulpturenpark project needs to be understood as engaging with a much older tradition of the sculpture park - a phenomenon well-known in Germany and elsewhere - the expectations this creates and the disappointments generated by the Skulpturenpark project in Berlin.

I don't know Matteo, I find myself wanting to agree with your critique, but it seems to me that this kind of 'radical' theory produces more problems than it solves. Not only does it lead to bad empirical analysis - in not engaging with the specificity of the city, the essay replicates the dis-embedding and de-contextualization criticized in the object of analysis (gentrification, creative city, etc.) - it also tends to lead to a rather confused political vision. Who's your target? In not analyzing at all the specific creative industries policies of Berlin or the urban geography of the city, this is absolutely lost. 

Keep your eyes on the prize, as Neil Smith - whom you approvingly quote in your text - also says...

Best,

bas




-----Original Message-----
From: my-ci-bounces at orgnets.net [mailto:my-ci-bounces at orgnets.net] On Behalf Of Matteo Pasquinelli
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 2:42 PM
To: my-ci at orgnets.net
Subject: *S*P*A*M* [My-ci] Beyond the Ruins of the Creative City


My contribution for the event The Artist and Urban Development
organised by Skulputerenpark (www.skulpturenpark.org) in Berlin
last saturday, pdf is of course more printer and human friendly.
Let's help this crisis to finish the job ;) /m
---

http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Beyond-the-Ruins-of-the-Creative- 
City.pdf



Matteo Pasquinelli

Beyond the Ruins of the Creative City: Berlin's Factory of Culture  
and the Sabotage of Rent



Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear were living at the  
end of something - of modernism, of the American dream, of the  
industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was  
all around us in the ruins of the cities... Urban ruins were the  
emblematic places for this era, the places that gave punk part of its  
aesthetic, and like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a  
worldview with a mandate  on how to act, how to live... A city is  
built to resemble a conscious mind, a network  that can calculate,  
administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city,  
its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and  in this truly bring  
it to life. With ruins a city springs free  of its plans into  
something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but  
perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy  
tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they  
come to life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative  
death like the corpse that feeds flower. An urban ruin is a place  
that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in  
some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the  
ordinary production and consumption of the city.
        - Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost1



 From Detroit to Berlin: history of the underground culture through  
the paradigm crisis.

Faster than any other form of art, music is said to incarnate but the  
unconscious of technology and dominant means of production, and in  
particular their crisis, the shift from paradigm to paradigm. Whereas  
Futurism welcomed the age of machines for the masses, punk and post- 
industrial music, in contrast, paid tribute to the disintegration of  
Fordism and colonised the relicts of suburban factories as a habitat  
for new forms of life. Despite their industrial fetish, Throbbing  
Gristle, the most experimental and filthy of UK punk bands, declared  
as early as 1976  their drive for "information war"2,  while in  
Germany computer music become popular thanks to Kraftwerk (literally,  
'power station'). In the late 80s techno music appeared in Detroit:  
the original sound of the Motor City incorporating the synthetic  
presentiment of the coming digital machines.3 The term 'techno' was  
inspired to Juan Atkins by Alvin Toffler's book The Third Wave, where  
the first 'techno rebels' were described as the pioneers of  
information age.4 Detroit techno was the analogue rhythm session of  
Fordism innervated by the harmonics of the first microchips.  
Thereafter when digital code became the hegemonic paradigm of  
information, underground music went even more modular, cognitive and  
minimal (switching from TR-909 drum machines to Max/MSP software, to  
simplify it in a technical formula).5 After diverse evolutions, the  
parable of the Detroit techno has found its way today into the Berlin  
clubs under the mainstream and micro-hedonist genre of 'minimal  
techno'.6 This basic genealogy of electronic music (skipping the  
predictable theories of sampling and remix culture) is to pose a  
simple question: where is the underground today? The horizontality of  
networks and digital matrix seems to have erased hierarchies and  
authorship but also the old reassuring topological notion of the  
underground. If the underground was precisely a parasitic form of  
life in the interstices of dominant mode of production, its urban and  
electronic infrastructures, where can we find its new incarnations in  
relation to the contemporary technology and metropolis? If the  
factories became informational and immaterial like even punks  
predicted, which relics is the art underground going to colonise in  
the next future? Which ruins and material memories will the digital  
matrix leave behind?
       The notion of the underground belongs obviously to the age of  
industrialism, when society had a clear class division and was not  
yet atomised into a multitude of precarious workers and free-lancers. 
7 For decades, the innervations of the industrial apparatuses formed  
the machinic imaginary of subcultures, also providing many urban  
interstices to populate. If the underground culture was the by- 
product of Fordism, such a spatial and political  dimension seems to  
evaporate in the age of the network society, the well-educated  
'creative' commons and corporate Free Culture. Where is the  
underground resistance in the age of financial capitalism and  
volatile stock markets?8 The contemporary phenomenons of  
financialisation and gentrification are examples of new techniques of  
valorisation (based on speculative rent) still to be comprehended by  
cultural activism and art world. Today the global credit crisis  
affected specifically these new models of business and has suddenly  
shifted many political and cultural coordinates. Gentrification as it  
has been experienced in Berlin and the European 'creative' cities may  
encounter its doppelgänger. Today's 	American nightmare is  
paradoxically the 1$ house and 'detroitification' is the neologism  
that describes this vertical collapse of the industrial sector, the  
real estate market and the very social fabric of US cities. Before  
knowledge economy and gentrification processes were fully understood,  
cultural production found itself in the new scenario of financial and  
credit crisis. In a city like Berlin the underground has become a  
'factory of value' (mainly for real estate speculation and city  
marketing), but now the destiny of cultural production has to be  
rethought within the current global crisis.


The invisible skyline of the cultural city: the frictions of the  
immaterial.

In Berlin the colonisation of the relicts of Fordism is still a  
fascinating and complex history: not only the vestiges of previous  
totalitarian regimes, but also the schizophrenic stratification of  
failed urban plans form the geology and the humus of the cultural  
world.9 Today this stratification includes a thick immaterial layer  
of cultural and symbolic capital, which is catalysing the 'creative  
city' buzz and well-known processes of gentrification. There is  
therefore an immaterial architecture yet to be uncovered, or more  
specifically, an economy of the immaterial that is fed unconsciously  
by the art world and underground subcultures. This issue is related  
once again to the question: what kind of underground culture is  
possible in a time of spectacular economy? What looks like a  
nostalgic question points in other ways to the political autonomy of  
the 'social factory' of culture and to new coordinates for cultural  
agency that may be more effective on the economic ground. The  
hypothesis advanced here is that the contemporary form of  
'underground' has to be found along the new chain of value  
accumulation - along the new ruins of financial crisis. The good old  
underground has become part of the cultural industries and the  
spectacular economy, as well as our life has been incorporate by a  
more general biopolitical production (that is the whole of our social  
life has been put to work). On a cynical note, this question of the  
neutralisation of the underground concerns also business. What's the  
future of gentrification if there are no more subcultures that  
produce 'added value' and make it circulate across the city?
       The literature which promotes the 'creative cities' (such as  
the work of Richard Florida)10 or denounces their hidden neoliberal  
agenda and social costs is extensive. This text approaches the  
ideological construct of the 'creative city' (and similar models)  
from a different angle in order to attempt a reverse engineering of  
its economic mechanism. Usually both liberal partisans or radical  
critics of 'creative economy' employ a symmetrical paradigm, where  
the material and the immaterial domains are defended in their  
autonomy and hegemony against each other. Therefore, the metropolis  
is respectively described along the urban fabric or the symbolic  
capital, the good old material economy or the supposedly virtuous  
economy of 'creativity'. On the opposite, this text tries to  
underline the conflicts, frictions and value asymmetries that occur  
along the material and immaterial domains; the material accumulation  
of value triggered by cultural production; the autonomy of the social  
factory of culture against the skyline of the 'creative' cities.  
Hopefully in this way the invisible motor of the cultural city can be  
grasped, possibly re-engineered and effectively inverted.  
Conceptually, three notions are introduced here. First, the concept  
of the factory of culture, that is the social production of culture  
versus the established Creative Industries and the institutional  
policies of the 'creative cities'. Second, the profound asymmetries  
of cultural commons and the accumulation of value between the two  
layers of symbolic production and material economy (as it happens for  
instance with gentrification: such conflictive concretions of value  
can be considered as the very 'ruins of the Creative City'). Finally,  
the notion of creative sabotage of creative rent is suggested as a  
political response to gentrification and exploitation of cultural  
capital (such a sabotage of value is 'creative' as it builds over the  
financial and real estate 'ruins' and is constitutive of the common).


The factory of culture and the metropolis

The concept of factory of culture is opposed to notions like culture  
industry, Creative Industries or 'creative cities.11 The contemporary  
production of culture is far more complex, machinic, social and  
conflictive than what the fashionable and institutional models of  
creativity promote: it is indeed a 'factory'. The old notion of  
subculture was developed as a alternative to the paradigm of dominant  
culture with a deep concern for a positive and productive identity.  
Postmodernism came to destroy the reassuring dialectics between  
highbrow and lowbrow culture, but never developed a proper economic  
model or value theory. The figure of the factory of culture addresses  
on the opposite a key productive role for the cultural world within  
what Mario Tronti described as 'social factory'.12 There are many  
social factories of immaterial labour in today's economy and each  
would deserve specific attention: education, art, digital networks,  
and so on. Underlining culture as a factory means also to show the  
machinic complexity of economy and to criticise the dominant reading  
of the commons as a territory virgin of any capitalist exploitation.  
Contrary to the interpretation of Free Culture apostles like Lawrence  
Lessig and Yochai Benkler, the commons of culture are not an  
independent domain of pure freedom, cooperation and autonomy, but  
they are constantly subjected to the force field of capitalism.13 The  
commons of culture are a form of life, always productive and  
conflictive, and often also easy to exploit.
       In particular, at the twilight of the society of the  
spectacle, a dense material economy is discovered at the core of  
cultural production. Debord's controversial aphorism can finally be  
reversed: "The capital is spectacle to such a degree of accumulation  
that it becomes a skyline of cement".14 After decades of parallel  
evolution, two strata of recent history have converged in a unique  
dispositif: the urban revolution (as Lefebvre described the city in  
the 1960s, a motor of autonomous production and capital accumulation) 
15 and the cultural industry (as the Frankfurt school inaugurated the  
transformation of culture in business and 'deception').16 The name of  
this newborn chimera is 'creative cities' - an asymmetrical  chimera,  
as the mask of culture is used to cover the hydra of concrete and  
real-estate speculation. The chimera of cultural cities is a complex  
machine, no longer based on the opposition between high and low  
culture that was central to the Frankfurt School canon of the culture  
industry. Specifically, culture production is today a biopolitical  
machine where all aspects of life are integrated and put to work,  
where new lifestyles become commodities, where culture is considered  
an economic flow like any other and where, in particular, the  
collective production of imaginary is quickly hijacked to increase  
the profits of corporate business. 17


The asymmetries of value in the cultural sphere: the 'artistic mode  
of production' and the 'collective symbolic capital'.

Under different respects, the hegemonic business model of cultural  
economy is rent. "Rent is the new profit", as Carlo Vercellone has  
put it.18 To be clear, rent is the motor of valorisation behind  
gentrification, for it exploits the common resource of land or  
cultural capital without being particularly productive. Forms of rent  
are also monopolies over software patents, communication protocols or  
network infrastructures (Microsoft, Google, Facebook just to bring  
few examples from the digital sphere). If profit and wage are the  
vectors of capitalist accumulation under industrialism, monopoly rent  
and exploitation of the cultural commons are the business models  
specific to knowledge-based economy, or cognitive capitalism.19  
Behind the new forms of gentrification there is a significant link  
between real estate speculation and cultural production - a link that  
is still not enough clear in many art circles.
       Neil Smith was the first to introduce gentrification as the  
new fault line between social classes in his seminal book The New  
Urban Frontier.20 In his principal model the gentrification of New  
York is described through the notion of rent gap: the circulation of  
a differential of ground value across the city triggers  
gentrification when such a value gap is profitable enough in a  
specific area.21 David Harvey further expanded the theory of rent to  
include the collective production of culture as a terrain that the  
market exploits to find new 'marks of distinctions'. In his essay The  
Art of Rent that describes the gentrification of Barcelona, Harvey  
introduces the notion of collective symbolic capital: real estate  
business exploits the old and new cultural capital which has  
gradually sedimented in a given city (in forms of sociality, quality  
of life, art, gastronomic traditions, etc.).22 Harvey's essay is one  
of the few texts to underline the political asymmetries of the much- 
celebrated cultural commons. Harvey links the intangible production  
and accumulation of real money not through the regime of intellectual  
property but along the parasitic exploitation of the immaterial  
domain by the material one. The collective symbolic capital is  
another name for the capitalist exploitation of the commons - a form  
of exploitation that does not need violent enclosures (a sort of  
'capitalism without private property' that many activists of Free  
Culture do not recognize).
       The notion of collective symbolic capital is crucial to reveal  
the intimate link between cultural production and real estate  
economy. The collective symbolic capital is accumulated in different  
ways. In a traditional way, it is the historical and social memory of  
a given locale (the case of Barcelona covered by Harvey). In an  
modern way, it can be produced exploiting urban subcultures and the  
art world  (describing the rise of the loft culture in the New York  
of the '80s, Sharon Zukin defined a specific artistic mode of  
production oriented to making neighbourhoods more attractive for  
business).23 Or, in a more artificial way, it can be generated by the  
PR campaigns of city councils eager to join the club of the creative  
cities (according to the strategies of  Richard Florida). Already  
1984 Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Ryan explained similar techniques in  
their classic article "The Fine Art of Gentrification".24
       Despite their different urban latitudes, Berlin and Barcelona  
share a similar destiny. The old underground of Berlin attracted and  
then boosted gentrification, just as in Barcelona. Later, over this  
cultural milieu, a second-order strategy developed large urban plans  
related to the media industries. In Barcelona the 22@ urban plan was  
designed to regenerate the former industrial district of Poble Nou  
under the fashionable concept of 'knowledge city'.25 Similarly, in  
Berlin the project 'Media Spree' aims to transform a big area on the  
Spree River into a new pole for culture industries.26 The area is  
well known for its underground music scene, and there is a stark  
contradiction that reveals more than a hundred analyses: to promote  
this area, the magazines of the investment companies are using the  
imagery of the same clubs that they put under eviction.27 Also the  
Berlin Biennale showed interest for the urban battlefield: the 2008  
edition featured the project Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum as one of  
its main venues. Skulpturenpark is an "urban void" owned by various  
private companies and individuals, formerly part of the  
"Mauerstreifen" (the militarized zone within the Berlin Wall) and now  
overgrown with weeds.28 It started not simply to host public art  
projects for the biennale but also to question the controversial role  
of artists in relation to the urban space. The arrest of Andrej Holm  
in July 2007 for his research on gentrification occurred in this  
broad urban context - an arrest that made clear to a wide audience  
the scale of economic interests and police attention around the new G  
word.29 Considering that even Walter Benjamin complained about  
bohemian bars being invaded by the new rampant middle class (in the  
1930s!), a century-long conflict could be traced in Berlin alone as a  
continental case study.30
       Today the 'artistic mode of production' has become an extended  
immaterial factory. Throughout Berlin and the whole of Europe, we are  
witnessing the condensation of a peculiar form of cultural capital as  
the leading force behind real estate and the 'creative cities'  
strategy of city councils eager to attract both investments and  
highly skilled workers. As a result, the real estate business, has  
established a perverse machinery in alliance with the art world and  
cultural producers. Even if for decades the counterculture has been  
feeding the spectacle and culture industries with fresh ideas, for  
the first time, the current generation of urban subcultures have to  
face the immediate concrete by-products of their symbolic labour.


The underground and the sabotage of rent

The most extreme incarnation of the artistic mode of production is  
the figure of Damien Hirst whose art has become a purely financial  
performance. A former student at Goldsmiths, Hirst ironically  
embodied the university's karma (it emerged from a heritage of a  
medieval guild of goldsmiths and jewellers!) and radicalised the PR  
machine provided to all the Young British Artists by the art  
deparment. His most recent artwork is a modern version of The Golden  
Calf that has been sold at Sotheby's for 10 million pounds just after  
its completion.31 This  piece will be recorded as a milestone only  
for one reason: it's the first time an artwork has accessed the open  
market by completely skipping the usual mill of galleries and art  
dealers. Indeed Hirst started to build over the 'ruins' of the  
financial mania. Yet is this cynical over-identification with  
capitalism the only destiny left to the underground? Maybe, in the  
same way the underground started to colonise post-industrial relicts,  
it is time to visualise the post-financial ruins which to build upon.
	However, many proposals coming from politically correct activism or  
so-called radical thought still sound quite ineffective. For  
instance, the plea 'Be uncreative!' addressed recently by the  
collective BAVO represents quite a paranoid attitude. Here we are  
still in the typical postmodern cul-de-sac, where each act of  
resistance is supposed to reinforce fatalistically the dominant Code. 
32 This Lacanian paranoia about a Spectacle able to co-opt any  
spontaneous production of culture results eventually in the self- 
castration of the living energy of the metropolis. Similarly, also  
the idea of sustainable art or  sustainable gentrification, where  
artists are supposed to be concerned about their production of  
symbolic capital and rent value, is simply naïve. One of the  
contradictions of cognitive capitalism is that once symbolic capital  
and value are accumulated, it is quite difficult to be de- 
accumulated. All these models lack a proper understanding of the  
economic model of cognitive capitalism: it is not possible to advance  
a proper political response without affecting the accumulation of  
surplus-value and ground rent must be confronted with a different  
strategy. Recently, Antonio Negri has criticised the forms of 'soft  
activism' in the metropolis, or those who believe that the 'political  
diagonal' can escape the trap of the 'biopolitical diagram' and so it  
would be possible to build 'temporary autonomous zones' like it was  
fashionable once.33 In other terms, Negri underlines the fact that  
the political action has to affect the economic production and  
exploitation, or else it remains an ephemeral gesture. In the case of  
cultural and urban gentrification then, the only hypothesis left is  
the  sabotage of rent - a sabotage of the value accumulated by  
exploiting the common domain of the cultural and symbolic capital and  
its redistribution.
       Since the 'creative destruction' of value characteristic of  
stock markets has become the political condition of current times, a  
redefinition of the cultural commons is needed too.34 A purely  
imaginary fabrication of value is a key component of the financial  
game as well as gentrification processes. Stock markets first taught  
everybody the sabotage of value. Sabotage is precisely what is  
considered impossible within the postmodern parlance (where each  
gesture supposedly reinforces the dominant regime), or conversely  
what Negri himself considered a form of self-valorisation during the  
social struggles of the '70s.35 What might occur if the urban  
multitudes and the art world enter this valorisation game and recover  
a common power over the chain of value production which these day is  
revealing its inherent fragility? The new coordinates of the  
underground in the age of cognitive and financial capitalism can be  
found along these intangible vectors of value, along these invisible  
'ruins' of the Creative City, just as once the music underground  
started to colonised the industrial relicts or to the invisible  
architecture of the first microprocessors. The punk underground grew  
out of the ruins of the suburban factories and now we experience a so- 
called creative economy parasiting the underground itself: it is time  
to imagine the factory of culture getting organised within the ruins  
of value that the 'creative cities' are ready to leave behind.



Matteo Pasquinelli
Berlin, December 2008







This text was presented at the Consistory Talk I: The Artist and  
Urban Development organised by Skulputerenpark in Berlin on Saturday,  
13 December 2008. (www.skulpturenpark.org). A German translation will  
be published in: Konrad Becker and Martin Wassermair (eds), Phantom  
Kulturstadt: Texte zur Zukunft der Kulturpolitik, vol. II, Vienna:  
Löcker Verlag, forthcoming 2009.

Download address for this PDF file: www.rekombinant.org/mat


1 Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, New York: Viking,  
2005, p. 88-90. Cited in: Franco La Cecla, Contro l'architettura,  
Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008.
2 V. Vale (ed.), RE/Search #6-7: Industrial Culture Handbook,  San  
Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1983.
3 See: Dan Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk,  
New York, Billboard Books, 1999.
4 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, New York: Bantam, 1980: "The Techno  
Rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the Third  
Wave. They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they  
are as much part of the advance to a new stage of civilisation as our  
missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries,  
or our explorations of the oceanic depths".
5 The TR-909 Rhythm Composer is a partially analog, partially sample- 
based drum machine built by the Japanese Roland Corporation in 1984.  
Max/MSP is a graphical development environment for music written by  
Miller Puckette in the mid-80s, but it became renown only in the late  
90s. A more intutive and crucial software for the latest generation  
of DJs and digital musicians is Ableton Live, whose first version was  
released in 2001.
6 For a definition of minimal techno see: Philip Sherburne, "Digital  
Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno," in: Audio Culture:  
Readings in Modern Music, New York: Continuum, 2004.
7 See: Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on  
Technology, Society, and Imagination, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
8 Underground Resistance (commonly abbreviated to UR) is also the  
name of a legendary musical collective from Detroit that has had a  
seminal role in the history of techno music. They are the most  
militantly political example of modern Detroit Techno with an anti- 
mainstream business strategy. See: www.undergroundresistance.com
9 See: Brian Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in  
the Urban Landscape, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997;  
Philipp Oswalt, Berlin - Stadt ohne Form. Strategien einer anderen  
Architektur, München: Prestel Verlag, 2000.
10 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's  
Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York:  
Basic Books, 2002; and: The Flight of the Creative Class: The New  
Global Competition for Talent, New York: Collins, 2005.
11 These notions have a different genealogy: respectively originated  
and conceptualised by the Frankfurt school ('culture industry'), UK  
Government Department for Culture, Media and Sport ('Creative  
Industries') and Richard Florida ('creative economy', 'creative  
class', etc). If these notions are based on the exploitation of  
intellectual property or cultural capital, the 'social factory'  
reclaims the common as an autonomous force of production.
12 Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale, Torino: Einaudi, 1966: "The more  
capitalist development advances, that is to say the more the  
production of relative surplus value penetrates everywhere, the more  
the circuit production-distribution-exchange-consumption inevitably  
develops; that is to say that the relationship between capitalists  
production and bourgeois society, between the factory and society,  
between society and the state, become more and more organic. At the  
highest level of capitalist development social relations become  
moments of the relations of production, and the whole society becomes  
an articulation of production. In short, all of society lives as a  
function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive  
domination over all of society".
13 See: Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology  
and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York:  
Penguin, 2004; Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social  
Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven: Yale University  
Press, 2006.
14 'The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it  
becomes an image', in: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New  
York: Zone Books, 1995, thesis 34. Orig.: La société du spectacle,  
Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967.
15 Henri Lefebvre, La Révolution urbaine, Paris: Gallimard, 1970;  
trans.: The Urban Revolution, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota  
Press, 2003.
16 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung,  
Amsterdam: Querido, 1947; trans.: Dialectic of Enlightenment (New  
York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
17 For a definition of 'biopolitical machine' see: Michael Hardt and  
Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
18 Carlo Vercellone, "La nuova articolazione salario, rendita,  
profitto nel capitalismo cognitivo", in Posse: Potere Precario, Roma:  
Manifestolibri: 2006; trans. by Arianna Bove: "The new articulation  
of wages, rent and profit in cognitive capitalism", www.generation- 
online.org/c/fc_rent2.htm
19 Ibid.
20 Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier. Gentrification and the  
Revanchist City, New York/London: Routledge, 1996.
21 Ibid., p. 67: "The rent gap is the disparity between the potential  
ground rent level and the actual ground rent capitalized under the  
present land use... Once the rent gap is wide enough, gentrification  
may be initiated in a given neighborhood by any of the several  
different actors in the land and housing market."
22 David Harvey, 'The Art of Rent: Globabalization and the  
Commodification of Culture', in: Spaces of Capital, New York:  
Routledge, 2001.
23 Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change,  
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. In a similar way,  
the role of artists and bohemians in the gentrification of New York's  
East Village in the 1960s has been highlighted also by Christopher  
Mele in Selling the Lower East Side (Minneapolis: University of  
Minnesota Press, 2000). Not to mention Manuel Castells' work on the  
particular role of gay men as 'gentrifiers' in San Francisco during  
the early 1980s (Manuel Castells, 'Cultural identity, sexual  
liberation and urban structure: the gay community in San Francisco',  
in: Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural  
Theory of Urban Social Movements, London: Edward Arnold, 1983). These  
studies are just a few examples that introduce the theoretical  
context hijacked by Richard Florida two decades later and transformed  
into banal marketing strategies for provincial towns, re-labelled as  
'creative cities'.
24 Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan, "The Fine Art of  
Gentrification", October, Vol. 31, (Winter, 1984), pp. 91-111.
25 See: www.22barcelona.com
26 See: www.mediaspree.de
27 See: www.mediaspree.de/Magazin.43.0.html
28 See: www.skulpturenpark.org
29 See: http://einstellung.so36.net/en, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
Andrej_Holm, http://annalist.noblogs.org.
30 Walter Benjamin, 'A Berlin Chronicle', 1932, in: Reflections, New  
York: Schocken, 1986: 'Very soon the Romanische Café accommodated the  
bohemians, who, in the years immediately after the war, were able to  
feel themselves masters of the house... When the German economy began  
to recover, the bohemian contingent visibly lost the threatening  
nimbus that had surrounded them in the era of the Expressionist  
revolutionary manifestoes... The 'artists' withdrew into the  
background, to become more and more part of the furniture, while the  
bourgeois, represented by stock-exchange speculators, managers, film  
and theater agents, literary-minded clerks, began to occupy the place  
- as a place of relaxation... The history of the Berlin coffeehouses  
is largely that of different strata of the public, those who first  
conquered the floor begin obliged to make way for others gradually  
pressing forward, and thus to ascend the stage.'
31 Arifa Akbar, "A formaldehyde frenzy as buyers snap up Hirst  
works", The Independent, 16 September 2008. Web: http:// 
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/a-formaldehyde- 
frenzy-as-buyers-snap-up-hirst-works-931979.html
32 BAVO, "Plea for an uncreative city. A self-interview", in: Geert  
Lovink et al. (eds), The Creativity: A Free Accidental Newspaper  
Dedicated to the Anonymous Creative Worker, Amsterdam: Institute of  
Network Cultures, 2007.
33 Antonio Negri, Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Anne Querrien,  
"Qu'est-ce qu'un événement ou un lieu biopolitique dans la  
métropole?", Multitudes #38:  Une micropolitique de la ville: l'agir  
urbain, Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2008; trans.: "What makes a  
biopolitical space?", www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-01-21-negri-en.html
34 The economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized and used the term  
'creative destruction' to describe the process of transformation that  
accompanies radical innovation. In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism,  
innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long- 
term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established  
companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power. See: Joseph  
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper &  
Brothers, 1942.
35 Antonio Negri, Il dominio e il sabotaggio. Sul metodo marxista  
della trasformazione sociale, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1977; trans.:  
Dominion and Sabotage: On the Marxist Method of Social  
Transformation, in; Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil  
War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, London/New York: Verso, 2005.



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