scholarly journals ‘What Difference does it Make? Women's Pop Cultural Production and Consumption in Manchester’

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Richards ◽  
Katie Milestone

This paper explores the experiences of women in small cultural businesses and is based upon interviews with women working in a range of contexts in Manchester's popular music sector. The research seeks to promote wider consideration of women's roles in cultural production and consumption. We argue that it is necessary that experiences of production and consumption be understood as inter-related processes. Each part of this process is imbued with particular gender characteristics that can serve to reinforce existing patterns and hierarchies. We explore the ways in which female leisure and consumption patterns have been marginalised and how this in turn shapes cultural production. This process influences career choices but it is also reinforced through the integration of consumption into the cultural workplace. Practices often associated with the sector, such as the blurring of work and leisure and ‘networking’, appear to be understood and operated in significantly different ways by women. As cultural industries such as popular music are predicated upon the colonisation of urban space we explore the use of the city and the particular character of Manchester's music scene. We conclude that, despite the existence of highly contingent and individualised identities, significant gender power relations remain evident. These are particularly clear in discussion of the performative and sexualised aspects of the job.


2018 ◽  

This edited volume provides a multifaceted investigation of the dynamic interrelations between visual arts and urbanization in contemporary Mainland China with a focus on unseen representations and urban interventions brought about by the transformations of the urban space and the various problems associated with it. Through a wide range of illuminating case studies, the authors demonstrate how innovative artistic and creative practices initiated by various stakeholders not only raise critical awareness on socio-political issues of Chinese urbanization but also actively reshape the urban living spaces. The formation of new collaborations, agencies, aesthetics and cultural production sites facilitate diverse forms of cultural activism as they challenge the dominant ways of interpreting social changes and encourage civic participation in the production of alternative meanings in and of the city. Their significance lies in their potential to question current values and power structures as well as to foster new subjectivities for disparate individuals and social groups.



Urban History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
MIKKEL THELLE

ABSTRACT:This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.



2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Deslandes

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) urbanism has become increasingly recognised as a non-professional and non-technocratic practice of urban alteration and community building. Already thus marked as ‘amateur’ in the contemporary sense (where the lines between amateur, professional, producer and consumer are significantly blurred), two of its key features are support for ‘proam’ cultural production and the ‘meanwhile’ use of commercial buildings. Within this, DIY urbanism is an important reference to economic and spatial scarcity in the Australian, English and North American cities where it has manifested as a discourse. The reference is particularly evident in the proximity to marginal urban space that participants in DIY urbanism share with other potential users of that space, which includes people experiencing primary homelessness. It is through this proximity that DIY urbanism works as a kind of ‘exemplary amateurism’. DIY urbanism demonstrates spatial scarcity in the city — a phenomenon in which amateur labour, 'meanwhile' use of buildings and homelessness are implicated.



2018 ◽  
pp. 30-32
Author(s):  
I. I. Parkhomenko

The article proposes theoretical concepts typology of the modern cultural economy, which proves the existence of economic relations in the field of culture according to the Western European scientific tradition of XX-XXI centuries: 1) cultural and philosophical (T.W.Adorno, J. Baudrillard, P.Bourdieu, M.Horkheimer, S.Lash, C.Lury, J.Urry); 2) cultural industries approach (R.Williams, B.Miege, N.Garhnam, P.L.Sacco); 3) economic and managerial (W.J.Baumol, W.G.Bowen, M.Blaug, V.A.Ginsburg, D.Hesmondhalgh, A.Klamer, B.Miege, A.J.Scott, D.Throsby, B.S.Frey). According to these modern theoretical concepts, culture is the sphere of production and consumption of goods and services; it is functioning as a resource for economic, social and cultural development. This understanding of culture is the basis of the current policy of cultural and creative industries in the European Union and the United Kingdom. Cultural production is an interdisciplinary object of study, since the cultural good has its own peculiarity: its cultural value determines economic value. The article analyzes production in the field of culture and, at first, determines economy of culture as a scientific approach for understanding the functioning of the modern society in the categories of production and consumption; secondly, economics of culture is a scientific discipline in the field of economics. Theoretical and methodological bases were interdisciplinary scientific approaches to the understanding of culture as a sphere of production and consumption. For that reason were organized and systematized approaches to the understanding of culture as an economic reality in scientific discourse: 1) critical theory of T.W.Adorno, W.Benjamin and M.Horkheimer and the concept of "cultural industry"; 2) the interaction of cultural and power institutions in the processes of democratization of society and industrialization of culture (R.Williams, N.Garhnam, P.L.Sacco); 3) culture as a set of cultural industries, which form cultural capital (P.Bourdieu, D.Hesmondhalgh, B.Miege, D.Throsby); 4) the functioning of modern society as global culture industry in theory of S.Lash and C.Lury; 5) cultural economics theory (W.J.Baumol, W.G.Bowen, M.Blaug, V.A.Ginsburg, A.J.Scott, D.Throsby, B.S.Frey).



2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Bottà

This article explores the relation between popular music and creative cities through the example of Manchester between 1976 and 1997. The formation of a local music scene is analysed through the notion of urban creative milieu stating its historical debt to the city industrial heritage; place-images produced by the local popular music scene are analysed as visual, aural and lyrical productions. The article examines the consolidation of the considered local popular music scene through bottom-up and autonomous projects and the regeneration of some areas of Manchester. It looks at the role of the 'New Left' municipality, its difficulties in recognizing the city's creative capital and its attitude towards the production and consumption of popular music. The conclusions present some general reflections on the Manchester legacy and its significance for a definition of creativity at the urban level.



2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Thiel

The paper addresses the abundant literature on the creative city that has been generated following publication in 2002 of Richard Florida’s work on the creative class. In particular, it is maintained that the discussion should be based more on a robust social economic analysis of urban economies. The paper starts with a brief review of the polarized debate on the creative city in which either the optimist obsession with a new growth sector is stressed or there is a focus of attention on its negative impact on urban society. Building on the idea of cultural production as a reflexive economic activity and on three empirical vignettes about how culture, the economy and the city interact, it argues that cultural production is an adaptable activity which is, however, permanently forced into a state of adaptation. Urban space and society have an ambivalent role here. On the one hand, the city offers adaptability: on the other hand, however, because this is the case, it fosters the need for permanent adaptation.



2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheng Zhong

This paper examines the firms in Shanghai’s official “Creative Industry Clusters (CICs)”. It aims to contribute to the creative city debate by unveiling the relationships between the production of new economy firms and the reconstruction of urban space in the Chinese context. Based on questionnaire surveys conducted in 2009, the paper finds that Shanghai’s creative firms are new, small and flexible and this image conforms to the prototypical “creative firms” described in widely cited Western literature. The paper argues that Shanghai’s CICs represent a market- oriented, fluid, and risk-taking production culture that is a break from the city’s socialist past. However, Shanghai’s new economy spaces in the making are faced with many constraints and contradictions. On the one hand, although market and neoliberalized urban spaces are providing critical resources for firms to grow at a time of state retreat, they also imposes risks, such as career instability, confusion for creative talents and cost pressure for new firms. On the other hand, the state’s ideological control reinforces the market’s homogenizing effect on cultural production. Therefore, Shanghai’s trajectory toward greater innovation and creativity are far from guaranteed despite fast proliferation of creative clusters in the city in the past decade.



2022 ◽  
pp. 146954052110620
Author(s):  
Liang Yao

By investigating the history of how yanqishui, originally a drink for factory heatstroke prevention, changed from welfare in the Mao years to a popular drink in post-socialist Shanghai, this article attempts to show the historical continuity of consumption in modern China and that the understanding of consumption patterns must be rooted in a local context. Using archives, local newspapers, memoirs, and interviews, the article explores the symbolic meanings of yanqishui before China’s 1978 reforms, which have left a deep impression on the Chinese masses and continuously impacted consumption thereafter. It argues that the popularity of yanqishui in contemporary Shanghai, to an extent, represents some kind of nostalgic consumption. However, instead of a nationwide sentiment, the nostalgia is sometimes local. As the biggest commercial center and then an industrial core in China’s modern history, Shanghai left people special memories on yanqishui that have greatly shaped the local consumer culture.



2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Avelino Barbosa

The fast urbanization in many regions of the world has generated a high competition between cities. In the race for investments and for international presence, some cities have increasingly resorting to the territorial marketing techniques like city branding. One of the strategies of recent years has been to use of creativity and / or labeling of creative city for the promotion of its destination. This phenomenon raises a question whether the city branding programs have worked in accordance with the cultural industries of the territory or if such labels influence the thought of tourists and locals. This paper begins by placing a consideration of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) and the strategies of the Territorial Marketing Program of the city of Lyon in France, Only Lyon. It also raises the question the perception of the target public to each of the current actions through semi-structured interviews which were applied between May and August 2015. Finally, I will try to open a discussion the brand positioning adopted by the city of Lyon



2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khangelani Moyo

Drawing on field research and a survey of 150 Zimbabwean migrants in Johannesburg, this paper explores the dimensions of migrants’ transnational experiences in the urban space. I discuss the use of communication platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook as well as other means such as telephone calls in fostering the embedding of transnational migrants within both the Johannesburg and the Zimbabwean socio-economic environments. I engage this migrant-embedding using Bourdieusian concepts of “transnational habitus” and “transnational social field,” which are migration specific variations of Bourdieu’s original concepts of “habitus” and “social field.” In deploying these Bourdieusian conceptual tools, I observe that the dynamics of South–South migration as observed in the Zimbabwean migrants are different to those in the South–North migration streams and it is important to move away from using the same lens in interpreting different realities. For Johannesburg-based migrants to operate within the socio-economic networks produced in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, they need to actively acquire a transnational habitus. I argue that migrants’ cultivation of networks in Johannesburg is instrumental, purposive, and geared towards achieving specific and immediate goals, and latently leads to the development and sustenance of flexible forms of permanency in the transnational urban space.



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