Article
Value struggles in the creative city
A People's Republic of Stokes Croft?
Urban Studies
1–17
! Urban Studies Journal Limited 2014
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0042098014536239
usj.sagepub.com
Fabian Frenzel
University of Leicester, UK
Armin Beverungen
Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany
Abstract
In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city which
has appropriated the discourse of the creative industries from the bottom up in order to foster
its regeneration against capital’s art of rent. We show how Stokes Croft’s self-branding as a cultural quarter has led to struggles over the creative and cultural commons thus produced, which
we conceptualise as value struggles where localised value practices clash with capital’s imposition
of value. Our case study including two vignettes points both to the productivity of such value
struggles in producing new value practices understood as commoning, as well as the limits of
reproducing a common life in the face of existing financial and property regimes. Stokes Croft
therefore serves as a case in point of the tragedy of the urban commons and points to potential
ways of overcoming it.
Keywords
art of rent, commons, creative industries, Stokes Croft, value struggles
Received May 2012; accepted March 2014
Introduction: A People’s Republic
of Stokes Croft?
Socialism in one city is not a viable concept.
(Harvey, 2012: 122)
In this paper we explore the case of Stokes
Croft, in the city of Bristol, UK as a neighbourhood taking the lead in its own postindustrial redevelopment. For the last ten
years, Stokes Croft established itself as a
new and increasingly attractive neighbourhood, mostly through its emergent graffiti
and music culture, which turned the
dereliction of the area into its key strength
via low rents and squatting. In particular,
the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft
(PRSC) appeared as a promoter of the arts
and an organisation involved in both establishing the identity of the neighbourhood
and branding it as a cultural quarter. More
recently, Stokes Croft gained fame and
infamy through the Stokes Croft riots, which
Corresponding author:
Fabian Frenzel, University of Leicester, School of
Management, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK.
Email: ff48@leicester.ac.uk
2
preceded the urban riots Britain witnessed
during the summer of 2011. The riots were a
response to the opening of a Tesco store and
point to a wider array of political struggles
over the conditions of life in Stokes Croft,
rather than merely its artistic credentials.
We propose to investigate Stokes Croft as
a case study focusing on two particular
aspects. The first concerns the way Stokes
Croft and in particular the PRSC have
appropriated the discourse of the creative
industries in order to foster the redevelopment of the area despite a disinterest from
the city council and financial investors. We
argue that this appropriation has gone hand
in hand with the recognition of the creative
and cultural labour of the inhabitants of
Stokes Croft as the crucial factor in achieving an increasing worth or wealth of the
area. The results of this labour can be understood as creative and cultural commons –
commons now being measured up by capital.
As house prices and rents are increasing and
new businesses open in shop fronts that were
until recently deserted, there is a growing
unease over negative impacts of gentrification. Following Harvey (2012: 89–112), we
suggest that Stokes Croft is at the centre of
the dynamics of global capital and its ‘art of
rent’ as capital seeks to extract monopoly rent
from an urban space made unique and
authentic by the commons it produces. The
strategy of embracing the discourses of the
creative industries has therefore led to Stokes
Croft becoming entangled in these attempts
by capital to extract value from it.
The second aspect we want to discuss
builds on this and concerns the way the
antagonisms between capital – represented
by property developers amongst others –
and inhabitants of Stokes Croft can be
understood. Our findings document a struggle of those individuals who have invested
their social labour into the area, against
those anonymous emanations of capital that
surface in increasing house prices and, for
Urban Studies
example, the opening of Tesco stores. We
conceptualise this as value struggles, following De Angelis (2007), wherein the value
regime of global capital is confronted with
alternative value practices situated at a local
level. Where culture produces value for capital (Böhm and Land, 2009), it is also the fertile ground for alternative values. The
alternative value practices that emerge out
of the struggles we document can be understood as forms of ‘commoning’, as practices
which are not merely concerned with creativity or culture but constitute attempts at the
social reproduction of common life.
The paper is structured into three sections. In the first section, we briefly discuss
the discourse of the creative industries,
which the PRSC adopts in order to promote
Stokes Croft as a cultural quarter. We
explore the history of this discourse particularly in its UK context, and discuss its key
features, noting that it must be understood
primarily as part of a neoliberal economic
governance reconfiguring subjects of labour
as cultural entrepreneurs. In the urban context, we suggest that where culture is meant
to produce value for the economy indirectly
(Böhm and Land, 2009), it plays neatly into
the ‘art of rent’ of global capital as described
by Harvey (2012: 89–112). However, as the
PRSC’s appropriation of the discourse will
demonstrate, these dynamics also go hand in
hand with a recognition of the labour producing commons, and the potential for common struggles beyond precarity not merely
concerned with the conditions of production
but life more generally.
Pointing to the limits of understanding
urban development solely in the context of
strategies of capital, as is often the case in
uses of Harvey’s (2012) approach, in the second section, we specify the notion of ‘value
struggles’ introduced by De Angelis (2007).
While the approach of post-capitalist ‘community economies’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006)
questions an antagonistic politics in favour
3
Frenzel and Beverungen
of the extending of post-capitalist alternatives, the concept of value struggles point to
the importance of antagonism to commoning, and the necessity of alternative value
practices to openly position themselves
against capital’s imposition of value. This
frame highlights the way in which capitalist
value expropriates the wealth produced in
common in a neighbourhood such as Stokes
Croft, which motivates its residents to
develop alternative value practices, or forms
of commoning, which at least attempt to
counteract the imposition of capitalist value.
In the third section, we present empirical
findings from the analysis of the value struggles as they have unfolded in Stokes Croft
since the riots in 2011. The research presented in this paper is based on ethnographic
data we collected in a participatory research
approach. After a short introduction to the
area, we take a look at the PRSC and its
role in the struggles surrounding the urban
regeneration of the area in two vignettes. A
first vignette concerns the struggle lead by
the local No Tesco Campaign and the setting up of a new initiative, the People’s
Supermarket. A second vignette concerns a
local ruin and the various initiatives at redeveloping it. Both vignettes demonstrate how
Stokes Croft has become subject to capital’s
art of rent attempting to extract surplus
from the area. But they also show the productivity of the ensuing value struggles, with
new value practices as well as limitations to
the art of rent emerging as a result.
Overall, our paper extends earlier
accounts of critiques and alternatives to the
view of culture as merely an extension of
capital’s art of rent by demonstrating how
value practices challenge it on a daily basis.
It contributes to critical perspectives on the
function of culture in urban regeneration
(Pratt, 2009) and builds on earlier studies of
the creative industries that conceive them as
cultural labour producing cultural commons
(e.g. Kanngieser, 2012; Shorthose and
Strange, 2004). It also adds a clearer geographical and spatial dimension to these
debates, particularly with regards to the discussion of ‘counter-enclosures’ as discussed
by De Angelis (2007). The key question the
papers contributes to these debates, drawing
on the opening quote and on the insinuations of the PRSC’s name, is whether it is
possible to construct a ‘socialism in one
city’ – or, rather, a ‘socialism in one neighbourhood’ – on the basis of strategies of
commoning, thus avoiding the ‘tragedy of
the urban commons’ (Harvey, 2012) and the
danger of commons being enclosed as part
of neoliberal’s ‘plan B’ (Caffentzis, 2010).
The valorisation of culture in
urban regeneration
To understand why and how the People’s
Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC) appropriated the discourse of the creative industries, it is necessary to explore and situate it.
It has precursors in entrepreneurship with its
focus on ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter,
1976) and in the ‘culture industries’ as a first
instantiation of the economisation of culture
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002), and can
even be seen as a ‘rebranding’ of the latter
(Gill and Pratt, 2008). It largely emerged,
however, from the 1980s, first in the UK,
when culture came to be seen as a potential
contributor to economic development in
general and urban regeneration in particular. From its early days in the UK of New
Labour (e.g. Department for Culture, Media
and Sports (DCMS), 2001) it has subsequently been embraced by policy makers in
the EU (e.g. KEA European Affairs, 2006)
and the United Nations (e.g. 2010), and has
found international application (Evans,
2009).
Despite the ‘fuzziness’ of the concept of
the ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2003; Markusen,
2006), its relentless mobilisation in policy
has meant that the discourse of the creative
4
Urban Studies
industries is imbricated in a wider shift
wherein the economy increasingly comes to
be governed in neoliberal terms. Much of
recent critical work on the creative industries
(e.g. Lovink and Rossiter, 2007; Raunig et
al., 2011) highlights its neoliberal tone and
effect. von Osten suggests that
it makes sense to think about the discourse of
‘creative industries’ as a technology that aims
not so much at the capitalization and mobilization of the cultural sectors in particular as
at the restructuring of relations between the
subject of labor and processes of valorization,
optimization and acceleration. (von Osten,
2011: 135)
Through ‘the vocabulary of creativity and
the references to bohemian life and work
biographies’ this discourse affects our understanding of labour more widely (von Osten,
2011). It is not merely a matter, then, of
plugging the gap left by the departed industries of yore with new creative or cultural
industries situated in the city and thereby
contributing to its regeneration. Rather,
through the imposition of the creative
imperative, all of labour is reconfigured.
This reconfiguration of labour becomes
apparent in the figure of the cultural entrepreneur or ‘culturepreneur’, which is the
image governance imposes on cultural and
creative labour, reproducing both neoliberal’s ideal of enterprise and competition, as
well as a concomitant precariousness (see
Loacker, 2013). McRobbie traces what she
suggests are three waves of cultural entrepreneurship in the UK: a first wave of ‘selfgenerated sub-cultural entrepreneurs’ which
experimented in ‘creative self-employment’
and refused ‘mundane work’; a second wave
marked by ‘the hovering presence of venture
capitalists’ and all the features of a deregulated labour market; and a third wave of
the Blair years where ‘the winner takes
all’ and cultural production is projectified
(McRobbie, 2011: 120–125). As we will see
below, the case of Stokes Croft could be
read as an attempt to rewind the history
recounted by McRobbie and to reassert the
independence and self-valorisation of cultural producers.
Where McRobbie observes the centrality
of culture to the economy, Böhm and Land
in their analysis of policy since 1997 note
how ‘discourses around the value of culture
have moved from a focus on the direct economic contributions of the culture industries
to their indirect economic benefits’ (Böhm
and Land, 2009: 75). In the creative city, cultural entrepreneurs produce indirect economic benefits by contributing to urban
regeneration. As in the case of Stokes Croft,
the geographical locus of the creative industries has been the ‘cultural quarters’ of cities
(see, e.g. Shorthose, 2004). Following
Harvey, we can understand how value is
extracted from cultural labour in these quarters through what he describes as the ‘art of
rent’ (Harvey, 2012). According to Harvey,
capital always relies on the extraction of
monopoly rent: capital is based on the
monopoly instituted in property and ownership of the means of production, and
through process of centralisation it also
tends towards monopoly (Harvey, 2012:
90ff.). Harvey suggests that where, as part of
globalisation, advances in travel and communication have eroded much of the monopoly power associated with space, culture
has become one way in which space, especially city space, has been valorised by
capital.
Harvey’s analysis of the art of rent foreshadows recent debates particularly within
what is known as autonomist or postworkerist Marxism regarding rent as a key
feature of financial and cognitive capitalism
(Hardt and Negri, 2009; Marazzi, 2010;
Vercellone, 2010). Marazzi, for example,
recounts the ways in which the marginalisation of wage-labour and the valorisation of
free (i.e. unpaid but still controlled) labour
5
Frenzel and Beverungen
is mirrored by financialisation as its ‘adequate and perverse modality of accumulation’ (Marazzi, 2010: 53, 66). Similarly,
Vercellone speaks of the ‘becoming-rent of
profit’ wherein ‘profit, like rent, increasingly
depends on mechanisms of value expropriation that proceed from a position of
exteriority in respect of the organization
of production’ (Vercellone, 2010: 91).
Vercellone also notes that this produces an
antagonism between ‘the institutions of the
common’ and ‘the logic of expropriation of
cognitive capitalism’ that is rent (2010: 92).
The cultural producers of the creative industries are not accidental to this development,
as McRobbie (2011) and von Osten (2011)
both make clear; rather, the creative industries is where ‘some of the broader strategies
[are] being developed by capital in order to
subsume autonomous, values-driven production into its structures of value production
and accumulation’, as Böhm and Land
(2009: 77) put it.
What could the PRSC gain in engaging
this discourse of the creative industries,
apart from a repetition of the fate of many
other cultural quarters, and the hope for
state funding? Our case suggests that
PRSC’s strategy, however conscious, does
not merely reproduce this discourse but
includes subversive if contentious elements,
and key to it is the focus on the precariousness not only of cultural production but
social life in general. Lorey suggests that the
‘normalization of cultural producers’ leads
to a self-precarisation wherein the precarity
that conditions our lives is seen to be selfafflicted (Lorey, 2009). Yet McRobbie
(2011) suggests that with the discourse of the
creative industries class struggle does not
disappear but is ‘deflected onto [the] field of
precariousness’ (2011: 130). The struggles
around precarity in France, and in particular the slogan ‘No culture without social
rights’ (Lazzarato, 2011: 46), already provide one example of the way in which the
labour involved in cultural production is
recognised and its social conditions are challenged. This includes ways in which cultural
producers seek to relate their class conflict
beyond the confines of the ‘creative class’
(Markusen, 2006). Lorey further contends
that precarisation is marked by ‘the capacity
for refusal’ and sees it as ‘a process of
recomposing work and life, of sociality,
which thus cannot be – not immediately, not
so quickly, and perhaps not even at all –
economicized’ (Lorey, 2010: n.p.). She also
suggests that those involved in precarious
struggles should explore what they have ‘in
common’: ‘a desire to make use of the productivity of precarious living and working
conditions to change these modes of governing, a means of working together to refuse
and elude them’ (Lorey, 2010: n.p.).
Such analyses already point two features
we will discover in our case study: the need
to deal with precarious life and the generalisation of these kinds of struggles around
labour and wealth. Böhm and Land (2009:
78) suggest that it is necessary to study the
strategies creatives ‘develop and mobilise in
resisting subsumption and developing autonomous counter-strategies of value production’. Before we do so in our case study,
we need to further move away from an
analysis of the strategies of capital and of
neoliberal discourses – analyses which easily
overemphasise the power of capital and the
state – in order to provide a frame for understanding the antagonisms and forms of resistance discovered in our case.
Value struggles and cultural
commons
This focus on the excess of social production, of the extended terrain of struggle
around precarity, and the ways in which
new forms of commonality may emerge
beyond it, already points to some dynamics
to be discovered in our case study. Yet
6
comprehending these dynamics, and specifically the economics of a production in
common which is potentially beyond expropriation, requires a different vocabulary to
that provided by the discourse of the creative industries and the art of rent. Harvey
does note that capital’s reliance on locality
in the art of rent allows for urban governance ‘to be directed towards opposition to
the banal cosmopolitanism of multinational
globalization’ (Harvey, 2012: 128), but there
is little vocabulary here that allows us to
grasp specifically how the labour of cultural
producers and their neighbours can be
understood to be productive of wealth.
Lorey’s turn to ‘the common’ (2010), and
Harvey’s focus on the ‘urban commons’
(2012: 67–88) provide first clues to how this
production in common may be understood,
and we will develop this perspective further
in this section.
Who produces wealth in the first
instance? Hardt and Negri (2009: 154) suggest that the city – not only its cultural quarter – is ‘a living dynamic of cultural
practices, intellectual circuits, affective networks, and social institutions’, and it is these
elements of the common that make the city
‘a source of the common and the receptacle
into which it flows’. The common of Hardt
and Negri refer to an anthropological basis
of social (re-)production, which for Graeber
(2001) challenges the kind of value espoused
by capital. A distinction must be made here
between value, values, and wealth.
Following Harvie and Milburn (2010), value
is that which is created by productive human
labour and whose measure is money. Wealth
in contrast is a much broader category and
includes goods such as clean air, cultural
products or free time. Other than for value
there is no universal measure for wealth.
The city is a space where the value of capital
cannot impose itself, since social creativity is
not subsumed by capital and its primary
mode of subsumption, wage-labour –
Urban Studies
especially not in times of precarity (Lorey,
2010; Ross, 2008).
Of course, even where most people are wage
laborers, it’s not as if all creativity is on the
market. Even in our own market-ridden society there are all sorts of domains – ranging
from housework to hobbies, political action,
personal projects of any sort – where there is
no such homogenizing apparatus. But it is
probably no coincidence that it’s precisely here
where one hears about ‘values’ in the plural
sense. (Graeber, 2001: 56)
The city, then, is a space in which heterogeneous values flourish and where social
wealth is produced in common and shared,
not merely through the market and mediated
by capital. De Angelis (2007) extends
Graeber’s analysis of value and values. For
him, all social relations can be understood as
‘value practices’, which he defines as ‘those
actions and processes, as well as correspondent webs of relations, that are both predicated on a given value system and in turn
(re)produce it’ (De Angelis, 2007: 24). De
Angelis’s value practices are therefore those
social practices which reproduce and sustain
the values that Graeber refers to, and which
stand in contrast to the regime of value
imposed by capital.
Gibson-Graham’s (2006) work on postcapitalist politics, in a similar vein, emphasises the role and importance of non-, or
post-capitalist practices and commons. They
see commons as a ‘community stock’ which
requires being ‘maintained and replenished’,
as in the case of the community garden as
an example of urban commons (GibsonGraham, 2006: 92, 97). The commons are
here only one coordinate for developing
community economies, and while these
involve ‘creating, enlarging, reclaiming,
replenishing and sharing a commons’,
Gibson-Graham neglects an account of the
antagonism necessary for protecting these
commons from capital. In contrast, to do so
7
Frenzel and Beverungen
De Angelis introduces the term ‘value struggles’, which connotes the way in which the
value practices which also prevail in the city
clash with capital’s regime of value. He
emphasises that value struggles always
depend on the creation of what he calls
‘counter-enclosures’, specific places where
alternatives emerge.
The space of alternatives to capital has to go
through the opening up of counter-enclosures,
of spaces of commons. The alternatives to capital pose a limit to accumulation by setting up
rigidities and liberating spaces. In a word,
alternatives, whatever they are, act as ‘counter-enclosures’. This, of course, opens up the
question of capital’s co-optation of alternatives . (De Angelis, 2007: 17)
The focus on value struggles highlights the
ways in which a conflict runs through the
social body, wherein an outside to capital is
posed which capital tries to enclose and
valorise, on the one hand, and which alternative value practices may seek to protect
and nurture, on the other. De Angelis here
points to the spatial dynamics of value
struggles, which will also become apparent
in the case of Stokes Croft. We suggest the
frame of value struggles serves well in capturing the antagonisms involved in the struggles we witnessed, which express an
antagonism between the people who do and
those that (try to) appropriate (cf. Harvie,
2005). It also allows us to highlight the
spatial dimensions of those very struggles,
particularly with regards to attempts to
appropriate spaces not only via squatting or
rent, but by taking common ownership
of previously private property. The frame of
value struggles also highlights the danger of
capitalist enclosure. If the PRSC is building
a counter-enclosure, is this counterenclosure not in danger of being ‘co-opted’
(De Angelis, 2007) and colonised by capital
(Harvey, 2012)? Our empirical material
points to a complex picture and tends to
confirm Caffentzis’ claim that a focus on the
commons highlights the question of social
reproduction as much as capital’s ‘ability to
terrorise us with our lack of capacity to
organise the reproduction of our lives
outside of its structures’ (Caffentzis, 2010:
25–26).
Stokes Croft: A People’s Republic?
In this section we look at value struggles in
the area of Stokes Croft in Bristol. We first
briefly describe Stokes Croft’s location
within Bristol’s adjacent neighbourhoods,
before turning to its social and economic
history and its emergence as a neighbourhood in itself. We then briefly discuss our
research methods and focus, before turning
to our findings. There we first introduce the
People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC)
as a key actor in branding Stokes Croft as a
cultural quarter and framing social, political
and economic struggles that ensue. Finally,
we turn to two vignettes exploring two specific examples of what we propose can be
understood as value struggles (De Angelis,
2007).
Making a neighbourhood
Stokes Croft is in one sense merely the name
of an A-road leading out of Bristol city centre towards the north.1 Different neighbourhoods border this road, including to the east
the area of St Pauls, which hosts a large
Afro-Caribbean community and was home,
for years, of the St Pauls’ carnival. Further
north sits the neighbourhood of Montpelier,
which houses students, young urban professionals and a liberal, green bourgeois populace. On the west side Stokes Croft is
flanked by council housing and the well-todo Kingsdown, a neighbourhood that gentrified in the 1980s and now boasts some of
the most expensive properties in inner
Bristol. Montpelier’s ward is represented by
8
a Green councillor, St Pauls’ is solid Labour
while Kingsdown tends to return Liberal
Democrat councillors. As this short description shows, Stokes Croft is more (and less)
than a neighbourhood in its own right.
Rather, it connects very different neighbourhoods to each other and forms their shared
border and, to some extent and increasingly,
their shared centre.
Being merely a road with a range of businesses and office buildings, Stokes Croft lost
its major employers and businesses in the
late 1980s when office buildings fell empty
and massage parlours and fast food eateries
appeared between more and more boardedup shop fronts. The 1990s were a period of
decay for the area, street drinking became
frequent and the street was generally considered unattractive, and by some outright dangerous (The Guardian, 2011). Over the last
decade only, with the development of a
strong graffiti and music culture, Stokes
Croft started its slow process of regeneration. In this process, and central for our
observation, ‘Stokes Croft’ moved from
being merely a street name to becoming an
urban area, even a brand. The becoming of
‘Stokes Croft’ has been a process lasting
around 10 years. It included the opening of
several art galleries, cultural venues and
shared studio and office spaces in the area.
One example of the latter is Hamilton
House, run by the community interest company Coexist.2 Individual artists and small
creative businesses and charities populate
Hamilton House, including festival organisers, urban designers and production companies (Portland Works, 2011).
Groups such as the PRSC and other community groups have been central in promoting this new ‘Stokes Croft’. The PRSC was
particularly vocal in branding efforts. They
created maps (see Figure 1) of the area, but
also signs on roads leading into the area
reading ‘Welcome to Stoke’s Croft –
Cultural Quarter – Conservation Area –
Urban Studies
Outdoor Gallery’ that designate the boundaries of Stokes Croft (PRSC, 2009).
While the process of making Stokes Croft
has lasted quite some time already, the
research presented here focuses on a more
recent period, starting in spring 2011. In
April 2011 Stokes Croft witnessed the AntiTesco riots and subsequently an increasingly
vocal discussion about gentrification
(PRSC, 2011). We argue that the intensification of struggles warrants a temporal focus
on the period from spring 2011 up to now.
Methodologically, we operate in a multimethod participatory research frame
inspired by forms of collective investigation
and theorisation (Freire, 1970; Shukaitis and
Graeber, 2007). For a period of one year
from summer 2011, we rented a studio in
Hamilton House. Based in the space, we
advertised our research project, held numerous informal conversations and participated
in community organisation events. Part of
our participatory research strategy were
seminars we conducted in Hamilton House
where we presented our ideas and fed them
into current discussions about the changes
in Stokes Croft and their evaluation.
In conducting our research we could not
avoid considering the important role of the
People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC),
incorporated as a community interest company in February 2009. Active in the community since 2007, it has been the brainchild
of founder and present chairman, Chris
Chalkley. The PRSC initially focused on
promoting street art in the area and organised gallery spaces and exhibitions. Over
the years it has also been actively involved in
debates about the character and identity of
Stokes Croft. The PRSC played a significant
role in creating the brand of ‘Stokes Croft’
as a cultural quarter, making it known as an
area in the city by appropriating the discourse of the creative industries. For example, the founding aims of the PSRC from
2009 state:
Frenzel and Beverungen
9
Figure 1. Stoke’s Croft cultural boundaries.
To realise a Cultural Quarter where creativity
in all its forms can flourish, and to facilitate
the conditions necessary for an appropriate
commercial sector, with creativity at its core,
to grow in Stokes Croft. To maintain and
improve the visual environment and infrastructure of Stokes Croft, pulling together all
members of the community. Initially, to create
10
Urban Studies
in Stokes Croft an Outdoor Gallery and
thereby make Stokes Croft a vibrant destination. (PRSC, 2009)
The ‘place-making strategies’ (Catungal
et al., 2009) or ‘city-branding’ (Eshuis and
Edwards, 2012) of the PRSC were combined, from the beginning, with an aggressive rhetoric of antagonism against the state,
local council and emanations of global capital, which are accused of having failed the
area.
We believe that Stokes Croft has been
criminally and deliberately neglected by
Government; that local government has
treated Stokes Croft as the sink, the sewer of
the City. A State that often favours the interests of those who are direct beneficiaries of
Financial Institutions, and continues to favour
the interests of excessively powerful
Corporations over the interests of the Local
Community whom they were elected to serve,
is necessarily suspect: We must suspect the
motives of Government, we must challenge
decisions that are visited upon us from afar.
(PRSC, 2011: 1)
Such vociferous rhetoric also helped the
‘place-branding’, however not from the
council, but ‘from below’, lending democratic legitimacy to its pursuit (cf. Eshuis
and Edwards, 2012). But as we will show in
the two vignettes, ‘place-branding from
below’ is not where the story ends. In our
observations of value struggles as they
unfolded around and after the Bristol riots
in April 2011, it became obvious that there
was an increasing desire to extend antagonistic practices beyond merely ‘cultural’ interventions of place-branding. The PRSC’s
Chris Chalkley expressed in an interview just
after the riots how companies and capital
from the city were realising the increasing
success and worth of the area:
The corporate forces of the city are marching
up the road from Cabot Circus [a big
shopping mall at the city centre end of Stokes
Croft] at present and Tesco is moving in from
the other direction [.] we are fighting a rearguard action here. (Chalkley, in The Guardian,
2011)
The two vignettes that follow highlight that
the value struggles extended in diverse ways,
involving and transforming a range of actors
and in their antagonistic setting, while
advancing debates in a range of projects
how to best counter gentrification and the
art of rent.
Vignette 1: Tesco in Stokes Croft and the
People’s Supermarket
The discussions over the Tesco supermarket
on Cheltenham Road, in the vicinity of the
area of Stokes Croft, started in November
2009, when building works were conducted
in a former comedy club. A resident, asking
the builders out of curiosity about what they
were doing, learned that they were preparing
a Tesco store. Almost immediately a local
protest group ‘No Tesco’ campaign was
formed.3 The PSRC played a central role in
initiating the alliance, and it soon attracted a
broad range of residents and people working
in the area including artists. Research conducted by the No Tesco Campaign pointed
to a broad rejection (98% of 700 surveyed)
(No Tesco Campaign, 2011). By inquiring
with the council, No Tesco found out that
Tesco had strategically avoided a public
consultation process by asking the original
owners of the building to change the licence
of the shop to one that allowed operating a
supermarket before Tesco actually bought
the building (No Tesco Campaign, n.d.).
The local protest group quickly grew in
support and urged the council to develop a
strategy to legally challenge Tesco’s licence
on the grounds that important issues such as
traffic resulting from the supplies of the store
had not been taken into account in the
Frenzel and Beverungen
original licence change. The council rejected
the call to embark on a legal challenge of
Tesco, citing limited means to pursue such a
challenge successfully. The council did however severely limit the shop’s business opportunities through its licensing powers (No
Tesco Campaign, n.d.). Yet No Tesco
attempted to take matters into their own
hands. In early 2010, the building of the prospective supermarket was squatted to prevent construction work. The squat raised the
profile of the struggle, and when it was
evicted hundreds of people attended and
protested against Tesco. When Tesco was
finally opened in early 2011, the group mobilised for a boycott of the company.
During the riots in April 2011 the Tesco
supermarket was looted just a few weeks
after it opened. Rather than focusing on the
riots as an expression of the value struggles
in the neighbourhood, we argue that the
more striking development is an initiative
for an ‘alternative supermarket’. The initiative has developed alongside and as a direct
result of the No Tesco Campaign. The process has brought together a group of 70 people working towards building a co-operative
food supply for the area.
Want healthy affordable food? Frustrated that
the big supermarkets are taking over Bristol
and taking their vast profits to remote shareholders? What if we could keep profits and
decision-making within our local community
and make healthy, local, fairtrade food available at affordable prices? (Bristol People’s
Supermarket, n.d.: n.p.)
The initiative can be seen as an attempt to
establish alternative value practices around
food which embrace and reproduce values
such as locality, affordability and health,
and which are immediately antagonistic
towards capitalist value practices as represented by Tesco. Showing the importance of
what De Angelis (2007) has called ‘counterenclosures’, the building of alternative
11
communities seems to depend on the struggle against value in a specific context.
Tesco’s aggressive move into the neighbourhood created a reason to be against it in
common, a struggle that formed the collective consciousness and perhaps sparked the
imagination to overcome the limits of imagination imposed by capital. If this is translated into the building of sociality and with
it the ‘autonomisation’ of material needs,
such as in the prospect of a people’s supermarket, a new terrain for imagination of
alternatives of capital-led recovery is
opened. Indeed, it seems that Stokes Croft’s
creative class started considering where their
food is coming from and attempted to reorganise the supply chain against capital. This
included artists-designed cups as well as
Banksy’s Bristol Riot Print sold by the
PRSC to raise legal funds. Also, numerous
hours of volunteering work by many participants went into presenting the supermarket,
attracting supporters and discussing its
structure.
The People’s Supermarket did not come
into being. In May 2012 the group issued a
statement in which they explained the complications they faced in the light of very wide
ranging aspirations for better food supplies.
But far from accepting defeat in the struggles against capital, the group outlined how
the idea of better food supplies had inspired
a range of other initiatives in the area.
[S]ince we have been in existence many other
organisations in the community have joined
the movement for making local, good quality
food more accessible. [.] These groups have
been pursuing the very projects that are needed
to have a form of People’s Supermarket in this
community. (Bristol People’s Supermarket,
2012)
Several food-related initiatives emerged in
Stokes Croft alongside the People’s
Supermarket, including the New Dawn
Traders, aiming to establish sustainable
12
Urban Studies
intercontinental food transport by using sailing boats (New Dawn Traders, 2013), or
The Community Kitchen, a Hamilton
House-based food and catering initiative
focused on sustainability and health. For us
this points to the productivity of value struggles, the creativity that propels and also
arises from the conflict of values and value,
a creativity that extends beyond the notion
of ‘creative industries’ as a tool of urban
regeneration. A new creative class emerges
that is not concerned only with producing
‘culture’ but reproducing life and sociality
more broadly.
Vignette 2: Westmoreland House
We turn now to a key site in Stokes Croft:
Westmoreland House, a ruin that dominates
the view of Stokes Croft, and is at the centre
of struggles over redevelopment and space
in the area.
Westmoreland House dominates local views
within and into the Stokes Croft and its current state of dereliction blights the
Conservation Area. The building towers over
its neighbours, and the overall bulk, materials
and design has a negative impact. (BBC,
2007: 12)
Westmoreland House’s story is illustrative of
the value struggles in the area not because its
fate has elicited the kind of conflicts we have
described with regards to Tesco. However,
as a property, Westmoreland House is a site
where the potential of capital to skim off
rent from Stokes Croft’s recovery is most
vividly exemplified. Since Westmoreland
House stopped being used as an office building in the 1980s, it has belonged to a large
London property development company,
today operating under the name Comer.
Comer’s strategy and long-term plan for the
site always focused on the redevelopment of
the office building into flats. The initial plan
dates from 1989 when planning permission
was obtained for a mixed residential and
business development. However, no works
were undertaken at the time and the planning permission elapsed in 1994. Comer
attempted to obtain a new planning permission for a similar project in 1994 but this was
rejected. In the period following, the owners
left the side derelict. In this period the abandoned and little guarded site increasingly
attracted local graffiti artists, who started to
use the ruin as a canvas (BBC, 2007).
In 2004 a man died when he fell off the
roof of the seven-storey building, and in
2007 a graffiti artist was severely injured in a
similar accident, while local police refused to
enter the site for occupational health reasons
(BBC, 2004, 2007). These incidents led to
the intensification of debates about the
future of what became increasingly labelled
the ‘eyesore’ of Stokes Croft. Under increasing pressure Bristol City Council for the first
time considered a compulsory purchase
order (CPO). The owners responded with a
new planning application which involved
building a new ten-storey apartment block
with more than 150 apartments on the site,
including a three-storey car park. The proposal was rejected by the council because of
various concerns relating to impact of this
mega development on the area. The council
subsequently rejected a range of new and
revised planning applications.
The council has shown some determination to prevent the development of this
large-scale private housing project with its
adverse implications for the area. Recently
the council has also launched a public consultation, promoted through a ‘stakeholder’
roundtable, the Carriageworks Action
Group (CAG) and a survey exercise that elicited 1400 responses from community members. This process has produced a
‘community vision’ for the future of the
derelict site (Carriageworks Action Group,
2012). Its aim was to develop a list of
requirements that any new developer has to
Frenzel and Beverungen
adhere to. This process is highly pertinent
from the perspective of value struggles. It
indicates that there is quite some willingness
by the council to not simply provide space
and political support for large-scale developments without consultation with the community. However, likewise there is no
willingness in the council to imagine a solution to the development of the site without
the capital of property developers.
The PRSC, in alliance with a number of
residents vocal in the open consultation process, would like the property to be bought
by the council, and then developed and used
commonly by the community.
In view of all this uncertainty, the way forward would be to recognise that the most
important thing for the long-term future of
Stokes Croft as a Cultural/Arts/Community
Centre/Destination would be to secure the
freehold of this property for the use of the
community. This would then open up the possibility of developing uses for the whole of this
property in a way that could be both sustainable and in line with the needs and aspirations
of the community as a whole. Funding could
be appropriated over the longer term, partners
chosen according to community needs and
desires, rather than on the basis of ‘financial
necessity’. (PRSC, 2008: 3)
The approach here is to take the ownership
of the land and the building out of private
hands and make it common. In this way
capital’s ability to extract the wealth produced in the area through rising property
prices in the art of rent would arguably be
severely limited. However, the ongoing consultation does not allow for such an
approach to be considered. The route the
council has decided to take is to involve a
developer. The community is considered a
‘third party’, coming in to consult the council and developer, but is not supposed to take
an active role in developing the site beyond
consultation. The council justifies this with
13
limited resources. It hopes to reclaim some
of the money spent to purchase the site from
the current owner. It also claims that there
are no resources for a council-led development of the site, nor to support a
community-led process (CAG Meeting, 19
April 2012). Limited council resources, however, are not natural. Rather they express a
lack of political imagination that results
from the sustained attacks of neoliberals on
the public sector, and capital’s success in
making us believe that we cannot reproduce
our own collectively live materially without
it (Caffentzis, 2010: 25–26).
In this case, then, the value struggle takes
a slightly different form. While the council
invites consultation and concedes that private developers must recognise the views of
the community, a truly communal, politically controlled development of the site is
deemed unrealistic. This indicates that the
consultation process is not truly open, a well
observed limit to public consultation in
more general terms (Atkinson, 1999). In the
consultation process some community activists came to the same conclusion, branding
the consultation process to be a ‘stitch-up’
(CAG Meeting, 19 April 2012). Despite
those criticisms, the process continued as
council and some residents repeated their
emphasis that Westmoreland House in its
current state is an ‘eyesore’ and something
needed to be done about it ‘urgently’. In
December 2013 Bristol City Council
declared Knightstone Housing Group
Limited its preferred development partner
for the redevelopment of the site.
Knightstone is a not-for-profit housing association with some history providing social
and low-cost housing in Bristol. The choice
of this particular developer responds to the
concerns of residents about rent extraction
and might be considered – from the perspective of value struggles – a small victory, even
though full community control over redevelopment has not been achieved.
14
As in the first vignette, the value struggles
over Westmoreland House were also productive in inspiring other initiatives. Faced
with the end of its lease in 2012, the Stokes
Croft community cinema ‘The Cube’
embarked on a fundraising campaign to buy
its location. £200,000 could be raised in the
community with match funding from the
Arts Council, enabling the communalisation
of the property.4
Discussion
The case of Stokes Croft, in our view,
demonstrates a number of complexities concerning economic development and urban
regeneration, as well as the vibrancy of value
struggles around culture and space in the
city. First, it provides an unusual example of
the way in which the discourse of the creative industries can be appropriated. On the
one hand, the way the PRSC sought to
brand the area as a cultural quarter plays
into the hands of the art of rent, as witnessed by the interest of property developers
and retail corporations – even if this interest
was still somewhat limited, with especially
property developers waiting for gentrification to further increase property values
before investing in redevelopment. On the
other hand, the case also at least insinuates
that the residents of Stokes Croft subsequently did not merely conform to the figure
of the culturepreneur (cf. Loacker, 2013),
and instead developed alternative value
practices. The terms ‘creative industries’ and
‘creative class’ are here shown to be incapable of grasping the common struggles
around work and living space as well as
social reproduction, e.g. when filmmakers or
puppeteers get involved in setting up a local
supermarket, occurring in the creative city.
These struggles are incomprehensible within
a frame that understands cultural quarters
to be merely about the production of culture
or the promotion of creativity (cf. Böhm
and Land, 2009).
Urban Studies
The case also, second, points to the productivity of value struggles. Certain initiatives such as the PRSC may start off in
branding exercises aiming at promoting
artist production, but faced with the unfolding of the art of rent they start political campaigns over planning decisions and
supermarkets, extending value struggles to
include all of social life. The net effect of
these value struggles witnessed in Stokes
Croft is the creation of the place of Stokes
Croft itself – a place defined through its
rejection of and resistance to a capitalist
value practice. Even where single initiatives
fail, as in the case of the People’s
Supermarket, the value struggles remain
productive, which is evidenced in the emergence of New Dawn Traders, and new food
initiatives such as the Community Kitchen.
This is also the case with Westmoreland
House, where value struggles have not thus
far succeeded in securing a fully community
controlled development, but have placed certain limits on capital’s ability to extract
monopoly rent nonetheless. Moreover, value
struggles have inspired ‘The Cube’ to communalise its location.
Finally, the case of Stokes Croft points
both to the primacy of urban and cultural
commons to the neoliberal economy, and to
their contested nature. While we argued that
in particular the efforts of the PRSC
involved an attempt to create a counterenclosure (De Angelis, 2007) in which
Stokes Croft’s commons could be protected
and reproduced in common, Caffentzis
(2010) warns of the danger of commons
being appropriated by capital. The people of
Stokes Croft seem to be aware of these dangers, and their strategies already regularly
raise this concern. Moreover they actively
engage in limiting capital’s grip on the commons, by engaging in value struggles. They
thereby also respond to a political context in
the UK in which new policy initiatives such
as the ‘Localism Bill’ and the ‘Big Society’
15
Frenzel and Beverungen
target the kinds of cultural and urban commons produced in Stokes Croft. We also
need to consider the increasing role commons play in capital’s plans for recovery.
This is precisely why we point to the importance of antagonism as expressed in the concept of value struggles. Without an
antagonistic set up ‘diverse economies’ may
not be very post-capitalist (Gibson-Graham,
2006) but rather in danger of confirming
and maintaining the hegemony of capitalist
value production, leaving unprofitable social
reproduction to well-meaning neighbourhood initiatives.
In this light, then, it seems difficult to
imagine ‘socialism in one city’ in the People’s
Republic of Stokes Croft. However, we suggest that the struggles that we tried to discuss
here are formative and transformative
experiences for the people involved in them,
while – in some way – the limits of their own
ability to produce ‘socialism in one city’ may
feed into a political subjectivity that allows
to start imagining how the production of
wealth can supersede and overcome its
appropriation through value on a much
more general level. The challenge here is one
of avoiding the ‘tragedy of the urban commons’ wherein those ‘who create an interesting and stimulating everyday neighbourhood
life lose it to predatory practices of the real
estate entrepreneurs, the financiers and
upper class consumers bereft of any social
imagination’ (Harvey, 2012: 78).
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or notfor-profit sectors.
Notes
1. For a further history of Stokes Croft, see
http://www.bristolinformation.co.uk/streets/
stokescroft-00.asp.
2. See http://www.hamiltonhouse.org.
3. See http://notesco.wordpress.com.
4. See http://www.cubecinema.com/freehold/.
References
Atkinson R (1999) Discourses of partnership and
empowerment in contemporary British urban
regeneration. Urban Studies 37: 1037–1055.
BBC (2004) Tatoo clue in mystery death fall.
Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/
england/bristol/somerset/3655290.stm.
BBC (2007) Building ‘too dangerous’ to enter.
Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/
england/bristol/somerset/6618969.stm.
Böhm S and Land C (2009) No measure for culture? Value in the new economy. Capital &
Class 33: 75–98.
Bristol People’s Supermarket (n.d.) Bristol People’s Supermarket. Avialable at: http://www.
scpeoplessupermarket.org.
Caffentzis G (2010) The future of ‘The Commons’: Neoliberalism’s ‘plan B’ or the original
disaccumulation of capital? New Formations
69: 23–41.
Carriageworks Action Group (2012) Carriageworks Community Vision. Available at: http://
carriageworks.org.uk/2012/03/08/the-carriageworks-community-vision-is-launched.
Catungal JP, Leslie D and Hii Y (2009) Geographies of displacement in the creative city: The
case of Liberty Village, Toronto. Urban Studies 46: 1095–1114.
De Angelis M (2007) The Beginning of History:
Value Struggles and Global Capital. London:
Pluto.
Department for Culture, Media and Sports (2001)
Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years.
London: DCMS.
Eshuis J and Edwards A (2012) Branding the city:
The democratic legitimacy of a new mode of
governance. Urban Studies 50: 1066–1082.
Evans G (2009) Creative cities, creative spaces and
urban policy. Urban Studies 46: 1003–1040.
Florida R (2003) The Rise of the Creative Class.
New York: Basic Books.
Freire P (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New
York: Herder & Herder.
Gibson-Graham JK (2006) A Postcapitalist Politics – University of Minnesota Press. Ann
Arbor, MI: Minnesota University Press.
16
Gill R and Pratt A (2008) In the social factory?
Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural
work. Theory, Culture & Society 25: 1–30.
Graeber D (2001) Towards an Anthropological
Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our
Dreams. London: Palgrave.
Guardian, The (2011) Tesco protests: The People’s
Republic of Stokes Croft – video. Available at:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2011/
may/24/tesco-protests-stokes-croft-video (accessed
9 August 2013).
Hardt M and Negri A (2009) Commonwealth.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harvey D (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to
the City to the Urban Revolution. London:
Verso.
Harvie D (2005) All labour produces value for
capital and we all struggle against value. The
Commoner 10: 132–171.
Harvie D and Milburn K (2010) How organizations value and how value organizes. Organization 17: 631–636.
Horkheimer M and Adorno TW (2002) Dialectic
of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.
(Trans. E Jephcott) Stanford, CT: Stanford
University Press.
Kanngieser A (2012) Creative labour in Shanghai: Questions on politics, composition and
ambivalence. Subjectivity 5: 54–74.
KEA European Affairs (2006) The Economy of
Culture in Europe. Available at: http://ec.europa.
eu/culture/key-documents/doc873_en.htm#bad_
nodepdf_word/economy_cult/.
Lazzarato M (2011) The misfortunes of the ‘artistic critique’ and of cultural employment.
(Trans. M O’Neill). In: Raunig G, Ray G and
Wuggenig U (eds) Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’. London: MayFly, pp. 41–56.
Loacker B (2013) Becoming ‘culturpreneur’: How
the ‘neoliberal regime of truth’ affects and
redefines artistic subject positions’. Culture
and Organization 18: 124–145.
Lorey I (2009) Governmentality and self-precarization: On the normalization of cultural producers. In: Raunig G and Ray G (eds) Art and
Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing
Institutional Critique. London: MayFly, pp.
187–202.
Urban Studies
Lorey I (2010) Becoming common: Precarization
as political constituting. e-flux 17. Available
at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/becomingcommon-precarization-as-political-constituting/.
Lovink G and Rossiter N (eds) (2007) MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries.
Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
McRobbie A (2011) The Los Angelesiation of
London: Three short waves of young people’s
micro-economies of culture and creativity in
the UK. In: Raunig G, Ray G and Wuggenig
U (eds) Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’. London: MayFly, pp. 119–132.
Marazzi C (2010) The Violence of Financial Capitalism. New York: Semiotext(e).
Markusen A (2006) Urban development and the
politics of the creative class: Evidence from
artists. Environment and Planning A 38(10):
1921–1940.
No Tesco Campaign (n.d.) Campaign Blog. Available at: http://notesco.wordpress.com/home-2/.
New Dawn Traders (2013) New Dawn Traders.
Available at: http://newdawntraders.com/
(accessed 9 August 2013).
People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (2008) Overall
Game Plan for Stokes Croft. Bristol: PRSC.
People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (2009) Mission
Statement. Available at: http://prsc.org.uk/
mission.htm.
People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (2011) Credo.
Available at: http://www.prsc.org.uk/politics.
htm (accessed 9 August 2013).
Pratt AC (2009) Urban regeneration: From the
arts ‘feel good’ factor to the cultural economy:
A case study of Hoxton, London. Urban Studies 46: 1041–1061.
Portland Works (2011) Portland Works Hamilton
House Bristol Case Study. Available at: http://
www.portlandworks.co.uk/download/2011/06/
13/casestudy4-coexistathamiltonhouse.pdf
(accessed 9 August 2013).
Raunig G, Ray G and Wuggenig U (eds) (2011) )
Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity
and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’. London: MayFly.
Ross A (2008) The new geography of work:
Power to the precarious? Theory, Culture &
Society 25: 31–49.
Frenzel and Beverungen
Schumpeter J (1976) Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy. London: Routledge.
Shorthose J (2004) A more critical view of the
creative industries: Production, consumption
and resistance. Capital & Class 28: 1–9.
Shorthose J and Strange G (2004) The new cultural economy, the artist and the social configuration of autonomy. Capital & Class 28:
43–59.
Shukaitis S and Graeber D (eds) (2007) Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorizations. Oakland: AK Press.
United Nations (2010) Creative Economy: A Feasible Development Option. Report 2010. New
York: United Nations.
17
Vercellone C (2010) The crisis of the law of value
and the becoming-rent of profit. In: Fumagalli
A and Mezzadro S (eds) Crisis in the Global
Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles
and New Political Scenarios. New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 85–118.
von Osten M (2011) Unpredictable outcomes/
unpredictable outcasts: On recent debates over
creativity and the creative industries. In: Raunig G, Ray G and Wuggenig U (eds) Critique
of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’. London:
MayFly, pp. 133–146.