Daniel Silver

Scenes, Innovation, and Urban Development

With the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida in 2002, the ‘creative city’ became the new hot topic among urban policymakers, planners and economists. Florida has developed one of three path-breaking theories about the relationship between creative individuals and urban environments. The economist A¥ke E. Andersson and the psychologist Dean Simonton are the other members of this ‘creative troika’. In the Handbook of Creative Cities, Florida, Andersson and Simonton appear in the same volume for the first time. The expert contributors in this timely Handbook extend their insights with a varied set of theoretical and empirical tools. The diversity of the contributions reflect the multidisciplinary nature of creative city theorizing, which encompasses urban economics, economic geography, social psychology, urban sociology, and urban planning. The stated policy implications are equally diverse, ranging from libertarian to social democratic visions of our shared creative and urban future.

CONTEXTUALIZING THE ARTISTIC DIVIDEND

ABSTRACT: Artists have been a central theme in recent debates about the causes of urban development. This article shifts attention to the question of context: in what sorts of places are artist concentrations most likely to stimulate the local economy? To tackle this question, we employ a Canadian national database of local amenities. This database includes roughly 1.8 million total amenities in 1,800 distinct categories, across every Canadian locality. By coding these amenity categories on 16 qualitative dimensions (like self-expression, glamour, or neighborliness), we measure the specific cultural “scene” for each Canadian neighborhood. Our main findings are threefold. First, in general there is a strong correlation between artist populations and rising local wages. Second, this correlation is strengthened in more self-expressive, glamorous, and charismatic scenes. Third, in contrast to artists, “creative professionals” are linked with lower local wage growth generally and in such scenes. Finally, synthesizing these results, we conclude with a comment about what it might mean for “bourgeois” and “bohemian” lifestyle preferences to become more tightly integrated in contemporary postindustrial contexts, offering evidence based on the location of artists, graphic designers, and advertising firms that processes of functional differentiation and interchange may provide a more compelling explanation than processes of fusion and conflict.

The Power of Scenes

This paper elaborates a general theory of scenes as multi-dimensional complexes of meaning embedded in material, local practices. It outlines techniques for measuring scenes empirically and shows how certain types of scenes provide environments in which new social movement (NSM) organizations (like human rights and environmental groups) tend to thrive. However universal and cosmopolitan the content of NSM goals, they appear to get much of their energy and support from the qualities that inhere in concrete local contexts.

Self-relations in Social Relations

This article contributes to an ongoing theoretical effort to extend the insights of relational and network sociology into adjacent domains. We integrate Simmel’s late theory of the relational self into the formal analysis of social relations, generating a framework for theorizing forms of association among self-relating individuals. On this model, every “node” in an interaction has relations not only to others but also to itself, specifically between its ideality and its actuality. We go on to integrate this self-relation into a formal model of social relations. This model provides a way to describe configurations of social interactions defined by the forms according to which social relations realize participants’ ideal selves. We examine four formal dimensions along which these self-relational relationships can vary: distance, symmetry, scope, and actualization.

Genre Complexes in Popular Music

Recent work in the sociology of music suggests a declining importance of genre categories. Yet other work in this research stream and in the sociology of classification argues for the continued prevalence of genres as a meaningful tool through which creators, critics and consumers focus their attention in the topology of available works. Building from work in the study of categories and categorization we examine how boundary strength and internal differentiation structure the genre pairings of some 3 million musicians and groups. Using a range of network-based and statistical techniques, we uncover three musical “complexes,” which are collectively constituted by 16 smaller genre communities. Our analysis shows that the musical universe is not monolithically organized but rather composed of multiple worlds that are differently structured—i.e., uncentered, single-centered, and multi-centered.

Cultural Scenes and Voting Patterns in Canada

Extending recent social science work using the concept of “scene” into politics, this paper investigates connections between cultural variation and political variation across Canadian localities. First, we introduce the notion of “scene.” Then, using a national database of local amenities (with some 1800 categories and 1.6 million data points), we show that key dimensions of cultural meaning account for significant differences in voting patterns in recent Canadian elections. In particular, electoral districts with scenes that suggest themes of self-expression are associated with support for left-leaning parties, while scenes that support locality and corporateness are associated with the right. We conclude with suggestions for pursuing hypotheses about potential mechanisms driving these associations.

From Hungry to Healthy: Simmel, Self-Cultivation and the Transformative Experience of Eating for Beauty

Abstract We examine American Cosmopolitan in order to understand how specific foods have been linked to dominant forms of beauty. Three food-beauty nexuses emerge, namely moralism, strategy and holism. To understand how women engaged with these nexuses, we draw on Simmel’s “religiosity.” Simmel traced deeply-felt experiences like self-cultivation (beauty) through cultural objects (food) using religious imagery. In this respect, changing messages about diets suggest profound encounters with the limits of forms of beauty. But the conflict of culture is also apparent: it is difficult to create new forms of beauty or do away with gendered beauty standards altogether.

Karaoke Together vs. Bowling Alone: Scenes Illuminate how Western Rules can be Transformed to Drive Development and Democracy

Abstract What drives workplace and political collaboration, democracy, trust, economic and population growth? Or protest against them? The Western models emerging from Putnam, Verba et al., Florida, Glaeser, Lloyd, Scott, and Porter stress variables that sometimes shift dramatically in Asia. Those relying on individualism and personal initiative, from Tocqueville on – which stress participation as driving legitimacy, and bohemia as innovating – often fail or shift drastically in a new study of related dynamics in China, Korea, and Japan, compared to the United States, Canada, France, and Spain. Karaoke restaurants and bars can play critical roles, reinforcing workplace and family solidarity, while organized groups shift in their dynamics from the West. We are constructing a multilevel interpretative framework specifying how cultural, political, and economic dynamics interpenetrate in distinct but varying combinations. How engaged or alienated are young persons, workers, and the general public shift other processes. Arts and culture can build glamour and charisma, or alienate as transgressive and inauthentic; each varies by context.

The significance of religious imagery in The Philosophy of Money Money and the transcendent character of life

This article seeks to understand a puzzling aspect of Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money, namely, the many religious analogies Simmel uses to characterize money. We argue that with these analogies Simmel indicates how what he would later term ‘the transcendent character of life’ permeates mundane monetary interactions. Specifically, we articulate how key religious forms of experience – faith, unity, and individuality – exist in monetary exchange and point toward a distinctively Simmelian way to understand the interplay between religion and economics.

Current debates in urban theory from a scale perspective: Introducing a scenes approach:

Cities, all over the world, have become more diverse than ever. This poses great challenges to urban studies and theorising. In this article, we review current debates in urban theory through Howitt’s (1998) three-facet conceptualisation of geographical scale and find that urban theorists have high levels of disagreement on the areal (scale as size), the hierarchical (scale as level) as well as the dialectical (scale as relation) aspects of the city. We show that, if urban theorists are to find a common approach to the city, we should contemplate: 1) what cities to study; 2) from which geographical level(s); and 3) how the city relates to other entities. We illustrate how the theory of urban scenes could potentially be used to address these debates in urban theory.