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Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local
Economic Development
NEW HORIZONS IN REGIONAL SCIENCE
Series Editor: Philip McCann, Professor of Economics, University of
Waikato, New Zealand and Professor of Urban and Regional Economics,
University of Reading, UK

Regional science analyses important issues surrounding the growth and

development of urban and regional systems and is emerging as a major social
science discipline. This series provides an invaluable forum for the publication of
high quality scholarly work on urban and regional studies, industrial location
economics, transport systems, economic geography and networks.
New Horizons in Regional Science aims to publish the best work by economists,
geographers, urban and regional planners and other researchers from throughout
the world. It is intended to serve a wide readership including academics, students
and policymakers.
Titles in the series include:
Entrepreneurship, Investment and Spatial Dynamics
Lessons and Implications for an Enlarged EU
Edited by Peter Nijkamp, Ronald L. Moomaw and Iulia Traistaru-Siedschlag
Regional Climate Change and Variability
Impacts and Responses
Edited by Matthias Ruth, Kieran Donaghy and Paul Kirshen
Industrial Agglomeration and New Technologies
A Global Perspective
Edited by Masatsugu Tsuji, Emanuele Giovannetti and Mitsuhiro Kagami
Incentives, Regulations and Plans
The Role of States and Nation-states in Smart Growth Planning
Edited by Gerrit J. Knaap, Huibert A. Haccoû, Kelly J. Clifton and John W. Frece
New Directions in Economic Geography
Edited by Bernard Fingleton
The Management and Measurement of Infrastructure
Performance, Efficiency and Innovation
Edited by Charlie Karlsson, William P. Anderson, Börje Johansson and Kiyoshi
Kobayashi
Knowledge Externalities, Innovation Clusters and Regional Development
Edited by Jordi Suriñach, Rosina Moreno and Esther Vayá
Regional Knowledge Economies
Markets, Clusters and Innovation
Philip Cooke, Carla De Laurentis, Franz Tödtling and Michaela Trippl
Entrepreneurship, Industrial Location and Economic Growth
Edited by Josep Maria Arauzo-Carol and Miguel C. Manjón-Antolín

Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development

Edited by Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti
Creative Cities,
Cultural Clusters and
Local Economic
Development

Edited by

Philip Cooke
University Research Professor in Regional Development and
Director, Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Wales,
Cardiff, UK

Luciana Lazzeretti
Professor of Cultural Economics, University of Florence, Italy

NEW HORIZONS IN REGIONAL SCIENCE

Edward Elgar
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
© Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission of the publisher.

Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
Glensanda House
Montpellier Parade
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 1UA
UK

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

William Pratt House
9 Dewey Court
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development/edited by

Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti.
p. cm. — (New horizons in regional science)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Urban economics. 2. City planning—Economic aspects. I. Cooke,
Philip, 1946– . II. Lazzeretti, Luciana.
HT321.C74 2008
307.76—dc22
2007030404

ISBN 978 1 84720 268 0

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
List of contributors vii
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xv

Creative cities: an introduction 1

Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti

PART I CULTURAL DISTRICTS, CULTURAL

CLUSTERS AND LOCAL ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT

1 Culture, clusters, districts and quarters: some reflections

on the scale question 25
Philip Cooke
2 Cultural resources and regional development: the case of
the cultural legacy of watchmaking 48
Leïla Kebir and Olivier Crevoisier
3 Cultural clusters and districts: the state of the art 70
Tommaso Cinti
4 The cultural districtualization model 93
Luciana Lazzeretti
5 Collective trademarks and cultural districts: the case of
San Gregorio Armeno, Naples 121
Tiziana Cuccia, Massimo Marrelli and Walter Santagata
6 Fixed book pricing in Spain: a debate between economic
efficiency and cultural diversity 137
Maria Luisa Palma Martos and Luís Palma Martos
7 Why do cultural industries cluster? Localization,
urbanization, products and projects 155
Mark Lorenzen and Lars Frederiksen

v
vi Contents

PART II KNOWLEDGE, CREATIVE INDUSTRIES AND

LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

8 Creativity, innovation and territorial agglomeration in

cultural activities: the roots of the creative city 183
Pedro Costa
9 Knowledge externalities and networks of cities in the
creative metropolis 211
Joan Trullén and Rafael Boix
10 The management of ‘events’ in the Veneto performing
music cluster: bridging latent networks and permanent
organizations 237
Fiorenza Belussi and Silvia Rita Sedita
11 Creative clusters and governance: the dominance of the
Hollywood film cluster 258
Lisa De Propris and Laura Hypponen
12 The creative city: a matter of values 287
Richard Smith and Katie Warfield
13 Evolving Singapore: the creative city 313
Hing Ai Yun
14 Mapping and analysing creative systems in Italy
(1991–2001) 338
Francesco Capone

Index 365
Contributors

Fiorenza Belussi, Professor of Business Economics at Padua University. She

has undertaken major international research on the issue of industrial dis-
tricts, clusters, creative networks, learning regions and local systems in
Europe and in the Eastern countries. She has recently co-edited The
Evolutionary Patterns of Local Production Systems (2000) and Technological
Evolution of Industrial Districts (2003). Author of numerous articles and
papers concerning the economics of innovation and creativity in small
firms, emergence of business networks, and organizational restructuring of
service sectors and creative industries.
Rafael Boix, Associate Professor of Applied Economics and Director of
the Research Group on Urban Economics, Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona. Adviser and reports to the City Hall of Barcelona, Spanish
Department of Industry and OECD. Recent publications: Knowledge, net-
works of cities and growth in regional urban systems (PiRS, with Joan
Trullén) and Barcelona ciudad del conocimiento (Ajuntament de Barcelona,
2006).
Francesco Capone, PhD, Research Fellow and Lecturer of Economics
and Management of Enterprises, Faculty of Economics, University of
Florence. Recent publications: ‘Tourist clusters, destination manage-
ment and tourist local systems: systemic approaches to tourism’ and
‘Identification and analysis of tourist local systems: an application to
Italy’ in L. Lazzeretti and C.S. Petrillo Tourism local systems and net-
working (Elsevier, 2006) and ‘Source of competitiveness and growth in
tourist local production systems in Italy’ in Annals of Regional Science
(2007).
Tommaso Cinti, PhD in Economics and Management of Enterprises and
Local Systems, is actually Research Fellow and Lecturer of Economics and
Management of Enterprises in the Faculty of Economics of the University
of Florence. He recently published a book in Italian: Museums and
Territory. Relationship Dynamics in the Museum Cluster of Florence
(Carocci, 2007). His research interests deal with cultural cluster, cultural
districts and local development.

vii
viii Contributors

Philip Cooke, Professor of Regional Development and Director, Centre for

Advanced Studies, Cardiff University. Activities in 2006: adviser to the
European Union (EU), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) and the United Nations Industrial Development
Organization (UNIDO), wrote reports for each. Partner in CESAGen, the
UK Genomics Policy Research Centre (at Cardiff). In 2006 reported to
Germany’s Science Ministry (BMBF). Adjunct Professor at University of
Aalborg. Awarded Honorary PhD, Lund University 2006. Recently pub-
lished two regional development books: Clusters & Regional Development
and Regional Development in the Knowledge Economy (both Routledge,
2006).
Pedro Costa, Auxiliar Professor of Economics at Instituto Superior de
Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa/University Institute of Social Sciences
and Business Studies (ISCTE), Lisbon, and Researcher and Vice-President
of Dinâmia (Research Centre on Socioeconomic Change). PhD in Urban
and Regional Planning. He has been teaching and researching mainly in the
fields of territorial economics, cultural economics and urban/regional devel-
opment policies. Recent work includes policy-oriented research projects to
public authorities on the issues of creative cities and cultural policies.
Olivier Crevoisier, Director of Research of the Group for Territorial
Economy (GRET) at the Institute of Sociology, University of Neuchâtel
(Switzerland) and a member of the European Research Group on Innovative
Milieus (GREMI). Recent publication: ‘Circulation of Competencies and
Dynamics of Regional Production Systems’ (with A. Berset) in International
Journal on Multicultural Societies, 2006.
Tiziana Cuccia, Associate Professor of Economic Policy at the Department
of Economics and Quantitative Methods of the University of Catania,
Italy. Her scientific interests are in cultural economics, local development,
and contingent valuation methods. Her publications include articles in the
Journal of Cultural Economics and in Applied Economics, along with con-
tributions in books published by Edward Elgar.
Lisa De Propris, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Economics, Birmingham
Business School, University of Birmingham. Fellow of the Institute for
Economic Development Policy. Recent publications: ‘The Birmingham
jewellery quarter: a Marshallian industrial district’ (with L. Lazzeretti),
European Planning Studies (2007); ‘The internationalisation of local produc-
tion systems: embeddedness, openness and governance’ in Entrepreneurship
and Regional Development (2007); ‘FDI, clusters and knowledge sourcing’, in
C. Pitelis, R. Sugden and J. Wilson’s Clusters and Globalisation: The
Development of Economies (Edward Elgar, 2006).
 Contributors ix

Lars Frederiksen, Research Associate, Innovation Studies Centre, Tanaka

Business School, Imperial College, London. Research interests: ‘open’ busi-
ness models ranging from innovation in inter-firm project ecologies to online
user communities, and management and organizational issues related to the
processes of distributed innovation. Empirical research interests: music, film,
software industries and utilities as water and energy provision. Recent pub-
lications in Organization Science and European Management Review.
Hing Ai Yun, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, National
University of Singapore. Has worked with the International Labour
Organization (ILO) and the Asian Productivity Organization on social
dimensions of productivity and restructuring in banking and manufactur-
ing. Recent publications include international journal articles on the family
and industrial development, and subjectivity and the new industrial regime
in Singapore.
Laura Hypponen, Research Associate at Birmingham Business School,
UK. A graduate of the European Film College in Denmark and the
Bachelor of Commerce programme in the Birmingham Business School,
Laura’s dissertation about competitiveness in the film industry won the
School’s prize for the best extended essay upon her graduation. Laura has
worked in various positions in the independent production sector of the
UK film industry as well as producing her own short fiction projects. She is
currently studying at the Film Business Academy’s pilot MSc course in
Cass Business School, London.
Leïla Kebir, Visiting Scholar at the Governance and Proximity Relations
(GRP) team at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research
(INRA) in Paris. Member of the European Research Group on Innovative
Milieus (GREMI). Recent publication: with O. Crevoisier, ‘Resource
dynamics and innovative milieus’, Journal of Entrepreneurship and
Innovation Management (2007).
Luciana Lazzeretti, Professor in Economics and Management of Firms,
co-ordinator of the PhD programme in ‘Economics and Management of
Enterprises and Local Systems’, co-ordinator of the Doctorate School in
Economics, director of Postgraduate Programme in ‘Economics and
Management of the Museum Goods’ at the Faculty of Economics,
University of Florence. She recently published Arts Cities, Cultural District
and Museums (Florence University Press, 2004) and co-edited Tourism
Local Systems and Networking (Elsevier, 2006). She is author of numerous
articles of cultural economics and local development in international jour-
nals and books.
x Contributors

Mark Lorenzen is Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial

Economics and Strategy, Copenhagen Business School. In his research,
Mark focuses upon economic organization of the market in, for example,
networks, projects and clusters, currently within the cultural industries.
Mark is director of the Imagine Creative Industries Research centre,
member of the executive committee of the Danish Research Unit on
Industrial Dynamics (DRUID), and executive editor of Industry and
Innovation.
Massimo Marrelli, Professor of Public Economics, Department of
Economics, President of the School of Humanities and Social Science,
University ‘Federico II’, Naples, Italy. Research interest: economics of
culture, mechanism design, and economics of regulation. He recently
edited the volume Public Decision Making and Asymmetric Information
(Kluwer, 2004) and other numerous articles in international journals and
books.
Luís Palma Martos, Professor in Economics and History of Economic
Thought of the University of Sevilla (Spain). Fields of research: cultural
economics; welfare economics and public policy; industrial economics;
European studies. Visiting scholar at Northwestern University. Visiting
professor in various universities in Europe and Latin America.
Maria Luisa Palma Martos, PhD in Economics, Associate Professor of
Microeconomics and Cultural Economics, Department of Economic
Theory and Political Economy, Faculty of Economics and Business, Seville
University.
Walter Santagata, Professor of Public Economics, Department of
Economics, University of Turin, Italy, Director of the EBLA (Economia
dei Beni culturali, della Legge e delle Attività creative) Center
(International Center for Research on the Economics of Culture,
Institutions and Creativity), Director of the Master programme ‘Cultural
Projects for Development’, International Training Centre-International
Labour Organization (ITC-ILO), Adviser to United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) and the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO). Recent publications: La Mode. Une économie de la Créativité et du
patrimoine (La Documentation Française, 2005) and ‘Cultural districts and
their role in economic development’, in V. Ginsbourg and D. Throsby (eds),
Handbook on the Economics of Art and Culture (North Holland, 2006).
Silvia Rita Sedita, PhD in Economics and Management of Enterprises and
Local Systems, currently Assistant Professor of Economics and Management
of Enterprises, Faculty of Political Science, Padua University. Main research
 Contributors xi

interests: industrial districts, clusters, creative networks, communities of

practice and inter-organizational learning. She recently published two
DRUID working papers on the issue of firms’ competitiveness and knowl-
edge transfer in the music industry.
Richard Smith, Associate Professor in the School of Communication at
Simon Fraser University (SFU), Vancouver, Canada. He is also director of
the Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST) at
SFU. Smith’s research focus is social inclusion/exclusion and new media.
Recent publication: Mobile and Wireless Communication (with G. Gow)
(Open University Press, 2006).
Joan Trullén, Professor of Applied Economics, Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona and Secretary General of Industry of Spain. Former Knowledge-
city Commissioner, City Hall of Barcelona. Recent publications: Knowledge,
Networks of Cities and Growth in Regional Urban Systems (with Rafael Boix,
PiRS) and Desarrollo local: teorías y estrategias (with G. Becattini and M.T.
Costa, Civitas, 2002).
Katie Warfield, Media and Cultural Studies Theory Lecturer in the
Department of Journalism at Kwantlen University College, Richmond,
BC. Current research grants include media values and journalistic cultures
in education and practice, and Canadian pop culture studies. Prior research
associate with the Centre for Excellence on Culture and Communities at the
Creative Cities Network Canada.
Preface
This volume takes part in the recent debate on modern economies and the
relationship between culture, creativity and models of local development.
The issues of creativity and economic development are dealt with from
many different viewpoints in economic analysis. Concurrently with the
advance of research aimed at exploring specific segments of the cultural
industry, either with an economic or a managerial outlook, the debate runs
to the inference that culture is a possible flywheel of economic development
for cities and places rich in cultural resources, as well as to the networks
between cities of knowledge. The positive impact of cultural industries
upon the ‘regional creative climate’ and the way in which culture tends to
concentrate in places that have a high level of knowledge ‘diversity’ are also
explored. On one side, the attempt is to focus on the organization of cre-
ative industries with the ambition of linking together with an ideal thread
different industries whose common feature is that of conveying new knowl-
edge (such as those founded on culture, design or science). On the other
side, the attempt is to identify key elements in order to understand and
manage creativity in cultural industries, also asserting that their distinctive
elements must be basically found in their dependence on creativity itself.
The 2006 OECD report on Competitive Cities in the Global Economy
underlines the strategic role of culture as a factor of sustainable economic
development and emphasizes its ability to activate new filières of innov-
ation and to contribute to the rejuvenation of traditional sectors. The
report stresses the potential of culture for the revitalization of European
urban historical centres and regions, in the context of the issues of urban
regeneration and governance, and the significant implications of clustering
in systems of firms or institutions, such as districts, clusters, cultural or cre-
ative neighbourhoods. Creative economy is tied in with culture as they both
stress, on the one hand, human capital, the creativeness of specific profes-
sions and the impact of context-related variables, and on the other hand,
belonging to social networks.
The first time the suggestion was made of collecting scientific contribu-
tions on the issue of culture, creativity and local development in their
mutual relationships was in 2004, at the Florence conference, ‘Industrial
districts and clusters. Applications and contaminations in the study of art
cities and cultural districts’. On that occasion, some reports focusing on art

xiii
xiv Preface

cities and the economic enhancement of art and culture were presented
(Cooke, Crevoisier, Kebir and Lazzeretti), which now constitute the early
chapters of this volume. The meeting was also attended by PhD students in
the research doctorate ‘Economics and management of enterprises and
local systems’ (University of Florence), who illustrated the first results of
their doctoral theses, the most relevant of which are also reproduced here
(Capone, Cinti and Sedita).
Starting from that experience, the present volume has taken shape by suc-
cessive enlargements in the issue of the culture–creativity relationship.
Studies were included of industrial, urban and regional economists, schol-
ars of local development (Belussi, Boix, Costa, De Propris, Hypponen,
Lorenzen, Frederiksen and Trullén), public and cultural economists
(Cuccia, Marelli, Luís Palma Martos, Maria Luisa Palma Martos and
Santagata); and while the latter are all European, a few media and com-
munication sociologists and specialists from Canada and Asia (Smith,
Warfield, Hing) were also invited to contribute.
Therefore, the triangle ‘culture–creativity–local development’ gathered
together a collection of studies and researches which offers, because of its
multidisciplinary approach, a variegated kaleidoscope of the paths of local
development based on culture and creativity.
This work would not have been possible without the precious help of
Francesco Capone, who was in charge of contacts among authors, and of
Phil Cooke, who took care of the book editing.
The present study benefited from financial support from PRIN/2005
project n. 20051370540, ‘Territorial benchmarking: analytical tools applied
to performance and competitiveness in local production systems’.
Acknowledgements
We thank the editors for having authorized the reproduction of the various
version of the papers published as conference records, part of the book and
in journals.

Chapter 1 – Cooke, P., ‘Culture, clusters, districts and quarters: some

reflections on the scale question’: a first version was published in the journal
Sviluppo Locale, 2004–2005, vol. XI, no. 26, edited by Rosenberg and
Sellier, Turin, pp. 7–30, and presented to the conference ‘Industrial districts
and clusters: applications and contaminations to the analysis of arts cities
and cultural districts’, 23–24 April 2004, Faculty of Economics, Florence.
Chapter 2 – Crevoisier, O. and Kebir, L., ‘Cultural resources and regional
development: the case of the cultural legacy of watchmaking’: a first Italian
version was published in the journal Sviluppo Locale, 2004–2005, vol. XI,
no. 26 edited by Rosenberg and Sellier, Turin, pp. 51–72, and presented
to the conference ‘Industrial districts and cluster: applications and con-
taminations to the analysis of arts cities and cultural districts’, 23–24
April 2004, Faculty of Economics, Florence, and to the ‘4th Congress on
Proximity Economics: Proximity, Networks and Co-ordination’, 17–18
June 2004, Marseille.
Chapter 4 – Lazzeretti, L., ‘The cultural districtualization models’: a first
and reduced version was published in Italian in the journal Sviluppo Locale,
2004–2005, vol. XI, no. 26 edited by Rosenberg and Sellier, Turin,
pp. 73–90 and presented to the conference ‘Industrial districts and cluster:
applications and contaminations to the analysis of arts cities and cultural
districts’, 23–24 April 2004, Faculty of Economics, Florence.
Chapter 5 – Cuccia, T., Marrelli, M. and Santagata, W., ‘Collective trade-
marks and cultural districts: the case of San Gregorio Armeno – Naples’,
a partial version of this paper was previously published as ‘Il ruolo dei
marchi collettivi nella valorizzazione dei distretti culturali: aspetti teorici
ed evidenze empiriche’, in C. Berni (ed.), Il territorio soggetto culturale,
F. Angeli, Milano, 2006.
Chapter 6 – Palma Martos, M. and Palma Martos, M., ‘Fixed book pricing
in Spain: a debate between economic efficiency and cultural diversity’: a

xv
xvi Acknowledgements

first version was presented to the 14th International Conference of the

International Association of Cultural Economics (ACEI), Wien, 6–9 July
2006.
Chapter 7 – Lorenzen, M. and Frederiksen, L., ‘Why do cultural industries
cluster? Localization, urbanization, products and projects’: Parts of section
4 draw upon a 2005 DRUID working paper 05-23 and the article ‘The man-
agement of projects and product experimentation: examples from the
music industry’, published in European Management Review, vol. 2, no. 3,
pp. 198–211.
Chapter 8 – Costa, P., ‘Creativity, innovation and territorial agglomeration
in cultural activities: the roots of the creative city’: different parts of this
paper were presented (in early stages) at the following conferences:
Centennial Meeting of The Association of American Geographers
(Philadelphia, 14–19 March 2004); First Meeting of the European Network
on Cultural Industries (Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan and
International Development Studies, Amsterdam, 26–27 January 2006), and
16th International Conference of RESER – European Research Network
on Services and Space (ISCTE, Lisboa, 28–30 September 2006). Parts of
section 3 were previously published in a Working Paper of Dinâmia/ISCTE
(Costa, P.; M. Magalhães, B. Vasconcelos and G. Sugahara, ‘On “Creative
Cities” governance models: a comparative approach’, WP no. 2006/52), and
are forthcoming in one of the 2007 issues of the Norwegian Journal of
Geography (edited by Taylor and Francis).
Chapter 10 – Belussi, F. and Sedita, S.R: ‘The management of “events” in
the Veneto performing music cluster: bridging latent networks and perma-
nent organizations’: a first version was presented to the DRUID Summer
Conference 2006 on ‘Knowledge, innovation and competitiveness: dynam-
ics of firms, networks, regions and institutions’, 18–20 June 2006, CBS,
Copenhagen, Denmark.
Chapter 14 – Capone, F., ‘Identification and mapping of creative systems
in Italy (1991–2001)’: a first version was presented to the 14th International
Conference of the International Association of Cultural Economics
(ACEI), Wien, 6th–9th of July 2006.
Creative cities: an introduction
Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti

INTRODUCTION

What is the creative city? This is not the first recent book to investigate that
important and growing question. A relatively recent collection by Power
and Scott (2004) explored similar territory under the rubric of cultural
industries and the production of culture. While we are delighted that books
of this quality and range are becoming available for study and research, we
aim in this book to be clear about one thing in particular. Most treatments
in this burgeoning field tend to use the terms ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’ inter-
changeably. As articulated with great precision for the case of Vancouver
by Smith and Warfield in Chapter 12, in the book generally and in this
introduction specifically we distinguish cultural economy and creative
industries. This is because – as shown in a companion book to this one
focusing upon Creative Regions (Cooke and Schwartz, 2007) – the two have
almost totally distinctive modes of production, institutional bases and aes-
thetic content. Thus it can be a little alarming to see, as yet, inadequate
recognition of these important differences.
That is not to say that the two do not engage, interact and inspire each
other as represented in ‘punk’ regalia or minimalist set design gracing pre-
sentations of Hamlet or Carmen, while it is notable that two of the globally
style-defining costumier companies, Gucci and Prada, retain their func-
tional bases in the adopted home town of Leonardo da Vinci in Florence.
Nevertheless, fundamentally, those apparent contradictions sum up the
important fissure that exists in conceptual and real terms between cultural
economy and creative industries. The former, as displayed by the operatic
illustration noted above, tends to be failed by the market and is perforce
usually subsidized or sponsored by industry. It is seen as a public good that
states are willing to cushion, efforts to ‘privatize’ in some countries notwith-
standing. Accordingly, entrance to certain cultural economy facilities like
museums and art galleries, where publicly owned, may be periodically free
or, depending upon political ideology, periodically to be paid for. Even in
the last case, ticket revenue alone is seldom sufficient to cover all overheads,
not to mention acquisitions. So the cultural part of the economy has an

1
2 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

aesthetic status comparable to that of many health-care systems, which are

fully or partly paid for from taxation. The comparison is deliberate in that
there is a strong perception that art, in particular, but also music, is a good
that should be universally available since contemplation of the sublime
refreshes the human spirit, rather as a brisk jog or an injection of antibi-
otics refreshes or restores bodily functions.
The creative industries are not like this. It is hard to think of any, cer-
tainly not many, that are cushioned like opera, the fine arts or much
classical music. New media cover a wide range of creative activities from
gaming to downloading images or funky music on a cellphone or increas-
ingly ubiquitous iPod. All make money, some criminally large amounts
thereof that induce re-regulation as happens with reality or interactive
television programmes where premium telephone lines are the means by
which the viewer casts his or her vote, is kept waiting, has to answer impos-
sible questions or can vote only long after the contest has been decided.
Welcome to interactive television from London, England – a scandal that
has caused channels and programmes temporarily or permanently to be
closed down to prevent their perpetrators being arrested. Or think about
such phenomena as Google uploading all of Western literature onto its
website despite the existence of copyright law of a kind that academics are
all too familiar with as the sweat of their collective brows channels crumb-
sized chunks of the revenue they generate back into their university ‘ser-
vices rendered’ accounts. Not to mention YouTube, My Space and their
ilk, pirating Hollywood video and classic excerpts. These more egregious
illustrations are drawn merely to articulate the distinctiveness of the mode
of cultural production and that of the production of ‘creative’ content.
Lengthily trained artists, singers, curators and musicians characterize the
former, entrepreneurship bordering upon racketeering characterizes much
of the latter. Their institutional bases in the academy or conservatory fol-
lowed by employment as a publicly subsidized specialist contrasts almost
entirely with that in the creative industries, which may have its origins
for some in higher education but for many knowledge means knowing
what is ‘going down on the street’. To reflect this, in a slightly less chiaro-
scuro manner, the book is composed of 14 evenly divided chapters in two
sections following this Introduction: Part I, ‘Cultural Districts, Cultural
Clusters and Local Economic Development’ and Part II, ‘Knowledge,
Creative Industries and Local Economic Development’. This sounds
rather more rigid than it actually is, and occasionally there is a little
slaloming of culture and creativity in the chapters. But the intention is
clear as the book moves from the subsidized end of the aesthetic economy
to its more rough and ready but largely profitable end in the creative
economy.
 An introduction 3

CREATIVE CITIES

Being clear analytically does not necessarily imply that such efforts are
matched by reality. Creative cities are usually thought of in terms that
combine the cultural economy and the creative industries even though they
usually occupy different ‘quarters’. One only has to start with London and
New York, with ‘high culture’ populating the South Bank of the Thames
river and creativity rubbing elbows with ‘red light’ district activities in
London’s Soho, while New York’s SoHo and Silicon Alley magnetize entre-
preneurial creativity and nearby Greenwich Village a folksier one, unifying
Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern (once also a favourite haunt of
nearby resident Jane Jacobs) and Bob Dylan at the Café Wha? and the
other MacDougal Street venues (for example, Folklore Centre, Gaslight
Café, The Kettle of Fish, The Commons and the Black Fat Pussycat).
Meanwhile the Lincoln Centre, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA), Guggenheim, Frick and Wharton museums are all in midtown,
near Central Park, Park Avenue and other well-heeled neighbourhoods.
Paris combines much the same ‘countercultural’ creativity on the Left Bank
of the Seine river, where the Sorbonne students, like those of New York
University (NYU) around Washington Square, congregate. Soho, close by
the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), where Dylan Thomas plied
his trade, a regular at the Fitzroy Tavern – epicentre of then Bohemian
‘Fitzrovia’ – had no university until nearby Westminster University, with a
globally leading Media Studies School, was so christened in the 1990s.
London’s university quarter is in or near Bloomsbury, where the likes of
Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes, aes-
thete as well as economist, resided, but even they, or at least George Orwell,
Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and Augustus John, preferred The
Fitzroy to gather to drink, argue and inspire each other. Virginia Woolf’s
home was once on Fitzroy Square where she would often stand looking out
of the window while she worked on her books. It was for a while in the
1940s considered to be the most famous pub in the world. But today it is
simply its part in the debauched history of some creative and interesting
people that attracts visitor attention.
What does this signify? It signifies the properties of emergence which
Johnson (2001), in a tribute to the intellectual achievements of Jane Jacobs,
defines as a general theory of clustering as a solution to the condition of
complexity. Change, Johnson argues, occurs from the bottom up. When
enough individual elements interact and organize themselves, the result is
collective intelligence – even though no one is in charge. It is a phenome-
non that exists at every level of experience. Clusters are at the core of this
theory of self-organization:
4 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

Jane Jacobs saw it in the formation of city neighbourhoods; Marvin Minsky in

the distributed networks of the human brain . . . Urban critics since Lewis
Mumford and Jane Jacobs have known that cities have lives of their own, with
neighbourhoods clustering into place without any Robert Moses figure dictat-
ing the plan from above . . . Thus the artists live on the Left Bank, the invest-
ment bankers in the Eighth Arrondissement.
(Johnson, 2001, pp. 18–41)

Heavy knowledge exploration, examination and exploitation practices

and capabilities such as the arts combine massive complexity from their
characteristic dialectic of disagreement, dissatisfaction, even alienation,
that is the key trigger and subsequent driver of creative work (Cooke,
2006). This by definition seeks to be different, novel, original and innova-
tive, a condition which exerts a psychosocial imperative towards social
interaction, recognition and consideration from peers, much as discussed
in the literature on ‘communities of practice’ (Brown and Duguid, 2001;
Wenger, 1998) and ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas, 1992). Much of this
‘communities’ research in relation to clustering focuses upon complexity
in engineering research or political negotiation and diplomacy, pointing to
the problems of inadequate ‘transaction spaces’ and ‘translation zones’
where implicit knowledge cannot readily be articulated as explicit knowl-
edge and much intermediary interpretation must go on, involving practi-
tioners with ‘complicit’ or even ‘hermeneutic’ skills of understanding and
expression.
Little attempt has ever been made to assess the extent to which artistic
labour and discourse are subject to the same ‘proximity’ solutions, prox-
imity meant consciously in terms of geographical propinquity or ‘neigh-
bourliness’. But a novel discovery of many of the chapters contained
in this book is that ‘cultural work’, or the creation and expression of ‘sym-
bolic knowledge’, is, if anything, more demanding than that of engin-
eering (synthetic knowledge) and even science (analytical knowledge)
because of its mix of relative impoverishment, ‘freelance’ living ‘from
hand to mouth’, pressures to articulate the novel idea or artefact, and a
paradoxical mix of psychosocial ‘lonerism’ on the one hand, and desire
for peer recognition of ‘novelty’ and ‘authenticity’ on the other. Hence
clustering is a sine qua non of both cultural economy and creative indus-
try and the city, especially the metropolis, has the requisite specialization
as well as ‘related variety’ (Boschma, 2005) to sustain clustering for and
by both. In really vibrant, creatively cultured cities there may be room for
many cultural and creative clusters. This is actually a clear expression, not
of the specialized form represented by the cluster but the related variety
form as represented by what might be called the creative–cultural platform
of the creative city.
 An introduction 5

THE NEW RURAL–URBAN RELATIONAL

CULTURAL–CREATIVE PLATFORM

A further criticism of the new ‘cultural economic geography’ is that it is

neglectful, even disdainful of rurality in its analyses either of culture or cre-
ativity. To some extent in this book Kebir and Crevoisier’s Chapter 2 may
be excepted from rebuke, although even there the rustic dimension of the
Swiss watchmaking industry is rather overshadowed by the quality dimen-
sion of the product. Nevertheless the ‘chronometric tourism’ adumbrated
by the authors will be a somewhat desiccated affair in the absence of
‘culinary tourism’ opportunities they imply to be required (Long, 2005).
Moving on, one of the newest concepts in regional theory relevant to cul-
tural–creative analysis is ‘regional platforms’, a post-sectoral, even post-
cluster formulation (Harmaakorpi, 2006; Harmaakorpi and Melkas, 2005).
As may readily be understood, the concept of regional or rural develop-
ment ‘platforms’ is new, although the terminology has been utilized in nar-
rower contexts for some decades, notably in terms of ‘technology’ or even
‘industry platforms’. Eliasson (2000) coined the term ‘learning platforms’
to argue in favour of a more entrepreneurial, problem-solving curriculum
in schools, given the rise of the ‘knowledge economy’ and the entrepre-
neurial demands a more liberal market economy might place upon society
and its skills base. However, the method of thinking embodied here focuses
specifically on the notion of rural agro-food-cultural and creative plat-
forms. For broader, regional, reflection the word ‘rural’ is normally paren-
thesized in this contribution. Thus the thinking here does not simply arise
upon a tabula rasa since, it will be clear, the following account of this inno-
vative policy-supporting perspective makes reference to three key areas of
literature that raise the key questions the general approach aims to answer.
The questions are the following:

● To what extent do rural in relation to urban economies display poten-

tial or actual development processes that enable them fully to engage
with the challenges and imperatives of the knowledge economy, with
its emphasis on the formalized rather than traditional, practical use
of knowledge in economic activity more generally?
● In what ways may such creative or innovative knowledges of the kind
often associated with ideas of a ‘knowledge economy’ be captured in
an integrated and only moderately specalized way to capture value
from rural–urban synergies that diversify the rural economic offer
and enable a more robust interaction to occur with urban, metropol-
itan and overseas tourist demand (that is, the new rural–urban rela-
tional space of organic farms–organic cuisine)?
6 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

● In what ways has policy – for example, World Trade Organization

(WTO), EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and ‘Convergence’
funds – assisted or hindered such processes of diversified rural devel-
opment platform building by promotion of ‘placeless foodscapes’,
what further reforms to policy may be envisaged to assist these
processes and what policy lessons are to be learned from diverse expe-
riences of rural diversification from within and outside the EU policy
experience (Ilbery and Kneafsey, 2000)?

The state of the art from the relevant published literature addressing these
questions can be summarized under the following three headings:

● The ‘worlds of production’ approach to regional development.

● The ‘related variety’ approach to evolutionary economic geography.
● The ‘regional innovation systems’ approach to knowledge utilization.

Each of these approaches theorizes contemporary regional development

as an interactive, integrated and relational question of identifying rural–
urban regional assets and ‘constructing regional advantage’ (Cooke and
Leydesdorff, 2006; De la Mothe and Mallory, 2003; Foray and Freeman,
1993) in ways that express the key factor in the knowledge economy, which
is that novel products arise from public investment in research and private
investment in innovation. As Asheim and Coenen (2006) argue, neither tra-
ditional sectoral nor more recent cluster analysis and policy pays adequate
attention to the important, sometimes pioneering, role of public finance and
leadership in the economic development process whenever knowledge assets,
particularly novel knowledge applications, are in focus. Rather, sectoral and
cluster approaches share a tendency to conceive of economic activity in ver-
tical not horizontal terms, in rather narrow and rigid ways, and in ways that
industry itself rarely recognizes. Industry in the contemporary era sees itself
as offering flexible, pervasive platforms around which numerous product and
process innovations may occur utilizing cross-sectoral synergies.

The ‘Worlds of Production’ Approach

This is associated most with efforts to characterize the basic variety of

industrial organizational forms in regional space in the fin de siècle era
(Storper, 1997; Storper and Salais, 1997). It is the theoretical framework
elaborated in these works that has proved most intellectually and practically
penetrative in the decade since they were published. The central concept, of
key importance to the analysis and investigational work proposed here, is
that different forms of production organization are internally coherent in
 An introduction 7

Standardized Dedicated

Industrial activity

Specialized Generic

Source: After Storper and Salais (1997).

Figure I.1 Regional ‘worlds of production’ in the contemporary era

terms of their driving institutions, network interactions and conventions. In

the current era these resolve the four ‘tensions’ represented in Figure I.1.
The first of these refers to ‘Standardized’ production as practised in mass-
production industries such as banking and automotives. This is in ‘tension’
with ‘Dedicated’ production that is customized to certain niche require-
ments such as luxury consumption (for example, ‘bespoke’ or customized
tailoring) but also software or, increasingly ‘designer drug solutions’ in
health care or personalized services of various kinds. ‘Specialization’
involves generic products being produced in specialized ways, such as spe-
cialized forms of a generic ‘tourism’ that might include, for example, archae-
ological cruises. Finally, ‘Generic’ means specialized processes being used
for standard products (for example, aquaculture). The arrows represent
certain tensions between these in specific dimensions.
The mention of aquaculture takes us neatly into an analysis of the con-
temporary food landscape. Because it seems true to say that the ‘worlds of
production’ analysis works especially well in the agro-food and to some
extent tourism industries but is harder to make work elsewhere (but see
Strambach, 2007, for an application of this approach in knowledge-intensive
business services [KIBS]). Although this approach is utilized in Morgan et al.
(2006) in their study of ‘worlds of food’, it is more clearly utilized by
Manniche (2007) in his review of tendencies in the European and global food
industry. Manniche is constrained to using a threefold categorization of
‘food cultures’ because of a methodological requirement to utilize three
knowledge categories (analytical, synthetic and symbolic) to structure his
discourse on functional foods (analytical, bioscience), conventional food
8 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

Intensive food and Organic food and

mass tourism niche (e.g. cultural) tourism

Agro-food industry
and tourism

Functional foods and Cook-chill processed food

‘molecular gastronomy’ and cruise holidays

Source: Halkier (2007); Manniche (2007); Morgan et al. (2006).

Figure I.2 Worlds of production in the agro-food and tourism industries

(synthetic, standardized, mass production, intensive agriculture) and alter-

native food (organic, local, specialty, fairtrade, and so on). Fortunately,
Morgan et al. (2006) note specialized processes for generic or comprehensive
foods such as ‘cook-chill’ for prepared meals as capturing the fourth segment
of the schema in Figure I.2. To this, partly influenced by Halkier (2007), have
been inserted equivalent subcategories of the ‘experience economy’ elabo-
rated with varieties of tourism experience in mind (Pine and Gilmour, 1999).
Standardized tourism in the form of the ‘package’ holiday has much in
common with conventional food and intensive agriculture. Dedicated
tourism is distinctively niched and possibly specific to the individualized
tourist requirement. Specialized tourism processes with a generic outcome
would be captured by visiting ‘beauty spots’ by cruise ship rather than more
conventional package holiday means. While, finally, the tourism equivalent
of a technologized ‘functional food’ experience might involve culinary
tourism to such ‘molecular gastronomy’ delights as Ferràn Adria’s El Bulli
restaurant in Gerona, Catalonia to compare his molecular gastronomy
with that of Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck near London and numerous imi-
tators elsewhere. These categorizations help to locate the distinctive kinds of
agro-food-cultural tourism region that might evolve in distinctive ways from
a present condition in which some aspects may dominate or, more com-
monly, there may exist overlapping categories but profitability and rising or
falling demand may point to new directions and requirements for policy
assistance in institution building and targeted investment. Thus, as a case in
point, Norway’s Inland Region (some one to two hours north of Oslo by
train) seems to combine many food and tourism types, from functional,
 An introduction 9

organic and conventional food (Hedmark County) to mass tourism (skiing,

Lillehammer) to specialized culinary and niche (trekking, hiking, ice-fishing)
tourism.

The ‘Related Variety’ Approach

We have seen something of the critical value and validity of this approach
earlier in this Introduction, but here we briefly reprise the main arguments
offered by the likes of Frenken and Boschma (2003) and Boschma (2005).
‘Related variety’ is an evolutionary concept, the use of which has moved
furthest in the academic field of evolutionary economic geography. It is,
usefully in the present context, a primarily laterally rather than vertically
inclined concept. This means that the spatial dimension is of key impor-
tance to its theoretical force. Whereas industrial economists tend, as we saw
earlier, to construct concepts in vertical fashion, such as sectors and clus-
ters, geographers see things more horizontally. Thus Cohen and Levinthal
(1989) introduced an important vertical concept of ‘absorptive capacity’ to
articulate the knowledge challenge to a large firm by outsourcing research
and development (R&D) knowledge it previously researched in-house to an
outside subcontractor with comparable but probably cheaper capabilities.
The challenge was to keep in the outsourcing larger firm such cognitive
skills as were necessary to evaluate the outsourced results. However, if we
introduce the idea of lateral absorptive capacity, a more spatial perspective,
it becomes an opportunity more than a challenge because what are being
sought are complementary knowledge spillovers, possibly in a region, from
neighbouring industries or business activities that could enable a novel
process or product innovation to diffuse rapidly among one or more firms
or industries. ‘Related variety’ enhances this by virtue of a sectoral ‘prox-
imity’ effect rather than a sectoral ‘portfolio’ (unrelated variety) effect
(Boschma, 2005).
This approach also resolves rather satisfactorily an ongoing dilemma in
economics dating from Marshall (1918) and Jacobs (1969). What is nowa-
days described as the Marshall-Arrow-Romer (MAR) thesis is that knowl-
edge spillovers move fastest and lead to innovation most efficiently and
effectively where the industrial economy is specialized. This view is reiter-
ated by numerous studies such as that of Glaeser et al. (1992), which argues
this to be the prime economic advantage of cities, although their argument
is couched mainly in terms of the specialized human capital cities are sup-
posed to host. Contrariwise, Jacobs (1969) argued that such dynamism as
cities offered was more a characteristic of diversification than specializa-
tion, and the rubbing up of industries, firms and people against distinctive
practices were the likelier source of novelty and innovation. This view was
10 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

later supported by research findings from inter alia Audretsch and Feldman
(1996) and Feldman and Audretsch (1999). However, Frenken and
Boschma’s (2003) empirical research suggests that neither is correct and
that the full set of Netherlands urban areas that they examined through the
lens of ‘related variety’ revealed that those with most related variety grew
fastest in gross domestic product (GDP) terms 1998–2006, an indicator
that a related variety perspective located between the extremes of special-
ization (clusters) and diversification (sectors) is probably superior intellec-
tually and in terms of policy interventions. Subsequently, Cantwell and
Iammarino (2003) found the best performing Italian regions displayed
‘related variety’ and as yet unpublished but publicly presented research by
Ketels and Porter (2006) strongly suggests the same thing from US research
they and colleagues have been conducting. Accordingly, this exciting new
perspective deserves further testing in the context of (rural) regions in rea-
sonable contact with urban markets and capable of attracting or poten-
tially attracting tourist, including ‘culinary tourism’ (Long, 2005), demand
because of their cross-sectoral economy platforms.

The ‘Regional Innovation Systems’ Approach

Consistent with the evolutionary emphasis in the foregoing is that dating

from somewhat earlier and known as the regional innovation systems
approach. This emphasizes the importance for regional development of the
search for usable, regionally (rurally) relevant knowledge through the artic-
ulation of a regional knowledge exploration sub-system. This may be centred
on knowledge institutions like universities or innovation centres or, where
these are absent, some special knowledge network arrangements such as
that found in six rural and smaller town regions of Finland (including the
Lahti region; Harmaakorpi, 2006) where filial networks are built up through
the regional employment of research professors and their associated teams
in non-university settings in the region but with affiliation to universities
outside the region (Kosonen, 2006; Sotarauta and Kosonen, 2004).
Paralleling the knowledge exploration sub-system is a knowledge exploita-
tion sub-system. Here are the firms and some intermediaries closely associ-
ated with business innovation, like investors, management accountants,
intellectual property rights (IPR) expertise, and so on that facilitate knowl-
edge flow into local firms from wherever is appropriate globally, nationally
and regionally. When these two sub-systems exist and interact appropriately,
a functioning regional innovation system, well networked at home and
abroad, may be said to exist (Braczyk et al., 1998; Cooke et al., 2000; 2004).
However, it has been rare for this innovation systems approach to be uti-
lized analytically or in policy terms in rural settings, nor has it often focused
 An introduction 11

Rogaland-Stavanger Culinary Innovation Platform

Stavanger-Rogaland
‘Norway’s Finest Culinary Cluster’

Gourmet Restaurants ‘Fusion’ Restaurants etc.

Bocuse D’Or European Cuisine Championships,

‘Buffet’ Chef, ‘Young Chefs’ Competitions,‘Green
Fair’, Gladmat, Food & Wine Festivals

Gourmet Chefs, Sommeliers

& Waiters

Regional, National and Global Supplier

Industries (e.g. Horticulture, Organic
Seafood and Meat, Non-organic Food,
Ceramics, Wine, Beer and Spirits, Equity
Finance, Culinary Law and Logistics, Chilling
and Freezing, Restaurant Design)

University of Stavanger Research on

Aquaculture Gastronomisk ‘Meat and Hospitality and Tourism Omega 3 Food
Research Institutt Drink Arena’ Management Enrichment

Food High School Training Food Science Training

Regions and Counties Innovation Norway

Government of Norway

Source: Cooke and Westgaard (2007).

Figure I.3 Representation of the Rogaland, Norway Regional Culinary

Innovation Platform

less upon scientific and technological knowledge exploration and exploita-

tion than upon more traditional and cultural or creative industry.
Nevertheless, as Figure I.3 provisionally shows from an initial piloting exer-
cise, the basic sub-system concepts of mainly public knowledge generation
and exploration activity (including research and vocational training) sup-
porting the mainly private creative activity around culinary expertise and
its regional and global value networks seems to hold up remarkably
robustly as an institutional analysis. It points to the need to perform such
institutional and evolutionary analysis in a variety of accomplished and
less accomplished regional and sub-regional settings. As noted earlier there
are important intellectual, analytical and practical gains to be made from
such an approach (Coenen et al., 2004). There are critiques by the likes of
12 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

Bathelt (2003), Moulaert and Sekia (2003) and Mackinnon et al. (2003) but
each of them seems wilfully to miss the point that by focusing on the local
or regional level of analysis of intervention the researcher does not neglect
or ignore the multi-level policy and conceptual levels of analysis. Nor, con-
trariwise, is the regional researcher constrained into a belief that only
multinational corporations and supranational or state governments matter
when it comes to the understanding of regional development processes and
requirements (Lagendijk and Hassink, 2001).

AN ARCHETYPE OF NEW RURAL–URBAN

‘RELATIONAL SPACE’

Rather persuasive of the notion of a new rural–urban relational space

focused on a cultural–creative, culinary platform is the picture for the oil
industry servicing region of Rogaland in which Stavanger is located. Recall
Stavanger is Norway’s and Europe’s oil capital, hence affluent. Recent
research has revealed the emergence of a globally competitive, regional gas-
tronomy and related industry value network involving varieties of food
and drinks production (organic farmed and wild seafood, livestock, horti-
culture, liquor, ceramics and logistics) and support institutions (canning
research, the Norwegian Culinary Institute, food high schools, promotional
networks, festivals, competitions, ceramics training, ‘experience tourism’,
and so on) in both Stavanger and the nearby Sulda Fjord where UK aristo-
crats in the nineteenth century built ‘salmon castles’ that are now luxury
hotels. In nearby Jaeren the platform is complemented with farming and
engineering entrepreneurship (Cooke and Westgaard, 2007; Isaksen, 1997).
The ‘innovation’ dimension in this localized food and related industry
platform arises from the manner in which locally trained chefs and other
culinary professionals have become globally competitive in cuisine compe-
titions due to entrepreneurial and innovative training, food, drinks, ceram-
ics, legal and logistics sourcing in the region and a tradition of restaurant
investment with associated interior design and equipment expertise deriv-
ing from results indicated from the premier cuisine competition, the bian-
nual Bocuse D’Or. Named for Paul Bocuse, the celebrated Lyonnais chef
this is the premier cuisine competition in the world, dating from 1987.
Noticeably, Norwegian chefs and others from Nordic countries have
performed commendably against a presumed Francophone elite in this
contest in recent years. Many Norwegian ‘starred’ chefs are trained in
Rogaland, the Norwegian Culinary Institute being in Stavanger, while
those from Denmark include contestants from the Danish Culinary
Institute, located in agricultural North Jutland at Aalborg. So, on this basis
 An introduction 13

for future cultural economic geography that might explore in more detail
rural–urban cultural–creative interdependencies we turn to an outline of
the content of this book.

THE CULTURAL AND THE CREATIVE CONDITION

OF THE CONTEMPORARY CITY

Cooke’s chapter (Chapter 1) analyses how culture is now well established as

an instrument for promoting city image, city appeal and the economy of the
city. Between 4 per cent and 8 per cent of employment may be accounted for
by cultural industries. He speaks more of the ‘cultural’ than the ‘creative’ side
of the distinction made in the Introduction. Culture must be inclusively not
exclusively defined, preferably along lines proposed by Raymond Williams as
‘ordinary’ or by Clifford Geertz as a ‘meaning transfer process’, in democ-
ratic policy-making. Shopping, sports and science are thus equally valid can-
didates as instruments for developing a city’s cultural assets. Cities need to
be aware of for whom a cultural policy is meant. Particularly, ‘global capture’
of assets (Temple Bar, Guggenheim, Millennium Stadium, Wimbledon) and
politically expedient ‘multiculturalism’ can alienate excluded citizens, includ-
ing those of hinterlands. High quality architectural planning and a focus on
‘cultural quarters’ accompanies successful city cultural policy (for example,
Bilbao, Dublin, Tallinn). The governance and funding of successful cultural
policy is often multi-level in nature rather than stand alone. International
benchmarking and networks of support are also key. Comparison shows
many cities in Europe to have significant cultural assets. Science and knowl-
edge are being embraced as cultural benchmarks. Thus cultural assets are
both historical and creatively reproduced as modern imagery. Media is the
greatest and most common cultural cluster in the modern city, but hardly
seen at all in the countryside.
Kebir and Crevoisier’s chapter (Chapter 2) deals with questions of
meaning and change in cultural infrastructures from a regional develop-
ment perspective. The first part presents an approach that is structured
around both the question of building resources and that of their alloca-
tion/appropriation. It then endeavours to explain the way in which objects
of any kind become, at some time and some place, an economic resource.
This relation is not a one-way process. The production system and its clients
influence the objects and, in turn, their own reproduction. A link is estab-
lished between a local community that succeeds in relating its cultural
resources with a production system and its markets/clients. This link is no
longer simply a commercial, functional or technological one, but is also – to
a virtually complete extent – a form of cultural communication. Swiss
14 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

watchmaking products became associated with symbols, images, and so on,

and became a means of communication. The watch, above all a utilitarian
object, incorporates various significances from the consumers’ point of
view. It becomes a way of reflecting the values and messages of fashion and
of luxury. Specialists in marketing, image concepts, sponsoring, advertising
and marketing methods began to appear. The watch become an object to be
shown, to state one’s identity. For consumers, it thus became a means of dis-
tinguishing social status. Luxury watchmaking revived in the 1990s and
more recently a project for regional promotion structured around the watch
began to take shape. The origins of the idea were attributed to a leading
figure in the region, linked to the watchmaking business, and who saw the
watch as the common denominator of a composite region lacking in unity
and visibility. Feedback from the tourist promotion sectors led to a first con-
crete product. The ‘Watchmaking Route’, in the form of various sectors,
presents various museums (public and private) located between Geneva and
Basel, with a detour via Zurich. A few months later, the concept of Watch
Valley, created by a firm of consultants from beyond the region, was
launched by the tourist offices in the Swiss Jura Arc that grouped together
for the purpose of this project.
Chapter 3 by Cinti reviews the state of the art with respect to ‘cultural
clusters’ and districts, giving them analytical representation before drawing
conclusions. The growing resort to this form of organization is especially
made in terms of territorial planning: the cluster/district is a policy instru-
ment meant to tackle several issues related to the enhancement of cultural
assets and urban regeneration. While in most countries re-qualification is
thought of as reclamation of downgraded areas or abandoned industrial
estates, in Italy it is deemed to make the special heritage of specific regions
more visible. Therefore, district implementation can result not only from
policies of institutional actors and urban planners, but also from private
initiatives of non-profit and cultural organizations, firms, and so on, or else
as the outcome of unprompted actions of artists, artisans, museums, and
so on. A demarcation factor in such a variety of experiences can be found
in the kind of approach: top down or bottom up. On this point literature
divides, as top-down implementation is considered impossible by some,
while others, although pointing at successful experiences of this kind,
believe there must be participation from the bottom. Therefore, a partici-
patory model of governance seems the only practicable way to develop cul-
tural clusters and districts.
In Chapter 4 Lazzeretti presents a model for sustainable economic
development based on the trinomial culture–economy–society and the
resource–actors–community axis that tends to enhance the artistic, cul-
tural, human and environmental differences of localities. The fulcrum is
 An introduction 15

represented by ‘culture as a resource’ for the economic development of

European cities and regions and the perspective employed is a replication
and implementation of the Becattini–Marshall approach to industrial dis-
tricts. Among the artistic resources in focus are the set of artistic assets and
of the artworks in the strict sense (for example, monuments, architectural
complexes, artworks, buildings, archaeological sites); cultural resources
refer to that set of activities, behaviours, habits and customs of life that
makes one place different from any other (for example, universities and
research centres, typical arts and crafts, contextual knowledge, events and
manifestations or the neighbourhood ‘atmosphere’); among the human
resources fall those expressly ascribable to human capital (for example,
artists, writers, scientists, artisans); and environmental resources refer to
typical elements of the urban, natural, and environmental landscape (for
example, urban morphology, ornamental gardens, parks, streets, squares,
neighbourhoods, characteristic flora and fauna).
Cuccia, Marrelli and Santagata in Chapter 5 investigate the traditional
role of individual and collective trademarks. They note that these distinctive
marks have a complex role when they are used as instruments for the pro-
motion and enhancement of cultural districts. Noting the many cases of
localized agglomerations of micro and small firms which may be considered
as districts, which generate a network of positive externalities able to sustain
an endogenous process of local development, the main reference here is to
the industrial cultural districts of what is known as Third Italy which had its
boom periods in the 1960s and 1970s). They also note that there are many
other cases where the localized agglomerations of firms – based on the idio-
syncrasies of the territory – have not been able to build that social and eco-
nomic network of horizontal and vertical linkages among local producers
which gives rise to the agglomeration externalities on which the district
model is founded. In such cases, which may be called ‘potential cultural
districts’, institutional interventions play an important role in turning the
potential district into a real one, for example, through the introduction of col-
lective property rights. The collective marks are seen as the most appropriate
operational instruments to promote market incentives sustaining local devel-
opment, and preserving and enhancing the common knowledge rooted in the
territory and shared by public and private stakeholders. Trade-offs are the
objective function of all the local stakeholders. The objective of local pro-
ducers of idiosyncratic goods – whose common idiosyncratic knowledge is
characterized by non-excludability as a public good – is to maximize their
profits in the short run, even if that has a cost in terms of preservation of the
local tradition. However, they may exploit the name or reputation of the
place by introducing poor-quality products or low-idiosyncrasy products on
the market.
16 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

In Chapter 6 Palma Martos and Palma Martos concentrate on fixed

book pricing (FBP) in Spain. This has been an attractive though contro-
versial instrument of cultural policy given its widespread use also among
other European countries. By means of this system the various players have
contributed to reaching the goals set, without having to establish bureau-
cratic structures, thereby reducing possible government failure to a
minimum. This is the principal advantage of this instrument. Thus it is
arguable that the FBP system is justifiable solely on cultural policy grounds,
notwithstanding the concomitant economic costs. Nevertheless, in view of
the actual technological conditions of the sector, it is increasingly being
questioned. Two key topics are: the existence of an extensive network of
bookshops, which allows the ‘all-inclusive service’ aim of cultural diffusion
to be realized, and the publication of high-quality books, thereby avoiding
the risks of a selection determined by economic considerations unrelated
to any cultural objectives. There is a consensus among experts that the use
of the Internet may reduce the need for an extensive network of bookshops,
contributing to the ‘all-inclusive service’ of cultural diffusion that is
declared as a political objective. What the FBP would do is hamper inno-
vation in more efficient channels of distribution. The authors note that in
the case of Spain, compared with bookshops and bookshop chains, which
account for 49 per cent of sales, sales via the Internet are less than 1 per
cent. Contrariwise, new technologies have brought about an appreciable
reduction in printing costs allowing à la carte editions, together with low-
cost electronic editions, which could substantially improve the profitability
of high-quality books.
Chapter 7 by Lorenzen and Frederiksen explores why although the dis-
tribution and marketing of cultural products spans globally, the develop-
ment of them is highly clustered in a few major cities. This conceptual
chapter investigates the reason for this clustering of parts of value chains
in cultural industries, by looking at the organization of cultural product
innovation. The chapter analyses the two categories of economic external-
ities that may make industries cluster: localization and urbanization. It also
analyses three types of product innovation in cultural industries: variety,
novelty and radical innovation. It argues that because the cultural indus-
tries oscillate between these types of product innovation, cultural industries
are dependent upon not just localization, but also urbanization.
Costa’s chapter (Chapter 8) marks the turn from deliberation about the
nature of culture in the city economy and society, to the creative dimension
that both sustains the cultural inheritance of cities but also supports the cre-
ative impulse of the present moment, and for future creative industry and
activity. This chapter contributes to systematizing and improving knowledge
on the creative and innovative dynamics verified in cultural-activities led
 An introduction 17

territorialized production systems. Costa provides a conceptual discussion

delineating the main contemporary debates on these issues, concerning ter-
ritorial agglomeration of cultural activities and creativity. The diversity of
experiences and the variety of regulatory mechanisms which support those
territorialized cultural-led creative dynamics are indicated. Subsequently, a
brief panorama of Portuguese empirical cases and research studies is pro-
vided, surveying key dynamics and reviewing research analyses conducted
recently in Portugal. The issues raised in Costa’s chapter set important chal-
lenges to public policy and to the governance of cultural-centred territorial-
systems dynamics. Foremost there is a need to move from thinking of
benefiting from the isolated effects of each particular action to the effective
construction of the creative city. The success of various recent experiences
points to the importance of issues like the articulation among agents, regu-
lation and the effective insertion of the events, facilities or institutions that
are promoted along with the implementation of these strategies in the life of
the city. Costa concludes that an integrated strategy for intervention must
embed in the specificity of local community and must exploit a combination
of resources, within a specific governance mechanism, in order to promote
territorial competitiveness and achieve sustainable development.
Chapter 9 by Trullén and Boix focuses on the Metropolitan Region of
Barcelona as one of the most interesting exponents of cultural knowledge
and the creative metropolis. In 1986 the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona
began a process of economic and territorial expansion that led to it becom-
ing one of the ten largest urban agglomerations in Europe, and ranked as
one of the thirty largest metropolises in the OECD. They argue that this
territorial expansion has arisen not from a process of hierarchical decen-
tralization but rather as an effect of the increasing interaction between the
urban continuum of Barcelona and a group of medium-sized cities that
were old industrial centres. The unit used for metropolitan planning has a
current population of some 5 million inhabitants. The metropolitan region
is structured as a polycentric network of cities looking like a constellation
of stars, where the most important city is Barcelona. The recent process
of growth and metamorphosis from a collection of industrial cities to a
knowledge-driven and creative metropolis is related to the existence of
intense increasing returns of a territorial nature. These increasing returns
are associated with internal economies and new organizational models,
external agglomeration and network economies, and the transformation of
the productive model towards the knowledge economy.
Belussi and Sedita in Chapter 10 focus on ‘event management’ in Veneto,
Italy’s musical performance cluster. They adopt a comprehensive approach,
which takes into consideration the interplay between different agents
involved in the realization of a musical event. So, at least at empirical level,
18 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

they seek to disentangle the apparent contradiction existing between long-

standing music institutions and volatile project organizations. They identify
the two main important elements which constitute the architecture of the
performing music sector in the Veneto region: the permanent organizations
devoted to music, which often promote and are in charge of preparing
the event, and the latent networks of artists informally linked together by
a reputation-driven mechanism. The project-based organization emerges
when an event has to be carried out, and it works as a bridge between per-
manent organizations and latent networks, which are mainly territorially
embedded. Latent networks formed by groups of artists are found, includ-
ing the network of workers attached to the activity of permanent organiza-
tions in symphonic music. Using the social network methodology of analysis
they map the groups of workers which, at the same time, share their working
time in one of the four permanent organizations identified, who also collab-
orate with many other symphonic music organizations in the region. This
approach overcomes the sterile discussion about the segmentation of the
labour market in creative industries. Temporary contracts are not a simple
negative aspect of cost-cutting strategies by firms, but a way of sustaining
flexibility with diversified and enriching working experience, sought by
workers through connections with various employing organizations.
Chapter 11 by De Propris and Hypponen explores the impact of concen-
trated governance and globalization on Hollywood’s creativity. Film-making
is one of the main forms of art and is therefore considered to be a creative
industry. The chapter briefly explores the concept of creativity and what
characterizes creative industries with a special focus on the film industry. As
centripetal forces lead creative industries to concentrate in specific places, so
the film industry has witnessed the emergence of Hollywood as one of the
world’s most visible film-making centres. The authors explore whether the
studio system that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s through a process of pro-
duction disintegration and flexible specialization together with concentrated
governance, is still capable of delivering creative outputs. The transforma-
tion of a creative activity into ‘show business’ and mass entertainment has,
on the one hand, made cinema available to a wider audience than ever but,
on the other hand, it has homogenized contents and ideas to appeal to very
different tastes and cultures. De Propris and Hypponen suggest that global-
ization and concentrated governance have suffocated the risk-taking and
path-breaking nature of creativity in Hollywood film-making in favour of a
‘blockbuster mentality’: recycled subjects, disappearance of film genres, cre-
ation of culture-neutral content and, finally, the control of marketing needs
over creativity.
Chapter 12 by Smith and Warfield anatomizes Vancouver, Canada, as a
creative city. Making the all-important distinction between the cultural and
 An introduction 19

the creative economy, the one public, tending to be subsidized or spon-

sored, the other much more market-facing but with clear interactions
between them, they hold that this clarified conception of the term ‘creative
city’ in Canada, enables them to compile the various ‘creative city formu-
lae’, suggested by Canadian urban policy theorists and analysts, as well as
practising ‘creative’ Canadian cities. These formulae – methods by which it
is suggested the creative Canadian city may be fostered – can be categorized
broadly into two categories: creative governance and direct support for
creative ventures.
To transform theory into practice, the last section of the chapter consid-
ers creativity in Vancouver. With the conceptual clarification of ‘creative city’
on the one hand, and the simplification of the various ‘creative city formu-
lae’ on the other, the purpose of the case study of Vancouver, is an attempt
to demonstrate that in practice, Canadian cities continue to muddle through
this conceptual divide between culture-centric principles and econo-centric
principles towards creativity. The case of Vancouver illustrates that within
the Canadian urban context, to foster creativity – whether for well-being
or profit – governance, citizenry and industry need to, themselves, become
creative agents of change.
A comparator chapter on a modern Pacific Rim city is presented for
Singapore in Chapter 13 by Hing Ai Yun. She shows how Singapore is
currently grappling with numerous problems associated with growing a
knowledge-based and creative economy. Intensive efforts put in by the state
are geared towards changing both infrastructures and personhood. The
successful advancement to a high-technology manufacturing centre is one
measure of this transformation. Part of this success should be attributed to
a conjuncture of global trends, including the adoption of supply-chain
manufacturing which is heavily dependent on precision and efficiency Arts
as both commodity and entertainment have flourished, as reflected in com-
parative indicators for preferred expatriate location. Top current affairs and
financial magazines rank Singapore ‘funky’ and ‘cool’, something of a sur-
prise given a recently inherited image of a city where one could be incar-
cerated for spitting gum onto the street. The Singaporean state fosters
profit-oriented creative industries that it understood from practical experi-
ence elsewhere would basically function in ways similar to any other indus-
tries. They require the same fundamentals of good management and
governance to help generate an acceptable rate of return, although different
segments of the knowledge economy have their own peculiar requirements
for survival.
However, Singapore’s poor record of management and authoritarian
political structures will have to be transformed. Hing notes that while the
Singapore state realizes that creativity cannot be mandated and top-class
20 Creative cities, cultural clusters and local economic development

talents working for global markets have choices, the solution seems to be to
enhance the environment for the reproductive needs of creative labour.
Global talents interviewed have never failed to mention how Singapore’s
clean and safe environment, good schools, health facilities and other
enrichment facilities have helped their decision to accept job relocation in
Singapore. The easy availability of foreign creative/innovative expertise has
worked both ways to dilute and strengthen pressures on Singaporeans to
accommodate and reject the state’s definition of arts as commodification.
In the final chapter (Chapter 14) Capone analyses the rise of creative
industry systems in Italy. The aim of this contribution is to identify con-
centrations of creative industries in Italy and to investigate the kind of cre-
ativity diffused in the country, that is, to answer the question of whether
Italian creative systems are mainly influenced by technology-related cre-
ative industries or by traditional cultural industries. In these pages, Capone
seeks to answer the following questions: where are the creative industries in
Italy, how can they be singled out, by which kind of creativity are they char-
acterized and what are the effects of these creative industry concentrations
upon the overall local economy? In this process, Capone concentrates
on the economic actors (enterprises) of a local system and the resultant
structure of its industries.
The chapter was inspired by Florida’s contribution to the study and
analysis of the creative economy and joins the wider debate about the role
of culture and creativity as factors promoting local development. The
empirical analysis differs from the creative economy concept in two ways:
the first regards the territorial unit of analysis, usually the metropolitan
area or the province, and the second regards the occupational categories
used to define the creative class (artists, engineers, designers, entrepreneurs,
and so on). In this chapter Capone instead uses as territorial units of analy-
sis the local labour systems and uses the creative industries as proxies for
analysing the creativity of a locality.

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PART I

Cultural Districts, Cultural Clusters and

Local Economic Development
1. Culture, clusters, districts and
quarters: some reflections on the
scale question
Philip Cooke

1. INTRODUCTION

Today, the world economy is increasingly equated to a ‘knowledge

economy’. It is so called as it more and more places a premium on creativ-
ity and innovation as competitive weapons. The knowledge economy is
accompanied by a media-driven, symbol-saturated, consumption society in
which celebrity, fashion and design compete for attention with traditional
elite cultural forms rooted in theatre, music and the fine arts. Cultural trans-
gressions occur in other domains of the cultural ‘field’. Universities are now
expected to act as economic motors for their regional economies rather
than repositories of cultural and scientific learning alone. They must
compete against their peers at home and abroad by driving forward bound-
ary-transcending research rather than mainly reproducing the scientific
canon as a coherent, stable body of knowledge to be passed on to the next
generation.
If we consider for a moment the following opinion of French science
analyst Bruno Latour,

Science is certainty; research is uncertainty. Science is supposed to be cold,

straight and detached; research is warm, involving and risky. Science puts an end
to the vagaries of human disputes; research creates controversies. Science pro-
duces objectivity by escaping as much as possible from the shackles of ideology,
passions and emotions; research feeds on all of those to render objects of inquiry
familiar.
(Latour, 1998: 280)

we might even consider substituting ‘research’ with ‘culture’ to make sense

of the attractiveness of both to contemporary capitalism. Research is a pro-
foundly cultural activity, for it concerns the creation of new knowledge
about the social and natural worlds, and in a knowledge economy has itself
become another cultural driver of the economy.

25
26 Cultural districts, cultural clusters and local economic development

In this chapter, four brief and interconnected arguments are made. First,
the general scene is set by reference to trends observable worldwide in the
revaluation of culture and its strongly city-focused realization in urban
revitalization, including adaptive reuse of former industrial buildings.
Second, key themes for discussion are drawn from the preceding and other
accompanying debates on the subject. These are open questions rather than
settled observations. Third, there is reportage on the methodology and
findings of an intensive research study of the role of culture in the eco-
nomic development of six cities, including Cardiff, Dublin and Tallinn – to
which comparable data for Bilbao have been added – to set the scene for
the detailed statements on those cities. Fourth, Cardiff, a shortlisted candi-
date for ‘Capital of Culture’ in 2008 (Liverpool was victorious in the UK
contest), and in 2005 celebrating anniversaries as both city and capital of
Wales, is benchmarked more widely, over time and against other European
regional or smaller national capital cities in terms of cultural assets like
museums, opera, theatre, orchestras, retail, science and related activities.

2. OBSERVATIONS ON THE RISE OF ‘CULTURAL

CITIES’

In a comparable way to that in which a long-established and traditional

institution like a university may now be seen performing a catalytic eco-
nomic role in the knowledge society, so there is also wide recognition that
traditional cultural facilities and activities have a catalytic economic role in
the urban economy. Taking together the three major US cities of New
York, Los Angeles and Chicago, Zukin (1995) showed that between 1980
and 1990 there had been a 34 per cent increase in the employment of cre-
ative artists from 202 000 in 1980 to 270 000 in 1990, a phenomenon that
accelerated into the late 1990s. Among the larger categories of change in
terms of creative occupation during that period were actors, directors, pho-
tographers, authors, designers and architects.
Of course, these aspects of the ‘symbolic economy’ are responsible for a
secondary employment impact upon demand for urban services such as
accommodation, restaurants, transportation and retailing. Given that it is
widely accepted that there is a cultural industries multiplier of around 2.0
(Myerscough, 1988), this means that Zukin’s estimate of a 68 000 employ-
ment increase for just the three major American metropolitan areas, in terms
of core cultural industries employment, translates into an overall ascribable
ten-year increase of 136 000. A rate of employment increase of over 13 000
per year compares reasonably with the 15 750 per year increase in Silicon
Valley’s high-technology complex during the 1996–99 ‘bubble’ growth period.
 Culture, clusters, districts and quarters 27

Thus, culture, arts and entertainment have come to be looked upon as a

‘new industry’ with enormous growth potential. In a study of Cologne, it
was shown that between 1985 and 1991 administrative budgets for the arts
and culture grew by an average 34 per cent while those for science and
research declined by exactly the same percentage. This echoes a recognition
by urban government of shifts in both latent and expressed demand for
expenditure. The scale of urban governmental expenditure on cultural
activities was, in 1991, some €1 billion for cities of 500 000 or more in
Germany (Friedrichs, 1995). Cologne was by no means at the top of the
ranking in terms of expenditure. Hamburg at some €500 per inhabitant led
the expenditure table, followed by Frankfurt (€450), Stuttgart (€400),
Cologne (€200) and Munich (€150).
All of this points to the growth capability associated with ‘creative cities’
(Landry et al., 1996). A keynote of this thinking is that ‘Historically, cre-
ativity and innovation have always been the lifeblood of our cities’ (ibid.:
1). More recent cutbacks in expenditure of the kind suffered by German
cities in the early 1990s and early 2000s also mean that artistically creative
organizations have had to become more entrepreneurial in seeking to con-
vince private financiers to invest in or sponsor their activities. The creative
city is very much compatible with the innovative city, the latter perceived in
terms of its incubator function regarding technology-intensive firms. It
tends to possess:

● harder infrastructures such as educational and research institutes,

cultural facilities and high-grade communication channels
● capacities to enable policies to translate city history into ‘image’,
urban cultures, value systems and lifestyles appropriate to creativity
in the city
● receptivity, openness to learning and responsiveness amongst citizens
and their public and private cultural organizations
● the existence of cultural, even experimental, spaces for the explo-
ration and promotion of cultural innovation.

Much of the rediscovery of the importance of cultural industries to urban

economies was occasioned by the economic shocks experienced by many in
the advanced economies with the demise in cities of ‘industrial age’ employ-
ment. This caused citizens and governance organizations to reappraise
their economic trajectory and look at the past as the possible guide to a
modified future. Thus Glasgow’s loss of shipbuilding caused a searching for
assets that could be built upon, and the urban fabric and cultural infra-
structure created as the outward display of the wealth of the city when it
was a leading industrial centre proved to be an asset which could be built
28 Cultural districts, cultural clusters and local economic development

upon. Such cases as Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Watershed Media Centre in

Bristol and a multitude of others are all examples of adaptive reuse of
former industrial buildings associated with the first era of growth experi-
enced by such cities (Suzuki, 1996).
Important, too, are the capabilities of actors in cultural governance to
interact with others inside and beyond the city. This networking propensity,
involving partnership, reciprocity, trust-building and open dialogue is
equally a feature of the ‘glue’ which holds together the ‘pieces’ with respect
to interactive cultural innovation. From these interactions a ‘synergetic
surplus’ may form, enabling the actions or projects of individuals to yield
much more value from being part of a larger programme. This also
devolves into the more formal organizational capability that creative cities
need if they are to promote major festivals or cultural programmes
intended to have an international not merely local cultural reach. Cultural
tourism, rather like business tourism, is associated with some 60 per cent
greater expenditure on secondary economic activity such as hotels and
restaurants, than normal tourist activity (Cooke, 1992).
Finally, the creative city displays key characteristics associated with
being knowledge-receptive. Knowledge creation is an exponential process;
the more you have, the greater your capacity to gain more. Knowledge-
based cities have much in common with knowledge-intensive organiza-
tions (Stewart, 2001), they have the capacity to create value from the
interaction of distinct knowledge types. Examples are crossovers from
mathematics of hydrology to financial derivatives (futures, options and
‘hedge funds’ – Chicago) weaving machine gears to prosthetic hips
(Manchester) or aerospace to racing car design (Oxford). Jane Jacobs
stressed this in her theory of the creativity of cities arising from such jux-
tapositions of diverse knowledge as they may sustain (Jacobs, 1969). In the
best-governed cases, cities have ‘lighthouse’ mechanisms enabling their
economic development trajectory to be monitored and action lines to be
adjusted accordingly. They also benchmark other cities’ cultural policies
and practices in light of global cultural trends to test for what is accept-
able or desired by their citizens.
The secondary effects of the development of a cultural strategy to cap-
italize upon the assets hitherto perhaps unappreciated, include the evolu-
tion of activities such as those now given the all-compassing title of
‘night-time economy’ (Bianchini, 1995). In Rome, this is promoted under
the banner of four separate cultural focii – city of film, city of sports and
dance, city of television and city of theatre – many being centred in former
warehouse or other redundant industrial buildings. Bianchini further
notes that when Manchester adopted a night-time economy policy in 1993,
there was a significant increase in the turnover of restaurants, clubs, bars,
 Culture, clusters, districts and quarters 29

taxi firms and so on, and a 43 per cent decline in city-centre arrests com-
pared with the period prior to the adoption of the policy. Hence the cre-
ative city may also become a more civilized city as its economic potential
expands.

3. KEY THEMES AND OPEN QUESTIONS FOR

‘CITIES OF CULTURE’

To advertise the canvas for debate beforehand, then investigate each

element in more detail as we go, we may identify the following five areas of
broadly unsettled sentiment and affirmation concerning the nature and role
of cultural strategy in the contemporary city.
Who and what is cultural development of cities for? To put the devil’s
advocacy argument first, if a city is ‘uncultured’ how should that be defined
and understood, how should the residents and governance of that city be
judged, and who should act under what responsibility or obligation to
make it ‘cultured’? In other words, is ‘culture’ politically demanded, or even
deliverable, to citizens as such or is it capable of being supplied more
readily, if at all, as part of a response to looser demands for a more civi-
lized place, a place with more diverting entertainment or a place with some
kind of ‘buzz’ about it? Is this best provided through overt ‘cultural’ policy
or by stimulating more diffuse social and economic change?
Is culture, broadly defined, a complex set of services that is meant to have
direct effects upon the happiness of citizens who may consume more
‘culture’ accordingly? Or is it primarily an economic service that creates
routine services jobs (in the main) while the city acts as a kind of interna-
tional host to tourists whose discretionary expenditure fuels the labour
market. The latter is called the ‘Wimbledon’ approach, where superb facil-
ities and organization provide a backdrop and major financial resource for
global tennis stars to ‘strut their stuff’. It is said the City of London has
been ‘Wimbledonized’ since all its merchant banks are now foreign owned
(Augar, 2001). It increasingly appears to be the case with Cardiff’s
Millennium Stadium. It has long been the case, in reverse, for the Welsh
National Opera. In a somewhat different way it is also said of Bilbao’s
super-successful Guggenheim Museum.
What role should a city’s cultural strategy play regarding its social or
cultural hinterlands? Is it appropriate for a city government to articulate
boldly its political vision through a strong, dynamic cultural policy or is
culture something that city governances may best animate or facilitate by
responding to pressures from markets and the pluralistic cultural sphere
(on this see Davies, 2002)? Thus, for example, Montreal’s urban economy
30 Cultural districts, cultural clusters and local economic development

was undermined during its strong francophone years in the 1980s as

commerce moved to anglophone Toronto. Was that strong francophone
policy, since moderated, nevertheless justified? If a city is highly politically
attuned to issues such as political asylum and providing welcome to
refugees by investing substantially in minority cultural and linguistic infra-
structure and resources, what is needed to avoid alienation of indigenous,
socially excluded communities – what might in the UK be called the
Oldham-Bradford ‘alienation-effect’? Was Dublin’s reinvention of itself as
a ‘Viking City’ more than a tourist-attraction marketing ploy? Did it
echo deeper cultural discontents concerning modernity, globalization,
Europeanization or cosmopolitanism? Does Bilbao pay more attention to
its historic, outward-looking port tradition (Guggenheim, Foster Metro,
International Convention Centre) than its Basque culture? How, cultur-
ally, does Tallinn treat its Russian minority? Is Cardiff a recognizably
‘Welsh’ as distinct from ‘multicultural’ city, and how would we know (see,
again, Davies, 2002)?
How broad a definition of culture should underpin cultural policy in
capitals of culture? Is T.S. Eliot an appropriate guide:

Culture . . . includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people:

Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog
races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into
sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the music
of Elgar.
(Eliot, 1948: 168)

Maybe, for Old England. Hardly, however, for a really inclusive culture
anywhere, as it elides the grossest class divides, as if culture were simply
additive. For Wales, certainly, not in its content, but what if we substitute
‘rugby internationals, Ryan Giggs, National Eisteddfod, Royal Welsh
(Agricultural Show), Caerphilly cheese, cawl (broth), bara brith (currant
bread), chapels’? Sadly it still does not work very well, especially not in
Cardiff.
Perhaps celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz is more to our taste
with his broader, more pliable, culture-as-process, definition: ‘Culture is an
historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a
system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of
which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about
and attitudes towards life’ (Geertz, 1973: 46). Better, rather gender-blind
but inclusive, except for its assumption of consensus and possible ‘one size
fits all’ implications.
Or is Welsh philosopher and literary critic, the late Raymond Williams
and his ‘culture as dialectics’ perspective the way to go?
 Culture, clusters, districts and quarters 31

We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life –
the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning – the special processes of
discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of
these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The
questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings.
Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.
(Williams, 1976: 97)

Perhaps it is, as it overcomes a sense that to leave out ‘ordinary’ urban cul-
tural representations and meanings is worse than Eliot’s additive idealistic
homogenization reminiscent of Matthew Arnold in Culture & Anarchy
(1869): ‘Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has
one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.’
Equally, Williams makes space for ‘high culture’ but treats them both as
ordinary. How, to conclude, does a city pursue both while treating them as
ordinary in a world where the ordinary must daily compete against the
extraordinary, whether as shown on television or available for the price of
a budget air ticket to Venice from easyJet?
To what extent may cultural development in the economy be driven
by constructing an innovative imagery for the city through a strong
architectural planning policy? Cardiff has an ignoble recent tradition
of creating difficulties regarding its ‘absorptive capacity’ towards new
architecture, and architects. Most notoriously Zaha Hadid’s remarkable
design for a Welsh National Opera House was rejected. More recently
Lord Richard Rogers’s design for the National Assembly for Wales has
been severely compromised, financially and on design grounds. Cardiff
tends to show a ‘provincial’ air rather than a more cosmopolitan, confident
air towards new architecture. Accordingly, much of its waterfront archi-
tecture is bland when it could have been challenging. Bilbao is at the exact
opposite pole, commissioning global ‘names’ like Cesar Pelli, Norman
Foster and Frank Gehry and trusting them to produce innovative work
that is nevertheless culturally rooted in the ‘New Regionalism’ architec-
tural style pioneered in Vancouver by Erickson and others. As the section
on Bilbao shows, this approach has brought impressive cultural and eco-
nomic returns.
What, finally, about culture and science, given the ideological power and
growing entertainment function that science offers? This comes through
specialist cable television channels, books, Techniquest and so on, never
mind the hitting power a major, successful university can make to the
‘image’ of the city in which it resides or, more, multiple universities,
research laboratories and the like give, not only in reputation but transla-
tion of that into hard research cash flowing through the city economy as
high income expenditure susceptible to purchasing ‘cultural commodities’
32 Cultural districts, cultural clusters and local economic development

whether of the ordinary or more highbrow kind. Never mind New York,
what about Boston, as Table 1.1 displays?
By 2003 about $1.5 billion will be flowing through Boston’s health
research economy funded by the National Institutes of Health alone. Add
in research in other disciplines and it becomes at least $3.0 billion. Then
add in the students and the teaching and administration side and it may
amount to $4.5–$5.0 billion per year and rising from the research and
teaching sector alone. In Wales a recent estimate from research conducted
in the Centre for Advanced Studies revealed the following. Wales performs
a valuable export function for the Welsh economy at university level
because, of the roughly 15 000 graduates produced each year by the 13
higher education institutions, half are from outside Wales. Each is worth,
notionally, £15 000 per year to the economy or £112.5 million, which over
a typical three-year degree course is an ‘export’ value of £337.5 million. If
to that are added the Welsh students, the figure doubles to £675 million,
and adding in the salaries of employees, the sum is over £1 billion
(although the ‘export’ value remains at a third of that). It may be added
that Cardiff’s universities contribute at least £17 million per annum edu-
cational export value and an equivalent amount of ‘domestic’ input,
making a £34 million annual contribution to the city’s economy. Should
city culture be more conscious of the cultural underpinning provided
increasingly by science and use positive indicators such as those to be
shown below in its ‘cultural offer’?

Table 1.1 Principal NIH-funded research institutions in Massachusetts,

2000

Rank funding Institution NIH ($ million)

7 Harvard University 250.4
17 Massachusetts General Hospital 180.5
22 Brigham & Women’s Hospital 162.5
38 Boston University 108.2
47 Dana-Farber Cancer Institute 87.2
53 Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre 82.1
54 Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research 81.3
60 University of Massachusetts Medical School 73.9
58 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 75.0
74 Children’s Hospital 52.9
86 Tufts University 37.5

Source: National Institutes of Health.

 Culture, clusters, districts and quarters 33

4. BRIEF LESSONS FROM A COMPARATIVE STUDY

OF CITY CULTURE POLICIES: FROM CARDIFF
THROUGH DUBLIN TO TALLINN AND BILBAO

In 1999, the Centre for Advanced Studies completed an EU-PHARE

(Poland and Hungary Assistance for the Restructuring of the Economy)
project on ‘Comparing culture industries in Baltic and Celtic cities’. Cases
were Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Tampere (Finland), Cardiff and Dublin. In this
brief report, only Cardiff, Dublin and Tallinn will be discussed and some
indicators for Bilbao added in for purposes of scale comparison.
The key points to note from the statistical picture in Table 1.2 are that
culture industry employment varies between about 4 per cent and 8 per cent
(Bilbao) of total employment in these cities. Regarding Cardiff specifically,
a 1998 study by D. Clarke Associates (DCA) and the Manchester Institute
of Popular Culture (MIPC) showed the city having the highest UK share
of culture industry employment, as Table 1.3 shows. It may be that, as the
report (DCA and MIPC, 1998) suggests, it is because Cardiff is a medium-
sized city with large culture industry employers such as media organiza-
tions, but it may equally be that Cardiff, with two main cultures, warrants
a large culture industry sector.
Let us now look at brief sketches of the cultural industry content of the
four comparator cities.

Cardiff

Cardiff’s status of capital of Wales means it tends to attract more cultural

industry activities and public services companies than a city of 310 000
might normally warrant. Moreover, the concentration of three colleges of
the University of Wales, including the Medical School means it retains a
relatively highly educated workforce.

Table 1.2 Cultural industry, demographic and economic indicators, 2000

Cardiff Tallinn Dublin Bilbao

Population 310 000 600 000 1 100 000 932 000
Unemployment 6.0% 13% 10% 15%
Employment 184 000 115 000 362 000 280 000
Cultural emp. 7 912 6 500 21 500 22 000

Source: Cooke (1998); Bilbao-Biscay website http://spain.archiseek.com/biscay/bilbao/

guggenheim.html.
34 Cultural districts, cultural clusters and local economic development

Table 1.3 Cardiff and UK comparators: culture industry employment

City Culture industry employment

Manchester 3.6%
London 2.3%
UK average 2.3%
Cardiff 4.3%

Source: DCA and MPCI (1998).

The cultural industries in Cardiff employed in 1995 some 4800 people

according to a study commissioned for the EU-Phare research project
(Clarke, 1996). The knock-on effect of these jobs was estimated at a further
2000, though the use of the multiplier of 2 referred to earlier would imply
many more. Of the 4800, 1865 were practitioners working as creative artists
and the remainder operated in various support functions such as adminis-
tration. Thus, then, some 3.5 per cent of resident employees worked in the
cultural sector in Cardiff compared to an estimated average of 2 per cent in
the UK as a whole (Table 1.3 shows how that subsequently increased). The
performance sector is the largest among the practitioner community,
reflecting the strong musical base to the city’s cultural economy.
Performance is followed by visual art and film/video/animation. The city has
three television companies engaged in broadcasting and a further 300 or so
small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) engaged in aspects of media and
multimedia production and services. The city has three major museums,
including the National Museum and Art Gallery, St Fagans Museum of
Welsh Life and Techniquest. In addition, the National Orchestra of Wales,
St David’s Concert Hall and the International Arena operate in the city. It
has four theatres and other centres of entertainment such as arts centres,
cinemas and private art galleries. Culture’s contribution to the local
economy through attendances and visits was in 1995 estimated at some £76
million gross (though this excludes the relatively large television industry),
to which could also be added Arts Council and other subsidies to the tune
of £18 million and private sponsorship of £1.4 million.

Cultural quarter
Of considerable importance to the future development of Cardiff’s cultural
economy were the activities of Cardiff Bay Development Corporation, a
UK government body established to revitalize Cardiff’s docklands
economy. Its function has since been absorbed by Cardiff County Council.
The arts and culture, more generally, play a significant part in plans for this
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that the news which, when it was given, had seemed disastrous
should have become the substance of his happiness.
Then doubt arose. The first letters Margaret wrote to Hugh on the
subject had confirmed Mr. Alter’s tale; both her father and mother
had been in favour of her going. Then her tone had become less
assured.
“I don’t know whether I shall go to China after all,” she wrote.
“Father is discovering difficulties—or, rather, Mr. Ordith, who has
been to China, is discovering them for him; and now he talks of
taking mother with him, and leaving me in the charge of some aunt
—I don’t know which aunt.”
And in a later letter:
“Father seems to have decided now that I am to stay in England. I
am horribly disappointed. It may be the only chance I shall ever
have of seeing the East—and the East is changing so fast. Mother is
still on my side, I think, though she doesn’t like to say very much. It
is so difficult for her and for me to argue, because neither of us
knows anything about China, and Mr. Ordith, who has been staying
with us again, is full of facts and figures. I wonder why he is so
much against my going? He is always pointing out difficulties. He
has a mind like a blue-book, all tabulated and accurate. You can
almost hear him saying, ‘Section Two, Sub-section Four—so-and-so;
Sub-section Five—so-and-so.’ What can an ordinary human being do
in face of that? Of course, father is tremendously impressed. He says
it is so refreshing to meet a young man with an orderly mind.
There’s no doubt that Mr. Ordith is clever, and very attractive—in a
way. I dare say he is right about the Chinese horrors, but, even if he
is, there’s no need to tell the truth so often. But I still have hopes.
Nothing is definite yet. Perhaps if I light enough of father’s cigarettes
and warm his Times for him every morning, he may relent. Or
perhaps all the aunts will refuse to have me, if I get my word in
first.”
When these letters arrived Hugh paid little attention to them. He had
made up his mind that his family was leaving England, and he
refused to be deluded by false hopes. But now, when his attitude
towards the matter had been changed, he read over with real
anxiety such of Margaret’s letters as he had not destroyed.
“This fellow Ordith,” he said to John, when the extracts had been
read aloud, “seems likely to be an infernal nuisance. He is a Gunnery
Lieut. R.N.—a star-turn at Whaley, an inventor and that kind of
thing. My father’s firm, Ibble and Company, has a lot of Admiralty
contracts. I suppose that’s how they met.”
“What has your sister said about it since?”
“I tore up the letters before we left the King Arthur. I kept these
only by chance—mixed up with some books. But, so far as I can
remember, she hasn’t said anything—certainly nothing definite. And
she hasn’t mentioned Ordith, I’m sure. It’s odd, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she has had a row with him?”
“No; but—— Anyway, we shan’t know anything until we get home to
England.”
Hugh laughed. “I believe you are just as keen as I am that my—that
my people should go to China.”
John answered quickly: “You see, I am counting on your invitations
to give me an excuse for leave.”

II
After spending nearly a week at home, John came up to London on
the first Friday of his leave. He was to stay with the Fane-Herberts,
who were giving a dance on the following day, and before he
returned to the country he and Hugh were to go together to Mr.
Reeve’s London branch and order the clothes they would need in
China.
“I am afraid it is no good,” Hugh told him. “It seems to be definitely
fixed that Margaret is to remain in England.”
But at dinner that night they were thrown once more into perplexity.
Mr. Fane-Herbert was away in the North, and was not expected
home until Saturday afternoon, when he would bring Mr. Ordith with
him.
“I believe Mr. Ordith is a wonderful dancer,” Mrs. Fane-Herbert said.
“From all accounts,” Hugh replied, “he must be wonderful at
everything.”
“My dear Hugh, you speak as if you disliked him already, without
ever having seen him.”
“I don’t dislike him, but I can’t see what he has to do with our
affairs.”
“Our affairs?”
“Margaret’s going to China. It was all fixed up before Ordith came on
the scene.”
Mrs. Fane-Herbert smiled. This was a chance better than she had
hoped for. “Now,” she said, “shall I show you how wrong you are? I
had a letter from father this afternoon, and, so far as I can judge,
for he is not at all definite, he has been thinking it all over, and has
come to the conclusion——”
“That I am to go after all, mother?” Margaret interrupted. “Do say I
am to go!”
“Well, dear, I don’t want you to be disappointed again, but I must
say that father seems to incline more towards taking you.... So you
see, Hugh, how little Mr. Ordith had to do with the matter. It is very
foolish to make rash judgments.”
“But why has father changed his mind?”
“It doesn’t matter why,” said Margaret. “The point is that he has
changed it.”
Hugh shrugged his shoulders. “It beats me, I confess.”
His mother allowed Hugh’s suspicion to fade into silence. To have
attempted to remove it would have been to emphasize it, and this
she wished to avoid. Her husband’s letter had given her two pieces
of information, the last of which explained the first. “I think,” he had
written, “that, after all, Margaret had better come with us when we
leave England. Edith might not wish to be burdened with her. I know
you would like to have her with you, and that she herself is anxious
to come. There are many obstacles, but, if you have really set your
heart on taking her, none that I am not prepared to overcome if I
can. We will talk it over when I reach home.” Mrs. Fane-Herbert,
when she read this, was as astonished as Hugh had been when he
heard of it; but at the end of the letter, separated from her
husband’s decision by more pages than he usually troubled to write
to her, was a brief announcement which made all clear: “Ordith has
been appointed to the Pathshire as an additional Gunnery
Lieutenant. Isn’t it a strange coincidence in connection with Hugh?”
To Mrs. Fane-Herbert it was an illumination uncomfortably brilliant.
She established at once the connection between her husband’s
change of mind and Mr. Ordith’s change of plan. But would Margaret
establish it? If possible, that must be prevented. Mrs. Fane-Herbert
was tempted to say nothing of the contents of her letter, to leave her
husband to make the best of it on his return. But his best, in this
instance, would, she knew, be bad indeed. He thought of Margaret
as of a child without perception. He would not trouble to deceive
her.
Mrs. Fane-Herbert realized that she herself must give these two
pieces of information to Margaret in such a manner as might prevent
their being connected with each other. The responsibility and the
chance of failure made her nervous and troubled. Dinner was to be
an ordeal. She wished that her husband was not so successful a man
—at any rate, that success had not blinded him to so many things
she would have liked him to see and value. She wished that Mr.
Ordith had not so much ability and charm; that she could bring
herself to dislike him frankly, and so to form a clear policy with
regard to him. He might make an admirable husband. She did not
think so. But what was there against him? Nothing but her instinct
and Mr. Alter’s saying that the young man had a systematized soul.
Her husband wanted him in Ibble and Company. She had seen,
scribbled on a blotting-pad in the writing that, years ago, had filled
her love-letters, the words “Ibble and Ordith—Ordith and Ibble,” as if
the amalgamation was already accomplished and a dispute about
the nomenclature had begun. Mr. Ordith would leave the Service and
succeed his father, Sir George Ordith, as head of Ordith and Co. The
plan was cut and dried, as were all Mr. Fane-Herbert’s plans. But she
hated the whole project. Even if the result were excellent, she hated
this involving of Margaret in the affairs of Ibble and Co., for Ibble
and Co. had already robbed her husband of the qualities she had
loved best in him. She disliked it the more because her husband had
never dared speak openly of it, and because she had never dared
mention it to him. She knew how he would answer. Was he trying to
force the girl? Absurd! He was trying to give a fair chance to a young
man whom he liked—surely a reasonable and proper course? Oh
yes, reasonable and proper! Mrs. Fane-Herbert thought helplessly.
But wrong, she felt—wrong in motive and bad in effect. If it were
not wrong, why did it already compel her to fence with her own
children?
Hugh had helped her at the beginning of dinner. The first piece of
information had been naturally given, she thought. Now for the
second, which was the test. She led the conversation into new
channels, and talked much and well—just as Mr. Fane-Herbert had
written those intermediate pages in his letter. But too long a delay
would draw attention to itself. Margaret would wonder why she had
put off speaking of Mr. Ordith. When should she speak?
She waited until dinner was ended. Then she paused in the open
doorway.
“Oh, and Hugh, father said in his letter something of Mr. Ordith’s
being appointed as additional Gunnery Lieutenant to the Pathshire.
Isn’t that an odd chance?”
“Ordith, too, going to China?”
“I suppose so.”
Mrs. Fane-Herbert made her way towards the drawing-room. She
knew Margaret was watching her. Why, oh why, had Hugh said,
“Ordith too?” Or was it her imagination and not his voice that had so
laid the emphasis? She did not look round to search Margaret’s face,
though her desire to do so was almost too strong for her. In a
moment Margaret would speak, and her tone, even more clearly
than her words, would indicate how much she had guessed.
But as they entered the drawing-room Margaret said: “If I am to go
East, mother, I shall want dozens of new frocks, shan’t I?”
And Mrs. Fane-Herbert was left without enlightenment.

III
Mr. George Ordith, later a baronet, and head of the great armament
firm honoured by the serious jealousy of Ibble and Co., had trained
his son Nicholas with extraordinary care and consistency. He had
been terrified lest Nick, who was to inherit all that a life’s toil had
accumulated, should value it little and dissipate it rashly. Therefore,
almost as soon as Nick’s fingers were able to close about the coin, a
penny had been thrust into his palm, and, when he had held it a
little while, been taken from him and dropped loudly into a money-
box bearing his name. Nick enjoyed the tinkle, and crowed in
accompaniment. The process was repeated every Saturday morning,
until at last, because he was never allowed to play with them, Nick
came to have a respect for pence. The money-box was cleared
annually, its contents supplemented by a sovereign, which was
George Ordith’s Christmas gift to his baby (for it was left to
womenfolk to present what were described as “baubles and
gewgaws”), and the whole was added to Nick’s deposit in the Post
Office Savings Bank. By the time he was out of dresses he was a
capitalist. Only Mrs. Ordith’s earnest entreaties saved her son from
being taught to read from the financial columns of the newspapers.
At school, Stocks and Shares were to Nick an exciting reality, and, at
the age of fifteen, he withdrew from the Post Office all his money
except half a crown, gave it to his father in return for a cheque
drawn in favour of the parental broker, and instructed this gentleman
to purchase on his behalf certain Meat Shares in the Argentine.
From this it must not be deduced either that George Ordith was a
miser or that he wished his son to become one. He said a thousand
times that money was not everything; that it could not purchase
happiness; that, though it was a blessing to wise men, it was a curse
to fools. And Nick said, “Yes, father,” and asked, as other children
might ask for a coveted toy, when he might have some of those
coupons that were cut off with scissors. George Ordith had acted
upon a theory that the sons of hard-working, careful men are often
wasters. He had wished to nip in the bud any natural tendency in
Nick to become a waster. And he erred in this, that Nick had been so
made that waste would in any case have been repugnant to him. If
George had not provided a money-box, Nick would have been
impelled by instinct to manufacture one out of the first empty
tobacco-tin whose lid he could pierce. If George had not built up the
firm of Ordith, Nick would probably have established it.
Thus had nature and training, instead of counteracting each other’s
effects, as Sir George Ordith had intended, been allies in the
production of the young Gunnery Lieutenant in whom Mr. Fane-
Herbert found so much to admire. He had taken firsts in every
examination in which it had been possible for him to take firsts; he
had created a reputation for himself at Whale Island; he had played
cricket and Rugby football for the Navy; he had smiled and danced
himself into the favour of innumerable hostesses; he had a nice
taste in wines, a beautiful touch in billiards, a safe seat on any
horse, and an inexhaustible supply of words, which flowed like oil
from his lips. He was tall, dark, and technically handsome. Moreover,
he had a level head—a head so level that business men, while they
admired him, looked back sometimes to the days of their own youth,
and reflected that, after all, young Ordith must be missing a great
deal. They would have liked an opportunity to raise their eyebrows
now and then, and to say, “Ah well, boys will be boys!”
But Nick never gave them a chance. He condescended so far as to
appear gallant and rash in the presence of women who he thought
would like that kind of thing; but in the presence of men from whom
something might be expected he gave no judgment which was not a
considered judgment, offered no opinion without quoting his
authority for the facts upon which it was based, relapsed into
thoughtful silence when he had no opinion to offer, and added little
by little to his reputation for soundness.
In a book to which he made frequent reference he wrote down such
details concerning his friends’ habits and tastes as might aid him in
his dealings with them. A glance into this volume reveals much of
the writer.
“Fane-Herbert, Walter.—Proud of cellar. Always offers to pay for
things—don’t let him. Likes to be taken aside from large company as
if conversation private and important. Sharp business man—try no
tricks. Wants me in Ibble’s—obviously with view to amalgamation.
Be dense about this. Probably fond of daughter when it comes to the
pinch. Personalty (authority, K.S.K.), over 700 thou. One son in
addition to daughter. Pleased with his feet—ask size of boots
occasionally. Eton best school in the world. Expectancy of life, 15
yrs.
“Fane-Herbert, Mrs.—Avoid cynicism. Ask her advice often. Points for
flattery: upbringing of children; fineness of bed and table linen;
acquaintance with Parnell—touch this carefully; Irish descent, rather
remote. Keep off subject of husband’s success. Keep business in the
background. Money not mentioned—except in connection charitable
purposes. Acute woman. Guesses about Ibble and Ordith, and about
daughter. Private income probably small. Ought to die well first.
“Fane-Herbert, Margaret.—Exceptional, requiring exceptional
treatment. Flattery must be restrained and veiled. Probable points
for flattery: shape of fingers; piano; knowledge of books; power to
see through pretences. Certain points for flattery: imperviousness to
it—and ability to keep secret. Necessary to cultivate literary
conversation. (Literature Primers, Edited by J. H. Green, and English
Lit. by Stopford Brooke, Macmillan and Co.; for contemporary lit. try
Bookman—? something more advanced.) Be careful not to split
infinitives; also use singular after none—e.g., ‘none of them is....’
Introduce ideals into all talk of the future. Might talk of improving
the conditions of Ordith’s workpeople, and thus establish secret
between her and me—but make quite sure bunkum of that kind
doesn’t spread and make things awkward at Ordith’s. Probably make
good hostess. Not extravagant, but might develop philanthropic
tendencies. To me very attractive: keep this clear in mind, as it may
be dangerous. Don’t touch her too much; guard eyes. Go slow.
Impulsiveness would probably be effective, but I am not good at
this, so better act judiciously.”
Nick Ordith clearly perceived his own weakness. He wished that
Margaret, the girl, were less important to him, and that he could
regard her as no more than a link with Ibble’s and a beneficiary
under her father’s will. This amalgamation was to be a big affair, and
he would have preferred to approach it with a cool head—with a
head, that is, not inflamed by any passion that disputed his
customarily perfect control. But, though you bind the Devil hand and
foot, he will lash you with his tail. All Nick’s care to restrict every
tendency in him that might interfere with his material success could
not prevent him from losing command a little in Margaret’s presence,
and he knew that some day, at a moment when he least expected it,
that command might break down altogether. He thrilled at her
touch; he thought of her at night when he ought to have been
thinking of fire-control instruments. And he knew he stood in danger
of revealing all this. Women, a few women, had so twisted him
before. He had no confidence in his ability to handle Margaret as if
she were built of the cool ivory of a chess-piece. She was young—
ten years his junior, and she was unspoiled. Youth and the unspoiled
had for him an attraction more powerful than his will. There might
come a time when he would lose the game as a result of his
reluctance to sacrifice his Queen. Certainly she would exercise an
undue influence upon his strategy.
He determined to dance with her that Saturday night as often as he
dared neglect more urgent business, and at dinner primed himself
for brilliance. Mr. Hartfeld of the Foreign Office and Mr. Street of the
Admiralty were present, and treated him with more deference than
the ordinary naval officer has a right to expect from Government
Departments. Mr. Fane-Herbert established himself with his back to
the smoking-room fire when dinner was over, smiling at Street,
Hartfeld, and Ordith, and glaring at Hugh until he suggested that he
and John should go and play billiards. At last the four great men
were left alone to discuss the prospects of the Empire overseas.
The detail of their conversation is not for the ears of the less
fortunate who hold no stock in armament firms, but the spirit of it
may be revealed in its conclusion.
“Of course,” said Mr. Fane-Herbert, “it is understood that we shall act
with the greatest reserve. Ordith’s presence out there will appear
accidental—or at any rate, whatever they may think, no one will
dare to say that it is otherwise. He will be my friend and personal
adviser—in no way personally interested.”
“The Foreign Office has nothing to do with it,” said Hartfeld.
“Nor the Admiralty,” Street echoed.
Street flicked the ash from his cigarette. “It is of the utmost
importance that we should be committed to nothing.”
“But we can rely upon your support?”
Hartfeld nodded. “Speaking for myself alone; I can’t answer for
others.”
“Isn’t that a little nebulous?” Ordith asked.
“We can do no more than promise to do our utmost,” said Street, in
the pained voice of one whose offer of his life’s blood has been
scorned.
“We shall be grateful,” said Ordith.
“Most grateful,” Mr. Fane-Herbert added solemnly. He knew how
foolish it was to ruffle officials. “Another brandy, Street? A cigar?”
“But, apart from the question of gratitude and the gentlemanly
preamble,” Ordith continued, “let’s see exactly how we stand. As I
see it——”
“My dear fellow,” Hartfeld exclaimed, flourishing a delicate hand,
“why this passion for black and white? Everything depends upon the
fluctuations of circumstance——”
“Lord help us! Why not say of ‘Change’?”
Mr. Fane-Herbert gave him a glance which advised that, since these
were not business men, they should not be treated as such. They
must be allowed to talk if they wanted to. “You were saying, Hartfeld
—the fluctuations of circumstance?”
“Upon the fluctuations of circumstance and the—er—signs of the
times. Definite commitments in affairs of this kind are always
dangerous, and are only to be obtained at the price of elasticity.”
“In other words,” said Street, “we want to give you the freest
possible hand.”
Three of them nodded wisely. Ordith’s fingers moved lightly on the
arms of his chair. He had not wanted these people brought into it.
“They can’t help,” he had said. But Mr. Fane-Herbert had taken him
by the shoulder; “No, they can’t help—granted. But they can hinder.
Look on their talk as the price you pay for a retainer, see?”
“Then what it comes to,” Ordith said, “is that you are concerned in
these contracts that we hope to obtain simply from the point of view
of the national interest, eh?” So far as he knew the question was
meaningless, but he felt that it would please them.
“Exactly,” they answered together.
“And you afford facilities?—a diplomatic phrase, surely?”
“Every facility.”
Mr. Fane-Herbert’s approving eye was upon him. “Then success
ought to be assured so long as there are no competitors.” That was
the point.
“Competitors?” said Hartfeld. “We can’t answer for foreign
competition.”
“No; I was thinking of competition from home. Ibble’s is not the only
firm in the British Isles.”
“By no means,” said Street gracefully.
“Oh, I can answer for Ordith’s; we have arranged that. There are
others.”
“I’m afraid we couldn’t possibly interfere with legitimate commercial
competition.”
“No one would ask it of you. But your attitude towards us will be at
least benevolent?” Ordith said.
“Certainly,” Hartfeld answered.
“Good.”
“It will be a brilliant success!” Street exclaimed.
“Success,” said Ordith, “depends less upon genius than upon an
adequate appreciation of the platitudes.”
This faith, so authoritatively expressed by a successful young man,
was put to the test soon after the dance had begun. He saw
Margaret dancing with John—her eyes shining with happiness in a
manner that might have caused another lover a little uneasiness. But
Ordith did not for a moment feel insecure. He could see that John
had gained ground, that the first ramparts of reserve had been
overpassed; but he had no fear. “Unlike poles attract,” he repeated,
choosing his platitude, and confident of his power to carry attack
upon that line to a successful issue. So, before seeking out the
important lady he had seen among the crowd and had chosen for his
immediate favour, he stood gazing at Margaret’s neck and shoulders
and admiring her movement with the eye of an anatomist.
He did not know that John had advanced farther than the first
ramparts. In the morning, when he and Hugh had gone together to
buy their China equipment, Margaret had come to offer feminine
advice on materials. She had watched them turning over shirts, and
hesitating, and retracting decisions in the manner of men at the
counter. Women and their shopping? Oh, but men were infinitely
worse! They had so small a field of choice, and yet they got lost in
it. She laughed at this and a thousand trifles, and laughter is the
truest ranging-arrow in love’s quiver. London, too, with its bright sun
and sky, and the cool wind that stirred up the sweet scent of her
furs, had conspired to bring them together. Hugh joined the
conspiracy by accepting an invitation to lunch with an old friend
whom he met in Mr. Reeve’s shop. John and Margaret came home by
way of Marble Arch and a diagonal cut through the Park. The dying
winter was old and weak—so weak that he could not gather up and
hide away in his dark box the coins of gold scattered beneath the
trees by the sunshine or the strands woven among the grasses. And,
as they went, they talked of all the things on earth they held most
dear—their nurseries and old toys, terra-cotta flower-pots, the
summer sound of lawns being mown, firelight in mirrors, books, the
silky touch of dogs’ ears—each as the centre of some tale which
seemed peculiar to their own autobiographies, though, at that
moment, it was being remembered afresh, in one form or another,
by every young creature—and every old one, too, who wasn’t too
stupid to value such things—from Kensington Palace to the western
pavement of Park Lane.
John and Margaret, like all the other young creatures, had no idea of
this. They felt as if they were telling each other secrets—which is the
best known of love’s tricks. In truth, they were but beginning to
discover the secrets of themselves, and had not yet had time to
become so confused as the rest of us in life’s attempt to draw a
boundary between the soul and the body. Dust to dust, ashes to
ashes! There was no dust, there were no ashes, their hearts argued;
therefore all—her lips and the colour the wind had whipped into her
cheeks, his frank eyes, and brown, fine-cut hands—all must have
something of the soul in them. What reason had they to doubt?
They were not afraid, and fear goes hand in hand with the Devil.
Their happiness was of the clean kind they would have liked to sing
about to all the world.
So it happened that they danced together that evening with all the
memories of daylight and keen air to lend magic to the flowers and
the sparkling lamps and the murmur of stringed instruments.
“I love the little pointed shadows under everybody’s feet,” she said,
“and the vague pools of light in the polished floor. It’s better than
fairies on the village green.”
“That’s not an absolute opinion,” he answered, laughing. “Shouldn’t
we be on the side of the fairies if we were dancing on green grass
now?”
To him it mattered only that they were dancing together, and her
silence acquiesced in his mood.
“There’s any number of people,” he exclaimed, “who are wishing the
music would stop. It’s strange to think of other people being tired
and bored.”
“Perhaps this isn’t the music they care for.”
“The old people?”
“Yes; probably they remember other tunes. Shall I ask the orchestra
to play something that was heard all over London thirty—forty—fifty
years ago? Shall I?”
They are for ever asking each other questions.
“Do you think anyone would dance to it?”
“I don’t know. Would we dance to this—fifty years on?”
He brushed aside the unimaginable future. At this moment she was
his, her voice speaking close to him, the curve of her cheek and
forehead clear beneath his eyes. He imagined suddenly that he
would remember this instant, that his future would be full of it; and
it took to itself already some of the glamour of history.
“Oh,” said she, “there’s Mr. Ordith watching us!”
The charm was lifted. He could not endure that another should peer
over his shoulder into the history-book of fancy, or that a stranger’s
eye should witness the building of this magic temple in which the
moment was to be preserved against the assaults of all time. Soon
the music faded into silence. A few feet slid on, and then stopped.
The room filled with human voices.
“That’s the end,” she said softly, and he did not find the remark
unnecessary. They sat down somewhere and talked little, each
aware of anticlimax. John was almost glad when Ordith, graceful and
self-confident, came up and took her away.
Perhaps her own emotion was communicated to Ordith; perhaps he,
perceiving it in her, realizing—as she did not—from what source it
flowed, and trying to take advantage of it, was himself entrapped.
He pursued a policy of what he described to himself as “talking big”;
he played upon an imagination already excited.
“I can’t bear to leave London,” he said. “And you are actually eager
to go! Life centres here. The people in this room have their fingers
on the pulse of the world.”
“The politicians?”
He smiled over her shoulder. “Yes. I know it is a middle-class fashion
to despise them. I can’t despise men with power and knowledge.
And not the politicians only. Everybody is here—the artists who
matter, the thinkers who are in touch. And at this moment, a crisis in
the history of the world, I am to go away.”
He made it sound a tragedy.
He knew that to Twenty Years the present is always the opportunity
of mankind—and an unpromising Twenty Years it would be if it
thought otherwise. He knew, too—for his shrewdness went deeper
than the surface—that Twenty Years has an understanding of many
truths that Disappointment, not Philosophy, describes subsequently
as illusions. But, so far as his immediate purpose was concerned, it
mattered nothing whether the ideas that dominated Margaret were
illusory or not. Only the fact of their domination was of importance
to him, for they were to be a means to his own dominion. He spun a
web of dreams that he might entangle her in it. His voice, which he
could tune to the very ring of sincerity, told her how the future was
to be glorious. There was to be battle against all the powers of evil—
a new political outlook, new relations between state and state, and
between governors and governed. That was the mission of their
generation.
“We must grip the essentials,” he said. “We must permit no
compromise. And, above all, we mustn’t lose ourselves in mere talk
—we must act temperately, and according to a clearly-conceived
plan.... And women!” he exclaimed. “What a tremendous chance!
Your influence is growing every day; soon it will be direct as well as
indirect. And then the best of you will not be content to manipulate
the party strings at dinner-tables. You will be cutting them where
they are obstructive. You will come with free hands—no stale
tradition—no fear of precedent—no corruption of ideals.”
He felt proud when he had delivered himself of this. It would win
him laurels, he thought, among the forward young men, with their
pamphlets and loose collars, their carpet-slippers and their political
ikons. And Margaret was in a mood to question little. Cynicism and
doubt had small influence over her that night. Was not Mr. Ordith
her father’s friend?—and, Heaven knew! he was no vague idealist.
And had not Mr. Ordith a reputation for soundness and level-
headedness where such a reputation was most difficult to win? She
paused neither to doubt nor to believe. It was enough that his
enthusiasm awakened in her a sensation of warmth and brilliance, of
assurance and power. And, though she danced with him a second
and a third time, and though intervals elapsed between the dances,
the sensation endured, and grew in intensity, grew until—so
inflammatory are wine, ideals, and the contact of dancing—Ordith,
too, became aware of its heat, and flamed amazingly, so that he was
cool-headed no more. The conflagration, he found, gave him greater
power over her—though power of a new kind. He was too wise to
speak personal endearments to her, even the lightest, but his voice
assumed a lower, more intimate tone, and vibrated now with a
passion that was not artificial. He spoke of the foolishness and
selfishness of other women, their blindness to ideals—how he loved
that word!—their fear of sacrifice, their failure to understand the real
needs of the world. It was implied that she was wonderfully different
from them all. How many and far-reaching were the victories within
the scope of a mind inspired by her motives! Somehow he was to be
her ally in these victories. “We,” he said, and “I,” but never “You,”
thereby binding her to him without emphasizing her submission to
the bond. The reality of triumph is in an opponent’s ignorance of his
own defeat.
But control was slipping from Ordith. After a brief struggle he let it
go, and rejoiced in his freedom. His eyes, looking down on her, lost
their breadth of vision, and saw none of her surroundings. Her
proximity obscured all else; his touch on her overwhelmed every
other sensation. His muscles tightened his grip, but it seemed to him
only that her body was laying a heavier and heavier weight upon his
arm. He danced faster, but was aware only of greater rapidity of
movement and breathing close to his heart.
Slowly this extraordinary concentration of his mind produced its
effect upon her. First she became conscious of having, in his view,
lost individuality, of having been relegated somehow to the position
of an instrument. Her will was to revolt against that, but revolt was
contrary to her inclination. She found a certain pleasure in the
strength of the current that was bearing her away, even while she
feared it. She said something; he did not answer. She repeated it;
and from his silence understood that his mind would not receive her
words. It was as if a wave, sweeping over her head and robbing her
voice of its effect, had roused her to resistance. His arm had grown
firmer about her. Her feet were scarce touching the ground. She
wanted breath and foothold. She became frightened, active,
determined to break free.
“Why are you dancing so fast?” was all she contrived to say.
But he heard, and looked down to drink in her powerlessness, to
exult in his own power, to strengthen his grip again. He could not
talk. His imagination was running on and on, dragging him with it.
His thoughts, which had no traceable sequence, were presenting to
him pictures of such vividness that he screwed up his eyes as if he
might physically see them.
“I am tired,” Margaret said, shrinking into the conventional. “Shall
we stop?” Then, a moment later, with a flash of determination that
compelled his attention: “I want to stop.”
He let her go suddenly—too suddenly. Her eyes were raised
questioningly for an instant, and, as he met them, were abruptly
turned away. He took her out of the crowd. He wanted to get
beyond the range of the many eyes that he imagined were turned
upon him. She sat down where he told her to sit.
“Listen,” he said. “I told you just now that I was sorry to leave
England. I want to tell you why. There’s so much to do here—so
much danger to be warded off. And this going away is”—he paused
feelingly—“is somehow shirking the fight. My father and I don’t
agree on all points. I should like to see Ordith’s run differently—the
position of our labour improved. I am on their side.... They know
it.... Further, the whole attitude of armament firms must be
changed. As matters stand their ambitions are warlike; their
influence on political action is—well, you can understand that. And
my chance to change all this is unique. No other young man has my
opportunities. But I stand alone, absolutely alone. I——”
“But why are you telling this to me?”
“Because—oh, don’t you feel as I do? Don’t you——”
“But why are you telling it to me now?”
He was seized by an impulse to put away even this rattling imitation
of reason, to make his spring now. All the world was moving so
swiftly about him that he felt only force and sensation could keep
pace with it. It pleased him to see that her eyes were frightened,
and that, though she wanted to go away, she could not move. This
was power; but he would not use it yet; he must not use it for
months to come. Now he would go on saying something while he
watched her.
“Can’t you understand why I am telling it to you?”
“You talk so fast,” she said, her hand travelling to her forehead.
“Then I’ll talk slower.”
“No,” she said, under her breath; but he paid no attention. His voice
continued—to her ears as inexplicit as music.
“Between us we will lay great plans,” she heard him say presently,
and her protest against being thus included was never uttered. “Out
in the East—the home of all philosophy—we shall have time to think.
Margaret, you will help me to get all this clear in my mind?”
All what? He didn’t know or care. It sufficed that he had bound her
to him by some tie, the more difficult to break because it was so
vague. Moreover, his use of her name had been resisted only by a
quick intaking of breath.
“You will help me?” he repeated. “You must—you must.” Then, too
confident, he stooped over her and reached with his hands for hers.
By his lightest touch the spell he had laid upon her was broken. She
started up, the blood tingling in her. She knew that she had
acquiesced in something she had not considered, as if she had
spoken in her sleep. His ascendancy was revealed as menacing—a
cloud that overshadowed her, and, while it held her attention,
warned her to take shelter.
“I can hear the music again.”
“But the next dance is ours.”
“No.”
“You promised. Look—your name.” He offered his programme, sure
that she would not examine it or remember the number of the
dance.
And she said without looking, “I can’t dance now.”
He answered as if he were stroking her. “Ah, you are trembling.
What is the matter? Have I frightened you?”
“Frightened?” The sound of her own laugh restored her calmness.
“What is there to be frightened of? But see,” she went on, holding
out her programme, “I am sure you have made a mistake. This
dance is Mr. Lynwood’s.”
John was coming up the stairs towards them. “Then I will find you
again a little later,” said Ordith, and disappeared.
“What has happened?” John asked, looking into her face, which had
now grown pale.
“Happened? Nothing—oh, nothing. I was a little tired, that’s all.”
And, in truth, Margaret knew of no cause for an effect so
overwhelming. Looking back, she wondered how so strong an
emotion had taken hold of her. Why had she been afraid? and why
now was she conscious of having escaped, of having awakened—of
having lost something, too?
“Let’s go and dance,” she said.
“No, not now,” John answered, “not if you are tired.” He led her
away, and stopped opposite two chairs. “There,” he said, “sit there
for a little while where it is cool. Don’t talk or worry.”
When she was seated he moved away a few yards, wishing to give
her the time she needed. Gradually she realized that the cloud
charged with so much power over her was indeed gone. The
atmosphere seemed less stifling. Freedom of thought and action was
returning. Presently she remembered John and was grateful because
he had taken her away from the place where she had been with
Ordith; and grateful, with warmth of gratitude, because he had
known how to be silent. Her look summoned him.
“You don’t know how good you have been,” she said.
“I hated to see you hurt, to-night of all nights.”
“To-night?”
“Because everything seemed so good. I was looking forward to
China and seeing you there. To-night seemed a kind of celebration of
the future.”
“But that remains,” she said, as if the recollection of the fact
surprised her. She could not forget Ordith’s power, or, for the time,
think of any part of her existence as being altogether free from his
influence. Where was he now? Was he near her? Involuntarily her
hand went out to John’s sleeve.
She tried to thank him for what he had done. Her sense of relief, of
safety after danger, made his chance intervention seem the result of
his kindness of heart; and every word she spoke, hesitating and
tremulous, between tears and laughter, was marvellous to him.
“Tell me,” he said, “what can I do? You haven’t told me the facts. Do
you trust me a little?”
“There are no facts.”
“But he——”
“Oh, leave him!” she exclaimed. “Let’s go down to where all the
people are. What time is it?” she added suddenly, as if awaking from
a wild dream to the surer business of the day.
He told her, but was certain she did not hear, her thoughts having
fled great distances by then. As he followed her, he realized dimly
with how great a force he had to contend, but he did not understand
how indirectly this force could act. He felt sure that Ordith must
have been in some manner definitely violent—have tried to kiss her,
he angrily imagined. Then her “Oh, leave him!” echoed in his ears.
“Margaret,” he said, “I haven’t been trying—to find things out. I
wanted to help if I could.”
She turned to him with a little movement of confidence which was a
full reward. “I know. Don’t think I am ungrateful. I shan’t ever
forget. Your coming made everything different—and secure again. I
would tell you about it if I could—if there was anything to tell; I
think telling would help. But there’s nothing—nothing tangible, at
least.” She shivered, as if something cold and flat had touched her.
“Only a feeling of having been caught and of having broken free
again.”
Together they went into the ball-room, where faces, still smiling their
response to some jest spoken a moment earlier, seemed out of
touch with reality. This colour, this light on chin and throat, this flash
of jewels and gleaming of shirt-fronts, was as a picture in oils that
had hung unnoticed while life pursued its course swiftly, and to
which, now there was breathing space, attention had reluctantly
returned.
 CHAPTER VIII
THE NET

On Sunday, John and Ordith were much with Margaret, and even
when she contrived to be alone she found she could not exclude
them from her mind. To think of either was disquieting, and she
needed peace. She felt that John was watching her. He knew how
she needed help and was eager to render it would she but indicate a
means. Her failure to indicate it was being interpreted by him as a
lack of trust for which he blamed himself. He could not understand,
his eyes said continually, what he had done or left undone that
repelled her confidence. And that he should attribute her silence to a
fault in himself added to her uneasiness. She could not speak her
mind to him; she could not ask him to help her with a problem the
terms of which were not yet clear to herself. She felt that he was
waiting for her to speak, and reproaching himself with some dullness
or hardness that, as he imagined, was sealing her lips. Several times
she tried to speak—if only to tell him that she was aware of his
sympathy; but words would not come.
Moreover—and this itself was an element in her difficulty—was not
John weak with her own weakness? Together they were set about by
forces stronger, infinitely stronger, than themselves. There was
comradeship in that, but not help. It was as if they were two
children side by side in a darkness that contained a menace, of
which both were in different measures conscious, but which neither
was able to grapple or even to define.
For a time, while she was in church, her trouble had been less. The
air of security, of permanence, of prosperity about the place, and the
absence of any kind of tumult within it had lulled and comforted.
“The peace of God which passeth all understanding....” She had
bowed her head with the rest, mistaking the decorous silence for
peace indeed. But, as she rose from her knees, her eyes
encountered Ordith’s which seemed half-laughingly to search and
accuse her; and, as if following a suggestion of his, she began to
think that the support she had received from the service had been
based, not upon faith, but upon the extraordinary beauty of its
prose. The hymns, with their redundancies and bad rhymes, had
meant nothing to her, despite their devotion, and to the modern
prayers on contemporary subjects she had given no heed. The
balance and completeness of the Litany, the Lessons’ direct beauty,
the Collects’ vigorous restraint—upon these her attention had been
concentrated. Though the matter of the Benediction had remained
unchanged, it would have brought no comfort to her if it had been
expressed differently—by the Archbishops, for example.
“Hadn’t old man Cranmer a wonderful ear for words?” Ordith said
lightly, cutting Margaret to the quick. She felt that he read her
thoughts, or—and this with a pang of fear that was reflected in the
eyes she suddenly raised—that he had imposed his thoughts upon
her.
“You don’t like my saying that?” he asked, looking into her face. And
even as she moved her lips to reply, to express somehow the
resentment that was burning in her, his power asserted itself and
drove her back to say, scarcely of her own will:
“Yes; it’s quite true.”
Like a pleasing, habitual vice, Ordith frightened and controlled her.
Her father had chosen him as her husband, and her mother seemed
to acquiesce in the choice. She pictured herself saying “No” to
Ordith, and “No” to her father and mother. She would be very calm,
very determined, and then all would be over, the battle fought and
won. Surely it would be easy to say “No.” One word to be spoken,
one definite resolve to be kept—that was all. Nowadays coercion was
impossible; the time of starvation, and imprisonment, and whips was
long past. What she had to do was to look Ordith in the face, say
“No,” and stand by her decision. It sounded easy.
And, on the other side, was the tradition of obedience to her father,
hard to break she knew, for she had failed often to break it, but not
unbreakable; and there was one thing more. Of this she thought, as
men think of all things that are too vast for their imagination’s
canvas, in a concrete, limited manner: so are we compelled to
picture God in the form of man. She thought of it as Ibble’s works
and yards as she had seen them when she had gone with her
mother to the launching of ships—bare tracts of granite setts,
buildings in common stock brick that had the motley appearance of
disease, sheds of corrugated iron, cranes that groped above her
head, railway-lines that tripped her feet, cables coiled up like
gigantic snakes, flames from darkness, the mutter of machinery and
the creaking of belts, the glass roofs through which the light came
blurred and thin. The foundries, where the molten metal grumbled
and spat and threw up scum on the runner-cups, had been her
childhood’s conception of hell. The whole place filled her with terror.
She had seen the workmen, with their sullen, yellow faces streaked
with machine-oil, and eyes dulled by labour into which imagination
had never entered. Her life had been overshadowed by Ibble’s, and
not her life only, but her father’s and mother’s lives. Her parents had
been omnipotent in her nursery. What power was this, then, that
stood behind them and dominated them? She learned to think of
Ibble’s as a tyrant inexorable because unapproachable; an
immovable background against which alone the movements of life
were visible, and in contrast to whose darkness life’s colours shone
out. As she grew older she discovered that Ibble’s did not stand
alone, but was a unit in a complex system, a string in a universal
net. The nature and extent of the net itself were not clear. These
facts stood out: that nearly all the world was in its meshes; that
somehow inclusion in it was profitable; that those who thought to
break it were fools and dreamers; that at any rate, though it was
delicate and fragile so that the winds of fate blew it hither and
thither, it was impossible to break. That was the first article in a
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