Animating the interstice: Protest as a creative act on the fringe of the ‘creative city’

Creative City discourse tends to rely heavily on paradigmatic examples of culture-led urban change that establish particular parameters for what the creative city can offer and achieve. Jordan Rowe reflects on the spatial implications of the recent UCU strike at UCL, and how it may help us to extend, reshape and challenge our understandings of what the creative city is — or could be.

For fourteen days in early 2018, UCU members at many UK universities went on strike. As part of the industrial action at UCL, proactive union members and supportive students organised an extensive programme of social, educational and political teach-outs on picket lines, as an alternative to the disrupted teaching timetable. The creativity on display inspired me to consider how such actions can re-frame our current understandings of the ‘creative city’.

A particularly interesting aspect of the teach-outs were the temporary occupation of micro-spaces immediately in front of UCL buildings. These surplus spaces became the sites of temporary acts of creative production and dissemination. Three in particular caught my eye, and the juxtapositions below display how the protest transformed them from passive to active sites:

15m² outside the Bartlett School of Architecture at 22 Gordon Street

A small space was utilised by strikers in front of the Bartlett School of Architecture

Steps leading to the entrance of UCL Art History outside 20 Gordon Square

(Art) Histories of Protest Teach Out on the steps of UCL’s Art History Department building

Ramp outside 14 Taviton Street, home to UCL Anthropology

The UCL Anthropology Teach Out programme animated the ramp leading up to the building

Bottom-up forms of creativity animated these interstices between the everyday street and one of the anchor tenants of the creative city inside — part of the ‘wellspring of the creative economy’, as Richard Florida puts it (2005: 144).

Decorated by self-made banners, placards and an endless amount of punning, the teach-outs covered subjects from mental health in academia, the art histories of protest, gentrification and even the creative city itself, whilst self-published zines were distributed and ‘making’ sessions organised. As scholar-activist Paul Chatterton writes, protests derive their energy ‘from the creativity and inventiveness of participants’ (2000: 395), and those in attendance at the teach-outs were encouraged to be active contributors, which leant the pickets a bustling atmosphere.

The Strike Chronicles: daily self-published zines produced and handed out on the picket line outside 22 Gordon Street

For urban planners and policymakers, spaces of urban void — albeit here on a micro scale — are economically unviable and thus ignored (Colomb, 2012). But my takeaway from the occupations is that, no matter how small, place itself can be a creative asset. The frontline of these protests had the effect of activating spaces which would otherwise remain excess and not be understood as creative. Re-framing them through the strike allows us to expand our concept of what can constitute part of the creative city.

If we understand ‘collectivity […] boundary spanning and risk taking’ to be notions of creativity (Pratt, 2000, cited in Chatterton, 2000: 391), then these protests displayed the radical end of creative practice, and might be considered part of a revised democratic, sustainable and healthy creative city.

A teach-out on public/private space by James O’Leary outside 22 Gordon Street

The suppression of protest in the increasingly privatised and regulated urban sphere (Minton, 2012), makes it appear unlikely policymakers will change tact and allow for more freedoms on where these activities can take place. The use of the micro-spaces being due to the limited rights strikers have to be elsewhere. Yet, considering how other originally subversive acts have been co-opted into the existing creative city framework — from support for LGBTQ+ Pride marches to the (semi-)promotion of street art — there is a precedent that exists for protest to be situated — or appropriated — within the current toolkit.

Bibliography

Chatterton, P. (2000) ‘Will the real Creative City please stand up?’, City, 4, 3, 390–397.

Colomb, C. (2012) ‘Pushing the Urban Frontier: Temporary Uses of Space, City Marketing, and the Creative City Discourse in 2000s Berlin’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 34, 2, 131–152.

Florida, R. L. (2005) Cities and the Creative Class, New York: Routledge.

Minton, A. (2012) Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city, London: Penguin.

Gallery of teach-out images

This article was originally published in March 2018 as a 500 word exercise on the Creative Cities module of the MSc Urban Studies course at UCL.

Jordan Rowe is the Centre Manager of UCL Urban Laboratory and an MSc Urban Studies student in the Department of Geography, UCL. You can follow him on Twitter at @jordanmjrowe.