User:Ana Luisa-Synopsis Creative Industries 1-

SYNOPSIS MURDER OF CREATIVITY IN ROTTERDAM

The essay is about Rotterdam’s attempt to label itself as creative city in order to attract entrepreneurial people and stimulate investment. The author enumerates the diverse obstacles that the city encounters in the pursuit of this goal, giving its characteristics, history and internal policy. Ultimately, the essay unfolds the contemporary exploitation of the creative industries as real estate label and the policies followed in this case by Rotterdam to make use of it. Creative mode of existence turns out to be a label of distinction and authenticity that people are willing to pay for. There is an illustration of two case studies: the Lloyd’s Kwartier and the Poetic Freedom. The first is a large scale waterfront development in which typologies of working, living and leisure relate to what is believed to be the creative way of living; the second refers to a strategy of injecting a (creative) community into a degrading area in order to regenerated it and increase its value. The author believes that the creative class should learn how to “act un-creatively” in order to dismantle the image used by developers and get free from speculative manipulation.

SYNOPSIS IMMATERIAL CIVIL WAR

The essay focuses on the collective production of value and on the strong competition that cognitive producers have to endure in the immaterial domain. Several terms from different authors are introduced and help to illustrate the mechanisms of valorization behind an intellectual product (awakening of collective desire, imitation and the extent of its diffusion), its exploitation by capitalism (and the strategies in use: control of dissemination, setting up of monopolies and feeding of local resistance – great value generated on ‘authenticity’) and the precarious position of the creative worker himself. Barcelona and its real estate speculation are used in this case as an example of exploitation of the ‘immaterial’ domain by the ‘material’ one. The author suggests that an immaterial civil war is taking place; creation of ‘meaning’ seen as creation of ‘value’ sets the base for a permanent field of conflict in which the creative worker must fight individually. The author wishes that a future generation of cognitive workers will be able to leave their solely imagery field and get a grip on the material consequences of their immaterial effort, being able to claim a fair share of their produce. At the same time the author also pleas for a destruction of the myth around the creative industry, used and abused by developers, by its simple abandonment. There shall not be a radical resistance to it, once it will only contribute to accentuate the ‘authentic nature of creativity’ that the capitalism is looking for.