Cultural Economy: Achievements, Divergences, Future Prospects

Cultural Economy: Achievements, Divergences,Future Prospectsgeor_738 282..290

CHRIS GIBSONAustralian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research, School of Earth and EnvironmentalSciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia.Email: [email protected]

Received 2 June 2011; Revised 8 September 2011; Accepted 29 September 2011

AbstractThis paper reflects on two decades’ scholarship in geography on culturaleconomy, assessing strides made against some of the expectations of early pro-ponents. Cultural economy continues to be a polysemic term. In some quarters, itrefers to a type of economic geography into which matters of ‘culture’ areabsorbed. This work frequently focuses on the empirics of the so-called ‘culturaland creative industries’. Others see cultural economic research as an opportunityto move beyond the epistemological constraints of ‘culture’ and ‘economy’,questioning their status as foundational categories. This latter approach has beenused in a broader set of empirical projects encompassing technology, knowledge,and society. Contrasting threads of cultural economic research have helpfullymoved geographical scholarship beyond paradigmatic limitations, but jostlesomewhat uncomfortably within existing (and increasingly specialised) disciplin-ary and subdisciplinary fields. The risk is that by questioning the categoricalunderpinnings of much specialised research, cultural economy struggles to‘belong’ in the increasingly coded and compartmentalised university setting. Iconclude with a discussion of future prospects. Some measure of vitality could beachieved through incorporation of a cultural economy perspective into the press-ing issues of climate change, human sustenance, and urban infrastructure plan-ning. These are issues for which the polysemy of cultural economy could proveconstructive, transcending technocentric market ‘fixes’ and bland assumptionsabout how best to ‘green’ our cities – promoting instead ethnographic interroga-tions of how humans access, use, exchange, and value financial and materialresources as moral and social beings.

KEY WORDS cultural economy; cultural industries; creative industries; eco-nomic geography; climate change; resources; infrastructure

IntroductionIn the mid-1990s the phrase cultural economyemerged across the social sciences and humani-ties, referring to an epistemological agendato destabilise the presumed separateness of‘culture’ and ‘economy’ as categories. As the fullimplications of post-structuralism worked theirway through the discipline, it became clear thatthe ‘cultural’ turn applied to economic geogra-

phy too (Barnes, 2001). ‘Culture’ and ‘economy’were questioned as ‘natural’ categorical order-ings, and geographers sought to examine how theboundaries between them were in fact moreblurry than first presumed. Hence for Crang(1997, 3), ‘the economic is embedded in the cul-tural . . . the economic is represented throughcultural media of symbols, signs and discourses. . . the cultural is seen as materialized in the

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282 Geographical Research • August 2012 • 50(3):282–290doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2011.00738.x

economic’. The ‘economic’ only ever ‘emergesas a sphere that is distinct from the political,cultural, and social spheres rather than being dis-tinct a priori’ (Prince and Dufty, 2009, 1744).The agenda was to understand ‘economic’ phe-nomena as constituted through cultural processesand to investigate them through the methods andtheories of cultural research (du Gay and Pryke,2002; Amin and Thrift, 2007).

What has emerged since is in many waysa mishmash of approaches, arguments, andadvances (Gibson and Kong, 2005). The field (ifit could be called that) has matured to the extentthat there are now several ‘handbooks’ and‘readers’ on cultural economy (e.g. Towse, 2003;Amin and Thrift, 2004), but cultural economyremains a polysemic phrase – used to describeeverything from research on the music industryto maple syrup production (Hinrichs, 1998;Scott, 1999a), from didjeridus to food commod-ity chains (Dixon, 1999; Gibson and Connell,2003). In this piece, I take stock of advancesmade and hope to provide some clarity to thissituation, drawing out distinct threads of researchin cultural economy and suggesting furtheravenues where a cultural economy approachmight be fruitfully pursued (especially in light ofclimate change). I discuss international examplesthroughout, drawing where relevant on distinctlyAustralian contributions and particularities. Atthe outset it is worth saying that the Australiancontext – a settler nation, multicultural, with highper capita carbon emissions, as well as unre-solved questions of Aboriginal sovereignty andself-determination – is one I believe lendsitself especially to cultural economic analysis.Whether Australian researchers within andbeyond geography have capitalised on this ismoot. I also raise concerns about the institutionalcontext within which we do research – and whatincreasingly compartmentalised university struc-tures might mean for research agendas such ascultural economy that attempt to dissolve, ratherthan reinforce, categorical distinctions.

The cultural into the economicWhen cultural economy developed in geographyin the mid-1990s, one way in which the phrasegot appropriated was in expanding the scope ofeconomic geography. This was less a paradigmshift than a new focus – an approach whicheschewed the deconstructive elements of culturalgeography but nonetheless sought to integratethings associated with ‘culture’ into economicgeography. Emerging mainly from the USA (but

also continental Europe), this thread of culturaleconomy was pioneered by Allen Scott, MichaelStorper, Susan Christopherson, and others inwork on the fashion and clothing trade, musicand film (Christopherson and Storper, 1986;Crewe and Forster, 1993; Scott, 1996). Inspira-tion was drawn from David Harvey’s (1989) trea-tise on new cultural forms and changes in theorganisation of capitalism (itself a critique ofpostmodern culture, then much in vogue, whichhad largely been theorised without reference tothe economic).1 Emphasised were the commodi-fication of culture, small firms, specialisation,and the increasingly ‘cultural’ logics that under-pinned industrial growth and transformation. Sofor Scott (1999b, 807): ‘The cultural economycomprises all those sectors in modern capitalismthat cater to consumer demands for amusement,ornamentation, self-affirmation, social displayand so on’. The outputs of industries hithertoignored by economic geographers such as craft,fashion, music, jewelry, and film ‘have high sym-bolic value relative to utilitarian purpose’ (Scott,1999a, 807; see also Lash and Urry, 1994). Therewere clear parallels discussing cultural policyand urban regeneration (Bianchini and Parkin-son, 1993), and media industries and globalisedcultural identities in cultural studies (Appadurai,1990). There were links too to Bourdieu’s analy-sis of cultural capital and the art world (Johnson,2009), and an even earlier antecedent in Adornoand Horkheimer’s (1977) culture industry thesis– a neo-Marxist argument about the deleteriouseffects of commodification on ‘culture’ – thelatter interpreted as ‘corrupted’ by commercial-ism, with mass reproduction aimed at deceivingand suppressing the masses.

Cultural economy became an object of schol-arly investigation – ‘the’ cultural economy – seenas a new, major component of urban and regionaleconomies, manifest in specific sectors that cameto be known as ‘cultural industries’ and laterthe so-called ‘creative industries’ (Scott, 2000).This particular emphasis in part reflected thetraditions of American geography – where thecultural turn was not quite as thorough as inthe UK or Australia; where superorganic concep-tions of ‘culture’ persisted (following Sauer) orwhere culture was interpreted predominantly as‘way of life’ (following Raymond Williams).‘Culture’ encapsulated pastime, tradition, popculture, forms of expression in art and new mediaand, it was argued, such activities ought not to bethought of as distinct from the realm of econom-ics. ‘Culture’ buttressed new industries growth

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and thus needed to be explored as a ‘driver’ ofthe economy. Subsequent themes have includedagglomeration effects and the reliance on locallabour markets (Scott, 1999b); the importance ofcultural milieu as geographical settings for cre-ativity (Scott, 2000); regional cultural distinc-tions and how place gets into the design of things(Molotch, 1996); and the role of cultural inter-mediaries as ‘gatekeepers’ who filter the culturaleconomy, establishing fashionable tastes andbrokering commercial opportunities (Negus,2002).

Such work on the cultural economy continuesto be produced industriously, especially ener-gised by the widespread interest in creativityafter successful bestsellers by Richard Florida,Charles Landry, and others (Kong et al., 2006). InAustralia and elsewhere attempts were made toquantify the cultural economy and understand itsspatial logics, clusters, networks and, topologies(Gibson et al., 2002; Bathelt and Gräf, 2008;Brennan-Horley, 2010; Thomas et al., 2010).Certainly there has been scholarly interest, aswell as support from funding agencies (includingthe Australian Research Council [ARC]), forresearch which seeks to understand and makesense of the geography of cultural and creativeindustries in Australian contexts – for instancethe distinct character of Australian suburban,regional, and rural/remote settings (Gibson andBrennan-Horley, 2006; Johnson, 2006; Andersen,2010; Felton et al., 2010). There is now also asecond wave of research on the cultural and cre-ative industries that distances itself from theboosterish and neo-liberal tendencies of RichardFlorida-inspired consultancy reports, exploringinstead creativity in working-class contexts(Jayne, 2004; Warren and Gibson, in press) andforms of vernacular creativity beyond money-making activities (Edensor et al., 2009; Ettlinger,2010) – echoing earlier ethnographic work onworking-class youth subcultures which sought totheorise creativity in everyday life (Willis, 1990).Distinctly Australian examples include ruralcommunity festivals (Gibson et al., 2010), post-card production (Mayes, 2010), and hand-makingsurfboards (Warren and Gibson, 2011) – the latterin particular linked to debates about crafting,place identities, emotion, and precarious labour(Christopherson, 2008). As Mayes’ (2010, 19)research on postcards produced by a remoteWestern Australian community revealed, creativ-ity is frequently ‘quotidian activity in the serviceof daily problems (such as lack of local postcards,the need to keep busy, fundraising) with an

emphasis not so much on commerce or noveltybut rather on “usefulness” ’. Others have docu-mented side effects of the growth of the creativeeconomy in a broader urban and social context.Critiques have included the role of the culturaleconomy in hipster-led gentrification (Ley, 2003;Hae, 2011); precarious labour and cultures ofexploitation (McRobbie, 2002; Gibson, 2003);social displacement (Barnes and Hutton, 2009;Catungal et al., 2009); and the wholesale integra-tion of ‘creativity’ into all manner of corporateadvertising, property market promotions, and realestate development marketing.

Notwithstanding the increasingly voluminousoutput on cultural and creative industries, I detecta lingering scepticism within some quarters ofeconomic geography towards what is still con-sidered ‘that fluffy cultural stuff’ – stemmingfrom an aversion, perhaps, to niche industries orsectors that compel researchers to explore cul-tural trends and logics. If so, then much remainsto be done to take ‘culture’ seriously within eco-nomic geography. Additionally, definitions ofcreativity and understandings of what are ‘cul-tural’ industries are being opened up in muchmore ethnographic ways – an alternative sourceof vitality for this subfield. The exact nature ofcreativity as socio-spatial process remains, forinstance, an unresolved empirical question – onethat may deliver answers that have little to dowith established creative industries (Pope, 2005)or have much to say about tangible economicdevelopment policymaking. Another alternativeis for this sort of research to engage more fullywith some of the original precepts of culturaleconomy – to revisit to deeper questions abouthow ‘the economic’ is constituted and ‘known’ inthe first place.

The ‘economy’ as socio-technical practiceLet us for a moment return back to where culturaleconomy came from originally: a critique of thescientific impulse to divide and categorise theworld (and knowledge about it) without soundontological basis. Much as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’came to be understood as artificially divided intoscience and humanities (a conceptual binary thatunhelpfully cordoned off humans from their eco-logical surroundings, in turn hindering attemptsto generate more integrated understandings ofhuman-environmental relations), so too by the1990s ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ increasinglylooked like mere semantic constructs. ‘Culture’and ‘economy’ were conceptual artefacts of awestern intellectual tradition, rather than terms

284 Geographical Research • August 2012 • 50(3):282–290


that ‘naturally’ stemmed from concrete experi-ence and material reality. Another thread of cul-tural economy has grown out of this critique,separate to the thread discussed above: thisinvolves more phenomenological explorations ofhow ‘the economic’ is constituted and per-formed. In this approach, cultural economybegins with a stated phenomenon, event or sce-nario, and traces qualitatively the relationshipsthat unfold in situ between humans, technolo-gies, other living things, institutions, and over-arching ideologies (Amin and Thrift, 2007, 145)– the assemblage that comes together in such away as to be known as ‘the economy’. Ratherthan seeing all people as homo economicus,working to machinist rule as profit-seeking indi-viduals – or indeed, seeing culture as a separatesphere somehow beyond questions of materialresources and transactional relationships – thiskind of cultural economic research traces a‘single phenomenological plane’ (Amin andThrift, 2007, 145) outwards from a scenario orlocation, documenting actions and emergentrelationships between agents that shape materialoutcomes. Cultural economic research troublesthe certitude of the first principles of neoclassicaleconomics, and seeks to situate the goals andmotivations infusing economic decisions andtransactions as contingent (Amin and Thrift,2007, 145). Economic ‘rationality’ is, forinstance, ‘a symbolic logic formed as part ofsocial imaginaries, formed that is in culture’(Peet, 2000, 1222). There is no such ‘thing’ as‘the economy’, but rather humans and non-humans caught up in rhythms, movements, rela-tionships, and exchanges. Cultural economy heremerges to some extent with what in the 2000sbecame known as the ‘relational turn’ in eco-nomic geography (see Yeung, 2005).

Timothy Mitchell’s (2002; 2008) work hasbeen particularly influential. He explored how‘the economy’ only fairly recently (he arguessince the mid 20th century) came to be under-stood, defined and managed as a free-standingobject. Through examples including electricityinfrastructure markets and property title systems,Mitchell (2008, 1116) shows how the economywas literally built through the actions, ideas, andbehaviours of ‘experts’ – inventors, technocrats,and especially economists, who ‘claimed only todescribe this object [economics], but in fact. . . participated in producing it’. In this kind ofanalysis, ‘the economy’ is not a separate entitybut a ‘project’ that particular actors worktowards. Genealogical analysis is therefore

required to tease out the exact mechanisms andpathways that bring ‘the economy’ into being –‘it means making the issue of power and agencya question, instead of an answer known inadvance’ (Mitchell, 2002, 52–53). In this vein,Kong et al. (2006) trace how ‘the creativeeconomy’ comes into being as a site of knowl-edge and policymaking as powerful ideas of thecontribution of creativity to the economy circu-lated throughout Asia. Maggie Walker’s (2007)work in Tijuana on the Mexican/Americanborder likewise documents through ‘grounded’excavation the structures and discourses thatembed ‘culture’ in the urban economy via gov-ernmental practices. In her case, it was the veryidea of the ‘border renaissance’ that came intobeing through image-making and through theactions of civic leaders and authorities. In theAustralian context, Sally Weller (2009, 790)appropriated a parallel framework in her analysisof the aviation industry, and the Ansett collapsein particular, to demonstrate how the economic isshaped by ‘the timing of key events and thetipping points that reconfigure relational trajec-tories in fields of relationships’.

Clarification is warranted here between theargument that the ‘the economy’ is culturallyconstructed (such a view misses the point aboutthe affective power of economic knowledges)and the argument that ‘the economic’ is a socio-technical project. As Mitchell (2008) reminds us,‘Economic knowledge does not represent theeconomy from some place outside. It participatesin making sites where its facts can survive’(1116). Or as Jessop and Oosterlynck (2008,1155) put it, ‘only some economic imaginariesamong the many that circulate actually come tobe selected and institutionalized’. Hence in thecase of the electricity industry, rival technologiesand ‘systems’ circulated at the time of the inven-tion of electrical lighting, but only selected onescame to prominence, thus shaping an industryand patterning and defining ‘the economic’:

. . . the economic is not a calculus that existsin advance, which then determines the suc-cess or failure of different technologies. Theeconomy was not a pre-existing sphere, intowhich technological innovation introduceschanges. Rather, there are different attemptsto introduce calculations and persuade othersthat they are superior to rival models and cal-culations. The economy is a twentieth-centuryinvention that was built out of such projects.(Mitchell, 2008, 1118)



It is disappointing, I believe, that this thread ofcritical work on ‘the economic’ rarely interactswith the earlier thread of cultural economy, pre-viously discussed (a situation noted some yearsearlier by Gibson and Kong, 2005). In manyrespects, early conceptual work on culturaleconomy laid the groundwork for later rela-tional and non-representational approaches – indestabilising categorical distinctions anddrawing attention to the role of actors, knowl-edges, and technologies in constituting what weunderstand as ‘economic’. But this kind of ana-lytical framework remains notably missing fromthe bulk of cultural economy-as-creative indus-tries research. That this is so is a missed oppor-tunity for economic geographers but also anirony – because academics researching creativeindustries have through their very empiricalexplorations brought into being ‘the creativeeconomy’ (as if it really were a component ofthe economy existing out there and just waitingto be documented and analysed). A rareexample of where the two threads have beenbrought together is in Nick Lewis et al.’s(2008) work on the New Zealand fashion indus-try – which demonstrates how in this particularcase a set of state political projects – globalisa-tion, the knowledge economy, creative cities,and social development – were serviced bypromotion of the designer fashion industry.Another example (not coincidentally also ema-nating from the University of Auckland’s geog-raphy department) is Brett Christophers’ (2009)work on the television industry. Christophersseeks both to trace a Marxian political economyof the globalising television industry andthrough it, to understand how national markets(‘territories’, in TV lingo) come into being aseconomic entities, imagined by media corpora-tions, measured through ratings systems andwhich then form the basis of advertising, invest-ment, and integration/disintegration strategies.Christophers’ is an empirical study of a culturalindustry par excellence, but also a deeper inter-rogation of how markets are measured andmapped, how they become known, controlled,and regulated. These examples notwithstanding,much work calling itself cultural economy inNorth America and Europe proceeds uninhib-ited – as if the ontological critique of ‘the eco-nomic’ never happened.

For me, a different kind of unresolved ques-tion is how relational cultural economy mightflourish in the increasingly segmented and neo-liberalised university setting. In Australia, the

Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) exer-cise has brought into being its own calculus to‘measure’ and ‘know’ research – a technicalmethod that produces its own understanding ofthe knowledge economy (and which is a produc-tion of a knowledge economy itself), via metricsto assess ‘quality’ in research (mirroring earlierincarnations of similar exercises in the UK andNew Zealand). The tension is that culturaleconomy seeks to dissolve categorical bound-aries at precisely the same time that the govern-mental urge is to compartmentalise knowledgefurther into minute ‘field of research’ codes,for the purposes of measurement. Journals arealigned with disciplinary codes, and outputs,grants, and people apportioned to disciplines. Aconcern I have is that all the intellectual effortthat has gone into questioning conceptual bound-aries between ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ will countfor little if the governmental impulse reigningover the university sector is towards further com-partmentalisation and specialisation. In the verymoment when significant foundational debatesseem possible between geographers, economists,political scientists, and sociologists about theartifice we call ‘the economy’, the system thatgoverns academic quality separates out effortsfrom within these disciplines for the purposes ofranking. Slippery notions such as culturaleconomy seem too radically hybrid for thissystem of metrics to ‘count’. And yet culturaleconomy ironically provides precisely the kindof ontologies needed to critically engage with theERA as a socio-technical project of promotingthe knowledge economy. Perhaps such workcan only ever exist within a rhizomatic patternof connections across disciplines – culturaleconomy constituting a quasi-anarchic field ofresearch emerging intermittently from belowtraditional disciplinary settings, includinggeography.

Future prospects: cultural economy inthe age of climate changeAnother as-yet-untapped potential for culturaleconomy is returning debate back to early 20thcentury notions of ‘economy’ – dropping ‘the’ inorder to revisit ‘economy’ as the basic notion ofthe ‘proper husbanding of material resources’(Mitchell, 2008, 1116). This was a notion muchmore widespread, for instance, within socialisedpractices in the Great Depression, but that couldbe revived now and inflected with a distinctlycultural twist in light of the above conceptualadvances. What I mean here is that, in light of the



cultural economic critique of the ontology of ‘theeconomic’, researchers might do well to explore‘economy’ not as an objective entity to bemodelled by expert economists, but as an ethno-graphic interrogation of how humans access,use, exchange, and value financial and materialresources as moral and social beings. For me,this is a fruitful possibility, a way to move from attimes difficult critiques of ‘the economic’ as gov-ernmental project to more tangible questionsabout how local, regional, urban or nationaleconomies are put together and the relationships,decisions and principles that govern them. This istimely, for the ascendancy of the human inshaping earth systems (what is increasinglybeing termed the Anthropocene) brings with itunparalleled environmental challenges, notablyclimate change, that are in essence problems ofeconomy (in the sense of the husbanding ofmaterial resources). There is a point of conver-gence here with Gibson-Graham’s (2006; 2008)agenda to open up debate on alternatives to capi-talism: if cultural economy is one means to pullthe carpet out from underneath the ontologicalcertainty of capitalism as the only way of con-ceiving reality, then all manner of more equi-table, sustainable, and rewarding alternatives canbe imagined into being (Gibson-Graham andRoelvink, 2010).

I would argue that cultural economy resonateswell with the imminent requirement that wequestion current unsustainable economic prac-tices – requiring, I would argue, a bolder sense ofnormative critique of the ‘rightness’/‘wrongness’of forms of production and commoditisation(Castree, 2004, 32) – and that we think throughthe values we want to ascribe to nature, people,energy, and goods as secure livelihoods andsustenance are sought. The cultural economyapproach suits considerations of basic questionsof sustenance and survival, but in a 21st centurycultural setting clearly shaped by complicatedprocesses of migration, multiculturalism, con-tradictory environmental positionings, coloniallegacies, new information technologies. Wain-wright (2010, 988) is right in arguing that‘capitalism is at the heart of the challenge ofconfronting climate change, and any seriousattempt to address global climate change mustcontend with global capitalism’. But key to this isalso exploring how capitalism connects, joins,circulates, and binds people, goods, technolo-gies, nature – differently across space – so wemight then begin to imagine alternative connec-tions, circuits, and joins.

This is important politically, because there ispotential in thinking across the culture–economy divide for how we respond at thespecies-level to human-induced climate change– beyond the empty rhetoric of ‘sustainability’(Davidson, 2010) or simply seeking market‘fixes’ based on accounting and carbon pricing(that themselves become ‘economic’ projects ofa different sort; Yusoff, 2009). Cultural economydissolves for instance 20th century binary con-cepts such as production/consumption thatunhelpfully prevent more integrated analysis ofthe socioecological routes, circuits, and path-ways of commodities (Watson and Lane, 2011).Just as capitalism is wrong (morally and empiri-cally) to reduce all of nature to a stock ofexploitable resources (‘a gigantic gasolinestation, an energy source for modern technologyand industry’, as Heidegger put it (1955, quotedin Wainwright, 2010, 988)), it is empiricallyfaulty to ignore how ‘economy’ is managed pro-saically within the household, within cities,within communities – to reduce all that is sig-nificant within the spaces of everyday life to‘consumption’, to one mere passive link in asystem of capitalist accumulation. ImportantAustralian work on water has demonstrated this,conceptualising households as sites of produc-tion as well as consumption (Allon and Sofoulis,2006; Head and Muir, 2007) and demonstratingcomplexities in the husbandry of water as amaterial resource (Moy, in press).

Also under question in light of climatechange (and financial crisis) is the very nature of‘the’ economy itself – in Mitchell’s sense of theeconomy as socio-technical project. Recentdebates in Australia about the future of manu-facturing (and in particular steel, after Blue-Scope announced the axing of a thousand jobsin Port Kembla) have mutated with climatechange and recession anxieties into a muchlarger public debate about exactly what consti-tutes the Australian economy, how to regulate it,and which industry lobby groups hold sway overits constitution. At stake are jobs, livelihoods,and carbon emissions. In 2010–2011, Australia’sminerals boom drove the national currency tounparalleled heights, rendering steel (and othermanufacturing) exports uncompetitive. Mean-while, mining companies ran public advertisingcampaigns about the contributions of mining tothe national interest and thwarted Federal Gov-ernment attempts to introduce both a mining taxand a price on carbon (in the process even top-pling Kevin Rudd, Australia’s most popular



post-war Prime Minister). Responding to massjob losses at BlueScope in Port Kembla (thatwere attributed to a collapse in exports based onAustralia’s high value currency), AustralianWorkers’ Union national secretary Paul Howesthus suggested:

The question the Australian community needsto ask itself – is, do we want to be a countrythat still makes things? Do we want to value-add to our natural resources, or do we want tobecome just one big sandpit for China and atourism resort for North Asia? . . . I think wecan remain a country which makes things. . . we must because it is in our strategic inter-est – but that means things are going to have tochange. (Quoted on ABC Radio, 22 August2011, 8:10am)

At precisely the same time as governmentalprojects to reform the economy in response toclimate change were launched (through forexample a carbon price), the mining industrysought to further their own project for the Aus-tralian economy – one firmly based on extractiveexports and profits – to the detriment of otherAustralian sectors and workers and, via subse-quent greenhouse gas emissions, ultimately tothe atmosphere. Variously deployed in service ofthis ‘quarry vision’ are forms of myth, marketing,and mania (Pearse, 2009). Cultural economy iswell positioned to contribute critiques of suchcontemporary issues, by seeking to illuminatethe Australian economy as an invention ratherthan an actual entity – and in so doing openopportunities for debate about how it could beput together differently, in ways that do not relyon coal.

Urban infrastructure planning is another,somewhat related area where more cultural eco-nomic analysis would be welcome. Greg Young(2008) has foreshadowed this in his argument forthe overdue need to enculturate the practice ofplanning. Rather than ghettoise ‘culture’ within‘cultural planning’ as a discrete but marginalenterprise (a tendency already there to only everput ‘culture’ into arts ministries or communityservices governmental divisions), the argumentis to open planning in its entirety up to self-reflexive, critical judgement: ‘a planning of thiskind would have a much greater change ofrunning with the grain of culture and not againstit . . . to recognise diversity both in communitiesand in epistemologies of knowledge’ (Young,2008, xv). And in a twist on the relational eco-nomic analysis described above, it becomes

possible, I would argue, to see all seemingly‘economic’ infrastructure planning (whether forfreeways, sewers, fresh water, public schools,community clinics, housing estates, carbonreduction schemes) as cultural technologies –coming to constitute ‘the urban economy’, butalso what we understand as ‘urban cultures’,from the patterning of commuter movementsand attempts to produce more ‘liveable’ cities tomore ‘adaptable’ or ‘sustainable’ citizens. Theseare not just essential services but technologiesthat variously regulate, constrain, or liberatepeople living within cities. There are links here togovernmentality studies of state infrastructureprovision (Dufty, 2007) but also to archaeo-logical and anthropological conceptions of tech-nology as material culture (Miller, 1997; Hollen-back and Schiffer, 2010). How might urbaninfrastructure planning be conducted differentlyto get away from profit as the only legitimatebenefit towards other kinds of public ‘goods’(O’Neill and McGuirk, 2005; O’Neill, 2010),including those fashioned to respond to the chal-lenge of climate change?

Taking ‘culture’ seriously in infrastructure andgovernmental service debates seems to me to becritical to redress what O’Neill (2010, 10) argueshave been ‘failures of understanding what infra-structure is and what we want it to be’. Thealternative is the further entrenchment of obfus-catory financialisation mechanisms and the hard-nosed calculus of market economics as the onlyways of ‘knowing’ infrastructure provision –even amidst the onset of climate change. Knox-Hayes (2010, 960) makes a similar prediction,painting a dark scenario where capitalism, unableto ‘account for impact on an independent naturalenvironment’, will through carbon pricing andtaxing mechanisms find new ways to completelyabsorb nature into its logic: ‘rather than addressthis problem, the solution is to convert the envi-ronment into something that capitalism can valueand trade . . . transferring the environment intocapitalism is seen as the only viable way to saveit’. Lest this depressing scenario fully eventuate,research on issues as diverse as household sus-tainability, manufacturing, infrastructure provi-sion, climate change adaptation, or everydaycreativity could productively pursue conceptualand empirical agendas opened up by culturaleconomy. Such research can in an ethnographicsense remind us of what matters, to people,beyond capitalist abstractions, through tangibleconceptions of material resources, circuits, andflows.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSFor conversations that helped shape my thoughts for thisarticle, and for generous and constructive comments onearlier drafts, I thank Lesley Head, Andrew Warren, BenGallan, Janelle Cornwell, Chantel Carr, Justin O’Connor, andthe journal’s anonymous reviewers.

NOTE1. In the 1980s and 1990s, development geographers and

even some mainstream economists had sought toacknowledge ‘culture’ as a context for development chal-lenges and failures – though this strain of incorporating‘culture’ into the ‘economic’ remained largely separatefrom the work calling itself ‘cultural economy’, and hassince been subject to critique – see Sheppard (2011).

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Documents

Cultural Economy: Achievements, Divergences, Future Prospects