Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research

Abstract

In the lead up to the 2004 election, federal member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly, infamously argued that Penrith, the main locality in her electorate, was a 'pram city', and did not need improved funding for its university. The image of place invoked essentialist understandings of suburban residents: outer areas were meant to be working class and anti-intellectual; a commuter belt, where students weren't welcome, where men travelled from to work in factories and offices, and women looked after children. This hotly contested invocation built on pre-existing imaginary geographies of the city that construct binaries between inner and outer city areas: densely populated vs. sprawl; gentrified terraces vs. new estates; zones of production and creativity vs. sedate, consumer territory. Although such binaries have been long debunked by researchers, we argue in this article that lurking behind recent urban research (particularly the flood of work on creativity and the creative class) has been an unconscious reproduction of such binaries. Though certainly not expressed in Kelly's regressive terminology, emphasis has been placed on inner metropolitan, gentrified zones of cities, where industries like film, music and advertising have tended to locate. Middle and outer ring suburbs (as well as rural areas) are largely ignored, implied to be 'uncreative' zones-places of domestic consumption rather than sites of innovation, the arts and creativity. This article deconstructs these binaries. It critiques indexing measures that portray suburbs as 'lagging' and 'uncreative', and draws instead on longitudinal research on creative industries in Sydney to reveal a more complex story of social change and sectoral differentiation, of concentration, dispersal and relational networks.

Multiple Work Sites and City-wide Networks: a topological approach to understanding creative work

“…Creative industry activity maps premised on concentrations of creative workers or firms perpetuate ideas of inner-city dominance (Gibson & Brennan-Horley 2006), with networks and connections between actors in inner-city clusters inferred rather than evidentially revealed (Kong 2009). In a policy sense, this reinforces inner-city clusters as key locations in the creativity value chain, masking the role of other locations in the day-to-day operation of creative activities.…”

“…Because of the city's mix of small population size and low density, the applicability of existing creative city mapping techniques were also called into question ). Mapping creative workers across varying spatial scales is a common methodology for understanding spatial patterns of creative activity (see Gibson & Brennan-Horley 2006;De Propris et al 2009). However, Darwin's small population, and thus comparatively small raw total numbers of creative workers spread out across a predominantly low-density city, meant that statistical analysis of work locations from the census was never going to provide enough detail for understanding how and where creative work is carried out in Darwin.…”

Making Connections: creative industries networks in outer-suburban locations

“…The outer suburbs now tend to be places of demographic plurality and social and economic complexity (Gibson & Brennan-Horley 2006;Gleeson 2002;Randolph 2004;Salt 2006;Turner 2007). Processes of urban consolidation have contributed to structural shifts in the suburban landscape -low density suburbs have been in-filled and mixed-use development has enabled the growth of large-scale multipurpose buildings--changing the structure and experience of the suburbs (Gibson & Brennan-Horley 2006, p. 456 This study attends to three types of networks: 1) those developed and maintained amongst participants with colleagues who work in the same industry or creative practice but work in other companies or elsewhere; 2) professional and informal networking associations which contribute to professional development and business opportunities; 3) those developed between clients and potential clients.…”

Mental mapping the ‘creative city’

“…Combined with policy talk about the importance of the 'Creative Class' (Florida, 2002) as a key demographic, many cities have rushed to develop creative mapping documents -effectively audits of creative activity intended to inform the planning of cultural precincts and creative clusters (which in turn are meant to attract creative workers and inward investment). Understanding the spatial dimensions of these industries is fraught with problems (Pratt, 2004;Gibson and Kong, 2005;Gibson and Brennan-Horley, 2006) but nonetheless is considered necessary when planning creative industry policies. By considering the everyday movements of a wide variety of creative workers, whose voices are often missing from the majority of mapping audits (which focus instead on employment statistics, quantifiable economic outputs of 'high end' creative businesses and successful economic ventures), insights can be gleaned on how creative industries interface with the city at the vernacular, grassroots scale.…”