Demystifying the Creative City
Fuse Magazine presents:
Town Hall: Demystifying the Creative City: Tired of all the creativity blah blah blah?
Organized by Fuse Magazine and Creative Class Struggle
The Town Hall will be followed with DJ Triple-X, Dancing and the Launch Party for Fuse Magazine’s summer issue, Goliath vs Goliath
Toronto Free Gallery
1277 Bloor Street West
Thursday June 18, 2009
Doors Open at 6:30 pm
Panel Begins at 7pm to 8:30
Party from 9pm to 1am
For press inquiries contact: Heather McLean hmclean@yorku.ca or Izida Zorde Izida@fusemagazine.org
Fuse Magazine and activists collective Creative Class Struggle are holding a Town Hall to talk about the real effects of the Creative City model currently produced in planning trends in communities across the city and globally. This conversation is intended to demystify this celebration and use of ‘creativity’ in economic development, land use planning, arts programming and community development. We are responding to these recent trends, popularized by urban researchers like Richard Florida.
The Creative City logic, advertises places of innovation, style and interactivity as places that will attract both business and the ‘creative class’ urban professionals and culture workers. This perspective, critiqued by some academics and policy makers for its vagueness and others for privileging certain types of jobs, neighborhoods and lifestyles at the expense of others is increasingly controversial. In this Town Hall, artists, activist, community workers, teachers and professors will be brought together to examine the realities of living under this policy paradigm. We will ask: what are the effects of these policies on the livelihoods of ordinary people? Who benefits from creative city planning that is meant to build money making cities in a time of cuts to vital services such as schools and important social spaces for ‘ordinary’ people such as community centres, and pools. What happens to the ‘non-creative’ workers in this script?
The panel’s goal is to address topics of race, class and gender, within the framework of the ‘creative class’, exploring how these policies celebrate a select group of glorified yet precarious professions and how cities are being re-structured and re-branded as money-makers, rather than places that offer secure livelihoods for their residents.
After the panel, we will bring together activists, academics, artists and workers for a Town Hall to discuss the increasing dominance of creative city ideas and policies. Through discussion we aim to demystify the politics concealed in the Creative Class ideology.
We have invited groups from across the city to contribute critiques and concerns based on their political organizing and/or personal experience. We plan to record this discussion and create a document that is intended to provide a thoughtful critique of the creative class script.
The panel includes the following speakers: Liette Gilbert – associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University. Her work focuses on policies, practices and ideologies of immigration, multiculturalism and citizenship.
Uzma Shakir – community-based researcher, advocate, activist and
the past Executive Director of Council of Agencies Serving South Asians
(CASSA) and the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (SALCO). Her work focuses on issues of race, erosion of civil liberties and critical multiculturalism.
Pamila Matharu – a Toronto-based artist, activist, educator and cultural organizer/ producer. An activist for over 15 years, currently focusing on youth, contemporary art, pedagogy and the “inner-city experience” in Parkdale.
Moderated by Heather McLean: Heather McLean is a PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Her research explores the relationships between relational aesthetics and performance and neo-liberal, competitive urban planning policies.
Fuse Magazine is proud to acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and Heritage Canada.