Angielski
The book outlines the cultural turn in urban policy from the 1980s to the 2000s, in which new art museums and cultural or heritage quarters lent a creative mask to urban redevelopment. The book challenges the notions of a creative class and a creative city, aligning them to gentrification, and situates the cultural turn in a longer historical context - back to Georgian times - of culture as a means of social ordering, or soft policing. Although many of the new art museums are architecturally interesting, or contain important collections, like culturally-led urban regeneration their implicit function is to mask capital's apparatus for containing all aspects of living and dissent. After the 2008 crash, the money has run out and the illusory creative city gives way to urban clearances. In the 1960s, creativity was identified with revolt. From the 1980s onwards it was subsumed in consumerism, as in 1990s cool culture. Now, after Occupy it can be asked what cultural work can do against capital's project of control. The book ends by looking selectively at the work of artists' collectives who refuse to agree with capital's imperatives.
