Networks and clusters
5.2. Networks and clusters
This can be seen more generally in terms of the second set of questions — linkages to the wider set of networks and music scenes in the city. Despite its notion of being mixed use, there has been a lack of retail and residential businesses in the area which has severe- ly reduced street level activity and animation. ”You’ve got no reason to go there unless you’re called to a boring meeting or have an office there”, says Winston Hazel (a promi- nent local DJ).The mix of small-scale retail, café bars and small businesses actually works
in the Devonshire Street area of the city, which has grown up independently of the city council or CIQ.The mix of production and consumption is crucial for music — to empha- sise production facilities alone is to ignore this crucial element of any ‘buzz’. Physically, the linkage between the CIQ and the rest of the city — a prime consideration amongst all the traders in the NQ — has remained a problem, and major improvements are now planned. Issues of lighting, pedestrianisation, public art and signage are still to be addressed, partly due to the production- and facility-based emphasis and partly a sign of the limits of the CIQ’s influence on city policy-making. There have been, until the open- ing of the NCPM, no big cultural magnets like Temple Bar or Dublin possesses and thus the physical impermeability tends to reduce the usage of the existing gallery and per- formance spaces. Shopping, wandering, random socialising, looking — none of these paths flow strongly though the CIQ at present. The concentration of effort on one physical area of the city without thinking through the spatial implications has also produced a sense of exclusion amongst some. The barriers between city centre and ‘inner city’ are a real source of contention in Britain at present, involving complex class, gender and ethnic lines. (On some issues around this, including the role of cultural quarters within a multiplex city, see Amin and Graham, 1997, pp. 411–429.) The spatial politics of a CIQ and other quarters and the implications for the sort of businesses that make use of its facilities has not been fully addressed, exacerbat-
ed by the fact that some previously-funded community arts perceive themselves as hav- ing suffered due to the priority given to the CIQ. The problems with physical linkages are thus often questions of social linkage.The CIQ’s emphasis on focusing support on a specific area has tended to ignore links to wider net- works of cultural production and consumption. Networks are about how the sector interacts and how knowledge is passed around. Networks are how ideas, sounds, ‘prod- uct’ are tested, validated, given credibility.The ‘music industry’, conceived as business con- cerns trading from premises, is merely the visible part of a complex series of networks, milieus, scenes and cultures.To ignore these linkages is quite damaging to a music indus- try strategy. The CIQ addressed the need of the music industry through what it could provide in physical terms within its immediate area. This has not only led to feelings of exclusion by some outside, but has also retarded their ability to think about a wider cul- tural industry strategy within which the CIQ could fit.We have already seen this in terms of the sector-specific targeting of training and support, but this also occurred in a more general sense. In part this reflects a general problem of local governance and the cultural sector. A co- ordinated approach to developing the cultural sector would include many non-cultural areas of policy, such as transport, housing, licensing and policing. However, even where, as in Sheffield, certain officers within key departments (in Sheffield’s case, employment) have been able to pursue cultural strategies, without a horizontal integration across depart- ments of such an approach, the impact will always be limited and partial, as both the CIQ and NQ have found.
A classic example was with late licensing. Those behind the CIQ managed, despite the odds, to build up strong political support for their initiatives — that music and cultural industries were worth investing in and taking seriously. However, despite vigorous sup- port from the CIQ for ventures such as The Republic Club, and initiatives such as the Dirty Stop Out Tour , licensing remained a policy problem for the CIQ as well as Sheffield as a whole. Whilst cities in the UK began to think about making the city centre more attrac- tive and user-friendly — whilst Manchester and Leeds vied for the title of ’24-Hour European City’, however fictional — Sheffield’s centre was suffering under the impact of an out-of-town retail park and severe problems with licensing. Until Republic opened its
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doors in 1995, there had been no new night-club license granted in the city centre for the previous 15 years. The delay in Republic’s opening (up to two years) has been cited as one of the reasons for its financial failure and receivership (although it was bought and fully re-opened in 1998). Draconian magistrates seemed completely out of touch with a city trying to reinvent itself as a centre for media and cultural production.The CIQ were powerless to reverse this. The key point here is that, despite the efforts of the CIQ officers, Sheffield City Council could promote the successes of the CIQ whilst making no effective connection to or gaining any contribution from other policy areas such as licensing, where serious problems persist (a recent development proposal for the Leadmill Bus Garage site was turned down because it contained a night club as part of its proposals). This is indicative of a failure by the city to realise the connection between cultural quarter, music industry, the wider scene and the cultural context of the city as a whole. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------