INTRODUCTION

Recent years have witnessed a “perfect storm” in the fashion industry. The rise of ultra-fast, online-only fashion (Camargo et al. 2020), the growing influence of platforms such as Amazon (Stewart 2022) and the ongoing pandemic (Brydges et al. 2021) have caused havoc for many fashion retailers. These developments have major implications for high streets and shopping malls in the world's fashion cities (i.e., centres with a concentration of leading fashion districts, designers and media, such as New York City, London, Milan and Shanghai). Recent media attention has focused on a number of major brands shuttering stores and filing for bankruptcy protection (Chitrakorn 2020). All of these challenges raise questions about the future of the fashion industry and its urban cultural infrastructure.

This chapter focuses on one segment of the industry – small independent fashion retailers – examining their responses to the crisis. It explores the ways that these retailers forge alternative urban infrastructure and affective atmospheres, interweaving in-store sensory experiences with digital and social media technologies. Through a hybrid use of old factories and warehouses, independent fashion retailers engage different spaces and materials. They cultivate closer relationships between producers, consumers and designers, advancing a “politics of reconnection” (Hartwick 1998) that seeks to address the social and environmental costs of fashion. As the crisis in the fashion industry intensifies, these small urban retailers maintain diverse linkages with their surrounding neighbourhoods, and, during the pandemic, became key sites of economic and social resilience in the face of global supply chain disruptions. In the process, they foster alternative realms of fashion, illustrating how urban infrastructure is at once cultural and political, as well as material (Alam & Houston 2020).

Utilizing a mixed methods approach, this chapter draws upon international trade reports, newspaper articles, websites and other social media, as well as open-ended interviews with alternative fashion retailers in Canadian and Australian cities. Organized into three main sections, it begins by providing an overview of global fashion infrastructure associated with major fashion centres. The second section discusses the crisis confronting the industry today and the third section examines how small, independent fashion retailers are responding to this crisis, utilizing physical, digital and cultural infrastructure to craft alternative urban fashion spaces.

INTRODUCTION

Arts festivals are important forms of cultural production and consumption (Négrier 2015). Irrespective of genre (e.g., visual arts, music or film) and whether single or multi-disciplinary, their primary endeavour is to engage people in the making, showcasing and performance of art. Yet arts festivals do not necessarily receive recognition or attention based on their cultural attributes alone. Festivals and events have become “central to entrepreneurial cities’ efforts to generate commerce, regenerate place and stand out on the highly competitive global stage” (Quinn et al. 2020: 1875). Along with arts and cultural activities more generally, recent decades have seen cities use them to “lure … consumption, property development, and knowledge industries” (Grodach 2017: 89) as a means of addressing social and economic urban problems. Inspired by neoliberal, creative-city style thinking, arts festivals now commonly feature on urban policy agendas the world over, with several researchers highlighting the prevalence of festivalization processes as “entire cities have transformed themselves into major stages for a continual stream of events” (Richards & Palmer 2010: 2).

Amid all the economic ambition, with its attendant commercial hype and spectacle, the role that arts festivals play in the cultural life and wider cultural systems of cities is often ill understood. Their ephemeral, intangible and immaterial nature lends them something of a chameleon quality which can be interpreted to mean that festivals do not matter as much as the other forms of creative practice that programme year-round activities and/or have a physical building to call their own. The invisibility that attaches to their immateriality, in contrast to the hard fixity of other cultural forms, is a particular problem when it comes to understanding how they form part of a city's cultural infrastructure. Researchers tend to focus on what Allen and McCreary (2021: 51) call “enduring material landscapes rather than temporary enactments such as festivals and parades”. City planners, when conceiving of cultural infrastructure tend to invest mostly in hard, material elements like art galleries, museums, theatres and performance spaces. Yet while arts festivals are commonly defined by their short duration, in reality, they are always connected into wider, year-round arts activities in complex ways that defy their apparent temporally bounded nature.

INTRODUCTION

An archive is understood to be a repository of historical artefacts, a place to which objects, images and documents from the past are consigned in anticipation of the collective will to remember (Appadurai 2003). In contrast with modernist state archives (the Archive), community-based archives are collections of materials that originate from, are collected by, and preserved for a “grassroots” community of interest to document and maintain control over community heritage (Caswell 2014). Since the rise of the LGBTQ+ social movement in urban North American and Europe in the 1960s, activists have been generating and collecting the materials that provide the basis for their own community-based counter-archives (Sheffield 2020). LGBTQ+ community-based archives are sites where “evidence of non-normative sexualities and gender non-conformity has been preserved”, repositories of queer knowledge that can potentially challenge “heteronormative and homocentric ways of being and knowing” (Sheffield 2020: 11). Such “activist archives” provide an infrastructure to “forge new relationships between parallel histories, reshape and reinterpret dominant narratives, and challenge conceptions of the archive itself” (Sellie et al. 2015: 454). Binding together material, digital and imagined spaces, these sites of “memory-in-action” provide community support networks, capacity building and skill-sharing both through their references to the past and practices in the present (Sizemore-Barber 2017: 127).

This chapter reflects on such sites of “memory-in-action” as urban cultural infrastructure. While LGBTQ+ community-based archival collections are geographically variable, due to the historic metropolitan materialities of their communities, their informational and physical infrastructure is primarily urban. Unlike the “hard”, large, official and durable urban infrastructure that underpins modernity and materially manifests biopolitical social norms (Gandy 2011), the infrastructure of LGBTQ+ community-based counter-archiving is oppositional, relational and place-based having been co-constructed and maintained through soft networks of people (Amin 2014). As social movement archives, their collections – or information infrastructure (McKinney 2020) – provide some of the only documentation of the queer “city-as-archive” (Rao 2009). Thus, they are intimately bound to the project of tracing local “queer infrastructure” described by Campkin (2021: 82) as the “dispersed, interconnected, heterogeneous” LGBTQ+ urban community spaces that traverse time through memory and stretch across metropolitan areas.

INTRODUCTION: REFRAMING MUSEUMS AS INFRASTRUCTURE

This chapter uses the analytic of infrastructuring to conceptualize museums along the lines of what they do, rather than by what they are or are supposed to be. With a practice-oriented and activist approach to museums, this chapter challenges existing, conventional museum definitions. It thus engages infrastructure as a verb rather than as a noun. Infrastructure as a noun predominantly grasps concrete and tangible human, organic, technological and material facilities. In contrast, Matthias Korn et al. (2019: 12) describe infrastructuring as a verb that initiates a shift “from single artefacts and sites to the connectedness and entanglement between them”. Accordingly, infrastructuring is under-stood as an embodied process and practice, that shapes, and is shaped by, socio-spatial encounters between different actors – including people, places, objects, feelings, discourses, histories, herstories and memories. Hence, the chapter deploys the lens of infrastructuring as a malleable and mobile conceptual frame to understand and practices of collecting culture.

This chapter argues that if museums are thought of as fluctuating formations that are articulated via practices of infrastructuring, we can better attend to different people and places, as well as the symbolical and material absences and presences of voices, narratives, traumatic and joyful memories, hopes and dreams, that together constitute cultural infrastructure. With the encompassing notion of infrastructuring the museum, existing definitions of museums can be radically challenged. When museums are approached via a lens of infrastructuring, it not only allows for more versatile and less spatially fixed imaginaries of museums, but importantly, also makes room for more socially diverse and intersectional practices of museum-making. The objective of this chapter, then, is to chart novel socially and spatially engaged museum practices as exemplary approaches of doing museums differently. For this purpose, the chapter discusses two projects of infrastructuring the museum, one from Ahmedabad, India, and the second from Berlin, Germany.

To approach museums as activist exercises of infrastructuring, this chapter is situated in theories of political difference and conflict (Landau et al. 2021). Political difference, in a nutshell, distinguishes between the realm and practices of “politics” (which aim to create order and control with the goal to maintain and institutionalize power) and “the political” which extends beyond formalized and routinized institutions where the logic of politics resides.

INTRODUCTION

A cultural district (or cultural quarter in Britain and mainland Europe) is a location within a city where cultural and artistic infrastructure, services, activities and networks are concentrated and embedded (Roodhouse 2006). Informally emergent in mixed-use urban neighbourhoods from the embryonic and ad hoc presence of cultural practitioners, cultural districts revalorize built heritage as “hubs, nodes, and workplaces for creative production” in lifecycles that extend from spatialization to recommodification (Zukin & Braslow 2011: 132). In the cultural industries, a cultural hub in a single building is the most “extreme” form of clustering (Pratt 2021). Such cultural hubs, and the industries and practitioners who animate them with their labour, have become important urban economic change agents in cities around the world grappling with industrial decline and restructuring. They adaptively reuse redundant industrial infrastructure (e.g., harbour areas, elevated rail corridors, shipyards, factories, warehouses and storage facilities), offices, schools, hospitals, churches and prisons, turning it into cultural infrastructure that can foster creativity through human co-presence (Pratt 2021). These “creative brownfields” – “aesthetically distinct, derelict and flexible industrial premises” that have attracted the attention of artistic communities and youth subculture – have become formalized as place-making anchors of cultural infrastructure, contributing to structural changes in neighbourhoods and cities (Andres & Golubchicov 2016: 758).

This chapter considers the informal and formal dimensions of cultural districts as urban infrastructure. It traces the historical roots of cultural districts to the precarity of artistic careers and the socio-spatial strategy of clustering as a means of professional survival. In the contemporary period, shaped by pandemic lockdowns, venue closures and event cancellations to control the spread of Covid-19, it demonstrates that economic uncertainties have deepened across the culture sector for practitioners and organizations alike, undermining the vitality and viability of cultural districts. Despite the seeming global ubiquity of cultural districts as an urban economic development tool, examples of this cultural infrastructure from Berlin and Leipzig in Germany and Toronto and Hamilton in Canada showcase intermediation in practice, demonstrating the range of cultural district spatial forms, programmes and rationales.

INTRODUCTION

In March 2020, theatres around the world shuttered their doors in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although it was not the first time that theatres had closed to contain viral spread, the scale and length of the closure was unprecedented. Unable to gather in person, theatre companies beyond and across Canada cancelled productions and postponed entire seasons. In Canada's largest city, Toronto, 12,000 public performances were cancelled between March 2020 and March 2021, leading to an estimated loss of CDN$58 million in ticket sales, a decline of 17 million audience members, and “CDN$16 million in lost artist and production salaries/fees” (Toronto Arts Council 2021). While some organizations found the demands of creating performance under pandemic conditions untenable, many theatres began pivoting, deploying diverse strategies to present new work and engage audiences safely. Aside from the almost universal move toward forms of digital dissemination, which involved adapting existing plays or commissioning new works for virtual platforms, companies reduced cast and crew size; collaborated with other theatres; reimagined the functionality of theatre spaces; and moved to outdoor private and public venues.

This chapter considers how the “pivots” made by Toronto theatres in response to the Covid-19 pandemic represent a significant infrastructural shift in how theatre is conceived, constructed and presented. The chapter consciously employs the word “pivot” – a term that became ubiquitous in North America during the pandemic – with the dual purpose of both celebrating the creativity and ingenuity of theatres and signalling the challenge of constant adaptation. Focusing on the first and second waves (March 2020– February 2021), while acknowledging that waves varied geographically according to a series of factors (including government policies and supports, public attitudes and access to vaccines, masks and other forms of personal protective equipment (PPE)), it identifies the wide variety of artistic strategies companies developed to foreground the infrastructural reappraisal that followed. As the realities of the first pandemic wave hit, companies had to rethink their infrastructure, not only in the turn from live to virtual presentations, but also as a means of guarding against the uncertainty of last-minute changes in public health restrictions.

Around the world, urbanism in the twenty-first century is marked by contradictory trends in consumption. In high-income countries, a seemingly unending drive towards mass production and centralized global distribution in large warehouses and big-box stores sits in tension with a middle-class quest for novelty within niche markets of consumption and commodification (Zukin 2010). In a competitive world of late neoliberalism where cities have only themselves to sell, the hyper-drive to ground global capital in place and retain creatives and “culturepreneurs” leads to pockets of urban homogeneity in tension with a search for difference and particularity (Lange 2011). Informal street hawkers and traders juxtapose with a global drive to homogenize the retail landscape through shopping malls, while DIY subcultures in wealthy cities appropriate the ancient informality and localism of pop-up trade. In mid-and higher-income countries, some neighbourhoods are branded as districts of art and entertainment, while gentrification is encouraged by introducing hipster bars, cafes, galleries, studios and farmers’ markets into low-income communities and public spaces (Hubbard 2016). This palette of middle-class cultural amenities fosters consumptive opportunities to build cultural capital and distinction.

Civic leaders and real estate developers seeking to normalize neoliberal urban rule also deploy cultural capital in the marketing of lifestyles, identities and urban spaces (Novy & Colomb 2013), such that neighbourhoods, or specific spaces within them, might be experienced as “cultural” by visitors. The expressly symbolic leveraging of urban cultural infrastructure and the affective atmospheres of creativity, ethno-cultural “diversity” and heritage to change the perception of a place – culture-led urban placemaking – is inevitably linked to the destructive dimensions of urban regeneration. It builds the products of culture into places often at the expense of local communities. Civic leaders also deploy technocratic spatial rationalities in the planning of streetscapes, demonstrating hostility towards disorderly and informal appropriation of urban space by hawkers, panhandlers and the homeless for the discordance they present to a modernist aesthetic of cityness (Watson 2003). In contradistinction to the emphasis on physical and technical infrastructure as modes by which cities are made productive, street trading emphasizes “people as infrastructure” to facilitate economic and social opportunities for poor urbanites (Simone 2004).

On a Munich summer night in 2018, I attended a dance party. The music was all over the place: an Afghan qataghani was followed by German hip-hop, a Syrian dabke tune would play after a Turkish remix of an old recording of a tango track. It had been almost three years since: thousands of migrants had arrived in Munich's central train station; the city had erected refugee camps to receive newcomers; the asylum paperwork, the translation, the German lessons and the mutual aid networks had all been established.

The partygoers had grown up in many different parts of the world, many of them waiting on Germany's immigration apparatus to process their refugee claims, or their appeals after their status had been turned down. People were dancing, drinking, talking or smoking by the club door. Of the 50-plus people there, most had arrived in Munich since the proclamation of a so-called “European refugee crisis” – some by foot, by bus, by train and some, like me, by plane. We shared the same room that night because we knew the music would be diverse. While it can be challenging to dance to unfamiliar musical styles and the shift from one track to the next can be jarring, this was to be part of the night's beauty.

The party, called Plug in Beats, was billed as an “intercultural democratic dance party” (Figure 6.1). Each month, long-established Munich residents and newly arrived people came together in Orangehouse, one of the small clubs housed in Feierwerk, a city-funded cultural centre. Armed with smartphones, attendees would choose music for each other to dance to. The process, which borrowed from karaoke, followed a specific format. Attendees were greeted by Feierwerk staff and volunteers who passed around laminated cards with numbers on them. Translators were on hand, and instructions in six different languages (Arabic, Farsi, French, German, English and Spanish) were laid out around the room explaining that numbers would soon appear on a VJ screen above the stage, indicating the moment to bring one's smartphone to the DJ with a musical selection ready.

This book has presented and examined the main economic theories relevant to industrial policy. It has also analysed how the strategies enacted by various countries can be applied in specific policy domains. It is thus targeted squarely at both an academic and policymaking audience. For students and academics, the aim has been to show how economic principles can be practically applied in a real-world setting, and how the effects vary by time and place, and are mediated by institutions. On the other hand, for policymakers interested in how their interventions affect the economy, understanding some of the theoretical concepts may help them appreciate what is feasible and desirable, and provides some underlying reasons for why these interventions sometimes go wrong.

This concluding chapter offers some final practical observations. These are directed at policymakers in particular but are also a way of rounding off the theoretical discussions. The chapter ends with some suggestions for further reading.

1. Have a strategy and stick to it. This book has described many specific industrial policies. But governments looking to intervene effectively in their economies should develop an industrial strategy. This involves an understanding of both means and ends, and how they can be reconciled. Even at a basic level, industrial policies – for example, those concerned with correcting market failures in say, innovation policy – should be conducted as part of an overarching plan for raising competitiveness, rather than ad hoc interventions. At the most complex and ambitious levels, for example when tasked with addressing systemic issues like decarbonization, careful strategizing informed by clear objectives is even more important.

Approaching industrial policy systemically, via a (coherent) strategy, also encourages policymakers to think about how policies are actually put into effect, in terms of the responses they elicit from firms and other actors over the short and long terms. Successful practitioners of industrial policy understand that it is more important to create a climate of collaboration between government and the private sector than just to provide financial incentives and hope for the best.

Government itself is an important actor, and its credibility is always on the line here.

This chapter examines industrial policy in the light of economic theory and unpacks some of the assumptions about the operation of modern economies that underly its use. Even though many of its theoretical precepts are largely accepted, industrial policy lacks a dedicated set of economic theories to explain it. Economists interested in the topic have tended to participate in debates about government intervention in the economy on an ad hoc basis, and there is no “school” of industrial policy in economics as such. Nevertheless, a number of distinct theoretical positions have emerged, which are explored in more detail here. These mirror how neoclassical assumptions about perfect and imperfect competition have been supplemented over the last 40 years with more holistic explanations of the workings of economies that emphasize their underlying capabilities and the dynamics of structural change.

The chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part examines two related controversies surrounding industrial policy which have been a feature of economic thought since Adam Smith’s day. The first of these concerns the relationship between the government and the market and, specifically, whether policymakers should intervene in markets or leave them to their own devices. Having concluded that intervention is justifiable in principle, the second section examines the nature of economic growth itself and the extent to which intervention via industrial and other policies is practical or desirable.

The second part of the chapter is more granular and divides theoretical approaches to industrial policy into three broad families, which are examined in turn. The first of these is the concept of market failure grounded in neoclassical economics, which provides a broad rationale for intervention in the economy to correct specific wrinkles in the operation of markets. The second family is one that advances the market failure framework to suggest that these failures can take the form of coordination problems which inhibit whole groups of firms from entering into new markets. The third takes a more structural view of economies and deals with attempts to alter their development path by intervening in the underlying drivers of growth and the composition of industrial bases.

The question of the government’s role in market societies has loomed large since at least Adam Smith’s day. There is a wide political and academic consensus today that well-designed economic policies delivered by the state or its agents can increase the well-being of societies through higher growth rates and greater efficiency. However, it is not always clear what these policies are, or should be, and how they can be put into effect.

This book explores some of these economic and policy questions through an examination of one particular strand of economic policymaking known as “industrial policy”. Industrial policy is a distinct policy domain which includes a wide range of measures aimed at developing productive and technological capabilities in industry and related sectors, building and supporting new industries, and increasing the productivity and competitiveness of the economy generally.

Industrial policies are separate from macroeconomic policy, which is concerned with the broad balance and direction of whole economies through tools like interest rates. But they are not necessarily synonymous with microeconomic policies either, as they can be directed at altering the structure of the productive sector of the economy by nudging domestic industries towards certain activities and developing broad attributes, such as higher productivity or greater R&D intensity.

Depending on circumstances, the objectives of industrial policy can include export promotion, development of linkages between firms in an industry and support for upstream technology development. Policy tools for achieving these objectives can include infrastructure spending, tax incentives for R&D, creation of intermediary institutions such as institutes for applied technology, vocational training programmes focused on high-technology, and direct intervention to protect or promote specific industries and even individual firms.

Done successfully, industrial policy can have a significant effect on economic well-being. Britain, the industrial pioneer, used industrial policies to nurture and guide its nascent manufacturing industries from the mid-eighteenth century (contrary to persistent myths that its industrial take-off was an entirely free-market affair; see Figure 1.1). South Korea went from being one of the world’s poorest countries in the 1950s to an advanced industrial nation in little more than 30 years through judicious use of industrial policy to develop its economy through planned, export-led growth.

The previous chapter compared how different countries have used industrial strategies to shape their economies, emphasizing the diversity of approaches to tackling common problems. This chapter focuses on some emerging future challenges which comprehensive and forward-thinking strategies can be deployed to tackle.

The first section deals with the task of getting to net zero emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). A number of countries have committed to ambitious carbon reduction programmes. Greening and transforming domestic industries plays an important part in all of these. Industrial policies are therefore being recast as combined developmental and emissions reduction programmes. The key challenge here is not necessarily technical. Many of the technologies needed for decarbonization are already available, although there is still a key role for innovation to make them cheaper and more scalable.

A much more difficult task for policymakers is achieving the momentum to reorganize entire economies built since their foundation around consumption of fossil fuels. There are two key problems here. First is the asset-specificity of many industries, which makes reconfiguring them along more sustainable lines an expensive and difficult project. This is due to the significant sunk costs in carbon-intensive industries, as well as potential resistance from workers who will need to be reskilled. The second problem, stemming from the first, is a time-inconsistency issue. Decarbonization entails large upfront costs for benefits that mainly lie in the future. Devising policies to focus minds on this can be difficult, given other pressing demands on funding and government attention. With this in mind, what do “green” industrial policies look like?

The second section covers globalization and, latterly, deglobalization. The decomposition of production into global value chains (GVCs) has meant lower prices for consumers, but at the price of job losses and greater insecurity of supply. Domestic discontent is combining with trade wars and hostility between China and the US to lead to their partial unravelling. This will affect both rich and poor countries, as each lie at opposite ends of GVCs. What should their governments do in response?

The third section covers the role of industrial strategies in dealing with the impact of technology and the “fourth industrial revolution”.