Figure 4.1 National Theatre, South Bank, London, photograph by Michael McKinnie.
London's South Bank and the Cultural Politics of Urban Governance
Michael McKinnie
In recent years, cities around the world have become creative. From New York to Paris, from London to Seoul, and from Cape Town to Toronto, the creative city has become a fashionable trope used both to characterize a growing number of cities and to advocate on their behalf. The ubiquity of this trope is matched only by its banality: it transforms a historical association of some cities with “innovation” into a generic civic boosterism; it also invents business opportunities for consulting firms that advise cities on how to improve their scores on “creative indexes” of dubious quality.1 The only certainty is that the creative city's currency will diminish over time, to be supplanted by some other way of characterizing the messy interplay of geography, culture, politics, and economics.
If the rather hyperbolic rhetoric about the creative city should be viewed with skepticism, creative city proponents have (wittingly or not) drawn attention to two empirically verifiable phenomena: that cultural industries have tended to cluster in identifiable districts within certain cities and that these districts are tightly bound up with processes of urban governance. The repertoire of cultural activities undertaken within such precincts may change over time, but concentrations of cultural industries in cities often persist over many years, within relatively stable geographical boundaries (think of New York's Broadway or London's West End, both of which have been home to theatre districts since the nineteenth century). For all the attention paid in recent years to the creative city, this should not distract from a longer, and more ambivalent, imbrication of cultural districts with the political-economic governance of cities.
Through an analysis of the South Bank area of London, this article considers how cultural districts are caught up with the complex histories and practices of urban governance. The South Bank stretches for approximately three kilometers along the southern side of the River Thames between County Hall to the west and Blackfriars Bridge to the east. (These boundaries are not hard and fast, since some extend the South Bank's eastern boundary to London Bridge, and the section between Blackfriars and Southwark bridges has also been called Bankside). It straddles the border between the boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark and is most notable today for the collection of iconic arts venues built along the river after World War II: the Royal Festival Hall (which opened in 1951), the National Film Theatre (1957), the Queen Elizabeth Hall (1967), the Hayward Gallery (1968), and the National Theatre (1976).
These were joined later by the reconstructed Globe Theatre (1997) and Tate Modern, the modern art museum constructed within the shell of the then disused Bankside Power Station (2000). The Young Vic Theatre, which reopened after major renovations in 2006, is located nearby on The Cut, as is the Old Vic. Alongside these arts venues there has been significant growth in other entertainment industries (particularly in film, television, and advertising).2 Since the 1990s the South Bank has also become an increasingly popular tourist destination, with shops, restaurants, and hotels opening to cater to the millions of people who visit the area each year.
Much current thinking about the relationship between cultural districts and cities focuses on the extent to which arts practices and environments are both symptoms of and agents within a contemporary, globalizing urban economy.3 This implies that cultural districts play a role in positing London as a cutting-edge creative city that competes with other “global” cities in a world of ostensibly free-flowing capital. The South Bank, though, is very much a legacy of welfare state cultural and urban planning, and this history does not simply disappear with its conscription into the operations of neoliberal capitalism
Figure 4.1 National Theatre, South Bank, London, photograph by Michael McKinnie.
(and its associated forms of production, consumption, and governance). Quite the opposite: London's prominence among major financial centers involves the rehabilitation and redeployment of the South Bank's welfare state legacy.
Building on Susan Bennett's analysis of the South Bank as a “tourist stage” and drawing on Mariana Valverde's work on “seeing like a city,” I argue that the South Bank does, indeed, play a role in securing London's prominence among global cities (even if the global cities paradigm, like the creative city notion, must be employed with a healthy degree of skepticism). But the nature of this role is very particular, and prompts a different account of the operations of urban cultural districts than critics have advanced to date (at least in relation to those cultural districts developed in many cities during the roughly three decades following the second world war). First, the South Bank offers a privileged space through which to ameliorate historical ambivalence about the welfare state that persists in the United Kingdom despite the recent “credit crunch” and growing socio-economic inequalities. If the South Bank has become increasingly popular since the late 1990s, it is, in part, because its most recent iteration ameliorates longstanding anxieties about the welfare state urban and cultural planning apparatus that was installed in the United Kingdom in the 1940s and elaborated over subsequent decades. As I will discuss, the South Bank was an instance of that apparatus but never central to it, with the result that it was widely seen as a failure in urban planning terms and too exclusive in artistic terms. The South Bank's current “success” hinges on a rehabilitation of that legacy through the district's integration into transnational forms of consumption and production, which are themselves supported by neoliberal forms of urban governance. Second, the South Bank provides a repository of spatial and planning tools, conceived by and for the welfare state, that are being redeployed within contemporary urban governance networks that seek to secure London's position as a leading centre of finance capital. Today, the South Bank is an integral part of London's urban and economic life, more than 60 years after it first emerged (and whether its cultural institutions are too exclusive is far less of a concern than in the past, since cultural exclusivity is now a key selling point for London). Ironically, this has been achieved by mobilizing the built form and technocratic inheritance of the welfare state itself, which the South Bank's arts venues embody on a monumental scale. The South Bank illustrates how cultural districts help make urban governance work within financialized capitalism, but it also demonstrates that this does not entail a wholesale repudiation of the welfare state that neoliberalism seeks to supplant. Rather, it involves a more extensive application of the welfare state's legacy, albeit in ostensibly better ways to serve markedly different ends.
That the South Bank is caught up in contemporary forms of urban governance is hard to dispute. In a broad sense, the South Bank assists London's shift toward, as Allen J. Scott puts it, a “cognitive-cultural economy” that “is being driven forward by key sectors like technology-intensive manufacturing, services of all varieties (business, financial, personal, etc.), fashion-oriented neo-artisanal production, and cultural-products industries.”4 As these activities tend to be concentrated in particular urban zones, cultural districts, including the South Bank, have proven effective in undertaking the “place-making” that increasingly marks the competition between cities under financialized capitalism.
A cultural district may be created intentionally through a comprehensive plan, but it may also be the cumulative result of decisions made by individual cultural producers with little or no active coordination between them (or, as in the case of the South Bank today, it may involve a combination of both). It may be driven, for instance, by commercial imperatives (as the entertainment zone of performance venues in Lambeth and Southwark was in mid-nineteenth century), or it may reflect civil society and state planning aspirations (as the post–World War II South Bank scheme did). However a cultural district comes into being, it functions as a localization or agglomeration economy, concentrating production in a particular location in order to, for example, access a specialized workforce or encourage consumption of its goods. In the case of consumption, the premise underlying the cultural district is that people are more likely to consume cultural goods when these goods are made available in a defined location that is well known (or can be made so) and is relatively easily accessed. Of course, like any space of economic activity, the characteristics of a cultural district will change over time. For instance, the tight proximity between cultural production and consumption is arguably becoming less prevalent than in the past— many South Bank cultural producers now create goods that are consumed at a distance (although activities like theatre, in which production and consumption take place almost simultaneously, remain important because their events link economic efficiency with ideals of community). Moreover, the range of cultural activities within such districts evolves. In the South Bank, theatrical performance (including music hall) was the dominant cultural industry in the area in the nineteenth century; in the mid- to late twentieth century, theatre was supplemented with other arts like music, cinema, and fine art; now, “traditional” arts institutions sit alongside enterprises like software design, television production, and advertising. And, of course, the built form of a district changes, often in ways that cannot be anticipated: almost none of the nineteenth-century performance venues exists any longer, but, at the same time, it is likely that the postwar complex of arts venues will spatially dominate the district for the foreseeable future. It does not diminish the significance of these transformations, though, to suggest that the economic and spatial logic underpinning the cultural district has remained relatively consistent for some time.
Cultural districts are members of governance networks and also serve as spatial instruments of governance within the wider urban environment. Governance, it must be acknowledged, is a slippery concept, defined almost as much by what it is not, as what it is. It is not synonymous with government, which usually refers to the body authorized (through democratic or other means) to direct state power to achieve its objectives. Neither is governance the sole preserve of the state or the market, since governing involves agents from across the public and private spheres. Governance may, as R.A.W. Rhodes points out, denote multiple concerns, including governance as political cover for a smaller state; corporate governance; the new public management, which takes managerial practices and incentive structures from the private sector and applies them in the public sector; “good governance,” which attempts to achieve liberal democratic aims through new public management; socio-cybernetic systems, in which the state operates through political “partnerships” with non-state agents rather than imposing policy from “on high”; and the management of self-organizing networks of organizations drawn from across the public and private spheres.5
Insofar as governance is a concern of those interested in the United Kingdom's cultural industries, it usually reflects the peculiar mix of technocratic and liberal-democratic impulses that strongly inflect thinking about the arts in Britain today. This often involves an emphasis on corporate governance combined with a healthy dose of new public management thinking (even if creative economy discourse privileges the commercial end of the spectrum, the cultural sector remains populated by a large number of not-for-profit, publicly subsidized enterprises). Advocates of good corporate governance in cultural industries are concerned primarily with the optimal management of arts organizations, often through “best practices” taken from the private sector. This, in turn, may be linked with “good governance” in a wider sense, as the managerial prerequisite for the arts being able to play their historical role in securing liberal-democratic ideals of citizenship and a healthy public sphere.6
The relationship between cultural districts and urban governance, though, is best understood through Rhodes's final, and preferred, sense of the term. Here, urban governance refers to the management of urban space through “self-organizing, interorganizational networks” of agents that span the public, private, not-for-profit, and voluntary sectors.7 These agents may be familiar ones like theatre companies or the Arts Council, but they are, increasingly, bodies like urban development agencies, charities, and private businesses.
It is through such governance networks that the South Bank increasingly operates and on which its success as a cultural district in London now depends. Susan Bennett argues persuasively that the South Bank has become a kind of contemporary “tourist stage,” in which “places, cities, regions, and countries in the tourism context are all composed as performances so that they might attract visitors' spectatorship, increasingly a lucrative part of the economy, and, in very many cases, a primary engine for employment.”8 Since the Globe and Tate Modern opened, the South Bank has seen a marked increase in visitor numbers and, as Bennett observes,
now boasts the extended trappings of a tourism economy: five hotels, clusters of restaurants (including the Globe's own popular eating venue), retail and service stores, as well as the Millennium Bridge, the city's first new pedestrian bridge across the Thames in more than a century, linking the South Bank back to the City of London (and another premier tourist destination, St. Paul's Cathedral).9
The efficacy of this urban performance (which, as Bennett highlights, is as much a geographical and economic one as it is a theatrical one) hinges on the South Bank's position within a dense web of governing relations encompassing a large number of agents: multiple departments within the national state, the Greater London Authority, the Mayor of London, Lambeth and Southwark councils (although local authorities are less important than in the past), urban planners, the Southbank Centre, individual arts organizations, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012 (via the Cultural Olympiad), global corporations, local and national businesses, media companies, and more. These networks contribute, in turn, to ongoing efforts to maintain London's position as a global city and secure its preeminence as the world's leading center of finance industries (in spite of the particularly severe effects of the credit crunch in the United Kingdom, owing to London's large and politically influential finance sector).10
The success of the South Bank as an urban performance also depends, in part, on the extent to which its current iteration ameliorates anxieties about the history of the South Bank scheme and the welfare state that sponsored it. The South Bank development has been controversial since its inception. The style of many of its venues has been attacked; Prince Charles, no fan of modernist architecture, infamously commented that the Dennis Lasdun–designed National Theatre (now a Grade II* listed building) was “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting.”11 Of more significant concern is that the South Bank development treated the bomb-damaged riverside as terra nullis, as an urban test case of modern planning doctrines. Realizing planning aims such as separation of use (where residential, industrial, and commercial areas are segregated to greater and lesser degrees) required the displacement of remaining industries along the Thames and a more sharply differentiated relationship with surrounding residential areas.12 This provoked conflict from the start: the South Bank's 1951 development plan drew a large number of objections (more than five thousand, by my estimate), often from businesses still operating in the area, who objected to the wholesale appropriation of such a large part of the riverside. But the London County Council (LCC) reiterated its view that the integration of the South Bank into central London's cultural and commercial provision necessitated the displacement of these businesses and the activities they undertook. In response to an objection to the planned expropriation and demolition of a modern wharf building used for waterside commerce, the LCC responded curtly: “South Bank area proposed as southward extension of central area of London. This part of area suitable for public buildings and cultural purposes—logical extension of the area between County Hall and Waterloo Bridge.”13 Later, in the 1980s, there was enormous resistance to the dominance of commercial interests and cultural industries on the South Bank, as the Greater London Council, the boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark, and residents' groups fought to maintain some measure of residential housing in the area.14 This antagonism was only amplified by the development's orientation toward the river, which planners hoped would bring the South Bank into the social and economic life of central London. But this made the complex appear, almost willfully, to turn its back on the areas immediately adjacent to it (such as the predominantly working-class Elephant and Castle, which itself experienced a highly contentious program of postwar reconstruction). As Marvin Carlson observes, “The South Bank was a bold scheme to reclaim some of the river,” but it came “at the cost of ignoring the blighted areas further to the south, on which the present complex resolutely turns its back.”15 For much of its existence, then, the South Bank scheme has been a source of recurring conflict between nearby residents, London borough governments, urban planners, social commentators, and the national state.16 Indeed, “fixing” the South Bank's problems has been a preoccupation of many, almost from the construction of its first building.
To the extent that the current South Bank does this, though, it is not by repudiating the welfare state governance apparatus that shepherded the original scheme. As Mariana Valverde points out, each new mode of governing tends to position itself as a revolution from the mode that came before. But making urban governance networks function requires ways of seeing the city that predate the emergence of those networks, and demands a continually shifting array of governing “techniques,” both old and new. Valverde attempts to formulate a more diachronic understanding of urban governance than is commonly employed within literatures on governance and governmentality. Using the example of modern land use regulation in North America, which is achieved through mechanisms such as city plans and zoning, Valverde argues that contemporary modes of urban governance rely significantly on techniques adopted from past governance regimes that they have ostensibly supplanted (in Valverde's case, she is particularly concerned with the ways that objective, rule-driven urban planning continues to manage urban disorder through the premodern legal category of nuisance, in spite of the fact that nuisance is a “subjective, aesthetic, [and] relational” civil law tort that contemporary land use governance aims to displace).17 She contends that James Scott's influential “seeing like a state” model of urban governance is excessively dirigiste and tends to “regard legal and governance inventions … as tools chosen to implement a fixed political project” rather than as contingent techniques whose current function may be substantially removed from their origin.18 Instead, she proposes the more flexible model of “seeing like a city”: a “pragmatic approach that uses both old and new gazes, premodern and modern knowledge formats, in a nonzero-sum manner and in unpredictable and shifting combinations.”19
The South Bank's efficacy as a cultural district within London's current urban governance regime now hinges on the redeployment of welfarist modes of governing and its associated built forms. The South Bank (in the form recognizable today) arguably entered the realm of urban governance in London in 1943. This can be seen in a seemingly minor, but in actuality enormously significant, instance: the outline of a theatre building on the south bank of the Thames on planning maps contained within the 1943 County of London Plan.20 The County Plan was commissioned by the County of London, the metropolitan level of government responsible for overseeing the area now usually referred to as “inner” London, at the bequest of the national Ministry of Works (a Greater London Plan, which addressed surrounding areas, was released the following year).21 The County Plan attempted to imagine the new London that would emerge from postwar reconstruction, explicitly positioning itself as the spatial counterpart to William Beveridge's recently published proposals on social security: “Sir William Beveridge has talked of giants in the path of social security. There are giants too in the path of city planning.”22 German bombing had destroyed many of the buildings on the southern bank of the Thames, and so the authors proposed “a great cultural centre, embracing, amongst other features, a modern theatre, a large concert hall and the headquarters of various organizations” as part of their plans for the spatial transformation of central and south London.23 That there was historical precedence for a cultural district in south London chimed with their aspirations, which were to resuscitate both the arts and the city through urban planning:
In earlier times the south bank [sic], with its Globe Theatre, Paris Garden, and its other centres of attraction, was a vital and popular district of London. There is little reason why it should not recapture some of is former lively spirit. The scheme we have prepared should provide the necessary impetus.24
Included in the County Plan was a picturesque illustration of the South Bank from 1647 placed next to photographs of the same, bomb-damaged, area in 1943. This invited the reader to imagine that the new scheme would restore the South Bank to its former glory as a “popular entertainment centre of London.”25 This would require a rewriting of the theatrical and urban history of south London, of course. At the time of the original Globe, the area south of the Thames was outside London proper, and, though “vital and popular,” it hardly conformed to modern planners' desires to integrate the area into central London (if anything, the area's “lively spirit” in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries relied on its exclusion from London, rather than any contiguity with the city). And the planners elided what was perhaps the area's most vibrant period as an entertainment district: from the late eighteenth century (beginning in Southwark) through the nineteenth century, when Lambeth was the home of a network of large theatres and music halls that provided entertainment for thousands of spectators each night.26 But this omission signaled a reversal of previous ways of understanding the relationship between the arts and the city. By the middle of the twentieth century, cultural industries were no longer seen as problems for the urban governance of south London (as they had been at different times in the nineteenth century).27 Moreover, the delineation of a theatre on the maps within the County Plan signaled that cultural venue-building was no longer just a long-standing rhetorical ambition, it was now integrated into the fine-grained planning of the city (even if, ironically, the theatre was the last venue to be built and it was located adjacent to the east, rather than west, side of Waterloo Bridge).
Realizing the aims of arts advocates and urban planners, however, required the creation of a governance apparatus that could coordinate intensive state investment in the built environment. This, in turn, brought the arts more firmly within the ambit of national and local governance, and it made possible the construction of arts venues in the United Kingdom in a way that was previously unachievable. When Beveridge demanded that the national state take responsibility for the economic and social security of the United Kingdom, he not only called for the creation of individual enterprises such as the National Health Service and increased state intervention in national economic management, he and his political allies offered a rationale for a new model of governance.28 Beveridge (along with allies like the Fabian Society and elements within all major political parties) reconceived the political, economic, and cultural spheres in which the British state could legitimately intervene and for which it should claim ultimate responsibility. This most directly involved the commanding heights of industry and social welfare, but it rapidly extended to other realms, like the arts, that appeared to share the ethos of social citizenship that the British welfare state would attempt to cultivate and for which it aimed to serve as guarantor (here I use the term “social citizenship” in the sense of L.H. Marshall's classic left liberal formulation, in which he argues that a full sense of citizenship can only be realized once the state augments its historical concern for civil and political rights with the right to “live the life of a civilized being according to the prevailing standards of society”).29 Expanding the role of the national state also necessitated the development of a governance apparatus that could actually implement the welfare state agenda and broker agreements with civil society organizations to finance and coordinate the delivery of public goods. It is in this light that the creation of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946 can be seen, as an agent and instrument of governance that could help coordinate relations between the national and local state, arts organizations, charities, and more. That the first chairman of the Arts Council was the leading economist John Maynard Keynes, who had led the British delegation at Bretton Woods in 1944 as well as provided much of the economic rationale for Beveridge and the postwar Labour government's program, only emphasized the degree to which the arts had become part of the political-economic governance of the United Kingdom. As Clive Gray puts it, these changes “depended not so much upon conditions within the arts world itself as it did upon changed conceptions of the role of the state and the management of the resources of society.”30 The arts—and the monumental cultural-venue building program undertaken on their behalf—were deeply implicated in establishing and extending welfare state governance, in both urban and political spheres.
When all of the buildings comprising the South Bank scheme were completed, it was remarkable how much they articulated, through built form, the ascendency of the British welfare state and the role of the arts and the state in securing it. They did so in several complementary ways: they testified to a compact between the state and civil society and gave physical form to a public good that this compact sought to promote; their scale—these are large buildings that cost a great deal to build—illustrated the state's newly developed fiscal capacity and its will to demonstrate it; they demonstrated the utility of the scientific planning techniques through which public spending was coordinated; and they spatially cultivated national and artistic prestige through their location and monumental architecture (their importance was signaled by their proximity to landmarks of church, state, and commerce across the river: St. Paul's Cathedral, the houses of Parliament, and the City of London). The South Bank development spatially legitimized the governance logic of the welfare state and the technical apparatus necessary to achieve it.
The South Bank's current operation as a tourist stage puts these achievements to work better than before and mobilizes them to serve different ends. From our current historical vantage point, it is easy to underestimate the profound economic corporatism at the heart of the welfare state and the persistence of corporatist habits even when the economy as a whole is governed in a less corporatist (and more parasitic) way than in the past. When it comes to cultural districts, corporatism is alive and well. The South Bank still depends on a partnership between the state and civil society; despite the multiplication of governing agents within the area, the state continues to use substantial investment in cultural institutions as a linchpin for urban development. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine how the South Bank could function without the sorts of continued brokerage between the state, private capital, and cultural and civil institutions that welfarist forms of governance inaugurated. Making the South Bank function as a tourist stage today does not require a new way of seeing the city, just the better application of an old way.
In terms of mobilizing the spatial legacy of the welfare state, the built form of the South Bank's arts venues is particularly important. Although each has its own style, all of the cultural venues share a modernist architectural vernacular that was commonly employed for public arts buildings in many countries following World War II. This style, often executed in poured concrete (though not exclusively—Royal Festival Hall is clad in stone), emphasizes rectilinear forms and mass. The buildings look sturdy, and are intended to do so: they spatially articulate aesthetic aspirations of permanence and contemplation.
The South Bank's arts venues have eventually come more into fashion, but this is not only due to changing popular tastes or judicious renovation. Rather, it is because, spatially, they perform an important palliative role within a city that is otherwise dedicated to the pursuit of finance capital. Places, as David Harvey argues, can be conceptualized in three main ways: “as absolute (bounded, fixed, and named), relative (interconnected and interactive through myriad flows), and relational (internalizing forces, powers, influences, and meanings from elsewhere).”31 All places have absolute, relative, and relational features in some combination, but our current era, characterized as it is by a “global network of interurban flows of finance capital,” privileges relativity and relationality to an almost bewildering degree.32 The monumental, solid architecture of welfare state cultural venues, however, is reassuring in a financialized economy predicated on flows of capital, and especially appealing in London, which is particularly beholden to finance capital. It would be naive to infer that the built form of the South Bank's arts venues make the district a bulwark against globalization (as Bennett shows, it is clearly implicated in globalization), but their mass implies a fixity that is tremendously important to the successful management of global cities—without these sorts of anchors, the South Bank implies, London would disappear in all the flow.
Moreover, the South Bank has come to model ideal forms of urban political economy within advanced capitalist societies, and this modeling is arguably even more significant at a time of financial crisis than it otherwise would be. The South Bank is efficient; it is affluent; it is creative, and therefore entrepreneurial; it is sustained through the benevolent stewardship of many partners (public, private, and not-for-profit); and, because it is dominated by cultural producers, uncomfortable oppositions like labor and capital seem not to apply in it. The South Bank is attractive today because it both expresses and helps manage the contradictions of financialization. Its ability to do so, however, depends on mentalities and technologies from an older way of governing that financialization ostensibly supplanted.
However ambivalent one might feel about the South Bank's current mix of culture and consumerism (though these two things are hardly antithetical when seen historically), it would be churlish to deny that the area is more vibrant than it was a decade or so ago. It is therefore tempting to see many of the South Bank's problems as having been solved—urban governance, it would seem, finally works for the South Bank, and the South Bank finally works for the urban governance of London. If this seems an appealing proposition, it is not because neoliberal forms of urban governance have finally put the welfare state to rest (no matter what their advocates may assert). In fact, the reverse is true: to the extent that the South Bank works today—both in itself and in its wider contribution to London's urban governance—it is because of that welfare state legacy. The South Bank's efficacy as a tourist stage today depends not on a repudiation of welfarist ways of seeing or welfarist governance techniques, but, instead, on their rehabilitation and more selective application. The South Bank scheme is now a very successful urban performance. Important parts of the script on which that performance is based, however, were written in another time.
1. For an academic argument that cities have historically been centers of innovation and creativity, see Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (London: Phoenix, 1999). At the time of writing, the highest profile creative city consulting firm is Richard Florida's Creative Class Group. See “Creative Class Group,” n.d., http://www.creativeclass. com.
2. For an analysis of the different types of cultural production in the South Bank, see Newman and Smith, “Cultural Production, Place and Politics on the South Bank of the Thames.”
3. See, for example, Guy Baeten, “Regenerating the South Bank: Reworking Community and the Emergence of Post-Political Regeneration,” in Robert Imrie, Loretta Lees, and Mike Raco (eds.), Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City (London: Routledge, 2009), 237–253; Susan Bennett, “Theatre/Tourism,” Theatre Journal 57:3 (2005), 407–428; Franco Bianchini and Michael Parkinson, Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration: The West European Experience (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993); Graeme Evans, Cultural Planning: An Urban Renaissance? (London: Routledge, 2001); Graeme Evans, “Creative Cities, Creative Spaces and Urban Policy,” Urban Studies 46:5–6 (May 1, 2009), 1003–1040; Richard L. Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (London: Routledge, 2005); Charles Landry, The Creative City (London: Demos, 1995); Peter Newman and Ian Smith, “Cultural Production, Place and Politics on the South Bank of the Thames,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (March 2000), 9–24; Allen J. Scott, “Creative Cities: Conceptual Issues and Policy Questions,” Journal of Urban Affairs 28:1 (January 2006), 1–17; F. J. Monclús and Manuel Guàrdia (eds.), Culture, Urbanism and Planning (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
4. Allen J. Scott, Social Economy of the Metropolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 65.
5. R.A.W. Rhodes, “The New Governance: Governing without Government,” Political Studies 44:4 (September 1, 1996), 653.
6. For example, this has been a concern of the British “creative adhocracy” Mission, Models, Money.
7. Rhodes, “The New Governance,” 660.
8. Susan Bennett, “Universal Experience: The City as Tourist Stage,” in Tracy C. Davis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 78.
9. Ibid., 83.
10. For an analysis of how cultural institutions have been conscripted into securing London's status as a global city—and cultivating the forms of subjectivity on which this globality depends—see Michael McKinnie, “Performing the Civic Transnational: Cultural Production, Governance, and Citizenship in Contemporary London,” in Performance and the City (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 110–127.
11. Nicholas Rossiter, “HRH The Prince of Wales: A Vision of Britain,” Omnibus (BBC1, October 28, 1988).
12. While the area immediately south of the Thames was hardly held in great esteem by politicians and planners, I would caution against any nostalgia about the South Bank before the plan. Bombing of the area was extensive, many of the historical industries in the area had been either damaged or were in decline, and the housing stock in the area was often of poor quality.
13. London County Council, “Objections to the 1951 Plan-Detailed Schedule of Objections, South Bank Area” (London: London Metropolitan Archives, 1951), LCC/AR/TP/04/040. This response was to objection 424A. The area between County Hall and Waterloo Bridge is where the Royal Festival Hall had been built.
14. Newman and Smith, “Cultural Production, Place and Politics on the South Bank of the Thames,” 17.
15. Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 94.
16. Bennett comments on recent political accommodation to the South Bank's current form. See Bennett, “Universal Experience: The City as Tourist Stage,” 81–82. Baeten provides an in-depth analysis of political conflicts related to the area during the 1980s and 1990s. See Baeten, “Regenerating the South Bank: Reworking Community and the Emergence of Post-Political Regeneration.”
17. Valverde, “Seeing Like a City,” 280.
18. Ibid. See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
19. Valverde, “Seeing Like a City,” 281.
20. J.H. Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie, County of London Plan (London: Macmillan, 1943), plate 48.1; ibid., 133, Figure 24.
21. Patrick Abercrombie, Greater London Plan 1944 (London: HMSO, 1945).
22. Forshaw and Abercrombie, County of London Plan 1943, iii–iv.
23. Ibid., 131.
24. Ibid., 135.
25. Ibid., plate L.1–3.
26. For an a good account of how the “Surreyside” theatres south of the Thames developed in concert with south London, see Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001). For a comprehensive study of nineteenth-century theatre and music hall audiences in London (including south London) see Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class, and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
27. See Nick Draper, “‘Across the Bridges’: Representations of Victorian South London,” London Journal 29:1 (2004), 25–43.
28. William Henry Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society: A Report (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1944).
29. T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto Press, 1992), 8.
30. Clive Gray, The Politics of the Arts in Britain (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), 40.
31. David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 191.
32. Ibid.
Abercrombie, Patrick, Greater London Flan 1944, London: HMSO, 1945.
Baeten, Guy, “Regenerating the South Bank: Reworking Community and the Emergence of Post-Political Regeneration,” in Robert Imrie, Loretta Lees, and Mike Raco (eds.), Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City, London: Routledge, 2009, 237–253.
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