Cultures and Lifestyles

From "Key Concepts in Urban Studies"

© SAGE Publications Ltd 2016

Urbanization is a consistent feature of immanent development of late capitalism and modernity. The
biannual United Habitat Report, State of the World's Cities, notes that, by 2050, 70% of the world's
population will be urban dwellers, and, moreover, that mega-cities and mega-regions will dominate the
global economy (United Nations, 2013). These forecasts notwithstanding, too many urbanists assume that
this process is universal in respect of culture and lifestyle. A Starbucks coffee tastes pretty much the same
in Shanghai as in London, but this globalization of beverage standards is often confused with globalization
of culture and lifestyle. In the UK, extending the opening hours of pubs and restaurants in the late 1990s
was meant to usher in a continental European style ‘café society’. Yet the prevailing Friday night culture in
many metropolitan areas is binge drinking - something Samuel Johnson the great narrator of London
chronicled in the 18th century in his 1738 poem ‘London’ (Johnson, 2000).

The essential problem of many urbanists is their lack of understanding of the anthropological and
sociological roots of examining culture. They have a tendency to lay a homogeneous template over
complex and different urban forms. In his book, Reason and Culture, the anthropologist Ernst Gellner
debates Reason versus Culture by reference to the work of the philosophers Descartes, Hume and Kant
(Gellner, 1992). In many accounts of urban culture there is often no reference to reason through any
investigation of the material rationality of different places; for example, the role of rent as a special form of
surplus value and the real estate sector in the secondary circuits of capital (Gotham, 2006; see entry on
Real Estate). Similarly, the cultural theorist Raymond Williams has sought to establish a sociology of
culture. He points to the convergence of anthropological and sociological constructs of culture based upon
two positions (Williams, 1980): first, the manifestation of national aesthetic histories in an institutional
setting that represents the interests and values of a people; and, second, the discovery of a general social
order by means of identifying its cultural manifestations.

Williams also noted that modernity is directly connected to urbanization, so that this convergence is
generally apparent in urban settings. A related issue is the increased professionalization of the production
of culture and the manner in which culture is a signifying system that is intrinsic to the economic structure of
an economy and its social relations. Too often this point is forgotten by the urban culturalists.

A multiple perspective on culture and urbanization is that identified by Michael Borer that he terms the
Urban Culturalist Perspective (Borer, 2006). It consists of six domains of research:

1. Images and representations of the city;

2. Urban community and civic culture;

 3. Place-based myths, narratives and collective memories;

4. Sentiment and meaning of and for places;

5. Urban identities and lifestyles;

6. Interaction places and practices.

In this view, culture is not just a by-product of the economic and political structures and processes of urban
settlements; rather it emphasizes that urban agglomerations are sites of the interaction between individuals’
values and meanings in which community engagement can be realized (Borer, 2006). In this perspective
urban places have function as well as meaning. This equally applies to the relationship between lifestyles
and culture, whereby the function of lifestyles is often expressed in the meaning of local cultures. The
danger with this perspective is that it stresses agency often at the expense of structure in that the examples
cited overlook the material roots and locations of many of the communities studied.

In the UK, in the 1960s, youth cultures developed a lifestyle based upon African-American urban cultures of
music and clothing. Adherents to this style were known as Mods. The lifestyle developed from an adoption
of modernity (hence Mods) and as a reaction against a conservative and conformist culture. In particular,
rising real wages and opportunities in new industries for young working-class (mainly) males, created
cultures of conspicuous consumption. Devotion to this urban-based culture and lifestyle also created a set
of meanings and informal practices that went beyond the buying of music and clothes, and that still re-
surfaces in different British cities from time to time.

The Beatles first sang ‘All You Need is Love’ in 1967, while Richard Florida wrote The Rise of the Creative
Class in 2002. In the latter case, the exposition was almost as simple. All you need is creative individuals to
locate in a city for its economic fortunes to be transformed (Florida, 2002). Florida lacks a theory, the
evidence is patchy and the data very variable. His argument is part of the design-led urban regeneration
discourse. This is based on real estate developments, centered on signature architecture and street
landscaping, with bars, restaurants and retail outlets catering for the professional service employees who
occupy the commanding heights of commercial real estate. This development encourages forms of
appropriating social production and consumption around imagined lifestyles, which in themselves provide
fertile ground for corporate place promotion and other signifiers (Bell and Jayne, 2004).

The recycling of conspicuous consumption in business and financial districts creates opportunities for
developers to create arts quarters, and aesthetic and tourist spaces. It is the latter which is the source of
claims about culture and lifestyles being the driver of intentional development in metropolitan areas (see
entry on Gentrification and Urban Redevelopment). Yet this is a secondary outcome of the primary driver of
real estate accumulation strategies. In the case of cities whose propulsive industry (manufacturing, etc.) has
disappeared, ‘creatives’ exploiting low rents are not the condition for revival and redevelopment, as Florida
and other creative-boosters claim. The essential problem is that Florida and his acolytes confuse
correlation with causation (Peck, 2005). The central issue is that creatives are drawn from professional
classes who have higher levels of wealth and income than average. Attracting them to some new
previously unexploited area of a metropolitan region does not of itself lead to an increase in regional
income and wealth. Moreover, in many cities in the world, bohemian and creative lifestyles (whatever their
meaning) are marginal. The rise of the use of unpaid interns and unstable short-term freelance work
contracts in the ‘creative industries’ (sic) in London is one example. The political repression of Pussy Riot
in Moscow is another that makes Florida's creative arcadia seem fanciful. These are the kinds of claims that
the urban culturalist perspective is critical of in that the creative classes thesis rest upon a functionalist view
of how these classes transform a place without reference to the meanings and values inherent in the
cultures and lifestyles of a place.

There is also a complete mis-specification of creative classes. In all cities around the world, their histories
are replete with immigrant communities who have transformed downtowns. In the US, after the Balkans War
of the 1990s, a large number of Bosnians escaped the conflict by migrating to the downtown of St Louis,
helping to revive some its former dynamism. In other literatures, this would be called entrepreneurialism -
you pay your money and take your choice of discourse.

Once you begin to look at the urban informal economy, a rather different creative and lifestyle economy
begins to emerge. John Rennie Short distinguishes different kinds of informal economy in the ‘urban order’.
These include the illegal informal economy, the communal economy and the domestic economy (Rennie
Short, 1996). All these forms have creativity at their heart, but as they encompass marginal populations they
appear below the radar for the creative class promoters like Florida and his ilk. It is clear that in the ghettos,
the slums and the barrios, a relatively high degree of creativity is needed to survive. Moreover, many
metropolitan areas survive on a reserve army of an underclass, displayed dramatically in the film Slum Dog
Millionaire set in Mumbai. Similarly, a number of favelas in Brazilian cities are developing themselves as
tourist destinations. The Santa Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro attracts 40,000 visitors a year. Once a violent
zone for drugs wars, it was ‘pacified’ in 2008 with the installation of a Pacifying Police Unit. Consequently,
the means and values of this community have altered as its culture and lifestyle have adapted in an
apparently creative manner. However, lionized by business magazine like Forbes as a zone for
entrepreneurial opportunities, the material reality of the drugs economy and state enforcement of
pacification are never far away.

It is the material basis of urbanization and not its aesthetic manifestation per se that establishes culture and
lifestyles, and thus it ever was. This point is admirably demonstrated in James Boswell's London Journal
written in the late 18th century. This intimate account of daily life in London has become a classic as it
portrays the lifestyles and culture of an imperial city near the height of its power (Boswell, 1992).

REFERENCES
Bell, D.; M. Jayne (eds) 2004. City of Quarters: Urban Villages in the Contemporary City, Ashgate
Aldershot.
Borer, M.I. 2006. ‘The Location of Culture: The Urban Culturalist Perspective’, City & Community, 5(2):
173-97.
Boswell, J. 1992. The Journals of James Boswell: 1762-1795, Yale University Press New Haven and
London.
Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday
Life, Basic Books New York.
Gellner, E. 1992. Reason and Culture, Blackwell Publishers Oxford.
Gotham, K. 2006. ‘Reconsidered: Globalization and the US Real Estate Sector’, American Journal of
Sociology, 112(1): 231-75.
Johnson, S. 2000. Major Works, Oxford University Press Oxford.
Peck, J. 2005. ‘Struggling with the Creative Class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, 29(4): 740-70.
 Rennie Short, J. 1996. The Urban Order: An Introduction to Urban Geography, Blackwell Publishers
Oxford.
United Nations 2013. State of the World's Cities 2012/2013: Prosperity of Cities, United Nations New
York.
Williams, R. 1980. Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, Verso London.

© SAGE Publications Ltd 2016

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Cultures and lifestyles. (2016). In M. Gottdiener, L. Budd & P. Lehtovuori (Eds.), SAGE key concepts: Key
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Harvard

Cultures and lifestyles (2016). [Online]. In M Gottdiener, L Budd & P Lehtovuori (eds.). SAGE key concepts:
Key concepts in urban studies. London, United Kingdom: Sage UK. Available from:
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url=http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/sageukus/cultures_and_lifestyles/0 [Accessed 31 July
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