Responding to and resisting resilience

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this Special Issue is to contribute to the still under-researched debate on regional and urban economic resilience by proposing some reflections focused on the contribution of art and culture to revitalization of de-activated spaces. In this sense, the idea that some creative regions, ‘corridors’ or cities are also resilient is to be examined to see the extent they are capable of re-energization. This means not only preserving but also transforming themselves in response to external pressures, generating local development, innovation and growth. The contributions included then offer, using a multidisciplinary perspective – in terms of theoretical approaches, research methodologies and empirical findings – an interesting contribution to a better understanding of the concept of this specific kind of regional and urban resilience. The Special Issue is composed of eight articles.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• art
• literature
• resistance
• patronage
• commissions
• contrarian

Introduction

In a report to the Environmental Advisory Council to the Swedish Government, as input to the process of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa from 26 August to 4 September 2002, a leading ‘resilience’ thinker – Carl Folke – and celebrated colleagues, including, Lance Gunderson and C.S. Holling (Gunderson & Holling, 2002) began with the following announcement:

Emerging recognition of two fundamental errors underpinning past polices for natural resource issues heralds awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management. The first error has been an implicit assumption that ecosystem responses to human use are linear, predictable and controllable. The second has been an assumption that human and natural systems can be treated independently. However, evidence that has been accumulating in diverse regions all over the world suggests that natural and social systems behave in nonlinear ways, exhibit marked thresholds in their dynamics, and that social-ecological systems act as strongly coupled, complex and evolving integrated systems. (Folke et al., 2002)

The explicit scepticism of ‘engineering’ resilience in this context, recognition of the more non-linear ‘ecological’ variety and the article’s emphasis in the title referencing ‘adaptive capacity’ in a complex world of rapid transformations are welcome. And yet, the criticism of the second ‘error’ regarding the non-linearity of social–ecological systems is not as reassuring as it seems. Moreover, it is more anxiety-inducing than it first appears. And this is a possible inkling that all is not well with the ‘ecological’ notion of resilience when applied to social–ecological systems or even more simply social systems.

In his famous book, Normal Accidents, the organizational sociologist Charles Perrow (1984) theorized the causes of disasters such as Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown and – more prosaically – the Chicago Mercantile Futures Exchange’s ‘flash crash’ MacKenzie (2011). Thus, on 6 May, $1 trillion was wiped off the value of markets in the space of 10 minutes. Perrow’s alert to such crises and terminology for systemic crashes more generally is defined as a situation of ‘tight coupling’: where there is very little ‘slack’, ‘give’ or ‘buffer’, and decisions need to be taken in what is on any ordinary human scale a very limited period of time (e.g. in the ‘flash crash’ five seconds). Systems that are both ‘tightly coupled’ and ‘highly complex’ are an organizational contradiction, says MacKenzie (2011):

Crudely put, high complexity in a system means that if something goes wrong it takes time to work out what has happened and to act appropriately. Tight coupling means that one doesn’t have that time. Moreover, (Perrow) suggests, a tightly coupled system needs centralised management, but a highly complex system can’t be managed effectively in a centralised way because we simply don’t understand it well enough; therefore its organisation must be decentralised. Systems that combine tight coupling with high complexity are an organisational contradiction. (MacKenzie, 2011, p. 18)

So, this paragraph effectively adds a third problematic condition (integration) to the first two (tight coupling and high complexity) of Folke et al.’s (2002) characterization of social–ecological systems. As noted, Perrow (1984) and MacKenzie (2011) see these linked characteristics as an organizational contradiction or, put another way, a disaster waiting to happen. Because of these contradictory elements, it is hard to escape the further two conditions about resilience that socio-ecological systems are also both capable of displaying linearity (lock-in to path dependence) and thresholds of indeterminate decline as well as recovery. These last two characteristics combined, that is, declining path dependent lock-in, are seldom stressed in the sub-consciously optimistic accounts of resilience thinkers inside or outside the socio-spatial and economic geographic sciences.

If this seems unfair, given that the Folke et al. (2002) article is some 15 years old and while they were alluding to environmental mismanagement disasters such as Three Mile Island but not failures in the US financial or art systems, it nevertheless brings into question the reliability of their analysis of resilience whether in ecological or social–ecological systems. Some aspects of systemic modern work such as stocks and bonds trading, which are highly computerized and processed through algorithms that operate at microsecond (millionth of a second) speed, mean they are a primitive species of artificial intelligence (AI) since the best human reaction time is 140 milliseconds (thousandths). Thus, an ‘engineering’ resilience metaphor may also be, peculiarly, at least partly admissible today.

Aesthetic and economic spheres

Either way, Folke et al. (2002) are unappreciative of linear ecological system models but their interpretation of non-linear social–ecological models is also open to serious questioning. Accordingly, in this brief introduction to the Special Issue on ‘The Role of Art and Culture for Regional and Urban Resilience’, we have encouraged contributors to be willing to think about the validity of the resilience concept in their articles. It is currently a driver of analyses of economic in relation to other macro-social and ecological relationships, including the variety, nature and change impulses to systems of art and culture. These too are faced with resilience shocks, tests and other disasters which they confront independently or in other system articulations (Hughes, 1991). A systems analysis of comparable appreciative depth is undoubtedly needed to determine whether art and culture are ‘floating signifiers’ of socio-economic and spatial development and planning, meaning very little for what occurs in places such as Wall Street, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the City of London. This is harder to do than it might seem for those who hold that art is indeed an independent sphere or system of the kind critiqued in Folke et al. (2002). For example, those lucky enough to admire the ‘colour field’ paintings of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman or Clyfford Still’s purer form of ‘abstract expressionism’ at London’s Royal Academy exhibition in autumn 2016 may have been reminded of Rothko’s ‘revenge on the bourgeoisie’ in 1959. He had been commissioned in 1954 to paint and select from up to forty mural-scale canvases for the main Four Seasons restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s modernist Seagram building in Manhattan. His subsequent decision to withdraw the commission, initially brokered by designer of the Four Seasons restaurant Phyllis Lambert and co-architect Philip Johnson, scandalized the Manhattan of that ‘Mad Men’ era. The breach of contract meant that he repaid his $35,000 commission to the Seagram company. Even notorious artist Jackson Pollock's famous ‘Blue Poles’ mural which was temporarily hanging in the smaller Four Seasons restaurant awaiting the delivery of Rothko’s own canvases lasted longer.

Why Rothko’s ‘revenge’? It is worth briefly recounting this remarkable expression of the separate resilience systems that contradict the spheres of aesthetics and economics. Rothko was a poor immigrant from Dvinsk, Russia born in 1903 and described by Jones (2002) as ‘ … intense, solitary, leftwing, used to poverty and failure’. Talking later, on record, of his by then more successful career to an editor of Harper’s Magazine, Rothko explained that he took the commission ‘to upset, offend and torture the diners at the Four Seasons, that his motivation was entirely subversive … so they feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up’ (Jones, 2002). There follows one of two classical references underlying Rothko’s creative motivation towards the murals. The first is found in Florence and is Michelangelo's vestibule of the Laurentian Library, leading from the cloister of the Medici church of San Lorenzo built in approximately 1524–1526. Jones (2002) sees it as ‘ … Michelangelo's most audacious architectural creation, one of the most staggering of all his works - and the most modern. It is the anteroom of death’. The second influence were the houses in Pompeii, city of the dead, particularly at the Villa of Mysteries where the interior decoration of sombre walls with broad expanses of black and red inspired his project. His aim for this was recorded as a desire to create a ‘Dionysian’ anti-architecture against the rational order of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building and torment the bourgeoisie’s anticipation of a pleasant supper.

The narrative of these events further suggested his own confusion about modernity:

Rothko wanted to prove that painting could exert power - that he could subvert his brief as a “decorative” artist and transform an up-market restaurant into a space dominated by sublime art. Rothko was trying to revive the idea central to modernism - that art can shatter our assumptions. But no artist in New York in 1959 had that kind of power. Sitting amid the buzz and excess of the Four Seasons, Rothko must have felt that he had been deluded - that the wealthy diners were not going to be harrowed. That art could not change anything. That his paintings would just be decoration after all …  (Jones, 2002)

Surprisingly, perhaps, Rothko’s misanthropic version of his motivation meant a myth of spirituality and optimism was created by the power elite of American art. This satisfied his collectors, as it expressed a perceived reverence for art as shared with other abstract expressionists embarked on an established aesthetic and spiritual journey. Poignantly, in 1970, Rothko committed suicide – as did other abstract expressionists like Ashille Gorky, Pollock and sculptor David Smith. But, before his death, he gave nine (actually offering as many as thirty) of the intended murals to the director of London’s Tate Gallery where they bleakly hang – as Rothko requested – in a low-lit, grey-walled, exclusive room in the Tate Modern. The remainder are now found in galleries in Japan and Washington DC. A key inference from this episode is that art may conquer the resilience of a specific corporate commission but not its collective ideological power. Ironically, Rothko’s generosity was to a gallery bequeathed to the public by the corporate power of UK sugar benefactor Henry Tate, founder of Tate & Lyle. Corporate power is precision-engineered to express art’s fragile dependence on such asymmetric power systems.

By contrast, abstract expressionist Clyfford Still (like Van Gogh) scarcely sold a painting in his life. Unlike the commissions, sponsorships and patronage available to the Manhattan art world of the 1950s. Still eschewed them all. Whereas, encouraged by trusted advisers, Peggy Guggenheim commissioned Jackson Pollock to paint his biggest painting ‘Mural’ for her new Manhattan townhouse hallway; Pollock in July 1943 duly signed a gallery contract with Guggenheim. The terms were $150 a month and a settlement at the end of the year if his paintings sold. For Still, there was none of this. He started a tough life in his ‘lostland’ moving over ‘the burning plains’ of depression-era North Dakota, eastern Washington and the prairies of southern Alberta, Canada. His self-reliant, outsider status meant that he would alienate the world of art criticism – a principle he saw as akin to ‘throwing the money lenders out of the temple’. Accordingly, he limited the presentation of his work, famously turning down not only sales, but also severing any gallery representation from 1951 to 1969, including an invitation to exhibit at the Venice Biennale in 1957. The only gifts of his work were to the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo NY and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Later, after his death but designed to his specifications (no other artists, dedicated to a city not a museum, no bookshop or café), the Clyfford Still Museum, an independent non-profit organization in Denver, Colorado, finally opened its doors in November 2011.

In those circumstances, even Rothko’s ‘principled’ right of refusal meant that the markets for art and economy operated more clearly in separate spheres. The US economy was booming from the huge wartime and subsequent Cold War defence build-up but to the artists contributing to the New York School (for many, a preferred name to ‘abstract expressionists’) for whom European art was in ruins, fellow-artist Barnett Newman wrote:

We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world destroyed by a great depression and a fierce World War, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of paintings that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. (Newman, 1969)

Most abstract expressionists had left-wing ideals and were opponents of social and economic inequality. This was enriched by immigrant intellectuals and ideas like surrealism, existentialism and Jungian psychology. Eventually, their view was at odds with a society increasingly concerned with the consumer lifestyle, fuelled by economic success and proliferation of the mass media. Still, however, lived up to the nickname of the abstract expressionists as the ‘irascibles’. His rejection of consumer society, the New York artworld and the monetization of his artistic output was total and rejected until his death. It took a Maryland legal ruling to allow four of the paintings in his will to be auctioned to endow his own memorial museum. On this theme, Still’s existential opposition to capitalism in practice is testimony to the dream that art and markets can exist as separate systems or spheres. To that extent, Still’s own resilience outmatched the upward regression line of the fluctuating art booms of his lifetime.

Resilience shocks and system repercussions

This inquiry into the economics and aesthetics of particular resilience ‘shocks’ to the art world has served three objectives which are reflected to varying degrees in the papers of this Special Issue. These include massive resilience shocks such as depression, global war, the ‘shock of the new’ as expressed in abstract expressionism, and individual resistances to the capitalist market. First, the three vignettes from abstract expressionism show how art has its own variety of relational work in the ‘art economy’ rather like high finance (speculation, acquisitions and commissions). We have identified three instances of variety in terms of the power relations of the art market. The first of these is ‘patronage’ as revealed in Pollock’s willing, if mildly principled, acceptance of Peggy Guggenheim’s ‘retainer’ contract or project fee. The challenge of ‘Mural’ was a direct aesthetic test as Pollock wrote to his brother: ‘as exciting as hell’. But Guggenheim’s patronage also gave him entry to the ‘art system’ of an avant-garde that was taken seriously by the critics, curators and collectors whose opinions mattered. The second instance is expressed in Rothko’s breach of contract with his specific commission and its corporate rather than individual ‘relational work’ (Zelizer, 2012). Here, an oppositional, aesthetic ideology is operating in a relationship where the artist is testing the resilience of his counterparties, informed by emotion as much as reason and even confused by his analysis of reason as represented by modern architecture. This worked against his more emotional, Dionysian appreciation of the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii. Thus, from the Seagram family to the Four Seasons diners, Rothko’s struggle against consumer society revealed itself to be futile. Finally, Clyfford Still succeeded in ways that Rothko was unable to. Himself a victim of the resilience failure represented by the depression-era into which he was born, he produced great art which transcended the ‘art system’ by his rejection of art criticism, art galleries and commissions of any kind. Still’s was the most distant of the separate spheres of art and economy, ultimately revealing that, except for the ‘work relation’ of money as pay, the two really can exist as distinctive systems.

Finally, connecting to the papers in this Special Issue, readers may be interested to notice the variety of types of relationship that occur according to these system differences. To delineate just a few distinctions, the following are offered for consideration. First, Turin was founded on the patronage of the Agnelli family until it decamped administratively to Amsterdam and London after merger with Chrysler. The second act that emphasizes a distinctive form of municipal ‘patronage’ reminiscent of (another) Guggenheim Museum, in Bilbao, is the Calatrava extravaganza in Valencia’s pre-recession bid to become an iconic global city. Although this has been seen by some as ushering in a major resilience downturn (for Spain), our authors here, while sceptical of resilience analysis more generally, are far from judging it a failure. The Rothkoesque crisis of confusion category may be most closely imitated by weaknesses of system integration on a particularly grand scale. Another ‘car cluster’ is characterized by the ‘long emergency’ of post-Fordist deindustrialization. Detroit stands as a post-industrial disaster where resilience is notable only for its absence. However, an even greater test of urban investment commissioning facing resilience is supplied by another paper on disasters, the one caused by the Kobe earthquake in Japan. In the latter case, Kobe may have recovered relatively well although hampered by Japan’s twenty-five-year economic stagnation. Smaller scale, more integrated deindustrialized industrial districts (IDs) in Italy are, albeit variably short-term in impact, marked by initiatives showing an ability to transition into creative economy activities that offer alternatives to their resilience crises.

Finally, the nearest equivalent macro-case or category of contrarian optimism in the face a long ‘resilience emergency’ is Slovenia’s response to the global financial crash of 2008 and northern England’s de-industrialized austerity and public expenditure cuts. Unsurprisingly, these had affected arts expenditure first of all but this has been responded to by an outpouring of energy through a voluntary arts and cultural renaissance among hitherto disaffected youth and other community groups. The quest for tourism innovation is also outlined in a review of EU RIS3 strategizing. This too suggests some blurring of the distinction of the arts and economic spheres and it must be hoped that it remains a sustainable model for the future of all such resilience and recession-hit places.

Structure of the special issue

The purpose of this Special Issue is to contribute to the still under-researched debate on regional and urban economic resilience by proposing some reflections focused on the contribution of art and culture to revitalization of de-activated spaces. In this sense, the idea that some creative regions, ‘corridors’ or cities are also resilient is to be examined to see the extent they are capable of re-energization. This means not only preserving but also transforming themselves in response to external pressures, generating local development, innovation and growth. The contributions included then offer, using a multidisciplinary perspective – in terms of theoretical approaches, research methodologies and empirical findings – an interesting contribution to a better understanding of the concept of this specific kind of regional and urban resilience. The Special Issue is composed of eight articles.

The two following papers focus on two cities, Turin, Italy and Valencia, Spain and at the urban level. Both are distinctive variants of ‘municipal or “urban patronage’ practised through powerful actors (the Agnelli and Calatrava ‘brands’) facilitated by city planners to adjust their past and future city ‘optics’ to the resilience challenge. The first one, written by Colombino and Vanolo, presents the case of Lingotto, an important industrial site and a highly symbolic former automotive space at the heart of the city of Turin, Italy. Following the changing economic conditions and connected discursive paradigms associated with the evolution of the local economy since the Fordist crisis of the 1970s, the article investigates the multiple trajectories, spatialities and layers of memory, meanings and practices that overlapped within and across Lingotto in the more recent past. The authors underline that Lingotto may be interpreted as a mirror of Turin’s resilience used to cope with the economic crises that have hit the city. Contrary to mainstream debates about the need to conserve local urban heritage, this paper highlights how forgetting the past may be a strategy for tackling the present and being resilient. The analysis contributes to understanding urban processes that entwine with the quest for resilience in the contemporary post-industrial city.

The second article of Rafael Boix, Pau Rausell and Raül Abeledo focuses on the city of Valencia in comparison with two other cities in Spain, Bilbao and Barcelona. The article critiques the effects that the version of cultural capitalism based on large events and architectural symbols has had on the resilience of cities when used as an engine, and not as a complement to the policies of urban transformation. The article presents an account of the ‘Calatrava model’ of the city of Valencia. The model depicts Valencia as a ‘cultural bubble’. This was designed to enable a new space between the beachfront and the historic core. The model is developed and contrasted with the two other examples of urban transformation designed to revitalize urban space: Bilbao – symbolically represented by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum – and the Barcelona 22@ – symbolically represented by Jean Nouvel’s Agbar Tower. Introducing the notion of ‘plasticity’, the authors discuss the overall failure of the Calatrava model and its negative effect on the short-term ability of the city to absorb shocks. Nevertheless, the authors point out that the city of Valencia was then able to adapt and absorb the urban transformation around Calatrava’s architectural complex and to incorporate it into their processes of dynamic resilience.

The second category uses Rothko’s ‘commisioning crisis’ and confusion about the meaning of modernity for art and economy. For Detroit, a history of past commissions from Henry Ford I’s Greenfield Village idyll to Henry Ford II’s modernist Renaissance Centre and the near-bankrupting of its Arts Institute resonates with the concept of ‘arrested dialectic’. This is employed in Cooke’s critique of the uneven development of various evolutionary phases (in art, literature and planning) after resilience’s manifold failures. The article critiques the relevance of the concept of ‘resilience’. The author believes that in the socio-spatial context, much of the modern space economy has been abandoned, lies derelict with city fabric often in ruins. The insights of art history are drawn upon to expose this ‘dark side’ of past urban and regional development. This is because just as art thrives in propitious economic conditions, so it also declines when urban austerity prevails. Catastrophic implications of globalization, neoliberal free trade, deindustrialization and populist political events can be traced to the exhaustion of Utopian practice, Enlightenment ideals and a weakness of states. This led to a fascination with the apparent decay of long-established values formerly expressed in western culture that now share more nihilistic elements with contemporary eastern culture. A proposal that a better interaction between the late capitalist ‘arrested dialectic’ of long-term stasis and the exhaustion of art’s wellsprings is that a new purpose can be found in fashioning an ‘Art of Warning of Incipient Disaster’.

The fourth article by Stefania Oliva and Luciana Lazzeretti discusses the concepts of adaptation, adaptability and resilience. The paper in particular investigates resilience in response to natural disasters through the analysis of the recovery process of the city of Kobe, Japan, destroyed by an earthquake in 1995. The case is an emblematic one because of its rapidity in urban reconstruction and speed of economic recovery. It is thus interesting to contrast with Edgington’s (2010) nuancing of city planning’s Phoenix Plan of memorial museums and advanced urban infrastructure for a traumatized citizenry. The authors underline that the reconstruction of Kobe represents a successful case of a resilient city able to adapt to changing circumstances and to foster local development proposing a renewed image of a creative city.

The following paper by Marco Bellandi and Erica Santini deals with the concept of resilience in IDs analysing how IDs well-endowed with innovation capabilities can fall into decline, and sometimes react against it. The authors state that mature IDs are often stuck in their cognitive core; moreover, their institutional frames are often weak with slow reactions to such crises, demonstrating a lack of adaptability and low resilience. However, lock-ins can be avoided or overcome by the activation and integration of a multiplicity of secondary know-how nuclei.

The three articles comprising our final category express its aims to capture the tendency, moderately or more radically, towards a more unexpected, even contrarian resilience response. These research accounts demonstrate distinctive ways communities may map out new pathways or implications by their focus on resilience in creative industries and tourism. The article of Marilena Vecco and Andrej Srakar focuses on the performing arts and it analyses the impact of two Slovenian jazz festivals on the economic resilience of the host cities: Jazzinty Novo Mesto and Jazz Cerkno. The authors analyse the extent the two jazz festivals contributed to the original pre-crisis status of the two cities as a reaction to the financial crisis of 2008. Using quantitative methodology, the authors estimate the effects of these festivals on tourism inflows and employment, confirming the important effects of the events in both cities, but with wide variation across the years. The authors discuss the differential resilience of the two cities attributed to the local context (and to the ‘home-grown’ nature of both festivals).

The contribution of Andy Pratt discusses the role of culture in today’s constricted economy, underlining that while culture has been the victim of profound funding cuts in the latest period of austerity, at the same time, it has prospered showing somehow a certain kind of resilience. The interesting article counters with an argument that resilience as a concept is relational, it does not have a unitary meaning and its forms will change depending on context (that is the cultural field, and the field of governance). For the author then, the strange survival of culture is explained not by austerity, but by the dynamism of the cultural field. The final part of the article discusses the risks and problems of this disjunction between governance and culture.

The last article, by Nicola Bellini, Francesco Grillo and Cecilia Pasquinelli investigates the role of tourism in promoting resilience among European regions. In doing this, three kinds of resilience are analysed: engineering, ecological and evolutionary types. The authors discuss the extent EU Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS3) might contribute to innovation, growth and industry composition. RIS3 could be an opportunity for reframing and operationalizing the innovative role of tourism in the resilience of European regions. The paper analyses how and the extent to which tourism is identified as one of the target areas of the place-based specialization notion and, accordingly, as a domain for exploiting and further steering regional research and innovation capabilities in favour of regional resilience and competitiveness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.