Places and their culture: The evolution of Dutch cultural industries from an international perspective, 1600-2000
Overview:
PROJECT MANAGEMENT:
Prof.dr. R.C. Kloosterman, Amsterdam Study Centre for the Metropolitan Environment
ABSTRACT
Cultural industries are becoming ever more important as sources of employment and income in post-industrial cities. This project will focus on the evolution of three selected Dutch cultural industries:visual arts, architecture, and publishing from 1600 to the present. The changes in the relationship between cities and these forms of cultural production will take the centre of the stage. We will (1) trace and analyse from an evolutionary socio-economic perspective the continuities and critical junctures in the development of main cultural industries in Dutch cities from 1600 to the present; (2) describe and examine from this perspective patterns of spatial clustering and the evolution of the spatial division of labour in main cultural industries between cities in the Netherlands; and (3) assess the role and position of selected Dutch cultural industries from an international comparative perspective. This research programme will shed light on the question what can be created on a short-term and what is deeply rooted regarding competitive economic activities.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Culture and places
Culture constitutes a crucial raison d’être for urbanity. According to the French
historian Le Goff (1997), many cities have now, after an industrial intermezzo of
about two centuries, gone back to their essential functions: “l’échange, l’information,
la vie culturelle et le pouvoir”. In the closing decades of the 20th century, culture and
more precisely the making of cultural products has seemed to offer a promising
avenue for advanced urban development providing both income and employment (cf.
Scott, 2004: 461). This is also recognised in the Netherlands, where cultural
industries have recently been identified as one of the strong points of the modern
Dutch economy (cf. Ministerievan Economische Zaken, 2005) and are now included
among the promising sectors for further development by the Dutch government’s
Innovatieplatform (Innovation Platform, a government think tank, to promote innovation
in a broader sense).
Looking at the historical trajectory could give us valuable insights in how cultural
industries evolve providing us with recommendations for policies aimed enhancing
urban competitiveness and social mobility. This research programme will focus on
the central question of whether there is any continuity in Dutch cultural production
from the 17th century to the present and which factors could explain such continuity.
We start with a brief theoretical clarification before delving deeper into this question.
Culture (defined as “the practices, goods, and ideas broadly classified under the arts
used for education and aesthetic and spiritual enlightenment or for entertainment and
diversion”, Gans, 1999: 5) has been subjected to radical processes of commodification.
Cultural products, in other words, are increasingly subjected to the
laws of supply and demand. We are witnessing, however, not only a process of
“economisation” of many forms of culture, but also a process of “culturalisation” of the
economy, whereby many products become imbued with semiotic values, further
blurring the distinction between high and low culture. The resulting expansion of the
domain of cultural products is transforming the cultural industries into one of the most
promising sets of post-industrial economic activities catering for growing (global) markets.
Despite the fundamental changes in the conditions of how and for whom culture is
created and produced, most of the cultural production is still strongly tied to cities.
Only urban milieus can provide the critical mass (of both producers and consumers),
the diversity (including the openness to newcomers and their new ideas), and the
proximity (enabling the formation of networks and intense face-to-face contacts) that are highly conducive to cultural production. However, not all cities are good at cultural production, and even those that are tend to specialise in particular forms of cultural production. As PeterHall (1998) has shown, Paris in the past has been clearly outstanding in the visual arts, but not as good in the creation of music, while
contemporary Vienna is much more important. In Paris, however, the combination of
the patronage of the FrenchState, a long artistic tradition that helped to create a
highly sophisticated local demand, and the openness to young artists from other parts of the world (from Van Gogh to Picasso) led to the formation of a creative milieu for a specific kind of cultural production that no other city at the time could match. Paris, in other words, could rely on resources of competitiveness underlying the brilliant innovation in the visual arts that were hard to emulate by potential competitors.
Cultural industries, clustering and path-dependency
In a series of path-breaking publications, AllenScott (1997, 2000, 2004) has pointed out that the underlying socio-economic and spatial dynamics of cultural industries are quite similar to those in high-tech industries. Cultural industries tend to agglomerate together in dense specialised clusters resembling (neo) Marshallian industrial districts of, for instance, ICT firms (for historical examples of clustering of cultural industries see Prak, 2003 and Kaufmann, 2004).
Firstly, cultural industries are typically organised in small and medium sized establishments that face a volatile demand for their, mostly customised, output, which tends to be characterised by a high and distinctive quality. These combined characteristics require a sufficiently large and elastic supply of highly skilled and specialised workers. The concentration of production in a relatively small area helps to create a pool of specialised skilled labour and reduces search costs both for firms and workers in cultural industries.
Second, clustering enables the sharing of specialised inputs and infrastructure (such
as specialised suppliers, intermediate agents to facilitate access to markets, institutions regarding quality control etc.)
Third, spatial clustering is conducive to innovation. Although cultural industries are not necessarily technology-intensive, they do require permanent improvement and creative change to distinguish themselves from competitors and to keep their customers surprised and sometimes even amused. As innovations, by definition, deal with new combinations, they involve the use of socalled tacit knowledge that is not yet sufficiently standardised and codified. Tacit knowledge, accordingly, cannot be exchanged by letter, phone, fax or email but only face-to-face, when the rich context of the knowledge can be reconstructed in an interactive and open way. Clustering promotes the flows of knowledge or spill over
necessary to sustain more or less permanent innovation. Hence, the need for innovation strengthens the significance of agglomeration economies.
These agglomeration economies may become more significant over time as
dedicated institutions (further) evolve that help the process of matching specialised
demand and specialised supply on the local labour market, contributing to increasing the skills and knowledge of workers (educational laboratories, research institutes or internships), stimulating spill overs of knowledge, or facilitating access to markets. Co- evolution of institutions, consequently, may imply increasing returns over a period of time and thus further contribute to the competitive edge of a specific cultural industry in a particular place. This increasing institutional thickness (Amin and Thrift, 1995) constitutes a form of sunk cost, which on the one hand, enables dynamics characterised by increasing returns, while on the other, it may block the opening of new paths of development as a place gets locked in. The dynamics of agglomeration economies are, hence, displaying the characteristics of path-dependency, where relatively contingent events in the past help to open up a specific trajectory of development that is based on a combination of co-evolution,specialisation, and increasing returns (cf. Pierson, 2000; Mahoney, 2000; Kloosterman and Stegmeijer, 2005).
The research questions
The programme is aimed at exploring long-term developments in the relationship between cities and the production of culture from a theoretical perspective that combines the analytical framework of spatial clustering with that path-dependent dynamics. Sources of advanced competitiveness (competing onquality and not on price) are seen as embedded in wider, but place-bound,institutional contexts (Storper, 1997; Whitley, 2000). These environments and theirembedded economic activities, moreover, have their own particular histories ofcomplex forms of co-evolution, displaying strong path-dependent characteristics (Mahoney, 2000; Bathelt, 2003). Path-dependency not only implies a distinctive trajectory (i.e. concentrating on one particular kind of cultural industry), but also a moment or window of path-creation, and after that, (or followed by) a phase of path-reproduction and (possibly) a window of path- ending.
This approach should enable us to unpack place-bound configurations of advanced
competitiveness and to distinguish between components that have deep historical
roots and those that can be created more instantaneously in cultural industries thus
helping to propose policy interventions. We will address more general questions
pertaining to economic dynamism and social mobility in cities from an innovative and
longterm perspective by looking at the developments in selected cultural industries.
Longterm, interdisciplinary studies combining new economic-geographic insights on dynamic agglomeration economies with extensive historical work on the evolution of institutional contexts are still rare (Kloosterman & Boschma, 2005; Glasmeier, 2000 is an exception).
Cultural industries offer a good case study as they tend to be well-documented
(even in the past). In addition, they are becoming more important as drivers of post-industrial urban economies, and, of course, they are intrinsically important as aesthetic statements in themselves and as mirrors of the society that produce them. The Netherlands, moreover, offers a rich past and present of cultural industries, which can serve as key cases of long-term dynamics in cultural production.
With this research programme we seek to:
1. trace and analyse from an evolutionary socio-economic perspective the
continuities and critical junctures in the development of main cultural
industries in Dutch cities from a moment of path creation in the 17th century
to the present time.
2 describe and examine from this perspective patterns of spatial clustering and
the evolution of the spatial division of labour in main cultural industries
between cities in the Netherlands;
3 assess the role and position of selected Dutch cultural industries from an
international comparative perspective.
The cases
Our program seeks to uncover the historical roots, i.e. the processes of creation and
reproduction of successful cultural industries in conjunction with their spatial
distribution within the Netherlands. For the purposes of this project, we have selected
three cultural industries in which the Netherlands has been competitive over a long
period of time in terms of quantity (market impact) and quality (innovative capacity),
both at home and abroad:
1. Visual arts
2. Architecture
3. Publishing
In the 17th century, Dutch painters rose to fame (Prak, 2005) constituting a clear
moment of path creation whereby a contingent combination of (social, economic,
institutional and cultural) factors led to the Golden Age of Dutch painting (Montias,
1988; Prak 2003). Dutch painters of the 17th century have been estimated to produce
literally millions of paintings (Woude 1991). They, moreover, also pioneered new
techniques and new types of paintings (for process and product innovation, see
Montias 1987). The same could be said for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
when, to name but two, Van Gogh and Mondriaan were at the cutting edge of
painting. More recently, one could also point to the international success of
photographers as AntonCorbijn and RinekeDijkstra as representatives of innovative
Dutch visual arts. In the seventeenth century Dutch architecture was exported to
North and Central Europe. Dutch architects of the twentieth century—from Berlage to
Koolhaas—have been extraordinarily successful worldwide (Lootsma, 2000;
Kloosterman and Stegmeijer, 2005). In the seventeenth century Dutch publishers
were dominating international markets (cf.Hoftijzer, 2001). Dutch book production in
the seventeenth century may have amounted to as much as half the total European
output (Delft/Wolf, 2003). In the field of international science and architecture, for
instance, (partly) Dutch publishing firms (e.g. Reed-Elsevier; 010 Publishers and NAi Publishers) are among the world leaders.
Although the three selected cultural industries can all be qualified as being, or having
been, at the international forefront of innovations in more than one historical period,
they are also quite different. Visual arts represent the high end of the market, and
where the supply side (i.e. the artists themselves) is very important and production is
mostly in small series (often just one, unique product). Architecture is already more
applied and more dependent on customers ordering specific buildings. There as well,
production in large series is rare and most buildings are quite unique. Publishing is
strongly geared towards consumer markets and much more likely to engage in mass
production. We thus have selected three cultural industries that encompass a continuum with respect to the extent of being artist-oriented and its liability to mass production.
Cultural industries that are successful over time are dependent on a thick institutional
environment. Such a thick institutional environment is anything but footloose; on the
contrary it is strongly rooted in concrete places. The proposed research programme
focuses on the three selected cultural industries. Research on the distribution of
cultural industries in the Netherlands in the past and in the present has all pointed to
the continuous importance of the Randstad (to use a retrospective term) and
especially of Amsterdam (Prak, 2003; Kloosterman, 2004). Unravelling the roots of
success of the three selected cultural industries over a longer period of time will
accordingly involve a closer study of the institutional context of the Randstad cities
and, more in particular that of Amsterdam.
The PhD projects
The above may seem to suggest that the story of Dutch cultural industries is one of
continuous success from the 17th century to the present. That, however, would not be
correct. Intriguingly, from the late seventeenth or early 18th century, depending
on the specific sector, Dutch cultural industries lost much of their momentum, more
or less in line with the Dutch economy as a whole. Around 1800 did the first signs of
revival appear, but these came to fruition really only in the second half of the
nineteenth century (Krabbe, 1997; Stolwijk, 1998). Reproduction of success in
cultural industries has, accordingly, been anything but given. The two PhD projects
are aimed at describing and analysing from an evolutionary socio-economic
perspective the continuities and critical junctures in the development of main cultural
industries in Dutch cities from a moment of path creation in the early 17th century to
the present time. Given the intrinsic linkages between the production of culture and
places, the historical analysis will also involve describing and examining the patterns
of spatial clustering and the evolution of the spatial division of labour in these three
main cultural industries between cities in the Netherlands.
We have opted for a dividing this part of the research between two PhD students on
the basis of two periods. The first period starts in 1600 when the Dutch cultural
industries stood on the eve of their finest moment and ends in 1900 when
industrialisation was taking off in the Netherlands. The second PhD-project, hence,
encompasses the period from 1900 to the present. The research design for these two
projects and the Post-Doc project, which is focused on the international comparative
dimension, is based on the extensive literature on clustering and path-dependent
developments and will entail an analytical grid that will be used to examine each of
the three cultural industries for a number of selected years. This will enable us, first,
to get a broad but systematic description of the development of the selected cultural
industries from 1600 onwards. Second, this analytical helicopter view makes it possible to trace when significant changes or critical junctures have taken place.
These critical junctures can then be studied in more detail to understand continuities
and discontinuities—path-reproduction, path-change and path-ending— and their causes of these key cultural industries.
The market position of each of the three cultural industries is the first issue that the
analytical grid targets. What is the role of the Dutch visual arts, architecture and
publishing on national and foreign markets in quantitative terms but also in qualitative
terms (innovation) in each of the selected years? Can they be labeled as world
leaders or do they play a more marginal role (even in the home market)?
The second characteristic concerns the supply side. Who are the important actors
and where are they located within the Dutch Randstad and, more precisely, where
exactly within the cities themselves. In addition, how do they relate to each other in
terms of competition and/or collaboration (cf. Whitley, 2000) and how is this, if so,
regulated by formal (e.g. guilds) or informal institutions (loose associations)? Can we
find evidence for an ongoing flow of knowledge that underpins processes of
innovation?
The third characteristic that needs to be looked at is labour. More in particular, how
does the (re)production of skilled labour take place? Which institutions are involved in
reproducing the skilled labour (both formal and on the job)? How is labour organised
and what role do newcomers or immigrants play?
The fourth characteristic that the analytical grid addresses is the demand side. Who
are the important players on the demand side? Is it the state, the church, or firms and
private households (upper or middle class or even the working class)? How are their
tastes formed, are their specific institutions that help to generate a (sophisticated)
demand as, for instance the Paris-based fashion journals do (cf. Storper, 1997)?
The fifth characteristic concerns the rules and regulations pertaining to production,
marketing and consumption in general and with respect to the selected cultural
industries more in particular. The overall regulatory regime may have a significant
impact on how things are produced, distributed and consumed (e.g. mercantilist policies).
These five issues will be explored for a selection of years which are crucial in Dutch
socio-economic (and cultural) history and which should provide us with a good
window on the evolution of the selected cultural industries. We propose to investigate the following:
Project 1:
The Evolution of Visual Arts, Architecture, and Publishing in the
Netherlands, 1600-1900
Selected years
1600: The starting point of the project which can be seen as a moment of path
creation with respect to the three selected cultural industries.
1670: The zenith of the Dutch Golden Age in many respects, economic as well as
cultural, just before the decline in 1672, the so-called Year of Disaster.
1750: The eighteenth century was a period of decline of the DutchRepublic.
Choosing this year would give us a viewpoint on that decline.
1810: The launching of new initiatives by the government of King LouisNapoleon
1870: The emergence of a new social economy and its institutional framework and,
more specifically, the creation of new professional organisations
Sources
Project 1 will rely on monographs and also on a variety of archival sources, many of
which have already been discovered by previous researchers. These sources will be
re-examined from the above mentioned analytical perspective on cultural industries
and, therefore, more systematically investigated than has been done so far (for
instance, in the case of the material relating to the reproduction of skilled labour). For
the project, the whole of the `Randstad' is considered as one metropolitan area,
albeit with internal variation. Archival research, however, will be mainly limited to
Amsterdam, and only incidentally undertaken in other towns. The Amsterdam
material will be supplemented by data from the literature on those other towns where
necessary.
Project 2: The Evolution of Visual Arts, Architecture, and Publishing in the
Netherlands, 1600-2000
Selected years
1900: Starting point when industrial society is gaining momentum, providing a good
opportunity to study the impact of industrialisation in particular on architecture and publishing.
1930: Interwar high mark, just before the Depression really struck and right before state intervention became (much) more pervasive, a time when the Dutch economy
was relatively inward-looking.
1950: The era of reconstruction with a large active role of the state in shaping society
in social, cultural and economic terms.
1970: High point of Fordist society, just before the end of the post-war Golden Age.
2000: Post-industrial society characterised by dominance of (advanced) services and intensive global linkages (also in the case of cultural industries).
Sources
The second PhD project will also use the rather large number of already existing monographs on visual arts, architecture and publishing. Here as well, the use of the analytical grid will open up these sources and render fresh insights on the evolution of these cultural industries. Moreover, the second project can rely on quantitative data to describe the evolution and spatial patterns of distribution in the selected sectors. In addition, use can be made of the extensive (quantitative and qualitative) data already compiled for the current research programme The Spatial Footprint ofthe Cultural and the Financial Industries; Patterns of Path-Creationand Path-Reproduction of Localised Competitiveness of the theme group Space and Economy.
Post-doc Project:
The Evolution of Visual Arts, Architecture, and Publishing: An
International Comparative Perspective
Cultural industries are now very much part of the global economy. Galleries in New
York sell Dutch paintings, Dutch architects design buildings in Beijing, and Dutch
publishing firms sell their products in nearly every part of the world. On these
markets, they have to compete with players in the cultural industries from other
places. This international dimension is, however, not entirely new or limited to the
period after 1970. Even in the 17 th century, the three selected Dutch cultural
industries were making a name for themselves abroad and selling their product to
customers in other countries. The Post-Doc project would seek to describe and to
assess the role and position of the visual arts, architecture, and publishing from an
international comparative perspective by looking at the patterns of evolution in
selected cities.
The Post-Doc project will, in principle, use the same methodology to trace the developments in the three selected cultural industries in other cities as deployed in the two PhD-projects. Therefore, the same analytical grid focusing on the characteristics of the market, the supply and demand side, the labour input, and the regulatory regime will be used. Here as well the research will start by looking at selected years. The emphasis, however, is very much on the international division of labour in the three selected cultural industries between important cities and how this changes over the years. Crucial moments of path-creation, path-reproduction and path-ending in the international division of labour in the selected industries will be identified and analysed. In this way, the international division of labour can be linked
with the local context of production and consumption and their evolution in an innovative way. The evolution of Dutch cultural industries and their urban environment(s) can then be understood against the backdrop of international developments, enabling us to assess whether there is anything typically Dutch about them over the ages and, if so, how this has emerged and has been reproduced on a long-term base. In addition, shifts in complementarities between cultural industries in
several cities on an international scale can be discerned and analysed.
To limit the workload of this part only five years are selected for the international
comparison:
1600: The starting point
1670: The zenith of the Dutch Golden Age
1750: The low point of the DutchRepublic
1900: Industrial society
2000: Post-industrial society
The selection of cities has not been decided yet, but given the evident importance of
Paris, London and New York in cultural industries, these cities will be included in the
comparison. Another three or four smaller cities, which have played a significant role
in the selected cultural industries will complement the sample. Milan, Barcelona,
Berlin, and Vienna are obvious candidates.
Sources
Although we intend to use a rather different methodology than the one used by Peter
Hall (1998) in his Cities in Civilization, we will also compare a limited number of
(Western) cities to comprehend the relationship between cities and culture. For his
rich case studies, he uses a whole array of secondary literature (monographs,
biographies etc.). We can, consequently, make use of his own case studies for
London, Paris and, if chosen, Berlin and Vienna and, of course, of his very extensive
list of references. For the other cases, we can follow his approach in the way he uses
secondary literature.
Literature
Amin, A. and N. Thrift (1995), ‘Globalisation, institutional “thickness” and the local economy’. In: Patsy
Healey et al. (Eds), Managing Cities The New Urban Context. Chicester: John Wiley 1995: 91-109.
Bathelt, H. (2002), ‘The re-emergence of a media industry cluster in Leipzig’, European Planning
Studies, 10(5): 583-611.
Gans, H. (1999), Popular Culture & High Culture; An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (Revised and
Updated Edition): New York: Basic Books
Glasmeier, A.K. (2000), Manufacturing Time; Global Competition in the Watch Industry, 1795-2000.
London: The Guildford Press
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Hoftijzer, Paul, `Metropolis of print: the Amsterdam book trade in the seventeenth century’, in: O’Brien et
al. 2001, 249-263
Kaufmann, ThomasDaCosta, Toward a geography of art, Chicago 2004
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Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht; a first exploration’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale
Geografie, 95:2: 243-262
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31(3): 181-191.
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(1775-1880), PhDthesis Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam 1997
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Republic', in: DavidFreedberg, Jande Vries (eds), Art in history, history in art. Studies in seventeenth-century Dutch culture. Santa Monica: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art: 285-329
International Literature (10 key publications)
Hall, P. (1998), Cities in Civilization. New York: Pantheon, 1998.
Kaufmann, ThomasDaCosta, Toward a geography of art, Chicago 2004
Mahoney, J. (2000), ‘Path dependence in historical sociology’, Theory and Society, 29: 507-548.
Montias, J.M. (1987), `Cost and value in seventeenth-century Dutch art', ArtHistory10: 455-466
Pierson, Paul, `Increasing returns, path dependence, and the study of politics’, The American Political Science Review 94 (2000) 251-67
Schama, S. (1991), The Embarrassment of Riches; An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. London: Fontana Press.
Scott, A.J. (1997), ‘The cultural economy of cities’, International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 21 (2): 323-339.
Scott, A.J. (2000), The Cultural Economy of Cities; Essays on the Geography of Image-Producing Industries. Londen/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Scott, A.J. (2004), Cultural-products industries and urban economic development;
Prospects for growth and market contestation in global context’, Urban Affairs Review (39:4): 461-490
Woude, A.M. van der (1991), `The Volume and Value of Paintings in Holland at the
Time of the DutchRepublic', in: DavidFreedberg, Jande Vries (eds), Art in history,
history in art. Studies in seventeenth-century Dutch culture. Santa Monica: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art: 285-329
Summary for non-specialists
Cultural industries are becoming ever more important as sources of employment and
income in post-industrial cities. To compete, these cultural industries have to be
innovative. Processes of innovation are dependent on historically formed local
environments or institutional contexts. That is were the workers learn their highly
specialised skills that is where the knowledge necessary for the innovations is “in the
air”. This research programme will focus on the evolution of three selected Dutch
cultural industries—visual arts, architecture, and publishing—from 1600 to the
present. The changes in the relationship between cities and these forms of cultural
production will take the centre of the stage. We will (1) trace and analyse from an
evolutionary socio-economic perspective the continuities and critical junctures in the
development of main cultural industries in Dutch cities from 1600 to the present; (2)
describe and examine from this perspective patterns of spatial clustering and the
evolution of the spatial division of labour in main cultural industries between cities in
the Netherlands; and (3) assess the role and position of selected Dutch cultural
industries from an international comparative perspective. This research programme
will shed light on the question what can be created on a short-term and what is deeply rooted regarding competitive economic activities.
Created by:
Ed Taverne
Date:
14-8-2007 12:32:19
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