Ann Markusen: Creative Economy, Artists and Urban Development

Ann Markusen is the American economist, professor emerita at the University of Minnesota, who made artists and the cultural industries an object of urban economics and who, at the same time, warned against the easy recipes of the creative city. Her studies in the 2000s measured for the first time how many artists live in each American metropolitan region, what they contribute to the local economy and what they need to stay; and her report Creative Placemaking (2010), written with Anne Gadwa for the National Endowment for the Arts, defined the cultural urbanism hundreds of cities have adopted since. Her thesis is that culture regenerates neighbourhoods when those who produce it are supported, not when it is used as a brand.

The artistic dividend: what artists contribute to the local economy

Markusen started from a statistical anomaly. Comparing regions, she found that Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco or Minneapolis concentrated artists far beyond their size, and that this concentration depended not on the commercial cultural industry but on a fabric of artists' centres, studios, non-profit organisations, universities and affordable housing she called the artistic dividend. Artists, she showed, are self-employed, export their work outside the region, improve the products of other sectors, from design to tourism, and sustain local cultural life, so a policy that retains them yields more than one that attracts firms.

Creative placemaking: small interventions against the cultural icon

The concept of creative placemaking systematised that idea. Against the large cultural facility, museum, concert hall, arts district, Markusen and Gadwa proposed small, distributed interventions: affordable workspaces, art in public space, neighbourhood festivals, alliances among artists, shops and residents' associations, which activate streets and build ties among residents. Their case studies, from Paducah, Kentucky, which offered cheap houses to artists to repopulate its centre, to the districts of Providence or Minneapolis, showed that small scale and local participation produce more regeneration per dollar than the icon.

The critique of Richard Florida's creative class

Her critique of Richard Florida's creative class is the other face. In 2006 she argued that the category lumps engineers, lawyers and artists with nothing in common, that the correlation between creatives and growth does not prove causation and that the recipe of attracting talent with cafés and tolerance serves to justify image policies and spending on elite consumption. Markusen defended instead supply-side policies: training, spaces, credit and networks for the cultural workers who already live in the city, and attention to the manufacturing and service sectors that sustain most employment.

Gentrification and permanence: measuring whether artists are still there

Gentrification is the risk she herself flagged. Artists who revitalise a neighbourhood are usually the first displaced when prices rise, as Sharon Zukin showed in SoHo, and creative placemaking can become an instrument of real estate promotion if it does not protect housing and workspaces. Markusen proposed measuring success by the permanence of artists and residents rather than by rising land values, and supported models such as community land trusts, studio cooperatives and limited-rent artists' housing, like those promoted by Artspace in Minneapolis.

Ann Markusen's lesson is that the creative economy exists and is urban, but that its benefit depends on who is supported. A cultural policy that invests in the people who produce culture, their spaces and their networks generates jobs, cohesion and neighbourhood life; one that invests in icons and branding produces tourism, prices and displacement. Against the creative city as slogan, Markusen left a method: count the artists, ask them what they need and measure whether they are still there when the neighbourhood prospers.