Project Rationale and Description
The creative classes have often gathered around left-behind post-industrial spaces. Northern cities were left with empty mills and warehouses, and cheap workers’ housing, ready to be ‘repurposed’ and re-colonised by ‘other’ occupants such as artists, vagabonds, free spirits, escapers, adventurers and voyeurs (Wilson, 2000). Florida (2002) offered a postmodern blueprint that lauds the ‘creative class’ as saviours of these places through which culture, tourism and gentrification coalesce to convert them into consumption citadels. Providing a compelling consumption-driven spatial fix, Florida’s thesis has found expression in many post-industrial cities, and provides the starting point for the PhD. Florida’s schema has, however, come under fire in academic circles for providing a shallow, market-driven set of cultural aesthetics that masks issues like structural unemployment and poverty rather than addressing them. The PhD will therefore ask: is an alternative Bohemian spatial aesthetic possible that produces deeper and wider socio-economic benefits in urban districts in a socially responsible way?
Whilst depictions of the starving artist, the Flaneur, and the pursuit of debauched lifestyles is accurate for some Bohemians; patronage, sponsorship and negotiating market dynamics are also important environmental conditions for nascent Bohemian citizenship (Lloyd, 2010). Thus members of nascent Bohemian communities would arguably need to negotiate, unpack, and understand these tensions in order to make them and their neighbourhoods sustainable. Equally, authentic place-making needs sensitive urban governance that understands how and why the informal drivers of art and creativity are stultified by formal structures that privilege the market over culture, and commodity over art. The study will therefore ask: can this alternative Bohemia be created in such a way that the presence of the combined energies of the likes of artists, beatniks, hipsters, social innovators, and creative entrepreneurs bring a positive place-making that sustains cultural districts as authentic, dynamic avant-garde spaces in the long-term?
In answering such questions, the PhD will determine the antecedents for the creation and sustenance of creatively lived urban spaces. This learning will then be applied to the processes and emergent communities of practice that coalesce in and around two distinct but internationally comparable case studies: one in Newcastle upon Tyne’s Quayside area and one in Amsterdam Noord, itself a quayside that is undergoing creative and culture-led regeneration. Via two ethnographies, the student will examine the Bohemian re-spatialisations and opportunities for creative entrepreneurship, alternative livelihoods, and inclusive projects in these places. And will question the potential for them to become authentically Bohemian as well as spaces of consumption – not least in light of the much anticipated re-spatialisation of urban centres ‘post-Covid’. In so doing, the project is concerned with the interplays of the political economies, power relations and affordances of creative spatial change, the relative status positions of stakeholders involved, and the people and place winners and losers that accrue from these dynamics.
Florida, R. (2002). Bohemia and economic geography. Journal of economic geography, 2(1), 55-71.
Lloyd, R. (2010). Neo-bohemia: Art and commerce in the postindustrial city. Routledge.
Wilson, E. (2000). Bohemians: The glamorous outcasts. Tauris Parke Paperbacks.
Eligibility and How to Apply:
Please note eligibility requirement:
- Academic excellence of the proposed student i.e. 2:1 (or equivalent GPA from non-UK universities [preference for 1st class honours]); or a Masters (preference for Merit or above); or APEL evidence of substantial practitioner achievement.
- Appropriate IELTS score, if required.
- Applicants cannot apply for this funding if currently engaged in Doctoral study at Northumbria or elsewhere.
For further details of how to apply, entry requirements and the application form, see
https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/research/postgraduate-research-degrees/how-to-apply/
Please note: Applications that do not include a research proposal of approximately 1,000 words (not a copy of the advert), or that do not include the advert reference (e.g. RDF21/BL/EIS/VARLEY) will not be considered.
Deadline for applications: 29 January 2021
Start Date: 1 October 2021
Northumbria University takes pride in, and values, the quality and diversity of our staff. We welcome applications from all members of the community.
For informal enquiries, please contact Prof Peter Varley ([Email Address Removed])
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