Beyond the Ruins of the Creative City: Berlin's Factory of Culture

The literature which promotes the ‘creative cities’ (such as the work of Richard Florida) or denounces their hidden neoliberal agenda and social costs is extensive. This text approaches the ideological construct of the ‘creative city’ (and similar models) from a different angle in order to attempt a reverse engineering of its economic mechanism. Usually both liberal partisans or radical critics of ‘creative economy’ employ a symmetrical paradigm, where the material and the immaterial domains are defended in their autonomy and hegemony against each other. On the opposite, this text tries to underline the conflicts, frictions and value asymmetries that occur along the material and immaterial domains; the material accumulation of value triggered by cultural production.