The problem of democracy in the ASEAN Creative City: the cases of Chiang Mai, Bandung, Cebu, and George Town.

• Author: Chuangchai, Phitchakan

Introduction: the geo-political framework

In April 2017, ASEAN held the first ASEAN Creative Cities Forum and Exhibition in Manila (Philippines) as a part of ASEAN 2017 Business Event. It was convened to discuss the use of culture and creativity as a driving force of sustainable development (principally through urban regeneration and infrastructure development, growth and innovation, but also ASEAN's socio-political aims of promoting social cohesion, citizen well-being and inter-cultural dialogue. Key parties already interested in the policy areas of Creative Economy were present, and through presentations and networking they shared their experiences and initiatives. How then did ASEAN actors adopt the Creative City as a development model for the region, and meet the expectations of the general political consensus on sustainable and inclusive development? Though ASEAN members (and not all) have just started using the Creative City discourse formally, some ASEAN cities have made huge progress. This paper looks at four exemplar cities: Chiang Mai (Thailand), Bandung (Indonesia), Cebu (Philippines), and George Town (Malaysia). These four cities formed a network within ASEAN in 2014 called the Southeast Asian Creative Cities Network (SEACCN), aiming to become the platform for policy development in the region.

The argument of this article is that the Creative City has become a 'fast' policy for ASEAN, regarded as a user-friendly tool for other, non-creative, policy aims. The fact remains, however, that cities are socially complex, and different, and so pertinent to this situation is the many scholars who have assessed the travel of such Western policy notions, (as 'fast policy' (Peck, 2005), 'Xerox' approach (Pratt, 2009), 'cookie-cutter' (Oakley, 2004), and so on). As a phenomenon of the now well-researched broader policy 'transfer' process, the Creative City has paradoxically been deployed without a thorough approach to culture itself--to a cultural audit of local assets, to cultural infrastructure, participants and producers, facilities and funding, and so on; and so this raises the suspicion that it has been co-opted as another policy instrument in the spectrum of urban economy development tools, hollowing out its actual purpose (and thus ultimate efficacy as a policy for culture). This article thus asks if the Creative City discourse has become a veritable Trojan Horse of neoliberalism in ASEAN, and in converting culture to economics, there are consequences. These consequences typify the implications of withdrawing or exploiting 'culture' in any society--that the development of democracy and civil society (of public life broadly) will be adversely impacted. Brenner and Theodore's (2002) framework of 'Actually Existing Neoliberalism' is useful in providing a range of specific criteria for the veritable 'neoliberalisation' of culture and society, specifically as facilitated by urban policies. This article's purpose is to assess neoliberalism as a process in four ASEAN cities and determine whether a substantive interconnection (not necessarily causal) can be posited between neoliberal processes and the features of urban life as they have emerged within the Creative City context. This is then discussed in the context of democracy and democratisation, or the general horizon of political expectation in each of these cities' host countries (Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia) as each national government does progressively confirm (and purport to conform) to the normative international principles of social and well as economic sustainability as defined by the United Nations.

The research literature formative of the Creative City discourse is broad and cannot be summarised here. Nonetheless, Charles Landry's The Creative City: A toolkit for urban innovators (2000, 2008) must be cited as a seminal reference point. Landry (2000), argued that creativity was a necessary framework for post-industrial urban development, and, like his younger American counter-part Richard Florida, knowledge, problem-solving, education, information and new technology were central. However, both Landry and Florida (the former arguably more than the latter) posited social and 'human' development as central to urban and city development (i.e. economic development more broadly).

For Florida, his controversial notion of the creative class has a high impact on the Creative City notion as he argues that the creative people are drawn to places with certain characteristics which he terms 'the 3T's', which includes technology, talent, and tolerance. With this, Florida (2002) argues that place has become crucial than ever as it enables (i) the clustering of creative industries, and (ii) the densification of creative people. When firms cluster, it provides the positive benefits of co-location or 'spillovers' (Florida, 2005, p.29); and creative industries, more than most, require face-to-face contact and a diversity of individual talents (Florida, 2008). Both Landry (2008) and Florida (2002, 2005, 2008) maintain that such are now essential for post-industrial economic growth, which is centred in cities, and cities are the most effective environments for individual ingenuity, development and collaboration. Landry's (2008) concept 'creative milieu', while largely untheorised, is effective in representing the social conditions for urban culture of creativity (why some cities are stimulating places of possibility, and others are not or are even the opposite).

Why Asia?

The emergence of the Creative City discourse in Asia was, in one sense, precipitated by one of the biggest crises in Asian history--the Asian financial crisis of 1997. In the 1990s, the government of Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and the Philippines, gradually relaxed control over the domestic movement of capital in order to attract foreign direct investment (Steger and Roy, 2010). However, as the latter half of the 1990s turned, the fluidity of capital and its motivation by transnational capital interests, was brought home when Thailand was hit by currency speculators and the value of the Baht (and its annual growth rate) fell so dramatically, social consequences were experienced at every level (from education to medical care). Soon after fell other Asian economies, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and while many of these rebounded on the strength of their manufacturing, cheap labour costs, and exports, an economic 'growth' rationale became pervasive across the political spectrum, Left and Right. However, they also absorbed the emerging consensus (cf. UN-Habitat and its role in the Sustainable Development Goal No.11) that cities are becoming the principal drivers of economic growth. And while a traditional industrial base of agriculture, manufacturing and natural resources, predominate in each ASEAN country, they each became open to Western market-based innovations, such as the use of new technologies, and the spillover effects of small-scale innovative firms, cultural heritage and tourism, and, specifically, the 'creative industries'. The four case studies in this article considers this latter adaptation.

Each of these cases is based on primary empirical research. For each city, desk research was conducted on the socio-economic history of the city, under what economic conditions each city has adopted and adapted the Creative City paradigm, and what rationales, developments and policy-facilitated actions have emerged. Information has been garnered from various news, government and investment agencies' websites, official publications (of government and its agencies, or public institutions), and secondary sources such as academic journal articles. These sources were assessed within a narrative critique on the evolution of neoliberalism, to explain and link the urban changes that cohere with Creative City paradigm. The research material was adapted to a tabulation of neoliberal impacts--that is, from the aforementioned article 'Actually Existing Neoliberalism' by Brenner and Theodore (2002). This allowed the argument a trajectory, in terms of the ways Creative City urban development proceeded in relation to each of the countries' political orientation in developing its civil society and democracy.

(1): Chiang Mai and participation

Banyan (2007) states that "The concept of participation implies involvement in public decisions, as distinguished from other forms of community involvement. Public decisions are those in which the entire community has a stake in the outcome" (p.2) The broad participatory mechanisms that would ensure the fairness, openness, competence and legitimacy in a democratised society are, classically, electoral participation, direct forms of participation, citizen-government interactions, group participation, and activism and dissent (ibid). Two mechanisms that are relevant to the Creative City discourse as it has become a policy framework in the Thai city of Chiang Mai are citizen-government interactions and group participation. The mechanism of group participation will be assessed first, as this relates to the central mechanism of the governance model of Chiang Mai's creative city making operations. Group participation takes place when "individuals feed their preferences through an organisation or body that acts as a mediator to express their interests" (Banyan, 2007, p.4), and while group participation allows the representation of marginal or disadvantaged voices, this matter is less obvious and perhaps incurs a greater political risk.

There are three issues we need to take into account: "(i) Groups are not equally accountable to all citizens but primarily respond to their own constituencies, (ii) groups are not necessarily guided by 'community' principles, and (iii) not all community interests are represented by groups" (Banyan, 2007, p.4). These are taken as assumptions in our assessment on citizen-government...