Creative Margins: Cultural Production in Canadian Suburbs by Alison L. Bain (review)

In Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City (2007), Pier Giorgio di Cicco identified that “it is in the edge cities and in the suburban archipelagos that the creative agenda is desperately needed.” Di Cicco was Toronto’s second poet laureate and Municipal Mind was his legacy project – a special initiative coordinated by each poet laureate that offers a lasting contribution to the civic. He envisioned the creative city as an aesthetic, a way of life, that promised to reform the materialism, individualism, and privacy that so many urbanites credit with hollowing out any sense of community and civic engagement in suburban spaces. Municipal Mind is prescriptive and aspirational: di Cicco doesn’t elaborate on how we may extend the creative city to spaces outside of the downtown core. However, Alison Bain’s Creative Margins presents an important intervention that surveys the creative portfolios of Toronto’s and Vancouver’s suburbs and proposes a community-based version of the creative city that can thrive beyond the metropole’s core. Bain presents some compelling critiques of creative practices in Canada and takes issue with the widespread denigration of suburban spaces in creative-city discourse. In doing so, Bain offers an important contribution to creative-city scholarship and Canadian cultural policy.

Creative Margins demonstrates the cultural complexity of suburban spaces by outlining their creative credentials and ability to innovate. Bain builds on the work of Charles Landry, David Ley, and Richard Florida, who privilege similar varieties of anti-suburban, cosmopolitan urbanism. Florida popularized the idea of the creative class – his term for knowledge workers, professionals, and artists who are financially rewarded for their creativity, wisdom, or ability to innovate. The creativity thesis contends that the creative class is attracted to diverse, authentic places and spectacular public spaces; governments across the globe have implemented Florida’s policy recommendations in order to win the global competition for creative talent. Bain identifies another contingent of cultural workers who prefer the suburbs’ pastoral and middle-class comforts: green space allows for artistic contemplation, and the lower cost of living provides cheap studio space (i.e., a room in a house). Creative Margins inverses several of the core contentions of the creativity thesis by showing how some, and I would suggest the minority, embrace aspects of the suburbs that are denigrated by those upholding the values of cosmopolitan urbanism. In short, not all members of the creative class are flocking to Canada’s downtown cores.

Bain’s best work appears in the monograph’s final chapters, in which she analyzes cultural policy and infrastructure to propose a model for community-based suburban development. Echoing di Cicco, she demonstrates how metropolitan policy privileges the downtown core at the expense of fringe locales. Metropolises disproportionally fund capitalintensive projects located in the core such as architecturally spectacular museums, galleries, and theatres, or megafestivals like Nuit Blanche or the Toronto International Film Festival. These initiatives are designed to brand the city as a hip, culturally vibrant place in order to attract members of the elusive creative class and the wallets of tourists. The prioritization of the centre has resulted in reduced funding and resources for inner suburbs like Toronto’s Etobicoke and Scarborough. In addition, she assesses the impact of creative policies in suburban municipalities that have uncritically copied their larger, metropolitan counterparts. This has resulted in the construction of multi-use cultural facilities that are inaccessible to many arts workers owing to poor transit; in practice, such centres tend to serve business interests (i.e., acting as conference centres) in order to cover operating costs. Bain rightfully points out that suburban municipalities cannot leverage such assets to attract tourists: any cultural tourist is guaranteed to bypass Mississauga’s Living Arts Centre and head straight for Toronto’s downtown core. In opposition, she demonstrates how smaller, community-focused hubs spread across the city are more effective at nurturing creative talent and improving the quality of life in inner and outer suburbs. Urban planners should take...