From brew town to cool town: Neoliberalism and the creative city development strategy in Milwaukee

Abstract

This research critically examines a new chapter in the evolution of the entrepreneurial city; one distinguished by its reliance on Richard Florida’s thesis about the relationship between the creative class and economic growth. Since the 2002 publication of his wildly-popular book, The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida’s ideas were broadly assimilated into the infrastructure of urban entrepreneurialism across the United States. This was especially the case in slow-growth metropolitan areas, where it was hoped that a “creative city” development strategy might reverse decades of relative decline. Using Milwaukee, Wisconsin as a representative case study, this paper scrutinizes the actions of that city’s image-makers, planners, and municipal actors, who together orchestrated a new round of urban promotional activities and planning strategies. What made this new round of growth coalition activities unique was that it highlighted a distinct set of urban motifs presumably commensurate with creative class lifestyles, cultural practices, and consumption habits. Following MacLeod [MacLeod, G (2002) From urban entrepreneurialism to a “revanchist city”?: on the spatial injustices of Glasgow’s renaissance. Antipode 34(3), 602–614], Maliszewski [Maliszewski, P (2004) Flexibility and its discontents. The Baffler 16, 69–79] and Peck [Peck, J (2005) Struggling with the creative class. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(4), 740–770], this work argues that this creative city growth strategy worked primarily to repackage and strengthen the extant downtown-based property-led development paradigm. The marriage of Florida’s ideas with municipal action therefore brought into even sharper relief what was already one of the most economically and racially polarized large cities in the United States.