Urbis et Orbis: Mikroistoriâ i Semiotika Goroda (Dec 2023)
The ethos of creative space in contemporary city
Abstract
The rapid development of creative industries changes key principles of urban development. This paper reveals ethical and aesthetic values that determine a specific character of creative space in contemporary cities. The author considers those conditions under which a new ethics emerges in this space and explicates its specific features. The article suggests the hypothesis that it is possible to compare the formation logics of the rococo salon community in opposition to the classicist and baroque aesthetics of the absolutist regime and the present-day creative class in its opposition to the etiquette of the dominant ideology. This analogy allows considering creative space as a superhistorical model for the aestheticization of political resistance, its further institutionalization, and transfiguration. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the value of novelty in different sociocultural and historical contexts of its embodiment and correspondent judgment strategies. The final part of the article outlines “the space of passion” as an essential expression and symbolic characteristic of magnetic urban zones. This analysis problematizes their aesthetic component in the situation of war to fulfill the critical reflection, to demonstrate the necessity and possibility of ethical judgment within and from outside creative space. The innovative productivity of creative space does not withdraw responsibility from its actors for side effects of the value transformation of their reality and the surrounding world. The paper outlines different aestheticizing tendencies of war and appropriate assessment strategies in early and late modernity. The author underlines the dangerous consequences of the loss of ethical perspectives in the analysis of such processes using the emblematic fiction on that topic at the beginning of the 20th and 21st centuries. The empirical sources demonstrate cultural and historical differences in ways of judging representatives of creative space under the conditions of war in Europe in early and late modernity. The conclusion presents the definition of creative space and its ethos as a subject of critical reflection within contemporary social theory.
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