Fashioning the city: Cultures of consumption in contemporary urban spaces

In this paper, we begin to unpack the cultural economies of urban regeneration in a former industrial quarter of a large English city, Nottingham's Lace Market. In this tightly defined urban space, the integration of culture and economic activity has been at the forefront of regeneration, and the area reveals a particular agglomeration of activities based around the production and consumption of fashion and design, media, architecture, and food and entertainment. Underpinning the revival of the area has been the development of defined networks of interlinked and embedded firms which cut across conventional production-consumption divides. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to explore the role of cultural production and consumption in contemporary urban regeneration. The piece begins with a theoretical discussion of the cultural economy of cities in the 1990s. We then introduce Nottingham's Lace Market as a cultural quarter of the city and report the findings of detailed interview work with a wide range of cultural intermediaries and consumers, discussing the roles played by both producers and consumers in the cultural renaissance of the Lace Market. We conclude by evaluating the viability of a simultaneous economic and cultural strategy for urban regeneration. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.