Neo-Bohemia: Culture and capital in postindustrial Chicago (Illinois)

Neo-Bohemia: Culture and Capital in Postindustrial Chicago uses an ethnographic case study undertaken in a West Side Chicago neighborhood as a vehicle for examining how former industrial spaces now contribute to profit-generating strategies in a cultural economy. The core concept demonstrates continuity with the modernist category of bohemia, while showing that this concept must be updated in light of changing dynamics in city economies. While bohemia was once considered a marginal or even oppositional space with regards to the mainstream economy, the new bohemia magnetizes individualizes possessing competence and dispositions appropriate to flexible, postindustrial production strategies.; During the 1990's, Wicker Park gained a national reputation as a site of hip urban culture, with a thriving music and art scene. In defining the local scene, both press accounts and participants evoke bohemian traditions of artistic innovation in the city. What distinguishes Wicker Park from past bohemian models is the intersection between these developments and a restructured urban economy. Thus while elements of the modernist bohemia persist in spaces such as Wicker Park, with creative individuals continuing to derive benefits from urban association, global economic trends elevate the importance of these practices to the reconfiguration of the neighborhood as a site of accumulation. These trends include: (1) The displacement of older economic functions, principally manufacturing, providing material and symbolic spaces available for "adaptive recycling." (2) The increasing importance of culture as a commodity, available to be consumed locally in entertainment venues and to be exported through traditional culture industries and new media enterprises. (3) The changing occupational structure of the global city, increasing the importance of educated, culturally competent workers to the material and immaterial labor of cultural production generated in a neighborhood like Wicker Park.