Post-Fordist State planners, developers, and their entrepreneurial service arm have debased the meaning of ‘creativity’ to a shallow pretext for the further looting of cities and public wealth. The cookie-cutter aestheticisation of selective zones of our cities (tourist promenades, waterside public art, creative quarters), is a mere fig leaf covering the acts of enclosure and exclusion that cultural regeneration entails. As the sensibilities of the Creative Class are sensationalised, courted, and monetised, the creative possibilities of the dehumanised majority narrow. But as the recession bites, there are signs that dreams of the Creative City are crashing, as the public purse-strings tighten and the financial sector’s ability to underwrite the creative industries weakens. In this issue we examine that possibility, explore artists’ creative sabotage of their own regenerative co-optation, and philosophically examine what ‘expression’ might actually be.

Editorial

Dériving Under the Influence 

Chris Jones inspects the wounds opened by Laura Oldfield Ford’s pictures of regenerate London

CG2014: Formulary for a Skewed Urbanism  

Neil Gray ambushes the cowboy capitalists staking out Glasgow’s ‘urban frontier’

The Creative City in Ruins

Artist’s project by Nils Norman

Concerning Art and Social Change

Brian Holmes and Marco Deseriis on critical culture within recuperative ‘semiocapitalism’

All Mouth, No History

William Dixon gets gobby with Christian Marazzi and his linguistic analysis of financialisation

Debt: The First Five Thousand Years

David Graeber gives us the elevator pitch on debt’s violent history

Hungry Ghost

Steve McQueen’s film Hunger whets Paul Helliwell’s appetite for some political context

A Climatic Disorder?

John Cunningham clears the air after a meeting between Climate Campers and the NUM

The Simple Expression of Complex Thought

M. Beatrice Fazi splices interactive media and the philosophy of expression

Objective Phantoms

Kenneth Cox toys with Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca’s objects and desires

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Contents of this cluster

1. Editorial
2. Dériving Under the Influence
3. CG 2014: Formulary for a Skewed Urbanism
4. Concerning Art and Social Change
5. All Mouth, No History
6. Debt: The First Five Thousand Years
7. Hungry Ghost
8. A Climatic Disorder? Class, Coal and Climate Change
9. ‘The Simple Expression of Complex Thought’: For a Media Theory of Expression
10. Objective Phantoms