14. Cities’ Hope Labour in Insecure Times: On Aspiring Creative Industries, Travelling Expectations and Aesthetic Pedagogies

Since the 2000s, for many midsize, former industrial cities in Europe, urban ‘worlding’ (Ong, Introduction: Worlding cities, or the art of being global. In A. Roy & A. Ong (Eds.), Worlding cities: Asian experiments and the art of being global (pp. 10–26). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (2011)) has involved imagining creative industry futures and pathways into creative work for its citizens. Comparing itself to major metropolitan areas such as London, New York or Vancouver, the Netherlands’ city of Rotterdam (700,000 inhabitants), for example, has been struggling to reinvent itself. This chapter outlines how certain norms and expectations towards workers have travelled from the creative industries to other fields and sectors, and how these expectations are now informing urban economic government. Part of cities’ aspirations to establish creative industries, I argue, happens through a translation of these aspirations into governments’ expectations of citizens. In particular, in the Rotterdam case, the dreams of prosperous futures translate into (1) ongoing displacements of the population deemed unfit for future labour markets, (2) aesthetic evaluations in welfare programmes and even sanctioning of welfare claimants based on aesthetic appearance and (3) aesthetic pedagogies for unemployed populations. Based on ethnographic vignettes and policy analyses, this chapter outlines some on the ground effects of worlding cities that are linked to the value of creativity, and the particular forms of gatekeeping in creative industries.