Analysis of Mommaas' (2004) Cultural Clusters and the Post-Industrial City

The post-Fordist strategies of cultural clustering while being employed for the sake of urban branding, positioning, and revitalization (Mommaas 2004: 507) stand at the intersection of cultural, economic, social, and political accumulation processes that within the structure of modernity (Munch 1991: 371) demand detailed delineation should the goal of urban development be achieved especially given the variation that cultural clusters bespeaking the urban interpenetration of economy and culture necessitate systematic analysis of the cultural, economic, social, and political dynamics of institutional differentiation and integration in the cultural policy projects. Since the last decade of the twentieth century the cultural clusters have increasingly become integrated into the entrepreneurial strategies of urban development (Mommaas 2004: 507-508) that have put the cultural production, presentation, and consumption into the spatial contexts ranging from separate buildings to architectural complexes networked across urban space or concentrated into quarters taking over from or replacing industrial areas appropriated for cultural, recreational, and commercial uses that can be planned ahead, informally redefined, or left vacant to subsequently be geared for urban revitalization, creative economy, and cultural planning.

Within the urban policy-making, cultural clustering entrepreneurial strategies represent a departure from a hierarchical arts organization functioning redistributively vis-a-vis their socially structured constituencies towards horizontal networks of actors engaging in interchange inclusively related to their economic, social, and political environments that take increasing part in the artistic field via investors, planners, and developers (Mommaas 2004: 508) leading thereby to the institutional interpenetration of the processes of accumulation of money, discourse, reputation, and power (Munch 1991: 371). Moreover, in the urban regeneration strategies the cultural clusters characterize the saturation stage coming in the wake of flagship projects that have to compete with other major cities already having dense festival programming, museum complexes, and theatre compounds (Mommaas 2004: 508) that drive the process of intensification of cultural consumption, production, and circulation. The broadening of the urban policy-making to include the theorization of the interpenetration processes among the social systems (Mommaas 2004: 508-509) addresses the need for precise accounting for the developments, conflicts, and interests involved in cultural projects strategies that participate in the structural functional relations leading to neither one-sided loss by the cultural system of its autonomy (Zukin 1982, 1991) nor to unchecked appropriation by the economic, political, or social systems of the urban space (Looseley 1999).

The interpenetration between the processes of accumulation of political power and cultural discourse is especially salient in the European Union (Mommaas 2004: 509) where the cultural entrepreneurship is embedded into the interchange between the cultural policy decisions and mobilization of power, on the one hand, and the political agency legitimization and the political mobilization of culture, on the other hand, (Munch 1991: 371) that influenced by the global integration of the political and cultural structures simultaneously shifts the decision-making capabilities both from the local to the global structures of accumulation and from any single social system to the relations of their institutional interpenetration (Looseley 1999). The change in the relations among the economic, cultural, social, and political systems stemming from the growing differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration of the structure of modernity(Munch 1984: 35, 63) has triggerd a corresponding alteration in the cultural policies that feature cultural clusters as foci of negotiation of institutional autonomy, innovation, and accumulation receiving their specific expression in the action strategies, causal structures, and institional environments of the variant structures of modernity (Mommaas 2004: 509).

Analysis of cultural clustering strategies contributes to the conceptual contruction of the comparative varieties of the structure of modernity that obtain as a consequence of different urban development strategies structurally following from particular configurations of the relations among the social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation dynamically affecting policy-making, social transformations, urban hierarchies, and collective action in the fields of arts and culture, urban governance, and economic policies (Mommaas 2004: 509-510). The cultural clustering policies allow classification into such corresponding ideal-typical strategies as museum quarter, post-industrial complex, urban regeneration, old city, and theatre quarter oriented forms of differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration among the urban varieties of the structure of modernity. The entrepreneurial strategies promoting the cultural clustering of the museum quarter type draw on the urban development policies seeking, as in Rotterdam and Baltimore, to offset rising unemployment, declining tax base, and capital flight by the collective action oriented at inner-city renewal, image overhaul, and comsumer services (Hajer 1993; Mommaas 2004: 510; Mommaas and van der Poel 1989; van Aalst 1997).

Designed by leading architects, the museum quarters usually contain classical and modern art museums, arts institutes, multi-purpose exhibition halls, nature museums, and open-air spaces for theatre and event programming serving to position the city as a culturally pioneering location (Mommaas 2004: 510). The planning of the museum quarters extends to the surrounding urban areas that are transformed, with cultural consumption in mind, into boulevards fillied with art galleries and cafes, historical atmosphere, informal networks, bars and restraunts, and education centers (Mommaas 2004: 510-511) that contribute to the success of the cultural cluster to the extent that gallery density, municipal support, and community participation increase (van Aalst 1997). In contrast, the cultural clusters using the post-industrial complexes for the urban development appropriate the sites of heavy industry, energy generation, and transportation infrastructure made obsolete, as in Amsterdam and London, by the changes in the structure of economic accumulation and transferred into the city ownership that due to the redevelopment resources lack, lingering environmental pollution, and unsuitability for residential and commerial purposes is easily adaptible for diverse short-term projects (Mommaas 2004: 511).

The combination of fashionable dining and drinking establishments, art-house film theatres, performing arts spaces, art and design companies, dance and festival environments, official and media events halls not only create a dynamic mixture of culturall activities but also attract tourists, residents, and investors who encounter in the reflexively managed historical authenticity, open variety, and bohemian atmosphere the type of cultural cluster that serves as a perfect backdrop for highly profitable dance parties, corporate meetings, and catwalk and filming events (Mommaas 2004: 511). Consequently, the necessity of investment into the infrastructure, landscape, and architectural development of the post-industrial cultural cluster creates conditions for public-private partnerships (Mommaas 2004: 511) that in the process of their institutionalization set art and cultural organizations, policy-making agendas, and economic development on the course of interpenetration. Yet another cultural clustering strategy, prevalent in towns spawned by industrial revolution, draws on deliberate cultural planning near already popular bar and restaurant areas that adjacent to former quarters of Fordist industry erased by post-industrial urban development seek to reintegrate the architectural remnants of the modernization process into downtown regeneration projects centering on service, residential, and office functions (Mommaas 2004: 512).

The cultural clustering is made part of the urban regeneration strategies with the help of local cultural managers, arts foundations, purpose-built venues, and cultural organizations that via multi-lateral negotiations arrive at an agreement to focus the cultural policy-making, economic development, and social policy on cultural quarters. On that basis the regenerated urban areas allow for on-going cultural development aiming at anchoring performing arts, cultural enterprises, specialized libraries, socially entrepreneurial projects, educational institutions, and arts and media productions in a cluster of newly designed, post-industrial, and legacy public buildings (Mommaas 2004: 512). Arts and culture can play the fuller role in the urban regeneration (Mommaas 2004: 512) the more the processes of social, political, economic accumulaton are interrelated in policy-making, institutional interpenetration, and network structure connecting individual and collective action. The increasing popularity of the cultural clustering as strategy of urban development has led in the cities performing administrative and service functions to the creation of museum quarters taking advantage of the old city centers featuring religious structures, historical facades, and transportation hubs where governmental development funds can be spent whereas the theater quarters can be situated in the vicinity of existing cultural facilities across the city space (Mommaas 2004: 513).

The promotion strategies of the old city type coherently aim at raising the quality of public, residential, recreational, and cultural areas by means of extensions and renovations of art, historical, and science museums linked into a network with other urban museums dedicated to specialist topics, with wider environmental restoration initiatives, with revitalization of the visual and performing arts, and with architectural development of studio, tourist, and professional spaces (Mommaas 2004: 513). Not being part of the tourism, investment, and services oriented urban development, the theater quarters clusters have to compete for affordable premisses with residencial, commercial, and public interest groups in order to establish urban presence in multi-purpose complexes making part of the mixed-use city neighborhoods where theatre companies highlight historical, architectural, and cultural references to reinforce their representation, funding, and publicity strategies (Mommaas 2004: 513). When the theatre quarter type strategies of cultural clustering succeed, more theatre companies are attracted into the area where they serve different stages of the theatre production, training, and promotion cycle while establishing collaborative relations among theatre companies, arts academies and centers, cultural organizations, and governmental institutions that falling into a structure of functional interrelations enable the emergence of the complementarities between the quarter and the economic development reliant on creativity, knowledge, and learning that it attracts (Mommaas 2004: 513).

The cultural clusterting rapidly becoming adopted for the strategies of urban development around the world the cultual policy-making converges on the growing emphasis on the place-based interpenetration of the processes of cultural, social, political, and economic accumulation complemented by wide variation of the institutional structures of social relations resulting from the particularities of macro environments for collective action and path-dependency of modernization (Mommaas 2004: 513-514). The entrepreneurial strategies of institutional innovation that have recourse to cultural clustering can exhibit horizontal structure of relations featuring differentiation, autonomization, and interpenetration among the cultural policy, market, discourse, and association (Munch 1991: 370) that composing the cultural system of institutonal relations enter in variable relations with the social, political, and economic systems that via their inter-systemic structure produce reflexive effects on urban culture ranging from cultural monopoly to vibrant cultural multiplicity (Mommaas 2004: 514). Under the conditions of action contingency and social complexity (Munch 1984: 119) the cultural clusters undergo the process of structural functional differentiation whereby each occupies leading position in design and planning, production and exchange, presentation and association, and decision making and distribution either separately or conjointly (Mommaas 2004: 514) leading to correspondingly weaker or stronger interpenetration links among the museums, cultural producers, corporate bodies, and governmental agencies.

The institutional framework of the cultural clusters involves various actors in the discursive management of the relations among social, political, economic, and cultural organizations (Munch 1984: 119) differently positioned with respect to their cluster network centrality, frequency of the inter-institional meetings, amount of managerial responsibility, fund-raising, cooperation and investment participation, and the distribution of the maintenance and promotion costs (Mommaas 2004: 514-515) with large institutions being less dependent on clustering strategies than small organizations are (van Bon 1999). The configuration of relationships among the social, political, economic, and cultural systems that the clusters belong to can differ in the degree of institutional interpenetration that public financial support, private funding and investment, entrance fees and lease contracts, and non-governmental and state endowments exhibit in each particular situation that either limits or increases the chances that the cultural quarters become self-sustaining via strengthening of the entrepreneurial agency, functional integration, and expertise exchange among the clustered organizations so that their local structure of inter-institutional relations can gain in urban identity, recognition, and dynamism (Mommaas 2004: 515).

Within the structure of social action (Munch 1984: 78), the agency of cultural clusters increases its spatial contingency and expands its discursive compexity by institutional openness, decreases its civic contingency and reduces its cultural complexity by relational adaptation, decreases its representational contingency and expands its urban complexity by normative consensus, and increases its organizational contingency and reduces its internal complexity by social substantiation in order that their cluster-based autonomy, institutional flexibility, and civic involvement position the cultural quarter as a place having open identity, organizational opportunities, urban relevance, and spatial anchoring (Mommaas 2004: 515). The development of the cultural clusters is path-dependent on whether they arise as a consequence of a centralized planning strategy or have emerged from multiple related projects while the differentiation between the developmental paths varies from more governmentally administered consumer-oriented clusters to more infrastructure-derived production-oriented clusters (Mommaas 2004: 515-516) as accessible spaces, cultural atmosphere, and creative community tend to be mutually reinforcing rather than planned (van Vliet 2000; ETIN Adviseurs 2003; Scott 1999).

As situated sites of institutional interpenetration among the processes of cultural, social, political, and economic accumulaton (Munch 1991: 371), the cultural clusters reflect the shifting positioning of the cultural institutions in the urban structure of social relations as more conventional city centers attract museum quarters while city margins define theatre quarters as bohemian and avant-garde (Mommaas 2004: 516) with post-Fordist cities increasingly breaking with the clear-cut spatial hierarchies in favor of cultural, spatial, and institutional innovation (Holt 1997; O'Connor and Wynne 1996). The cultural development employing the place-based entrepreneurial strategies is affected by the complexity of the relations that permit neither its reduction to structural and causal explanations nor its induction from ethnographic and classificatory descriptions (Munch 1984: 32) so that the ideal-typical conceptualization of cultural clusters beyond the general model of institutional interpenetration of the processes of accumulation within the dense urban environments of interaction demands micro analysis of the actual clustering of related activities, structured exchanges, represented identities, and situated functions (Mommaas 2004: 516-517).

The deployment of the micro corrective to the structural functionalist approach (Colomy and Rhoades 1994) allows to arrive at the institutionally entrepreneurial interests behind the strategies of cultural clusters development that unfold according to the models of individual and collective agency unlike those that govern the organizational, structural, and urban dynamics alone (Mommaas 2004: 517). The cultural clustering strategies are supported by discursive frames that justify, legitimize, and position the urban development projects in the macro environments where the entrepreneurial groups implementing the cultural policy operate to reformulate the terms of institutional interpenetration between culture and cities (Mommaas 2004: 517). The discursive frame more commonly used by the entrepreneurial strategies promoting cultural clusters refers to the improved positioning of the city in the structure of economic flows that the museum quarters and post-industrial complexes development can bring in return to municipal, regional, and national spending (Mommaas 2004: 517). As consumer, tourist, and social mobility increases, spurred by the advances in transportation, communication, and cultural infrastructures, cities have to compete for decreasing share of the constantly diversifying leisure activities ungoverned by hierarchies of taste, class, and culture (Mommaas 2004: 517-518) no longer having a discernibly structured relation to the shrinking time budgets (van den Broek et al. 1999) spread thin across globalized experience, entertainment, and alternative opportunities available to more prosperous societies increasingly prizing authenticity, creativity, and individuality over more conventional cultural consumption (Richards 2001).

The decoupling of the economic structures from the spatial structures (Knulst and Mommaas 2000) likewise makes cities less dependent on producer services and more on consumer services for their revenue flows (Mommaas 2004: 518) increasingly attracted by their cultural infrastructures (Featherstone 1991; Martin 1998) that serving a post-Fordist social structure face heterogeneity, instability, and undifferentiated taste patterns (van Eijck 1999; Wynne and O'Connor 1998) as their operating environments. The urban positioning strategies increasingly adopted as a means to counteract the on-going volatility of the locational geography of post-Fordist industries constantly optimizing the production, service, and agglomeration factors of their individual and collective action (Amin and Graham 1997; Castells 1996; Lash and Urry 1994) devalue the existing asset bases of material resources, buildings, and infrastrictures of cities while putting on them pressure to support increasingly important immaterial inputs of ambience, quality, and image value (Mommaas 2004: 518) into the circuits of social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation. Given the instability of their macro environments, the cultural clustering strategies seeking to promote the brand image of their hosting cities as places that residents, visitors, and investors might prefer over increasing number of other as marketed destinations (Mommaas 2004: 518) leverage their infrastructure of cultural consumption to achieve the saturation of the urban experiece they offer with qualities of spectacle, specialness, and signification closely related to social, political and economic accumulation (Hannigan 1998; Lury 2000; Mommaas et al. 2000) via image-making (Debord 1994), staging (MacCannell 1999), and aesthetization (Wiley 1998) strategies.

The pressures to make arts and culture more community-oriented, financially independent, and multiculturally innovative transform the cultural policy-making into an action strategy aimed at restoring relevance of cultural organizations to the experience economy of media, entertainment and tourism (Mommaas 2004: 518-519; Mommaas et al. 2000; Pine and Gilmore 1999). As classical arts and cultural heritage increasingly lose their social relevance (de Haan 1997; de Haan and Knulst 2000; Knulst 1995; Mommaas 2004: 519; O'Connor and Wynne 1996) the cultural accumulation becomes decoupled from the social structure so that not only the post-Fordist emphasis on the post-modernist affinitities with popular culture and immediate experience become predominant (de Haan and Knulst 2000) but also the modernist and classical culture has become just another sector on the market of cultural preferences (Munch 1991: 245-248). Despite the arts and cultural education programs oriented at modernist heritage the success of new cultural forms, popular music, new media, digital culture, artistic fashion, and architectural design has shifted the balance of the public policy in favor of an entrepreneurial approach towards cultural production and consumption since the criteria for culural policy-making no longer can be imposed from outside of the cultural market without running the risk of biased evaluation, selection, participation, and circulation decisions (Mommaas 2004: 519).

The cultural policy reoriented to support the entrepreneurial projects stimulates the circulation of exposure, funds, and space among the formats, activities and institutions that cross the generational, cultural, and community boundaries at the expense of making all cultural organizations more dependent on their market performance, of expanding the range of cultural topics covered by educational curricula, and of legitimizing the institutional interpenetration between culture and economy (Mommaas 2004: 519-520) so that a sustainable structure of urban relations among the processes of social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation arises (Munch 1991: 249-256). Even though the reformulation of the cultural policy away from classical and modern arts and culture towards approaching cultural market as a macro envrionment for institutionally entrepreneurial projects (Colomy and Rhoades 1994) is bound to elicit opposition from the more established arts organizations, having long enjoyed governmentally supported institutional autonomy, (Mommaas 2004: 520) the necessity of the political system to legitimate its collective decisions by the mobilization of cultural discourse and power (Munch 1991: 371) makes the post-Fordist adjustment of the governemental cultural policy towards the field of arts and culture into an indespensable measure for strengthening the independent political, economic, cultural, and social agency (Giddens 1991; Pots 2000) vis-a-vis the corresponding processes of globalization (Looseley 1999).

The cultural policy-making encouraging the proliferation of cultural entreprenerialism, arts-driven development, and institutional interpenetration widens the financial, public, and social sources of its support that can be focused on cultural clusters as intergal parts of the urban revitalization strategies able to react more effectively to the macro environment of the "global cultural industries, the commodification of culture, changing taste paradigms and the rise of new media formats" (Mommaas 2004: 520). Cultural clusters have come to the fore of the cultural policy-making due to the strategic role that the creative economy is playing in the post-Fordist restructuring of cities that pursue revitalization via structural funtional integration of cultural production into the circuits of globalized accumulation (Mommaas 2004: 520-521) where economies of added cultural value, communication and information, and creativity, experience and concepts (Waters 1995) converge upon the creative city as a place that permanently adjusts to the multiple dynamic macro environments characterized by global cycles of innovation, regeneration, and change (Landry 2000; Verwijnen and Lehtovuori 1999). The institutional interpenetration of the social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation brings about the correspondingly growing interrelationship of the policy-making in each of the accumulation systems (O'Connor 1999) so that the urban development strategies aimed at bolstering the creative economy, urban renewal, and institutional innovation have to create, stimulate, and nourish the cultural clusters serving as critical infrastructure for the on-going differentiation, interpenetration, and culturalization of the urban structure via the accumulation of creative, infrastructural, and social capital whose complementarities can compensate for risk and uncertainty (Banks et al. 2000), create stable spatial identity (van Bon 1999), and spread the creative innovation benefits (Mommaas 2004: 521).

The economic policy-making fits into such structural functional interpenetration by offering place-related advantages to the enterprizes (Simmie 2002) that exhibit economically, socially, and culturally innovative agency in the environment of volatize, ephemeral and reflexive post-industrial production dependent on constant inputs of creative individuals, open networks, and social feedback (Banks et al. 2000; Bilton 1999) where independent location, lifestyle, and professional choices are decisive (Mommaas 2004: 521). Though the emergence of such famous creative districts as Monmartre, Rive Gauche, and SoHo has been spontaneous the conditions favourable to their development can be preserved from dissapearance under the deleterious impact of social, political, and economic effects triggered by creative success (Frank 2002; Zukin 1982) should the process of institutional interpenetration be steered towards reinforcing those paths and models of interrelated development that bridge bohemian marginality and cultural start-ups, plan openness and decentralization into urban design, and link institutions of cultural production with richly diversified reception environments (Mommaas 2004: 521-522; Verwijned and Lehtovuori 1999).

The cultural clustering strategy mutually reinforces the institutional interpenetration of the social, political, economic, and cultural accumulation processes that create macro environments of risk, openness, and dynamism that are favorable to the creatively entrepreneurial individual and collective action oriented at symbolic, ephemeral, and service economy (Amin and Graham 1997; Bilton 1999; Mommaas 2004: Munch 1991; 522; O'Connor 1999; Scott 2000; van Bon 1999; Verwijnen and Lehtovuori 1999). The post-Fordist transformation of the relations among the processes of social, political, economic and cultural accumulation has made obsolete entire economic sectors of the cities formerly hosting thriving industrial, ship-building, transportation, military, religious, public, and medical infrastructures that have both thwarted attempts at their modernization and heightened the inter-urban competition where reorientation towards post-industrial economy has succeeeded thereby putting the increasing share of urban heritage in the cultural consumption into the center of entrepreneurial strategies of diversity, history, and local identity celebration (Mommaas 2004: 522). The post-Fordist accumulation has turned the post-industrial urban spaces into the environments of coexistence of counter-cultural groups and gentrified development projects, of cultural incubators and commodification of space, and of spectacular event areas and real estate speculation (Mommaas 2004: 522).

The successful integration of the post-industrial urban infrastructures into the post-Fordist accumulation as office, residential, and exhibition spaces makes the development of the cultural policy oriented at retention of the cultural producers in the cities dependent on post-industrial production into a strategy critically necessary to maintain competitive positioning within the open, creative, and mobile networks within which the cultural producers move (Mommaas 2004: 522-523). Moreover, the adoption of the cultural clustering strategies depends not only on the architectural heritage available for integration into the cultural infrastructure, but also on the emergent development, maintenance, and proliferation of the local support networks linking the cities to the circuits of symbolic, economic, and cultural accumulation (Mommaas 2004: 523). However, even though the processes of institutional differentiation, autonomization, and interpenetration are in line with the post-Fordist developments reflected in cultural policies of cities that have established cultural clusters in a bid to position themselves as centers of innovative cultural production (Mommaas 2004: 523), the individual and collective entrepreneurual strategies that have led to the respective decision making provide micro corrective to the structural explanations of the transition to post-Fordism.

The crisis in the Fordist accumulation giving impetus to the novel forms of legitimation of and of power mobilization for social, political, economic, and cultural decisions (Munch 1991: 371) has led to the renegotiation of the structure of interrelations among the insitutions, groups, and discourses bearing immediate effects of the post-Fordist reogranization of arts and culture, collective action, economic exchange, urban space, and governmental policy to promote cultural expression, investment, training, marketing, distribution, and relevance (Bianchini 1989; 37-38; Mommaas 2004: 523-524). Consequently, the cultural clustering strategies as urban linchpins of the processes of post-Fordist accumulation reproduce the social structure emerging from the deregulated social, political, economic, and cultural markets increasingly less depenent on the policy-making input for their operation via local networks, inter-institutional cooperation, and interpenetration of money, representation, reputation, and power (Mommaas 2004: 524; Munch 1991: 371). Nevetheless, contributing to cultural diversity, urban democracy, and alternative platforms (Mommaas 2004: 524), cultural clusters give spatial expression to the process of interpenetration of the social, political, economic, and cultural institutions within an open structural functional framework serving as a means of urban differentiation, autonomization, and integration.

The cultural clusters represent urban effects of the process of interpenetration of the social systems of accumulation as they enlist support via integration of the exchange of economic cooperation for social goods and services, of legitimation of political action for cultural policy-making, of cultural democracy implementation for legitimization of collective social action, of economical and infrastructural decisions for political benefits and services, of political cooperation for social policy decisions, and of cultural production and consumption for legitimization of economic agency (Mommaas 2004: 524-525; Munch 1991: 371). Though each cultural cluster realizes the interpenetration of the social, political, economic, and cultural accunmulation, the particular urban configurations these processes enter into resist generalization beyond the entrepreneurial strategies of the groups that manage, finance, justify and embed the creative quarters into the circuits of institutional accumulation accomodating both centralized consumption-oriented approach to cultural policy-making and decentralized emergence of cultural production projects (Mommaas 2004: 525). The urban particularization of the structure of modernity (Munch 1991: 368-369) depends on the local circumstances that facilitate or hamper different combinations of institutional interpenetration and their developmental trajectories which together contribute to the structural congifuration of cultural clusters as contingent outcomes of entrepreneurial strategies of policy-makers, as systems reflexively changing in response to on-going interaction between macro environments and individual and collective actors, and as environments for institutional self-observation by the organizations involved in urban development of creative economy, cultural infrastructure, and cultural democracy (Mommaas 2004: 525).

The place that arts and culture occopy in the post-Fordist urban development (Zukin 1982, 1991, 1992) draws on the dynamics of deindustrialization of cities turning their formerly industrial production districts into the quarters of cultural consumption as urban renewal procceeding via reintegration of the socially, politically, economically, and culturally marginal spaces into the urban structure of global modernity (Appadurai 1996) where the interaction between the macro environment of the post-industrial economic development and the institutionally entrepreneurial groups sets the course of the mediation among the multiple processes of urban accumulation (Mommaas 2004: 525-526). Though the projects promoting the culture-driven urban regenetration frequently meet with criticism of the dynamics of instrumentalization of culture for the purposes of economic development (Mommaas 2004: 526), such aesthetic critique of capitalism not only conflates the dynamics of modernity with its economically reductivist interpretation but also reinforces the deregulating effects of the crisis of Fordism by insisting on the autonomy of the cultural institutions that are increasingly out of touch with the social, political, economic, and cultural developments of the global modernity.

The concerns that the cultural clustering strategies of urban development raise are significant since as macro institutional environments that cultural producers and consumers confront they participate in the contradictory dynamics of modernity whereby rising real estate values hinder cultural development, rising cultural cluster popularity socially homogenizes the surrounding urban areas, and rising influx of diversity-seeking tourists increases the pressure for cultural conformity of the institutional programming (Mommaas 2004: 526). As part of the processes of social, political, economic, and cultural interpenetration, cultural clusters exhibit variation arising from the particular entreprenerial strategies of urban development that critically depend on the urban environments shaping the micro dynamics of the structure of modernity in its interdependence with the interrelations among individual organizations, available strategies, and cultural objectives (Munch 1991: 369) that institutionally mediate between culture and economy, places and flows, and agency and structure (Mommaas 2004: 526-527;) in each city according to its place in the structural functional relations of the global modernity developiong along non-linear trajectories of accumulation of capital, culture, reputation, and power (Featherstone 1991; O'Connor and Wynne 1996: 75; Schulze 1992).

The transformation of modernity towards greater differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration of its constituent systems via continuous circuits of institutional integration, goal specification, adaptive opennes, and structural generalization (Munch 1991: 368) allows itself to be observed in the status of cultural clusters as sites of interrelated accumulation processes of discourse, reputation, power, and money that cannot impose their exclusive logic of operation on the groups and individuals pursuing other accumulation strategies without risking to undermine their legitimation, mobilization, and transaction power vis-a-vis the urban structure of post-industrial modernity (Mommaas 2004: 527-528; Munch 1991: 371). The variability of the structure of modernity allows for different models of relations where the cultural infrastructure, interest groups, and policy-making can be embedded (Mommaas 2004: 528). As institutionally entrepreneurial strategies (Colomy and Rhoades 1994), the cultural clustering policies can flexibly react to their local conditions, innovatively apply developmental models, and situatively form interest-based inter-organizational alliances (Bilton 1999; Mintzberg and McHugh 1985; Mommaas 2004: 528) thereby affecting the configuration of the interinstitutional relations in which they reflexively participate.

To the factors likely to negatively affect the effectiveness of the cultural clustering strategies belongs the lack of systemic interpenetration with the urban structure of globalized accumulation taking place via global creative industry corporations signing exclusive contracts with local cultural producers, national cultural infrastructure companies being owned by global advertisement corporations, global financial services companies building head offices in cultural quarters, and inter-institutional cooperation frameworks failing to achieve formal recognition by governmental organizations (Bilton 1999; Mommaas 2004: 529). However, without concerted social, political, economic, and cultural policy-making oriented at creating favorable macro environment for innovative entrepreneurial projects, the post-Fordist accumulation cannot on its own produce the cultural, reflexive, and strategic conditions necessary for solving its crises (Mommaas 2004: 529). The urban particularization of cultural clustering strategies represents the micro corrective to the structural functionalist approach to the models of development that the process of modernization can follow so that the post-Fordist transformation of the hierarchical social structures governing the processes of accumulation into the network-based, process-oriented, and post-industrial environments finds its urban reflection in cultural clusters (Mommaas 2004: 529-530) that have to be complemented with reflexive policy-making in tune with local structures of inter-institutional relations to be effective.

Cultural clustering strategies being increasingly adopted by the urban development policies since the late twentieth century, the spatial configurations of cultural institutions fall into inter-related patterns of differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration that the cultural policy-making has to take into account to adequately inform individual and collective action in the post-Fordist envrionment of diverse, inclusive, and entrepreneurial inter-institutional networks (Mommaas 2004: 530). The urban structure of social relations among the accumulation processes affects the form that cultural clusters take via their activities portfolios, governance structures, financial arrangements, infrastructural embedding, and developmental trajectories that determine the balance between cultural production and consumption, between art and entertainment orientation, and between hierarchical centralization and open networks (Mommaas 2004: 530). Cultural cluster development can serve creative economy, urban positioning, cultural revitalization, architectural preservation, and cultural democracy. Importantly, the urban development deploying cultural clustering strategies is widely implemented as a result of emergent process of inter-institutional interpenetration of culture-oriented strategies of individual and collective action (Mommaas 2004: 530).

While cultural clustering strategies clearly result from the interpenetration among the processes of social, political, economic, and cultural policy-making, the eventual success of cultural clusters being dependent on institutionally entrepreneurial strategies of individual and collective actors ther urban environments critically affect the trajectories of urban development, policy-making, and global positioning (Mommaas 2004: 530). The transition to the post-Fordist forms of accumulation does not resolve the contradictions of modernity (Munch 1991) but alters them in the direction of greater complexity, instability, and reflexivity (Mommaas 2004: 530-531) forcing thereby the policy-making process on urban, regional, and national levels to increasingly take into account the on-going social differentiation, rationalization, and interpenetration as macro environment of its strategic agency. Given that the moden processes of social, political, economic, and cultural accummulation can each come to play a disproportionate role in the collective decision-making (Munch 1991), the critique of modernity has to rely on detailed analysis of the structure of inter-institutional relations in order to formulate fine-tuned strategies of urban governance, reflexive involvement, and cultural clustering.