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Rich Mix in Brick Lane

by Ashwani Sharma

Ash Sharma explores the cultural and political geography of Brick Lane and locates the Rich Mix arts centre, due to open there in summer 2006.

I am a trustee of the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, and I want to talk about the project, its context, and the way it tries to navigate the convergence of culture, politics and urban regeneration, and to suggest that perhaps it offers a positive model for that process of negotiation.

Rich Mix is just north of Brick Lane on Bethnal Green Road. Brick Lane is an interesting metaphor, a symptom of the broader shifts not only in Tower Hamlets but also in the whole cultural economy of East London.

Over the years I have been going to Brick Lane there have been dramatic changes in the nature of the street, both in the real and in the imagined sense. In some ways it is a mosaic of the imagined agendas of cultural regeneration. Among the bagel shops, music shops and studios, the heart of it has always been the Indian restaurant – perhaps the greatest British invention of the past 50 years! And the makeover of the British-Indian restaurant in the past 20 years reflects the transformation of the place of minority culture in the British imagination.

It’s not a ‘makeover’ where the new removes the old; rather it is layered. And you could do a Marxist, dialectical analysis of the three phases of the Indian restaurant as an allegory of cultural transformations in East London.

In the 1970s came the formica-topped café: small, entrepreneurial but community-organised and catering mainly for the local Bangladeshi population. Some of those cafes carried on while others were transformed into the second stage, which was the ‘Indian curry house’ – every district had one – the classic Indian restaurant of the British national imaginary. It produced a cuisine aimed at a public beyond Bangladeshi or South Asian populations.

And now the new wave is the Asian fusion, cosmopolitan cuisine of some of the restaurants in Brick Lane which is aimed principally at the cultural tourist – probably white cultural tourists who, even if they live in the area, are likely to be new to it. This offers Asian culture as something to be consumed.

I see the Indian restaurant as an alternative public space for locality and community, but one which is increasingly integrated into a complex set of cultural dialogues. Here we’ve arrived at multiculturalism, diversity – although the language here is slippery. And this is what I want to talk about, because for me ‘multiculturalism’ is really about ‘race’. Also, it involves the commodification of ethnicity in a cultural economy, where ethnicity becomes one of the wares which is shown, bought and consumed to the point where Brick Lane is now a kind of ‘ethnic Disneyland’.

This has the effect of hiding the power relations within and across communities, and what is presented to the consumer is much simpler than the complex power relationships within, say, local Bangladeshi, North African or Islamic cultures.

There is also a fuzziness in the way culture is mobilised in urban regeneration, a deliberate blurring between the idea of culture linked to citizenship and creativity and the idea of culture linked to community, and in the latter aspect the idea of culture is that it is firmly fixed.

This is limiting and essentialising, and in my mind it erases the power differentials within the community itself. But in the discourse – and this has real consequences for how funds and resources are allocated – gender and class get lost, and certain agents control the agenda and play the game using the definitions prescribed by local government discourse.

Also in the mobilisation of culture in urban regeneration, culture is seemingly conflict-free; it is a model of celebration, and so we are back to the old, liberal model of multiculturalism from the 1970s – which in some ways we never left. Here the multicultural festival remains the key way of establishing credentials in a local community. Personally, I don’t have a problem with celebration but what it does is erase the problem of difference and power differentials within and across those communities.

In the present discourse, ‘multiculturalism’ has largely been swept away by ‘cultural diversity’, but I have to say the latter is virtually meaningless as a means of achieving critical purchase. Instead it becomes a catch-all for any kind of difference or different activity, and further it does not allow for consideration of white ethnicity.

The white working class disappears and what you get is a bourgeois discourse, which focuses the problem of harmonious cultural relations on to the white working class community, so the dynamic of more complex relations between different cultural communities tends actually to get erased with ‘diversity’.

Hence the question of ‘race’ gets erased; racism is hardly mentioned, and although there are codes for it, the effect is that ‘race’ gets simultaneously submerged and articulated in a different way.

So there is a discourse of institutional multiculturalism which is a continuation from the past but which is increasingly integrative. But what this does in its codified way is to replace a binary model of ‘race’ – ‘you’re either in or out’ – with a differential model in which if you’re Hindu you could be in, but if Muslim probably out: a pluralistic, multicultural racism.

The discourse of culture and community meets the creative industries discourse in the context of urban policy and regeneration. The creative industries discourse is already tied to the multicultural agenda, so that if you are a creative professional in, say, Tower Hamlets, the presumption is that you are linked to the diversity agenda. This verifies the creative industries as progressive, even though there is a hierarchy, in which the creative industries’ agenda dominates the thinking around cultural communities, so that the latter has to be tied into the market and community politics is steered through the market, making it difficult to intervene in this debate.

This is no new turn to multiculture, in that since the 1960s the urban policy agenda has always been about ‘race’ and class. There were different models for dealing with ‘race’, but there has always been a racial agenda as in the deeply racialised policies for inner cities. In fact, it is quite hard to think of urban policy outside these racialised terms.

My own position is that the idea of culturally-driven urban regeneration policy is deeply flawed, and unfortunately these are the terms in which questions of employment, for example, are now addressed. To tie jobs and housing to a cultural agenda is deeply problematic, and only benefits a minority of minority populations.

What’s absent from the debate is a political activist agenda which I think has to be brought back in, in such a way as to emphasise the connection between culture and the politics of social change as was clearly the case in the 1970s, in the struggle against fascism, for example.

Which brings me back to the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, a £21million capital project with key funding from the Millennium Commission, London Development Agency, the London Borough Of Tower Hamlets, Arts Council and Cityside, the local urban regeneration body .

It is now established as an independent charity. Rich Mix Cultural Foundation is the body which is setting up the Rich Mix arts space on Bethnal Green Road, due to open in the middle of 2006 - to include three cinemas, interactive gallery space, bookshop/café, a big bar area on the top floor, a performance space, and ‘incubation’ studios at low rents. It will also house CM, formerly Community Music, and ADFED (Asian Dub Foundation Education) and BBC London.

At its heart it’s a public space, though funded with all the contradictions previously set out, and with a management board whose members range from ‘hard’ left to ‘New Labour’. It’s chaired by Oona King, and Lord Waheed Ali is also a member, and without those major political players it probably would not have got as far as it has. It’s also a key ‘diversity’ project for the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.

Its ethos is to negotiate and navigate the terms of reference in a cultural regeneration agenda. It has its roots in a more radical moment connected to grassroots community activism, and in some ways it is an attempt to recreate a bigger project as envisaged at that moment. Which also means that its ‘failure’ as a utopian public project is already built into the walls, I suspect.

The regional precedents - Stratford Circus, Ocean - have run into real problems. Partly its agenda is to redefine the terms of culture and policy, and to do this by its own activity. A key question is that of ownership. It wants to see itself as driven from what is called ‘no threshold’, where the emphasis is on local access – and at the other end the ambition is of a sort of ICA East - the late sixties radicalism of the ICA redefined by diversity and internationalism and established in East London. It’s interesting that the ICA has been interested in shifting east.

The key question is thinking about it as public space which serves local communities, creatives and tourists, in a way that does not erase differences but by holding on to the complexity of culture, creates a ‘Habermasian’ public space with differences. There is the idea of innovation by locating the local, bedroom DJ in the context of what is also an international arts space. Maybe that’s impossible, but the intention is to avoid the patronising dimension of community arts, while including local history and education. The metaphors are mixed, starting with marketplace, but at the moment it’s more like a factory: a creative factory which also exhibits.

I see it as a kind of intervention. The local geography is so racially and class demarcated into white spaces and Asian spaces, middle-class and working-class - the utopian vision of Rich Mix is that within its boundaries those existing spaces are able to meet and overlap, at least by accident; and maybe something may happen. It is also an ethical project in that in the context of commercial pressure it is an attempt to create public space which, though publicly funded initially, does derive significant revenue from a market dimension.

A good example of Rich Mix’s ethos is Asian Dub Foundation Education: the band Asian Dub Foundation was formed from a training course at Community Music, they go on to make commercially successful records, and then themselves set up a training organisation which is based at Rich Mix and which puts on courses mainly for kids excluded from school, using music technologies to introduce them to the possibility of creative work.

This is just one example of how Rich Mix aims to act as a catalyst.

Ashwani Sharma is a trustee of Rich Mix and a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University Of East London.

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