Generationing cultural quarters: the temporal embeddedness of relational places

Cultural quarters concentrate and embed cultural and artistic activities, services, and networks in place, yet they are neither singular nor discrete entities. Within cities, cultural quarters exist in multiple temporal and spatial relations. Their degree of embeddedness within place is variable and dependent upon other sites’ physical, social, and affective relationships to the past and future. Building on our existing work on the political, organizational, social, ephemeral, and spatial forms of embeddedness of cultural quarters (POSES Star Framework; Bain and Landau, 2019a), this paper focuses on temporal embeddedness. Permeated by discursive-material rem(a)inders of industrial pasts, and dispersed via multiple, possibly conflicting hopes and plans for uncertain futures, such a nuanced approach to embeddedness speaks to the co-implicated temporalities and spatialities of cultural quarters. The paper argues that a temporally-sensitive analysis of cultural quarter embeddedness, and the transposition of developmental psychology notions of generationing (i.e., inter- and intragenerational) and birth order (i.e., firstborn, middleborn, lastborn), can advance urban geographical understandings of the interdependencies of sites of cultural production and consumption within cities. A comparative study of four proximate German cultural quarters in former industrial sites in West Leipzig - Baumwollspinnerei, Tapetenwerk, Westwerk, and Kunstkraftwerk - illustrates how generationing showcases cultural quarters as relational places.