Communication Practices of Knowledge Generation: Comparing Creative Communities in St. Petersburg

Today urban space appears to be the principal arena of communication between various actors and their groupings. As such, it becomes the locus of intensive knowledge creation where clashes and intersections of different knowledge fields take place. With the growing competition of cities for recognition and symbolic benefits and the development of creative industries as the foundation of urban economy, artists become one of the major knowledge-generating urban space powers that creates artworks as both knowledge objects influencing opinions and discourses and communication mediums between artists and their publics.

This paper is focused on four creative communities of visual artists located in St. Petersburg who join their efforts in common artistic styles and promotional methods. The communities are different in scale, structure, ideological orientation, professional background and artistic style. They differently act in the urban space provoking response from their colleagues and broader audiences and sometimes successfully involving them in the development, reproduction and promotion of meanings. Using comparative case study strategy we analyze such knowledge-generating communication of the communities and highlight the key characteristics shaping the unique sets of their knowledge creation practices such as emotionality, reflexivity, inclusivity, participatory character, embeddedness in the urban space, dependence on community leaders and focus on the values and norms constituting the institutions of art world.