title: Spatial transformations in entrepreneurship: A study of the Liverpool ‘Baltic Triangle’
Creators: name: Davis, Thomas
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2022

description: Entrepreneurship is frequently seen as a transformational force for underdeveloped urban spaces. While much research has emphasized the role of urban governance or visionary individuals, less is known about how entrepreneurship works with and on these spaces over time. Investigating these processes involves taking entrepreneurship out of primarily economic concerns, and into a debate on the social, material and historical constitution of built environments. In this thesis I present a study of the Liverpool Baltic Triangle, exploring how the past is brought into its present-day entrepreneurial transformations. The main body of my dissertation is compiled of four main chapters which form standalone paper-based contributions but also fit together here as a cohesive study (along with an introduction which is presented in Chapter One and a discussion and conclusion presented in Chapter Six). Within this work, I present two analytical studies, both taking on a key thinker on space which I theoretically set in relation to entrepreneurial activity at the Baltic Triangle. I begin with a literature review, presented in Chapter Two, where I identify and interrogate theoretical and analytical approaches that have been employed for studying urban spaces and entrepreneurship. I present a typology of this body of work that is comprised of four distinct categories, including a sub-set of approaches that have explored the historical character of the ‘in-between’ and ‘lived’ aspects of urban entrepreneurial spaces, I subsequently use these latter studies as a springboard for my own research. In Chapter Three, I outline a methodological agenda for my empirical research. I introduce Henri Lefebvre’s ‘spatial triad’ and elaborate a set of methodological principles and processes for mobilizing his triadic notion of space for studying entrepreneurship. I emphasize historicized methodological procedures incorporated into a research design that combines multiple analytical techniques. My first empirical study, which I present in Chapter Four, analyzes the entrepreneurial transformation of the Baltic Triangle as a history of spatial change. Informed by the methodological agenda I outline above I operationalize Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, reading his work alongside Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus’s theory of entrepreneurial ‘world-making,’ to generate a dynamic account of the Baltic Triangle as a contested site of openings and restrictions for entrepreneurship. I use Lefebvre’s triadic spatial elements as a configuring frame for witnessing how entrepreneurial practices continually emerge ‘in-between’ (and subsequently transform) the Baltics’ spatial characteristics through time. My second empirical study, which I present in Chapter Five, explores the entrepreneurial renewal of one of the Baltic Triangle’s flagship buildings: the Cain’s brewery complex. Here, I focus on the transformational potential of aesthetic encounters with space, drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s kaleidoscopic account of his memories of childhood recalled through his present-day experience of the streets of Berlin, to investigate how the history of the Cain’s brewery is experienced by entrepreneurial individuals as acts of remembrance. Employing conceptual and analytical techniques derived from a close reading of Benjamin’s A Berlin Chronicle, I emphasize a cyclical process with a transformational potential: how entrepreneurial subjects remember is formed in encounters with the brewery; architectural experiences contributing to the collective articulation of a new entrepreneurial form. By employing Lefebvre’s spatial theory in Chapter Four I investigate the origins of entrepreneurial beginnings and how they grow and develop, using his triadic elements to trace the creative acts of multiple people as they collectively bring new ideas into commerce and contribute to the remaking of the Baltic Triangle. Conversant with Lefebvre, I emphasize especially the unfinished nature of this process. Entrepreneurial remaking creates new spatial conditions that eventually lead to an ‘un-making’ as the space becomes increasingly commercial, requiring new formulations of entrepreneurial action. Through my reading of Benjamin’s work on remembrance in Chapter Five, I emphasize a different process of entrepreneurial renewal. Benjamin’ writings on memory offers a more aesthetic sensibility – he is interested less in the broader movements of change as they unfold through time, and more at how history is experienced in the present moment through personal encounters with architecture. Through Benjamin, I am able to get in closer to what it means to creatively inhabit the Cain’s brewery to offer new insights into how its resident entrepreneurs pick up on its latent potential. By engaging these two spatial theorists in my study of the Baltic Triangle, my study reveals entrepreneurship as both more and less than frequently assumed. More, in the sense of its pivotal role in the facilitation of transitions between social, material, cultural or historical moments in space, and thus, downgrading the role of primarily economic concerns with urban governance. But also, less, in terms of the role that any single entrepreneurial individual can play in creating such epochal spatial transformations.