Culture and money perform a fragile balancing act when you bring urban development into play. Big Capital funding can it seems function like a crow bar to the kind of creative labour force that consists mainly of small, flexible networks of people, pushing it further to the periphery. Big art funding sometimes achieves the opposite of its aims, expelling smaller-scale creative activity from urban areas. Lisa Haskel finds out about one of the true costs of paving London's South Bank with gold.

Let me clarify the situation a little. There is a thriving little community of music and multimedia practitioners in a building on Clink Street, close to London Bridge. That community has sprung up totally without subsidy or local authority support - it's the dream of any cultural bureaucrat - a community of small, economically sustainable, highly creative businesses who also engage in non-profit making, 'culturally-driven' creative activity. They do this by drawing on their own resources and, when they want to, some of those organisations have applied and benefited from relatively small arts subsidies for creative projects. Part of the building is being run as a public-access media space called Backspace; kind of a cross between a cybercafŽ and a media lab. This space, and its web server, also has no subsidy for running costs and is pretty interdependent with at least some of the 20 or so small cultural 'micro-enterprises' in the building. It gets its connectivity from a service provider in the building, for instance, and bits of equipment and resources are often borrowed from the several music studios in the building. Many people from the London, national and international scene know it as a space where people and small groups working in experimental and critical ways with networked technologies gather and find a place to work.

Last month, Backspace received an eviction notice. As I understand and interpret things, this is what has happened. The area around the riverside by London Bridge is the latest target of the seemingly endless, frighteningly swift and undoubtedly ruthless encroachment of property developers into different areas of the capital. Usually their activities, which result in a massive and swift upward drive of property prices, are actively supported by local authorities under the banner of 'urban regeneration'. Cultural industries and institutions are seen as drivers behind 'regeneration', in bureaucratic, urban development terms, and as encouraging the growth of employment and improvement of local environments. During the past five years, many parts of the UK have seen public investment from local authorities, the National Lottery and in some cases the European Union in cultural institutions on the basis of this model.

So here's the contradiction in the case of Backspace. While the building that it occupies actually fits all the criteria of an urban regeneration scheme, it has come about in an unplanned way, with no institutional backing of any kind. Meanwhile, just up the river, the Tate Gallery of Modern Art, the UK's major collection of 20th century art, is developing a new site. A huge old oil-fired power station - Bankside - is being converted into a brand new contemporary art venue, at a cost of roughly 100 million pounds, around 50 million coming from the National Lottery. True to the kind of form that the urban planners aim for, this indeed put a premium on the land and property in the surrounding area. The increase in the value of the freehold and rents in Winchester Wharf are rising dramatically. The freeholder wants to sell. The leaseholder requires vacant possession. All the organisations in the building are on short-term licenses. They have no recourse to anybody, and no institutional clout to protect them. Their assets are moveable and very valuable, especially to the kind of bully-boy tactics often employed when there's this much value at stake. Quite what's going to happen next is anybody's guess.

Lisa Haskel [lisa@lisa.demon.co.uk]