Search

Policy-makers and urban planners struggle to find the right formula to implement urban regeneration processes based on cultural assets, often focusing on the desired outcomes, but rarely questioning how the policy process can shape them. This paper examines different governance models for the implementation and organization of cultural districts, and evaluates how they can affect their actual realization by investigating three cases in Copenhagen, Denmark. The deindustrialization of Copenhagen left many of the city’s harbour areas disused and in turn provided the opportunity to develop three new cultural districts in the city centre. The paper contributes to the literature on cultural districts by matching specificities and contingencies attached to a particular urban area with the governance model adopted for its development. The paper claims that temporal experimentation has to be included in cultural planning and a mix of bottom-up and top-down approaches is more desirable than both a totally unregulated initiative and a real estate-driven development and a totally unregulated initiative, as it ensures that initiatives remain financially viable and that the creative workers and companies retain a certain control of the area development, and in turn counteracts gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the last two decades, cultural quarters have been used by many local councils across the UK as attempts to redevelop and revitalize declining urban centres. Cities have spent millions of pounds developing cultural quarter policies, justified by the prevailing rhetoric of culture revitalizing the local economy and the creation of a “cultural milieu” that stimulates creative industry activity. However, in many cases in the UK, visitor numbers remain lower than expected, and in some cases, flagship projects have been sold off or closed down. High rents force out small and freelance creative industry actors, and (non-commercial) artistic interventions are strictly policed. Forming part of the wider debate on the political circumscription of the creativity paradigm, this paper argues that cultural quarters have been viewed within a predominately economistic, dichotomous and simplistic framework. This paper argues that there is a need for a more practiced-based, subjective account of cultural quarters that goes beyond such a traditional framework to include more deleterious practices such as community impoverishment, precariousness and short-termism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to close specific gaps in our understanding of practice and policy concerning culture, planning and development in Ireland. This is a nation in which the development and planning impacts of cultural policy are of increasing importance, yet the state of knowledge of policy and infrastructure remains underdeveloped. The paper begins by charting the evolution of culture-led development in Western Europe over the last few decades, highlighting the emergence of culture as a central element in both economic and social development strategies. The paper then focuses upon Ireland, reviewing the nation's rich cultural and especially musical heritage, and the direct economic impacts of this. Detailing the successful mobilization of this heritage in search of tourism, the recent incorporation of culture into strategic planning and development initiatives, and the links between culture and development in Dublin, Cork and Galway, the paper concludes that Ireland is in a strong position to avail itself of the positive social and economic impacts of planning for culture and creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that it is important for urban scholars and practitioners to comparatively appraise the differential forms of local embeddedness of cultural quarters. Such appraisals can help to realize more sustainable practices of cultural quarter anchoring within neighbourhoods. The case study of Leipzig, Germany – a city that deploys both 'creative city' and 'cultural industries' models of urban development within a context of post-industrial, post-socialist transformation – is used to examine the adaptive re-use of a former cotton-spinning mill, the Baumwollspinnerei, into an internationally renowned cultural quarter. The POSES Star Framework is developed as an analytical tool to systematically outline multiple local embeddedness dynamics (political, organizational, social, ephemeral, and spatial) of a cultural quarter within a neighbourhood and within a specific urban planning and policy context. The application of the POSES Star Framework to the Baumwollspinnerei reveals that internal organizational concerns for site development and marketing are prioritized over external engagements with Leipzig's urban planning and cultural policy discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of culture in defining new models of local development has been increasingly emphasized. However, less attention has been paid to the influence of local development models on local cultural policy. This article will focus on analysing two cities that have used culture as a central element in their economic and urban development. In both cases, they have followed different strategies but the two have finally finished generating two “white elephants”: the Universal Forum of Cultures in the case of Barcelona and the City of Arts and Sciences in the case of Valencia. From a comparison of the two cases, the paper analyses the causes of this urban phenomenon, which combines cultural legitimation, wasteful investments, financial and social unsustainability and, last but not least, corruption. These four characteristics of cultural white elephants express the depletion of a neoliberal city model based on real estate speculation and tourism, which de facto relegates culture – in spite of discourses about social cohesion and sustainability – as an instrument of urban branding and elite socio-economic domination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the creative and cultural policies that are developed on a European cross-border scale. It provides a comparative case study of the Pyrenees-Mediterranean Euroregion, located on the French–Spanish eastern border and the Greater Region between Luxembourg, Germany, Belgium and France. The analysis is based on the concept of cultural development, which is related to Euroregions to emphasize the uses of culture, identity and creative resources in strategies of territorial attractiveness and institutional capacity-building. The analysis then shows how the dynamics of cultural development concretely impact Euroregional policies: implications, or even strengthening, of arts and creativity in cross-cutting policies—tourism and sustainable development, promotion of cultural diversity and the human dimension of development. Furthermore, these dynamics underline the contribution of cultural policy to the construction of territoriality, and subsequently the contribution of Euroregions to the territorial and cultural construction of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks about differences and similarities in the way cultural policy and business policy deal with regions in Norwegian city regions. The article discusses New Regionalism as a particular spatial practice, and stresses the difference between regionalism as a bottom-up process driven by local stakeholders and regionalization as a top-down process driven by state bodies. The role and significance of New Regionalism in city-regional policy-making is investigated. Empirical findings shows that cultural policy at the city-regional level is still under strong influence from a top-down state regionalization, while business policy at the city-regional level is, to a large extent, an example of bottom-up regionalism. The spatial logic of these two policy-fields differs from each other. Business policy rests on an interpretation of region/place as a container of established networks, relations and interactions that should be coordinated in order to strengthen the region in its competition with other regions. Cultural policy rests on another interpretation that is not territorial in the same degree, but rather on a logic that place/region is created as relations between persons, groups and institutions within a geographical scope that is not predefined and fixed with borders and boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Interreg IIIB Community Initiative Programme (2000–2006) is considered one of the main instruments to promote the application of the European Spatial Development Perspectives (ESDP), realizing in a concrete way the integrated approach to spatial development, also making effective the so-called Community spatial planning approach. Also important is the involvement of regions, public administrations and actors having direct competence for territorial planning and management. Taking into account the above, the aim of the article is to give a realistic perspective on the application of the ESDP through this Community initiative and, moreover, how it is interpreted and managed in south Europe. The state of the art of Interreg IIIB programmes relevant to south Europe will be presented and investigated, analysing the coherence of their goals with the ESDP political aims. Moreover, the innovative and central role played by the regions involved in the process of the application of the ESDP principles will be highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the relationship between consumption and identity in relational and socially contextualized terms. Discussion on the transformation of the material world into the commodity form; Details on associated fears about the increasing artificiality of relationships with nature and with other people; Discussion on the domestic context of family shopping; Institutionalization of ideas through the privatization of public space; Political and social implications.