Culture-led Regeneration Research Articles

Railway feat. culture – Rumia library effect as an example of the influence of culture-led regeneration in a medium-sized city in Poland

The purpose of this article is to verify the thesis put forward by Skot-Hansen et al. (2013) with regard to the potential of modern libraries, but considered in the context of an investment located in a post-socialist medium-sized city in Poland. The study focuses on determining whether it is possible to create in an ordinary medium-sized city in a country belonging to the Socialist Bloc in 1945–1989 an extraordinary library which will have the potential to become (1) an icon, (2) a placemaker and (3) part of community vitalisation. Such a potential of modern libraries is indicated by Skot-Hansen et al. (2013). They analyse libraries located in large Western European cities. Therefore, the question arises about the possibility of extrapolating the indicated features to libraries located in smaller settlement units and located in Eastern European countries. This is an area whose socio-economic development over the past decades has been different than the countries of Western Europe indicated by Skot-Hansen et al. (2013).

Exploring Ronan’s conceptual, methodological and substantive innovations: Ronan on public art

ABSTRACT As the academic field of study into public art, particularly within regeneration contexts, was emerging, Ronan Paddison brought his interests in quality of life, culture-led regeneration, community and public spaces, and the broader processes of urban change to the discipline. This paper briefly outlines how these conversations developed and can be seen reflected in current thinking around the role of art, particularly in urban regeneration.

Consuming culture-led regeneration: the rise and fall of the democratic urban experience

ABSTRACT The role of culture in the reinvention of the post-industrial city has long fascinated urban scholars. Ronan Paddison made contributions to this debate at a time when culture had become something of a strategic orthodoxy. This paper reflects upon the emergence of the so-called creative city and its relationship to broader processes of commodification. It contends that this creativity discourse embellished a partial version of the city as a symbolic (and latterly digital) entity and, in this context, reflects upon Paddison’s broader contribution to our understanding of the city as a multifaceted arena in which social injustice so often thrives.

Reinventing and Promoting Northern Industrial Heritage: Regeneration in the Textile Sites of Ancoats and Saltaire

The promotion of heritage and culture-led regeneration in Ancoats and Saltaire, two formerly industrial districts of Manchester and Bradford, are comparatively examined in this article. It seeks to analyse the role of industrial heritage amidst initiatives aiming at the regeneration and reuse of the historic built environment, in a context suggesting a positive reassessment of industrial vestiges in the North of England. If both northern post-industrial cities are determined to improve their image and to promote themselves as tourist destinations, they strongly differ with regard to the use of industrial heritage as a promotional tool, thereby implying a swaying between the acknowledgment of the industrial past and the will to move forward.

Inheritance or variation? Spatial regeneration and acculturation via implantation of cultural and creative industries in Beijing's traditional compounds

Nowadays, the implantation of cultural and creative industries into the historic blocks of inner cities is widely accepted. With controversial impacts on heritage, the sustainability of culture-led regeneration has got increased research attention. This study focuses on cultural impact of the regeneration, as the creation of identity is the core of these new industries and might be the internal source of sustainability. Originally, it considers historical heritage as a production and marketing resource, while the regeneration process may have a negative impact on the former local identity and image. Responding to this paradox, we emphasize that the evaluation of the cultural impact of the implantation of new industries into historic blocks must consider multicultural backgrounds, because the culture-led regeneration actually hybridizes the conservation of former local identity and expression of contemporary identity. It can be stimulated by multiculturalism and is realized through the work of cultural entrepreneur with enhanced mobility, transcultural experience, and cultural sensitivity. Therefore, the identity of these new entrepreneurs and their spatial preferences may directly influence the regeneration results. Thus, this study not only demonstrates the physical regeneration results but also explores the relation between physical transformation and complexity of cultural identity, through the case study of Wudaoying Hutong in Beijing, a regenerated historic block with multicultural imprints. First, space syntax was used to investigate spatial transformation. Next, a bilinear measurement model of acculturation was used through a combination of questionnaires and in-depth interviews, and the corresponding acculturation conditions of new entrepreneurs were observed. Finally, the correlation between the spatial results and the acculturation measurements was verified and the implicit dynamics between acculturation conditions and the regeneration strategy was interpreted.

Supporting the cultural offer in England’s towns

The role of culture in regeneration is well understood by policy makers and practitioners. In recent years, however, culture-led regeneration, along with other policies relating to place, has been challenged on the basis that cultural opportunity is not equally distributed and this has penalised certain types of places, restricting their potential to benefit from culture and its contribution to regeneration. This challenge has focused in particular on towns, as places seen as being ‘left behind’ by policy makers’ attention and excluded from the benefits of growth and regeneration. This paper explores policy opportunities and recent practice relating to culture in towns and identifies some challenges to be addressed if culture is to make a substantial contribution to the renewal of towns in England.

Culture and Tourism in Porto City Centre: Conflicts and (Im)Possible Solutions

City centres are spaces where different economic and cultural values converge as a consequence of their current uses and functions. In the case of Porto (Portugal), more than 20 years after being declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (in 1996), tourism has had remarkable effects on its physical, social and economic features. Therefore, Porto—and in particular its city centre—is taken in this article as the object of study. The interest of this space lies in the fact that it has been rapidly transformed from a devalued old area into the centre of an important urban tourism destination on a European level. Based on the spatial and temporal analysis of a set of indicators related to tourism, housing and economic activity, we identify the main threats that this “culture-led regeneration”—much supported by tourism—could have on the cultural values of Porto. Our results show that this process is promoting an excessive use of space by tourism and an overexploitation of cultural values. We conclude with some policy recommendations to support strategies capable of keeping cultural values alive, which we consider sustainable compromises between heritage and modernization.

Towards developing a cultural and creative quarter: Culture-led regeneration of the historical district of Rasht Great Bazaar, Iran

This research attempts to examine the contribution of culture-led regeneration approach through the determination of policies and strategies to develop a cultural & creative quarter in a case of the historical district of Rasht Great Bazaar (RGB) at the city-centre, where is the main place of food creativity and pertinent Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). According to methodology, relevant literature through a critical review of academic papers is examined to develop a theoretical framework and to assess the case study through mixed-method research. Aimed at evaluating related measures regarding cultural quarters including cultural regeneration and economic impacts, tourism, and socio-cultural vitality, this study structures the development procedure into four categories: cultural setting, local CCIs, cultural and creative tourism, and cultural infrastructure to present a systematic overview of the regeneration process. To suggest proper land-use for RGB, a questionnaire, SWOT analysis and a systematic process encompassing objectives, strategies and policies are employed in this paper. Results of the questionnaire and the survey revealed that considering different economic-cultural and social aspects of local CCIs and the city’s characteristics in the implementation of cultural development strategies are needed to regenerate the derelict Rasht Bazaar’s spaces and to reach the desired outcome.

What Determines the Success of Culture-Led Regeneration Projects in China?

Culture-led regeneration projects (CRPs) have been identified as an effective means for enhancing the sustainable development of cities. Related topics have been investigated; however, relatively little information is known about what factors are critical for achieving success in these kinds of regeneration projects. Based on a literature review and five case studies, this study contributes to the body of knowledge by identifying 25 critical success factors (CSFs) for managing CRPs in China. A questionnaire survey was designed to evaluate the relative importance of these factors from practitioners’ and researchers’ perspectives. In addition, a factor analysis was carried out to group these CSFs into five categories, namely government policies and culture-led regeneration strategies, stakeholder management and financing support, technical solutions for CRPs, social security, and industry development. The results demonstrated that cultural value management, integrating cultural development with urban planning, adopting sustainable development principles, reconstructing the city image and brand, and the availability of culture-led planning methods played the most important roles in the success of CRPs. The findings of this study can help practitioners enhance their regeneration project performance.

Collective memory and urban regeneration in urban spaces: Reproducing memories in Baharestan Square, city of Tehran, Iran

Abstract Baharestan Square as the most memorable square in Tehran, has many historical and cultural monuments. This square as the historic public space, faces urban decay and dilution of social belonging due to urban transformations which are eroding the collective memory of not only its meaning but also its physical environment. This research aims to propose a theoretical model for continuing and reproducing features of collective memory in historic urban spaces. Qualitative research is applied via field study and in-depth interviews with 20 residents and users aged 25–65 years. The respondents were known as local residents in Baharestan neighbourhood in Tehran. The observations, interviews, and related documents and texts were analyzed with qualitative content analysis. The data gathering was continued up to theoretical saturation. This study indicates that collective memory is composed of objective and subjective dimensions, including place, events/activities, history, and personal values/images. This framework can be applied through the culture-led regeneration of historic urban spaces with the help of interventions in relation to the needs and attitudes of social groups, local users, and residents.

Learning to belong? ‘Culture’ and ‘place making’ among children and young people in Hull, UK City of Culture 2017

ABSTRACTDespite the rise of ‘child-friendly cities’ internationally, and a growing interest in youth engagement in urban planning, the role of children and young people in culture-led regeneration and ‘place making’ schemes, remains under-researched. Notwithstanding the wealth of research into childhood and youth cultures, little is known about the ways in which the abstract (and perhaps predominantly ‘adult’) notions of ‘culture’ and ‘place’ are negotiated by younger citizens. Drawing on participative research with schools across Hull, the UK City of Culture 2017, this contribution explores children’s and young people’s understandings of culture and place within this cultural regeneration event. Although our findings suggest that the City of Culture designation has brought benefits to children and young people in a marginalised city, there is still much to be learned from their often personal and informal interpretations of ‘place’ and ‘culture’, as well as the role played by schools in this context.

Musealization as an Urban Process: The Transformation of the Sultanahmet District in Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula

As culture-led urban regeneration has become a widely adopted strategy for dilapidated historic cities, the museum as a concept has become a key aspect of this regeneration. With the tangible and intangible aspects of culture being presented in museums, many historic buildings are repurposed as museums, urban, or archaeological sites designated as open-air museums, and the boundaries between museums and historic cities have been dissolved. This article discusses how the museum concept expands from the boundaries of a single building into the historic city itself. Defining this expansion as musealization, this article evaluates its contribution as an urban process in the transformation of Sultanahmet in Istanbul’s historic peninsula, which has been the major subject of conservation studies from the nineteenth century until present day.

‘Britain’s First Media Centre’: A History of Bristol’s Watershed Cinema, 1964–1998

This article examines the genesis and development of the UK’s Watershed Cinema and Digital Creativity Centre. Established in 1982, Watershed was both the first full-time multi-screen independent cinema outside London and the first to integrate exhibition with production across a range of media arts: an innovative model that earned it the moniker, ‘Britain’s first media centre’. Watershed was also one of the first culture-led regeneration projects in the country, a model later much-imitated elsewhere. Despite its significance, however, Watershed’s genesis and development is largely unaccounted for. Beginning in the mid-1960s with the British Film Institute’s Regional Film Theatre policy, the article analyses Watershed’s history until the late-1990s. It reveals the complex local and national contexts that shaped Watershed’s development and investigates how and why such a major cultural initiative came into being at a time of profound cuts to arts funding in the UK. Moreover, the article demonstrates how issues central to Watershed’s development remain at the heart of contemporary debates about independent cinema exhibition, from questions of subsidy and tensions between nation and region to the difficulties of policy implementation and the complex realities of ‘independence’.

Manchester’s Post-punk Heritage: Mobilising and Contesting Transcultural Memory in the Context of Urban Regeneration

Urban memories are remediated and mobilised by different - and often conflicting - stakeholders, representing the heritage industry, municipal city branding campaigns or anti-gentrification struggles. Post-punk ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011) coincided with the culture-led regeneration of former industrial cities in the Northwest of England, relaunching the cities as creative clusters (Cohen 2007, Bottà 2009, Roberts & Cohen 2014, Roberts 2014). Drawing on my case study of the memory cultures evolving around Manchester‘s post-punk era (Brunow 2015), this article shows how narratives and images travel through urban space. Looking at contemporary politics of city branding, it examines the power relations involved in adapting (white homosocial) post-punk memories into the self-fashioning of Manchester as a creative city. Situated at the interface of memory studies and film studies, this article offers an anti-essentialist approach to the notion of ‘transcultural memory’. Examining the power relations involved in the construction of audiovisual memories, this article argues that subcultural or popular memories are not emancipatory per se, but can easily tie into neoliberal politics. Moreover, there has been a tendency to sideline or overlook feminist and queer as well as Black and Asian British contributions to post-punk culture. Only partially have such marginalised narratives been observed so far, for instance in Carol Morley’s documentary The Alcohol Years (2000) or by the Manchester Digital Music Archive. The article illustrates how different stakeholders invest in subcultural histories, sustaining or contesting hegemonic power relations within memory culture. While being remediated within various transmedia contexts, Manchester’s postpunk memories have been sanitised, fabricating consensus instead of celebrating difference.

Event and Sustainable Culture-Led Regeneration: Lessons from the 2008 European Capital of Culture, Liverpool

Culture-led regeneration has been widely accepted by European cities as an important component of urban renewal and sustainable development. However, the instrumental role of culture in urban regeneration has revealed several controversies. The study aims at contributing to the debate on urban cultural policy and management by answering two research questions: What are the key success factors for sustainable culture-led regeneration? How can cities strike a balance between the dilemmas of culture-led regeneration? Based on a case study of Liverpool as the 2008 European Capital of Culture, this research draws on long-term and multi-faceted data. The study period is from 2007 to 2018, with a view to tracking the long-term impact of event. Liverpool’s strategies for sustainable culture-led regeneration are investigated from three aspects: cultural funding dilemma, economic dilemma and spatial dilemma. The findings reveal that incorporating events in a city’s long-term regeneration trajectory, continued support and enhancement of local cultural processes and structures, and highlighting community involvement and development are major factors to ensure the cultural sustainability of event.

Culture-led regeneration in a Persian historical city centre: A case study of the Karim Khan-e Zand Complex

In recent decades, the dramatic growth of urbanisation and modernism has had significant effects on historic city centres, the most negative of which is the phenomenon of ‘placelessness’ in the historical fabric. Therefore, urban design that maintains the historical fabric concentrates on the priority of ‘placemaking’ and aims to provide a ‘unique place’ in the city centre.1 Culture-led regeneration can enhance the symbolic centre of cities and improve the character of the area and the power to attract citizens, tourists and investors. The old and valuable centre of Shiraz, the cultural capital of Iran, is considered at the national and international level an appropriate example of how to use culture as the catalyst for regeneration because of its cultural and historical past as well as its iconic buildings and places. This research paper attempts to model the relationship between culture and regeneration in historical city centres. Questions addressed in this study include: what models can be used in the regeneration/culture relationship in historic city centres and how do they work? Which characteristics make Karim Khan-e Zand unique? What culture-led regeneration policies were used in the Karim Khan-e Zand Complex?

The Study on the Residential Space in Culture-led Urban Regeneration: a case study of Residential Space in Henan

The concept of culture-led urban regeneration is one design solution for restoring urban vitality and re-creating urban culture based on the tangible and intangible cultural resources of the city. As an important part of culture, residential culture is changing with the development of society. Literature shows that there are still deficiencies in the study of residential culture in culture-led urban regeneration. This study tried to find the cultural identity and belonging in the residential space in one hand, create a suitable space layout in the other hand. The living space pattern of traditional and modern is summarized. The cultural characteristics of Henan province have been abstract and offering the basis of the improvement solution for living space from the perspective of cultural. This study offered the reference to the culture-led urban regeneration of Henan province.

Post-socialist context of culture-led urban regeneration – Case study of a street in Novi Sad, Serbia

In West European cities, culture has evolved to become a crucial ingredient of regeneration projects, in which stakeholders' cooperation is of utmost importance and economic and social benefits are often well balanced. In contrast, the majority of second-tier Central and East European cities, primarily non-holders of the European Capital of Culture title, still seem to struggle with clearly defining the relationship between culture and urban regeneration, precisely determining the responsibilities of the key actors and making the distinction between social and economic goals in regeneration projects. In this paper, the authors join the emerging discussion on the post-socialist context of culture-led regeneration through a case study of a street in the old core of Novi Sad, Serbia. In an effort to contribute to understanding various challenges that Serbian cities have been facing since the fall of communism, they seek to identify cultural effects of a very distinctive process of transition. They also investigate the interplay between the citizens' cultural preferences, visions of urbanity, private sector's interests and usage of urban space, and discuss the impacts of spontaneous utilization versus exploitation of space and culture. Furthermore, they analyse the outcomes of culture-led transformation conducted in the absence of cultural strategies and in-depth regeneration policies and marked by the laisser-faire attitude of the local authorities. Having completed the analysis, the authors propose the means for redefining the relationship between culture and regeneration in second-tier Serbian cities, yet also in other CEE cities of similar size, emphasizing the role of culture, responsibilities of the local authorities, significance of bottom-up approaches and relevance of place context.

Sustainability issues in the industrial heritage adaptive reuse: rethinking culture-led urban regeneration through Chinese case studies

Targeted at the fragility of culture-led regeneration as a result of market frustrations and policy instability, the paper proposes a sustainable perspective to re-examine the prospects of culture-led urban regeneration projects at the local level through the taxonomy of three signatures—The Beijing 798 Art Zone, The Shanghai M50 and The Guangzhou Xinyi International Club are chosen as different, yet representative cases of industrial heritage transformed creative clusters. By comparing the development trajectories and statuses of these pioneer culture-led regeneration projects, the paper reveals the mechanism and confirms the model of practice for the reincarnation of industrial heritage by creative clusters in the local context of the cities. Ultimately, the analysis of this model indicates that the reuse of industrial heritage is an effective approach in response to the cultural demands of the post-industrial era; however, it brings forth the inevitable challenges beyond economic dimension, from a sustainability perspective. The analysis further identifies those underlying reasons of unsustainability and provides recommendations in order to explore the full potential of the “cultural value” of urban regeneration.

The Paradox of Culture-led Urban Regeneration, Gentrification and Socially Engaged Art: A Case Study on Art Collective Assemble

The Paradox of Culture-led Urban Regeneration, Gentrification and Socially Engaged Art: A Case Study on Art Collective Assemble