Creative interventions in the Latin American city: Exploring culture-led urban regeneration from below

• In Event: Nuevas y viejas formas de exclusión: entre segregación y gentrificación

Abstract

Culture has become central to processes of urban transformation in contemporary cities. From converting industrial buildings to developing whole districts into arts squares or creative clusters, culture functions today as the cornerstone of a new orthodoxy by which cities seek to enhance their competitive position (Miles and Paddison, 2005:833). Among these entrepreneurial urban policies, culture-led urban regeneration has risen as a global phenomenon, widely acclaimed by policymakers. Yet the discourse of urban regeneration becomes an indirect way of promoting gentrification as the cure for all the problems of cities, disguising its negative effects (Lees, 2000). Urban regeneration and gentrification, then, become two sides of the same coin, one which sees culture as a panacea, enabling the implementation of exclusionary urban renewal processes (Dinardi, 2012). While official culture-led urban regeneration has been widely documented, forms of urban revitalisation from below have been overlooked in the academic debates. This paper engages from a critical, sociological perspective, with the role of culture in urban development by examining emerging creative interventions in public space in two Latin American cities: Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. In doing so, the paper seeks to de-centralise the production of knowledge about culture-led urban regeneration by bringing to the fore experiences of culture and creativity from Latin America, and showing how these produce alternative cultural forms in contexts of urban segregation, social inequality, precariousness, poor-quality public spaces and growing informal settlements.

Author

• Maria C Dinardi, City University London