The role of artistic and cultural practices in uneven urban development processes: a reasoning on a few different forms that power relationships between the agents of urban renewal and the local communities can take in processes mediated by cultural and artistic practices within the public sphere and the urban context

The present research work is aimed at facing a debate that embraces the realms of sociology, geography and cultural studies. It builds upon the gathering of three distinct papers which common purpose is to investigate how art and cultural practices, operating through social phenomena, relate to wider systems of power in contemporary cities. Each of the three papers specifically focuses on a different form that power relationships between the agents of urban renewal and the local communities can take in processes mediated by cultural and artistic practices within the public sphere and the urban context. The conceptual framework underpinning the orientation of my research draws principally upon both the new urban sociology literature, along with the theories of Henri Lefebvre's right to the city, and the theories of some neo-Marxist thinkers, such as those of David Harvey, Peter Marcuse and Sharon Zukin. Developing from the theories based on these lines of thoughts, I here aim to analyze the debate about the art-led gentrification, reasoning about the role the creative class has played in the main long-established theories of gentrification, looking respectively at culture and capital as key drivers, and on the extent to which it is organically integrated in the gentrification processes. I also aim to contextualize the consequences of these processes in terms of social costs, dwelling on two case studies. In the first article, “Two versions of heterotopia: the role of art practices in participative urban renewal processes” I put forward a new conceptual frame, built on the comparison between two notions of heterotopia as theoretical alternatives for the reading of cities as social and participatory spaces, exploring the implications of the interaction of artistic practices with the urban space. Within this analysis, Foucault’s notion of heterotopia turns out to be potentially conducive to top-down planning processes and to gentrification, while Lefebvre’s notion is instead better suited to participatory practices as strategies of reactivation of the right to the city. In the second article, “Gentrification as space domestication. The High Line Art case”, I interpret the gentrification process as a strategy of public space domestication in the context of culture-driven urban regeneration. As a role model of this theoretical construction, I refer to a full-blown case of gentrification taking place in the area of West Chelsea in New York, focusing on its main public art project, the High Line Art, and on its specific involvement to art-driven space domestication processes. I critically question the responsibility artists have towards the environment’s identity and social bonds in which they operate once the art-led re-shaping of public space means turning it into a narratively orchestrated context of individualized consumerist entertainment. The last article finds its foundation in the gentrification without displacement debate: “The loss of place identity: when gentrification perpetuates cultural and economic misappropriation. The NoLo district case” analyses an Italian case of gentrification in its peculiar context. I here aim to assess how hegemonic models of culture-led urban development, with its commodification of public spaces and social amenities in terms of trade, meeting places and aesthetic landscape, can lead to a harmful change in social meanings at odds of local community’s identity and consistency.