Track 9: Culture, Heritage and Planning
- Track Co-Chairs
- Zeynep Enlil, Yildiz Technical University
- Mervi Ilmonen, Aalto University School of Science and Technology
Since a decade or so culture and creativity have been widely recognized to be central when addressing local and regional economic challenges. A creative fever has infected planners and policy makers in Europe. According to the creative city discourse post-industrial cities and regions in Europe will only have a chance to be competitive and successful in attracting investment, qualified labor and events, if their cultural assets are seriously seen as valuable endogenous assets. Such cultural assets include a wide range of things, both tangible and intangible. Tangible elements of the built environment combined with aesthetic and symbolic elements strengthen the cultural identities of spaces and places. While globalization tends to promote homogeneity, competitive cities have a strong individual and particular cultural identity. Thus globalization paradoxically calls for strengthening local and regional identity. Planning and local economic development are now exploring how to benefit from culture and urban heritage as a significant potential for spatial and economic development, for creating and securing jobs, without turning European cities into cultural Disney parks.
European cities, at least most inner cities, are “luxury spaces”. Their cultural heritage is protected and highly regulated. However, conflicts arise, when developers aim to respond to the creative city fever. They do it to benefit from changing values and housing preferences of middle-class households, who wish return to the cities from dull and eroding suburbs. They respond to consumer trends when shifting shopping centres from green-field sites back to inner city locations. And they support universities wishing to expand their inner city campuses to meet the requirements of their knowledge workers. Following mainstream policies for attracting the trendy “creative class” to their cities, city managers and their advisory circles, they support the development of creative spaces and the promotion of creative industries, wherever urban conditions allow. As a rule they are not aware, or they rather tend to accept, that they accelerate gentrification processes and add to the social polarization and fragmentation of the city. Though strengthening the local identity has undesired social implications for those citizens, who cannot afford to live in such luxury spaces, who are driven out to live in the suburbs, where local identity is weak, urban heritage is poor, and access to cultural facilities is limited. This is the experience in many cities all over Europe.
It is not an easy task planners have to face in Europe. Promoting culture, heritage and creative spaces in cities, while avoiding negative social implications, requires much sensitivity and strategic thinking, particularly in times, when cities have to cope with the financial repercussions of the global financial crisis. We invite you to submit papers exploring such challenges and we welcome both theoretical insights as well as practical case studies. Thereby we have a particular interest in papers, which address strategic solutions to the new challenge.
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