Culture Leading to Urban Regeneration : Empirical Evidence from Some Italian Funding Programs

In recent years policies fostered the leading role of culture in urban regeneration in Italy, financing and supporting not only consolidated cultural and art institutions, but also providing new economic opportunities to emerging community-based groups and associations. Research on culture-led urban interventions has however mostly adopted a micro-level of analysis, missing the possibility to grasp general trends also usable in a policy dimension. The paper aims to advance the state-of-the-art of the national debate on long-lasting culture-led regeneration processes, by offering a landscape view of the phenomenon in Italy. The research is based on the analysis of two databases of project applications for national-level funding programs on culture-led urban regeneration, containing respectively 141 and 54 processes. The paper identifies the most salient trends and common characters of these initiatives: i) the spatial dimension (location and real estate assets) ii) the scale of intervention iii) the service delivered in the regeneration effort. The paper argues that culture is neither uniform, nor alone in culture-led urban regeneration initiatives: culture is present in different shapes and in different types of activities, ranging from fruition to production; furthermore, it is often hybridised with other services, linked with local welfare provisions or commercial activities. While most of the initiatives are rooted on the regeneration of a single building, most of them adopt an area-based approach, being oriented to the revitalization of an entire urban area also through spatial and intangible actions, tending to collaborate with public authorities.