Journal
URBAN STUDIES
Volume 54, Issue 4, Pages 953-970Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/0042098016630507
Keywords
Bilbao; cultural clusters; cultural industries; gentrification; local identity; neighbourhood renewal
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
In the past 30 years, culture has been used as a means for revitalising neighbourhoods and branding the urban economy. Often, culture-led urban policies have had undesirable consequences in terms of rising rents, displacement of former residents and changes in the economic and retail landscape, i.e. gentrification. However, this process is not univocal, and displacement may not occur while disrupting community life. In this paper we explore the changes that have occurred in San Francisco, a working-class neighbourhood of Bilbao where the attraction of cultural industries has been used to revitalise the area and change the city image. We employ a framework that considers the built form, the cultural cluster organisation and the socioeconomic and demographic changes and we rely on different sources of evidence, including neighbourhood level socioeconomic data, personal interviews and a participatory evaluation, to capture the edges of this complex phenomenon. Our analysis suggests a less deterministic and more complex characterisation of culture-led neighbourhood transformations beyond the revitalisation/gentrification discourses, since conflicts may be driven not by economic transformations and social class replacement, but by the symbolic representation of space and the right to the neighbourhood'.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available