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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Urban Re/inventors « Previous | |Next »
November 12, 2008

The Urban Re/inventors has a Flickr stream and an Online Urban Journal, which is conceived as a collection of writings, commentaries, reportages, photographic galleries, films and videos on urban topics. In the Introduction to the first issue of the journal Alessandro Busà, the Chief Editor of The Urban Reinventors, says:

The notion of "Urban Reinvention" addresses a set of political strategies of urban redevelopment implemented by entrepreneurial local administrations within the growth-oriented and competition-driven framework of urban governance of the post Fordist-Keynesan era after the mid 1970's. If the term "urban regeneration", as Neil Smith (2002, New Globalism, New Urbanism, Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy) argues, tends to insinuate that such strategies are the outcome of physiological or natural processes, and the much used term of "renaissance" seems to hint at spontaneous and endogenous processes, the more appropriate notion of reinvention suggests a conscious strategic action undertaken by those in charge - in our case, the entrepreneurial local administrations.

The city is reinvented by use of the strategies of the "reinvention of memory" and the "staging of the future", which play equal parts in a bigger political strategy of manipulation of the image of the city. Busà goes on to say that urban reinvention:
also highlights the preponderant role played by creativity in the strategies implemented...In responses to the accelerating retreat of the Fordist economy, local administrations are increasingly seeking for local revenues in order to promote growth and provide services.Within this framework, cities are experimenting with new social policies, innovative pilot projects and workfare programs, and new creative strategies, through often controversial public-private partnerships with new local or extra-local private actors. Cities are entrepreneurial and act as corporations, competingwith each other for growth and for tax revenues (that is, seeking to lure citizens, especially middle class taxpayers, within the city boundaries). As a result of this shift to entrepreneurialism, cities increasingly try to "market" themselves in the global economy.

The role of the local administrations or city councils has changed from being the (more or less redistributive) local arm of the welfare state, to acting as a catalyst of processes of innovation.Entrepreneurial urban policies try to reposition the city, and in particular the inner city and its renewed downtown, within the geography of consumption, and this through three different spheres of reinvention.
Firstly, entrepreneurial municipalities race on the global market attempting to attract major global corporations creating central business districts and vibrant downtowns in answer to the demands of the so-called "creative class" (Richard Florida, 2004, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's
Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life) and by providing a "business friendly"
environment......

A second tool is gentrification, consciously promoted by local politics as a strategy of growth and as a mean for social change which may bring benefits to the wider city through increased tax revenues.
According to Neil Smith (2002, New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy), "the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint and local anomaly in the housing markets of some "command-center cities", is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy hat takes over from liberal urban policy […] The strategic appropriation and generalization of gentrification as a mean of global interurban competition finds its most developed expression in the language of "urban regeneration" and "urban renaissance"".....

As wealth expands, gentrification in successful cities pushes up prices for housing, making access for lower income households much harder, and ultimately pricing out of its boundaries the same informal creative forces the city was trying to appeal in the first instance.

Thirdly, so-called “creative” strategies make claims of anti-bureaucratic management and innovative holistic approaches to urban policies, including marketing strategies, image-making policies, and strategies of festivalization of the public space.

On the wave of the recent debate concerning development- and growth-strategies of the “entrepreneurial city,” in the last two decades a wealth of literature has developed on the subject, proposing experimental instruments of urban revitalization (see for instance the works of Michael Landry, 2000, The creative City, and John O. Norquist, 1999, The Wealth of Cities: Revitalizing the Centers of American Life). Under the banner of "urban renaissance" or "urban regeneration", architects, urban planners and politicians have worked to create strategies for the redevelopment of central downtowns, of deserted urban business districts, and of declining suburbs, in an attempt to restore the historic downtown its role and prestige and to halt the middle class flight to the suburbs.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:11 PM |