STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
Gathering people in public spaces, at events that are free of charge seemed to be a good way to
enhance social integration and the revival of old city centres. In the 1970s, the role of culture in
urban regeneration was still apprehended as a social action. It was only from the mid 1980s that
cultural development and cultural policy of cities obtained an economic aspect, as a result of the
public sector’s crises and the cut of cultural sectors’ public subsidising 291 .
Philippe Chaudoir describes the same phenomenon from the special aspect of street arts 292 .
Street arts had reappeared as an important field of urban arts during the 1960s and 1970s: in the
same moment as urban planners recognised the danger of emptying cities traditional centre and
increasing the number of neighbourhoods without meaning, called by Chaudoir, les non llieux.
Along the 1970s, street arts had been developed as integrated parts of social urban development
and policy making.
Street arts projected a new conception on public space. Instead of regarding it as a functionalist
space, on half-way between home and other ‘useful’ spaces in the city (for work, for shopping,
for leisure or for culture) it proposed to treat public spaces as common places, usable by
everyone. Public spaces appear in street art movements as places for meeting, for relaxing, for
going out, and, of course, for culture and for arts, available for all. Street arts gave new identities
to old city centres, and as such, became tools of urban regeneration process.
2.2. Culture and creation as part of a global economic development
Culture, no doubt, obtained a new, enlarged and emphasized role in spatial and urban
development since de mid 1990s. This new role is related to the deep and global transformation
of economies, a process that had begun in the 1980s and that has expanded on the whole globe
and on almost all sectors by the 1990s. The new economy, also called global economy (again a
notion that is treated as a new one although rooted in the Middle Ages…), is partly based on the
increasing weigh of immaterial sectors (services and IT, knowledge-sector or tourism.). Culture,
cultural production and cultural services became one of the most developing sectors of the new
economy 293 .
Global economy performs another particularity as well: the parallel feature of concentration and
de-concentration. On the one hand, economic production is concentrated in the largest urban
areas (the “global cities”). On the other hand, de-concentration helps the revival of regions or
cities that had lost their economic potentials as a result of economic or political transformations.
In the era of global economies, competitiveness is one of the key notions, referring to the fact
that any location, any community or even any person can only keep its attraction and therefore
can only develop if it is able to obtain some special knowledge or some unique attraction. This
rule became a core element of urban policies: cities and regions all seek to develop their special
offer, special image and identity in order to maintain their competitiveness. Here again, culture
will obtain a high importance. Why?
Transformation of urban policies is also related to the weakening of the public sector, the
reinforcing of the role of private investments and the gradual decreasing of subsidies allocated
for local development. The practice of urban planning has entirely changed through the past
decades. Today, we may say, there is practically NO urban planning, but mainly strategy
291 Bianchini, F. “Remaking European cities: The role of cultural policies”, op.cit, p.1-21.
292 Chaudoir, P., Les Villes en scènes, op.cit.
293 Scott A., The Cultural Economy of Cities, London: Sage, Zukin, S., 1995, and Cultures of Cities, New York,
2000.
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PE 375.307