STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

6. Conclusion
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Street Artists in Europe
Street arts play an important role in cities, although it is difficult to measure its concrete impact
on urban development. In the fist part of this study we attempted to summarise how these
impacts can be described in a theoretical way. Since the 1960s, the integration of street arts as
one element of urban development was a parallel phenomenon with the increasing role of
culture in general in urban and economic development. During the past decades a bilateral
approach between urban policies and street arts can be observed. In some countries this
phenomenon also appears if the form of a permanent public financing of certain street art events
and festivals. But how street art may intervene in cities? In this chapter, four fields of impact
have been determined and examined:
• The impact of street art on the spatial development of the city;
• The impact on social cohesion, or, as Philippe Chaudoir has written, on the ‘publicinhabitants’;
• The impact on urban economy, and on the economic attractiveness of the city;
• The impact on urban development and on cultural policies.
Street arts are the more and more considered as a good and useful method for cities to enhance
their attractiveness and to improve their images. This appears very clearly in the European
Capitals of Culture (ECOC) programmes. Street arts events are used here as large events
attracting crowds of people in order to call a wide attention on the city, or as artworks aiming to
change the conception of the city on its own public and natural spaces.
In the second part of the chapter, the analysis of interviews and questionnaires has been depicted
following four main questions:
- Regulations:
• Regulations that are present almost in all countries are related to noise, to fire and to the
occupation of public space. Concerning these regulations, countries try to create laws
that are conform to the European Union’s directives. EU plans to create a common law
on fireworks in the following years.
• Permits for street art events and festivals are purchased in the majority of cases, by the
local authorities: the local municipality and the local police prefecture. In some
countries, or in the case of some events, other permits are needed as well, for instance
from the local transport companies or from health insurances…
• Rules and regulations are still very strongly remaining the competences of local
authorities. That explains also the high level of diversity of rules in the different
countries.
- The relationship between street art and the urban areas:
• The second group of questions related to the localisation of street art events in the city
gave some surprising results. The theoretic part of this study has highlighted the strong
vocation of street art in social and spatial integration. Albeit in the more practical
approach it turned out that a slight majority of the events are concentrated in city centres
and historical neighbourhoods, i.e. in the urban areas that maybe represent the less the of
problems related to social and spatial exclusion. In the analysis, we searched for some
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