STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
Street arts projected a new conception of the public space. Instead of regarding it as a
functionalist space, half way between home and other “useful” spaces in the city (for work,
shopping, leisure or culture) they proposed to treat public spaces as common places, usable by
everyone. Public spaces appear in street arts movements as places for meeting, relaxing, going
out and, of course, for culture and the arts, available to everyone. Street arts gave new identities
to old city centres, and as such, became tools of the urban regeneration process.
4.1.2. Culture and economic development
Culture, no doubt, acquired a new, enlarged and emphasised role in spatial and urban
development starting in the mid-1990s. The new economy, which is also called the global
economy, is partly based on the increasing weight of immaterial sectors (services and IT, the
knowledge sector or tourism) 47 . Culture, cultural production and cultural services became one of
the most rapidly developing sectors of the new economy 48 .
The global economy has another particularity as well: the parallel feature of concentration and
deconcentration. On the one hand, economic production is concentrated in the largest urban
areas (the “global cities”). On the other hand, deconcentration helps the revival of regions or
cities that had lost their economic potential 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 attractivity 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.
One way to become attractive is to develop something “unique”, which will serve as a label for
the city in the future. And this is how we arrive at the role of culture today in urban
development. Culture has a double meaning: creation on the one hand, and the ensemble of
characteristics of a special place or community, in other words, identity, on the other. Culture is
able, at the same time, to create and represent (maintain) local identities. And the term identity
almost covers that little specialty that can make a place be special and attractive… Culture
became a key factor for urban development, and this for a dual reason: its determining role in
the new economy and its determining role in the creation and maintenance of regional and urban
identities. The presence of sectors relevant to culture and creativity, i.e. the strength of the
‘creative economy’ became a key condition of urban competitiveness 49 . Street arts are one of
cultural sector’s branches that represents the strongest relationship between art, urban space and
urban development.
4.2. Framework
By the 1990s and 2000s, in post-socialist countries, street arts continued to occupy a different
position than in Western Europe. First, as a result of the withdrawal of public funding from
cultural sector, an important segment of the street arts movement, with other types of the “off”
47 The study The Economy of Culture in Europe proves this from more than one angle. This study, carried out by
KEA European Affairs in cooperation with Media Group (Turku School of Economics) and MKW
Wirtschaftsforschung GmbH at the request of the European Commission, stresses both the direct contribution
(in terms of GNP, growth and employment) and the indirect contribution (links with creativity and innovation,
links with the ICT sector, development of the attractivity of regions) of the cultural and creative sector on the
Lisbon Agenda.
48 Scott, A., The Cultural Economy of Cities, Sage, London, 2000; Zukin, S., Cultures of Cities, New York, 1995.
49 Landry, C., The Creative City, Comedia, London, 2000.
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PE 375.307