Culture-led neighbourhood transformations beyond the revitalisation/gentrification dichotomy

Abstract

In the past thirty years culture has been used as a mean for revitalizing 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 revitalize the area and change the city image. We employ a framework that considers the built form, the cultural cluster organization 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 characterization of culture-led neighbourhood transformations beyond the revitalization/gentrification discourses, since conflicts may not be driven by economic transformations and social class replacement, but by the symbolic representation of space and the ‘right to the neighbourhood’.