Editorial
by Alessandro Busà - Editor in Chief
The Urban Reinventors

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 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. It also highlights the preponderant role played by creativity in the strategies implemented, as will be explored in the following chapters.

The social, economic, and longterm macroeconomic impacts of strategies of urban reinvention require robust theoretical and empirical evaluation. The aim of this journal is to make those evaluations and to put current debates about strategies of urban reinvention in context and perspective. Through the analysis of several case studies of critical significance, assets as well as pitfalls and disfunctionalities of such strategies will be unraveled. This editorial will conclude with a call for an ethical, cross-sectional cooperation among enlightened planners and politicians, private actors and civic activists in the pursuit of a more just and equitable urban reinvention agenda.

Confronting Strategies in Urban Reinvention: In this issue

Several contributions featured in the first issue of the journal will portray some general features of strategies of urban reinvention in western Europe and in the United States, whereby a particular attention has been placed on the “urban renaissance” agenda in the US and the UK, and on so called “creative” urban strategies. The core of this issue will be the analysis of specific case studies of redevelopments in European and US cities, whereby particular attention is paid to assets and pitfalls of the strategies implemented.

Especially in northern Europe and in the East and West U.S. coasts, experiments based on the idea of creativity have played an important role in the transformation of the urban landscape. Strategies based on creativity have proven able to unleash economic growth uncovering hidden local resources, enhancing local distinctiveness, supporting research and education, managing cultural facilities and venues, and more. Creative strategies play a significant role in urban reinvention agendas worldwide. According to Charles Landry (2004, Creativity and the City: Thinking through the Steps) “Creativity is not the answer to all our urban problems but it creates the pre-conditions within which it is possible to open out opportunities to find solutions. Most importantly it requires a change in mindset. Urban creativity requires an ethical framework to drive the city forward not in a prescriptive sense. At is core this ethic is about something life giving, sustaining, opening out rather than curtailing”. Creative strategies in urban reinvention, as a typical product of the entrepreneurial age, deliver precedents and paradigms which ought to be explored further. Charles Landry argues: “Creative cities have an ethical purpose that guides and directs the mass of energies present in most places. These ethical goals might be to generate both wealth and to reduce inequalities or to grow economically but to focus on sustainability or to focus on local distinctiveness […] This implies bending the market to public good objectives. Places can develop creative initiatives without such a framework, but I would not call places like that ‘creative cities’”. The debate is still open on whether creative strategies in urban reinvention are able to contribute significantly to meeting important goals of long term economic innovation, social inclusion, democratic engagement, and environmental sustainability.
As Tom Cannon (working paper, 2003, Welcome to Ideopolis) argues, “Even well known liveable cities can start to become victims of their own attractiveness. Social polarization, inequalities and an increasing divide seem often to be the outcome of policies of regeneration.” Cities like Glasgow, which only two decades ago were pointed like examples of urban renaissance driven by creativity, are facing once again growing conflicts of social division and increasing crime rates.

In her essay The Ambivalence of Diversity in the Urban Renaissance Politics, Loretta Lees (King’s College, London, investigates the underlying vision of urban space and urban living that is being promoted by the urban renaissance agenda in the city of Portland, Maine: “Planners, architects, developers and policy-makers agree that urban reinvention initiatives must embrace diversity, both cultural and economic, as well as functional and spatial and esthetic”. Nonetheless, Loretta Lees argues that urban reinvention initiatives are deeply ambivalent about urban diversity - they promote cultural diversity more often as an aesthetic tool to foster consumption, at the same time promoting social control policies as a necessary mean to provide and maintain a business- and consumer-friendly environment, whose end effect is actually that of limiting diversity. The simplistic celebration of a “cosmetic” diversity predicated by urban renaissance agendas needs to be strongly corrected through more holistic approaches in the pursuit of a renewed, more democratic form of urban reinvention.

The privatization of the public space as a consequence of the downtown revitalization policies in New York City is highlighted in Gregory T. Donovan’s contribution Repurposing the Square - Digital Symptoms of a Park’s Privatization, focused on Manhattan’s Union Square. Again, the side effects of urban regeneration policies undertaken by private actors and public-private partnerships, such as displacement of classes of lesser means due to gentrification in districts where urban reinvention strategies are implemented, control and privatization of the public space through forms of festivalization (within entertainment-and-consumption-based urban redevelopments) suggest the underlying ambivalence of the very notion of revitalization proclaimed by the urban renaissance agenda.

An exhaustive mapping of clusters of creative industries in New York City is the topic of Doreen Jakob’s article, Intra-metropolitan Creative Industries Clusters - A Different Way of looking at Agglomeration Dynamics in New York CIty, which explores the “production” of creativity in the geography of New York City: “Apart from their function as manufacturing sites, creative industries clusters are places of mediation and consumption of creative products and services, as well as signature places that can adopt images and identities of creativity and innovation […] New York City’s most recent intra-metropolitan developments are largely driven by a strong competition for resources and attention within the urban creative economy as well as between the different neighborhood based growth coalitions.”

In his Images of Renewal and Decline, Robert A. Beauregard, with the help of the images of photographer and ethnographer Camilo José Vergara, portrays the striking contrast between the reality of poverty and abandonment, and the glittering rhetoric adopted by the boostering image-making and city-marketing policies of the local administration of Camden, New Jersey, in the era of inter-urban competition.

The transformations of the urban region in central Europe, and the role local politics will play in the regeneration of its downtowns and in the restructuring of its outer districts and sprawling suburbs, is addressed in Harald Bodenschatz’s essay Urbanization and Suburbanization - Assumptions about the Future of European Urban Regions. Harald Bodenschatz calls for a radical shift in the urban planning discourse when he claims for a revitalization not only of the downtown, but of the district centers and of suburbia itself, which should be made denser and more valuable: “Strengthening the center simply is not enough. Parts of the remaining inner city are characterized by decreasing purchasing power, insufficient investment, and the concentration of social problems […] When strengthening quarters of the inner city, one should concentrate on strengthening their district centers as well. Their revitalization affects the inner city as a whole. People often underestimate and hence do not care for the enormous development potential inherent in district centers: the bundling of economic activity. In these small centers, districts can develop and display their distinct and different profiles.”

This issue also includes a Reportage section that features an insight on the aftermath of the New Orleans’ catastrophe with the investigation on FEMA’s Botched Plans for Emergency Housing After Katrina by James Dickinson and his personal photographic documentation on New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward in the aftermath of the disaster.

The Urban stories section features a short biography of New Yorker artist Eric Drooker written by Allen Ginsberg in 1985, and a novel on the gentrification of San Diego written by stand-up comedian and urban writer David Hayes, A San Diego Morning Haze.

The “Galleries Section” host urban photographer and ethnographer Camilo José Vergara with an anthology from his personal documentation of urban decay in Camden (NJ) called Textures of Decay, a photographic selection of revitalized urban and suburban landscapes in the urban renaissance era, a collection of images of American photographer Rich Mason with his impressive nocturnal visions of American suburbia, a glimpse on the city of Tokyo and its life and people by Berlin-based photographer Michael Kuchinke-Hofer, and a selection of drawings from The New Yorker’s well known urban artist Eric Drooker.

The Reinvention of the City: a few more words

In his 1989 book From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism, David Harvey firstly argued that a new “entrepreneurial” urban entity has burgeoned. Under the label “urban entrepreneurialism” scholars describe a pervasive “reorientation of urban governance from the managerial, welfarist mode of the Fordist-Keynesan period to an entrepreneurial, growth-oriented framework” (Neil Brenner, 2004, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the rescaling of Statehood), currently embedded in urban agendas worldwide. 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, competing with 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.
“Alongside new forms of governance and public-private collaborations in economic development and social service, new ways of planning and financing urban redevelopment are burgeoning. The role of the local administrations has changed from being the (more or less redistributive) local arm of the welfare state, to acting as a catalyst of processes of innovation” (Margit Mayer, 1994, Post-Fordist City Politics). The local administration is de facto able to govern only through constant compromises and interactions with the private sector.

Main Features of Strategies in Urban Reinvention

As a response to the diminished urban ?scal capacity of cities and the decline of welfarist mode of governance, 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.
Redevelopment policies of the entrepreneurial city are in most cases based upon a double instrumental treatment of the concept of time and history on a local scale: the city is reinvented, on one hand through the manipulation of its past and in some cases the removal of awkward memories: that is, through policies of preservation or reconstruction, the selective use of chosen historical elements, and sometimes, like in the festival marketplace, through the removal of authentic traces of the past and their substitution with iconic historicist architecture and historic simulacra. A particularly good example of this is the city of Berlin’s planned reconstruction of the Berliner Prussian Castle on the Spreeinsel; on the other hand its image is reinvented through the staging of a magnificent future through physical suggestions of modernity and progress. New business districts of office space rise in order to attract labor and capital: the communicative force of contemporary architecture and the power of iconic buildings are tools allowing to create and recreate the city-image. Both strategies, which could be called the “reinvention of memory” and the “staging of the future” play equal parts in a bigger political strategy of manipulation of the image of the city (Harald Bodenschatz, 2005, Renaissance der Mitte), a main tool of urban governance in the era of global competition.
To the first kind of strategies also belong urban interventions reminiscent of the New Labour’s “urban renaissance” agenda. Aiming for architectural improvement of cities with the rhetoric of diversity, density and sustainability, they seek to “promote a new urban idyll in order to counteract the anti-urban residential preferences of the middle class (Claire Colomb’s working paper, 2007, Urban Renaissance, public space and social cohesion in contemporary British cities. An emerging politics of ‘Revanchist Urbanism’ or a socially sustainable renaissance of the inner city?). Often such strategies come along with a revival of a traditionalist architectural style - as promoted in America by elements of the Congress of New Urbanism (C.N.U.). From an urban planning perspective, the American doctrine of “New Urbanism” as healer of the wounds to environment and city inflicted by the urban sprawl phenomenon, is increasingly being embraced by local governments in the United States, in northern Europe and especially in the UK. While the features that distinguish smart growth can vary from place to place, new urbanist communities generally tend to be transit and pedestrian-oriented, have a fair mix of housing, commercial and retail uses, they often tend to optimize utilization of previously developed, vacant lots, featuring good land use and practicing ecological planning, design, construction and management. In big metropolises New Urbanism is likely to manifest itself through so called urban-infill projects, which try to reconstitute the urban pattern where it was wounded in the era of modernist planning.
To what extent new urbanist strategies have been demonstrated to create neighborhoods of real diversity and integration, as New Urbanism theorists maintain, and hasn’t rather proved, as other critics have argued, producing nothing more then middle class enclaves, remains to be further analyzed. Architecture will have to play a major role in producing more affordable housing, and this issue is currently on the table of the Congress for New Urbanism. But in the U.S., architecture alone won’t be able to fulfill the demands of classes of lesser means unless major shifts in housing policies are adopted.

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 that 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”". Neil Smith’s claim that a new “revanchist” urbanism has replaced the liberal urban policy in the advanced capitalist world seems confirmed, since spatial unevenness and social inequity produced by market-led urban redevelopment within urban reinvention redevelopments are two of the most consistent findings by gentrification researchers. As Loretta Lees (ibidem) argues in her essay: “Urban revitalization strategies are aimed not just at attracting middle class gentrifiers as resident taxpayers, but also at bringing them back to urban areas as consuming visitors. The gentrified city is thus built as an entertainment venue for the consuming middle classes”. 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, as the New York City case clearly demonstrates.

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.
Much of this literature has been adopted by local governments worldwide as a program manifesto. Nonetheless, much criticism has pointed to this work as a theory justifying the most regrettable phenomena common to the entrepreneurial city (gentrification, displacement, and spatial segregation), in the guise of easy, appealing placebo-strategies, often concentrated on short-term growth initiatives, the long-term macroeconomic effects of which are not known (Jamie Peck, 2005, Struggling with the Creative Class, and Peter Marcuse, 2006, working paper). Criticism has been levelled against Richard Florida’s work in particular, citing superficiality, several essentially unscientific arguments, and the underlying defence of the most negative social aspects of entrepreneurial policies in urban redevelopment and urban revitalization.
According to Jamie Peck (ibidem), Florida’s work “has attracted strong criticism for its relative neglect of issues of intraurban inequality and working poverty. […] The Rise of the Creative Class seems to glorify the free new economy, discursively validating the liberties it generates, and the lifestyles it facilitates, for the favored class of creatives”, thus neglecting the rights and interests of other social groups.

Urgent Challenges for research on “The Urban Reinventors”

Cities undergoing a “renaissance” are too often reminders of massive inequalities.
The aim of this journal is to highlight and possibly deliver answers to several questions: who are the main beneficiaries of urban reinvention policies? Who are the losers at this game? Is it possible to correct the disfunctionalities of such strategies within their own conceptual framework?
Policies pursued by the entrepreneurial city are often structurally unable to involve the interests of classes and social groups who have no voice in the market-led economy. The demands of classes of lesser means have thus far played only a very modest role in this framework. Key issues virtually excluded from the “urban renaissance” agendas worldwide (from Manchester to Portland, London to New York) are affordable housing, affordable retail and facilities, policies of welfare and redistribution of wealth. Thus, redevelopment policies typical of the entrepreneurial city have also been called “revanchist” (Neil Smith 1996, The New Urban Frontier).

Investigating disfunctionalities and pitfalls, as well as assets and innovations of creative strategies of regeneration might be a first step allowing us to find solutions to these problems. The celebratory tones used in the rhetoric of local administrations won’t help further understand the underlying ambivalences and structural inabilities of these strategies. The first steps in urban reinvention have been taken, but now it might be time to refine and perfect these ideas in the ambitious pursuit of a new urban reinvention era favoring a deeper integration of classes, hindering the increasing polarization and spatial segregation in cities, and fostering a renewed and more democratic vision of the public space itself.

The main goal of future research is to delineate a set of corrections for a more socially healthy urban reinvention which embraces the needs of the entire class spectrum.

In particular the editor imagines a different city which is able, even within the entrepreneurial framework, to respond to the demands of classes of lesser means. A new renaissance agenda for classes of lower income? It might seem like a naive idea, but now could in fact be the moment to provide concrete proposals to bypass the most significant limitation investigated in today’s most successful models - those that promote urban policies univocally modeled on the needs of an affluent urban middle class and of Florida’s “creative class,” virtually excluding other social groups.

Other factors must be integrated into the decision-making process in a relevant way, and new needs must be considered in progressive urban policies: often democratic and participatory ways of interaction and innovative ways of using the public space owe inspiration from certain well working low-income districts, where social capital is strong, and where informal economies are able to flourish.
The city must be able to shift towards policies of reinforcement of such districts, instead of aiming at their simplistic “upgrading” or at their plain substitution with middle class enclaves as soon as these districts become marketable. It is necessary to focus as well on the requirements, desires and needs of classes of lesser means for whom the entrepreneurial city must also be able to provide facilities and services: not only affordable housing and facilities, but also greater support for forms of community development planning, wider social participation in planning at the microlevels of district and neighborhood, more affordable recreation and retail, as well as opportunities of work and interchange, of training and growth.

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Confronting Strategies in Urban Reinvention :: The Urban Reinventors :: #1 Issue - June 07