The Mediterranean urban alternative? (Re)theorizing culture-led regeneration from Palermo (Italy)

Keywords: Southern Europe, culture-led regeneration, (in)formality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 75

Abstract

Since at least 1990, when Lila Leontidou first published “The Mediterranean city in transition” (1990), some scholars have started to reconsider urban development in Southern Europe as a neglected specificity within the field of Urban Studies. During the following three decades, scholars have increasingly focused on Southern European cities, arguing that they differ from the cities of both the Global North and the Global South, in terms of patterns of development, planning policies, and models of governance. Leaving aside the debate on the supposed Mediterranean urban paradigm, I suggest reconsidering Southern Europe cities as the very ground where alternative urban developments to the Anglo-American model can find an opportunity of recognition and investigation.
Drawing on these epistemological premises, the aim of this paper is to critically examine the processes of culture-led transformation in the Southern Italian city of Palermo from 2014 to 2020 in order to question and unsettle the Anglo-American debate on the role of culture in regenerating urban spaces. Based on a three-years and multi-sited fieldwork, a combination of participant observation, interviews, and descriptive analysis of statistic data, this paper considers the ways in which cultural and artistic interventions can and do affect the (re)production of urban spaces from a Southern Europe perspective. More specifically, I will focus on the multiple entanglements between formality and informality, civic initiatives and institutional investments, tourism development and community mobilization, to seriously reconsider culture-led regeneration theories and their contested geopolitics.