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Art and urban regeneration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Malcolm Miles
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Abstract

The case for art in urban regeneration is widely promoted. Some local authorities and development corporations see it as a means of access to an international cultural map; others see it as enabling the construction of identities for communities. The case remains speculative. The model of post-Enlightenment cities is one of exclusion and confinement, whereby ‘awkward’ aspects of the city, such as the insane or vagrant, are excluded from view and confined in institutions. This compartmentalization of the city extends into policies for single use zoning and a general retreat from public space. If there is a role for art in urban renewal, it is in reclaiming the decorative as an aspect of public space, not in replicating monuments which affirm the dominant, divisive culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , August 1995 , pp. 238 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 The case for ‘public art’ is set out in Arts Council, Percent for Art: A Review (London, 1991), 16–20.Google Scholar

2 A report by Sara Selwood on public art in London, Yorkshire and the West Midlands will be published by the Policy Studies Institute in 1995. It will be the first attempt, using focus groups, to explore responses to major commissions for public art.

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5 See Sennett, , The Conscience of the Eye (1992 ed.), 177–80.Google Scholar Sennett argues that public clocks ‘created a different order of discipline’ from the regulation of hours in monastic life, and a ‘grid’ leading to payment of labour by the hour. He cites Goff, J. Le, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Goldhammer, A. (Chicago, 1980).Google Scholar

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7 A supposed unity of art and architecture has been proposed, for example by Charles Jencks, and is Utopian in as much as neither term has a reality before the Renaissance. See Jencks, C., ‘A modest proposal: on the collaboration between artist and architect’, in Townsend, P. (ed.), Art Within Reach (London, 1984), 15–19.Google Scholar A psychoanalytic approach to the mental projection of unity on to past or future might begin at the relation of infants to mothers before and shortly after birth, a unity which is always lost in the process of individuation.

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28 Paley Park was used by about 35, and Greenacre by about 25, people per 1,000 sq. ft of open space. In contrast, most corporate plazas scored about 5: Whyte, W. H., The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Washington, 1980), 73.Google Scholar See also Carr, S., Francis, M., Rivlin, L. and Stone, A., Public Space (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 100–1.Google Scholar

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36 Funded by Television South West and South West Arts.

37 Gormley uses his own body.

38 Garden festivals were held at Liverpool, Stoke, Glasgow, Gateshead and Ebbw Vale. Each used redundant land for a temporary display of horticulture and visual culture. Most of the sites retain elements of disuse.

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