A special section exploring the complicity, and potential oppositionality, of art in neoliberal urbanism

Special section on urban 'regeneration' and art, including:

> Simon Pope sets some new co-ordinates, and salvages some old ones, for locative art
> Gregory Sholette on artist's collective REPOhistory and urban renewal in New York
> Mark Crinson on artists working with collective memory and the post-industrial city

Art’s ofï¬?cial role in the scenarios of urban development used to be a limited one. In soulless new towns and redeveloped cities, abstract sculptures were deployed as spiritual furniture for functionalist spaces. Purged of ‘content’, public art simply imparted visual relief or continued the tedium by other means.

As post-war redevelopment and renewal gave way to ‘regeneration’, the (re)makers of deindustrialised towns and cities realised their mistake. They started to talk openly of heritage, tradition, local identity, etc – all the things they had previously sought to concrete over. Public art was more than a visual prop, it could narrate, memorialise and celebrate the spirit of the industrial past. Assimilating the concern with history and local identity which community art projects of the ‘70s and ‘80s had already been elaborating against the erasures and displacements of modernisation, government and developers found willing partners in charitable trusts dedicated to the collaborative production of public art. A tokenistic reference to local history became a standard component in large scale redevelopment projects. Communities would be hunted down and consulted as to their preferred form of self-objectiï¬?cation. Your obituary here. Ephemeral, site-speciï¬?c, participatory art projects flourished alongside polymorphous sculptural tributes to the local proletariat’s no longer threatening progenitors. Simultaneously functioning as reiï¬?cations of the past and totems of renewal, selective remembering invoked new rounds of investment and service industries.

Today, a new generation of artists are actively engaging with this unappetising postmodern ‘tradition’. Seeking to interrogate, critique or complicate the familiar rituals of public and community art, artists play the roles of urban ethnographers, activists, social historians and even social workers. Social engagement and psychogeographic immersion in the minutiae of the local grows so deep, so richly detailed, that some lose sight of the bigger processes in which artistic interventions take place. As social housing is sold off, services cut down, rents raised and actually existing communities displaced, art can seem like the worst kind of beautiï¬?cation, the smoke screen for acts of not so creative destruction.

With the ever growing emphasis on the regenerative effect of ‘creative’ activity, art’s most profound impact on the city is now seen by government, in an ironically modernist turn, as a process, not an end in itself. Art is not about making static things, abstract sculptures etc; through gentriï¬?cation artists’ power to revalorise devalued space by their physical presence in an area becomes their key contribution to ‘inner city renaissance’.

Whether or not artists explicitly confront all this in their work, art is now clearly an essential component in the rebranding and social reengineering of cities, right up to the economic stimulus provided by international mega-musems like Guggenheim Bilbao or Tate Modern. Fostering ‘cultural tourism’, which might once have sounded like an insult, is now a regeneration priority. Dwarfed by the imperative of economic ‘rebirth’, art and artists subsist in the interstices of real estate speculation and redevelopment. Can art produced out of such an unholy conjunction critically engage with it?

The following articles look at some artists, (new) art forms and projects tackling this question in different ways. We hope they suggest the extent to which familiar notions of critical practice are no longer adequate, while opening up a new, more creatively destructive attitude to the regeneration-art symbiosis on the part of the regeneration industry’s favourite people.