Culture-led strategies for urban regeneration: a comparative perspective on Bilbao

Culture is used as a development strategy in many European cities, a means to attract capital, to improve the image of the city, and to promote unity and cooperation. Like other strategies, it has winners and losers and, in its symbolic meanings, may provoke conflict. Urban competition and growth coalitions Since the 1980s, economic development has become a principal preoccupation of European cities. Increasingly, economic development is seen as a competitive matter, in which cities struggle for advantage in national and international markets. This marks a break from the post-war years, in which cities were integrated into national economies, planning systems and welfare states, which themselves assumed the obligation to maintain some sort of territorial balance. Yet it recalls earlier eras in the early modern period or the nineteenth century, when urban leaders had more autonomy and showed a certain entrepreneurship and awareness of the need to position themselves strategically. 1 Preoccupation with economic development also invites comparison with the United States, where the idea of cities competing is a staple of the literature on urban politics. 2 Cities compete for investment, for jobs, for a larger tax base, for visitors, and for state subsidies. In a less clearly defined sense, they also compete for visibility and prestige. In the United States, where there are fewer restrictions on the part of central (or state) government, they spend relatively freely on subsidies, tax breaks, partnerships and other special deals for corporations and other investors. European cities, which generally have less fiscal autonomy, are deprived of these financial instruments, but at the same time more protected from investor demands for subsidies out of the taxpayers’ revenues. 3 However, European economic integration and pressures on national welfare state expenditures increase urban competition here as well. This leads urban leaders to follow the example of the United States and seek other means for stimulating investment and attracting mobile capital. Yet, it is not by any means clear that they are obliged to do so, or that their efforts to attract capital in practice achieves the expected returns. The economic competitiveness paradigm that depicts cities as condemned to compete in a war of ‘all against all’ to attract limited investment makes a number of questionable assumptions. First, it assumes that cities as local polities are productive units, with an internal logic and cohesion, which can