Place before Form, People before Profit: Reclaiming Venues of Art and Culture in the Midst of Tourism-Centred Reimaging of Cities

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1980s, a growing number of cities around the world have been looking to invest in extensive city-reimaging and place-marketing initiatives in efforts to announce themselves or to raise their profiles on the tourism market. In either case, the objective is to facilitate economic growth in times of rising importance of the service sector, of which tourism is widely seen as one of the most lucrative areas since it helps attract new investors, generate more revenue, and create additional jobs. It is in pursuit of such economic benefits that government officials, policy-makers, urban-planning agencies, land developers, and other private stakeholders have been coming together to identify potential urban precincts within cities, before transforming these precincts into art and cultural districts, often home to at least one visually striking art museum or a performing arts center – almost always designed by an elite band of celebrity architects. Fully or partially funded by taxpayer money, these signature art museums and performing arts centers are conceptualized and built as icons of the city, and as objects of the tourist gaze, with little or no interest in the physical and environmental peculiarities of place and with little or no regard for local residents including local artists and cultural producers. Traveling from Bilbao in Spain to Bhopal in India, this chapter expands on some of the events that led to an outburst of formally overstated and spatially exclusive venues of art and culture in the last two decades, before sharing some thoughts and restarting conversations on reclaiming and reimagining these venues as open, inclusive, and pulsating public spaces embedded in the actual fabrics of cities, at once accessible to locals and tourists.

Citation

Chohan, S. (2022), "Place before Form, People before Profit: Reclaiming Venues of Art and Culture in the Midst of Tourism-Centred Reimaging of Cities", Rozzoni, S., Boonstra, B. and Cutler-Broyles, T. (Ed.) Re-Imagining Spaces and Places (Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 79-90. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80071-737-420221006