Urban Regeneration Policies: Effects on the Cultural Dynamics of Cities

Urban regeneration projects are instruments based on integral interventions in territories that present some type of urban vulnerability.

In Spain, since the 90s, urban regeneration projects have been carried out in different cities, where the work of these initiatives try to influence the opportunities that the environment offers to the inhabitants of the neighborhoods intervened.

The characteristics of the projects themselves may have effects on different aspects of local well-being, for example in terms of their cultural dimension, among others.

In this case, we analyze the effect that these projects present when it comes to forming cultural dynamics through the specialization of their cultural facilities. That is, how intervention through urban regeneration projects affects the formation of different structures of opportunities for the development of different lifestyles and practices of cultural consumption. Namely, these processes influence the formation of different 'cultural scenes' or the evolution over time of these 'scenes'.

In order to do this, we will analyze the impact of urban regeneration projects through a quasi-experimental design, namely, we compared urban areas with integral intervention (experimental areas) and similar urban areas without interventions (control areas).

This paper uses information gathered under the URBANIMPACTS project financed by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER (CSO- CSO2015-70048-R)