Culture-Led Urban Policy across the Globe: Mechanisms, Trajectories, Future Directions

Culture has become one of the most heavily used tools in contemporary urban policy, deployed everywhere from Seoul's cultural districts and Singapore's heritage-led regeneration to Gulf mega-projects, African creative-city strategies, Latin American favela art programs, and European initiatives like the New European Bauhaus. Culture-led approaches are increasingly asked to do more, and more varied, work: absorbing climate shocks, repairing social cohesion, softening inequality, fighting exclusion, integrating ageing population, boosting local economies and restoring trust in institutions and the city itself. This session takes stock of what we have learned so far. Across decades of culture-led urban policy, which mechanisms have demonstrably worked, for whom, and under what conditions – and which have quietly failed, or produced effects opposite to those intended? How is cultural policy evolving in response to accumulating experience: are cities converging on shared models, or diverging into distinct approaches shaped by different political economies, welfare regimes, and cultural traditions? And as culture is asked to answer ever more challenges, is its toolkit expanding, or are the same instruments – festivals, flagship buildings, heritage branding, creative districts – simply redeployed against problems they were never designed to solve? We invite theoretical, comparative, and empirical contributions from across world regions and scales, from monumental architecture and cultural infrastructure to neighborhood festivals and grassroots practice, examining both the achievements and unintended consequences of culture-led urban policy, and asking what a genuinely evidence-based, globally attentive cultural policy might look like going forward.