Living, Working, Playing

Over the last decade, the chimera of creativity-led urban "regeneration" has functioned as a recurrent mantra for public administrations in charge of designing citywide cultural policies. Moreover, some of its most well-known arguments (such as those of Florida and Landry) have also been internalized by cultural institutions with varying degrees of self-awareness– as a convenient way of justifying the legitimacy of their state funding. Faced with the prospect of an unprecedented liberalization and large-scale privatization of our cultural institutions, the political case for them needs to be revised. This paper will attempt to do so, by proposing a reformulated model of the relationship between cultural institutions and the cities they inhabit.