Cultural production in peripheral urban spaces: lessons from Barriera, Turin (Italy)

ABSTRACT

Practices of cultural production within a peripheral urban neighbourhood can contribute to foster the sense of place, community belonging and local collective action. Starting from a critical perspective on the interconnections between cultural practices and urban regeneration, and developing on the concept of place-making, the paper has two main purposes: to investigate the nature of embeddedness of these practices and explore the ways of self-organization of cultural actors and their relationships with public policies. The case study concerns ‘Barriera di Milano’, a large peripheral area in Turin (Italy), formerly one of the most industrialized zones of the city. Over the past few years, and particularly after the real-estate bubble burst of 2007–2008, in Barriera a lively concentration of initiatives of culture has been taking place, redefining the urban and social space. These initiatives seem to be innovative for many reasons: firstly, while demonstrating a peculiar but significant embeddedness in the neighbourhood, they are mostly self-generated; secondly, the institutional assets, the economic self-sufficiency and the low degree of connection among initiatives support new forms of citizenship and place-making based on a ‘not-for-profit entrepreneurship’.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural production
• Turin
• place-making
• embeddedness
• urban regeneration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sara Bonini Baraldi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6853-8075

Notes

1 The ‘Tavolo delle Arti’ is a cooperating initiative among actors working in art and culture, established by Urban Barriera at the request of the Ettore Fico Museum. The purpose of the Tavolo is to map the realities and seek to develop an organized system for the proposals and needs of the different cultural organizations.

2 The ‘Case del Quartiere’ network includes 13 ‘open public places; social and cultural workshops expressing collective thoughts and experiences; spaces offering opportunities for participation, involvement and self-organization’.

3 From an initial analysis, it also emerged how the level of economic health of the various initiatives is not clearly correlated to their dependency on public funds; several independent organizations or some which have public funding only for specific projects appear to be in very good economic health.