City centre regeneration in the context of the 2001 european capital of culture in Porto, Portugal

Abstract

In 2001, the city of Porto hosted the European Capital of Culture event. ‘Porto 2001’ was a year-long programme of arts, cultural events and urban regeneration activities. The purpose of this article is to discuss the city centre regeneration operation conducted in conjunction with the European Capital of Culture initiative in Porto. My objective is to extract a set of lessons learned that can be useful to other cities pursuing the same designation and strategy. The key finding is that despite rich and well-participated cultural events, too much emphasis was put on attracting public investment to regenerate the public space, replacing infrastructures, and modernizing cultural facilities. This was done at the expense of institutional capacity building and boosting civic creativity.

Keywords:

• Urban planning
• regeneration
• city and Culture
• Portugal

Acknowledgement

Different versions of this article were presented at the 2001 ‘Euro-Conference Consumption and the Post-Industrial City’ at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany and at the 2002 ‘Annual Meeting of the Urban Affairs Association’ in Boston, USA. Miriam Fujita and Gloria Jeffery read and gave constructive comments on this specific paper.