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Urban cultural policies operate usually under two competing logics. The first gravitates around flagship cultural infrastructures and large-scale events — museums, cultural centres, international festivals — deployed as instruments of city branding and global competitiveness. Across European, Latin American and Asian cities, culture has been increasingly instrumentalized as a place-marketing asset within global urban hierarchies. The second logic is territorially embedded: it operates through neighbourhood-level equipment, local cultural praesidia — the finest-grained contact points between cultural and creative professionals and local communities — creative clusters, and support for emerging cultural producers, prioritising social cohesion, local identity, and cultural democracy over symbolic visibility.
This panel invites comparative and theoretical contributions that interrogate what variables determine the relative weight of each logic in different urban contexts. Urban cultural policy is not made at a single scale: national cultural policy frameworks, municipal governance structures, and supranational initiatives — most notably the European Union's New European Bauhaus — shape the conditions under which cities design and implement cultural strategies. The panel examines how these multilevel policy architectures interact, constrain, or enable locally embedded approaches, and whether EU instruments effectively reach the neighbourhood and community scales they increasingly target.
Heritage — material, urban, industrial, and intangible — stands at the centre of this debate: why do some cities activate their heritage through bottom-up cultural initiatives or locally anchored regeneration strategies, while others allow it to be demolished, alienated, or deprotected through market-driven redevelopment? What role do national heritage frameworks, municipal governance, and EU funding instruments play in these divergent outcomes?
Papers may address single city cases, comparative urban studies, or theoretical frameworks across European, Latin American, and Global South contexts. Contributions engaging with creative placemaking, spatial justice, participatory cultural governance, and the politics of memory are particularly welcome.