Social Innovation in Arts and Culture: Place-Regeneration Initiatives Driven by Arts and Culture to Achieve Social Cohesion

Arts & Culture emerge as a particularly fruitful field for the development of social innovation and civic engagement. First, the arts—by their own nature—are likely to establish meaningful forms of dialogue among differ ent societal actors. Second, the remarkable changes experienced by such sector during the last decade have paved the way for cultivating innovative (social) experimentations—in light of the deeply renewed roles of the pivotal actors involved. Such new experiences include the implementation of institutionalized forms of enlarged corporate governance (e.g., participa tive foundations), the sharing of decisional power on production and funding through online platforms (e.g., crowdfunding and crowdsourcing) and new forms of participative governance and self-government mechanisms by socio-cultural movements. This chapter focuses on a particular type of trend characterizing the artistic and cultural field, presenting the evolution of the social innovation stream of “place-regeneration initiatives driven by arts and culture to achieve social cohesion”. Such initiatives occurred since the 1960s, but nowadays they are blossoming throughout Europe also because of their greater media and institutional attention. We label this phenomenon as an “innovation” as it has shifted the attention from the economic to the social impact of place rejuvenation in depressed urban setting. Culture-led regeneration projects are no longer intended only as vehicles of neighborhood urbanistic amelioration or local economic development of distressed urban areas, but also as a means to produce social cohesion (defined as the on-going process of developing a community of shared values, shared challenges and equal opportunities based on a sense of trust, hope and reciprocity; see Jeannotte, 2000). We therefore explore the evolution of this social innovation stream in a comparative and dynamic way. More specifically we analyze which initiatives and which actors contributed to the development of the stream over time in different geographical settings located in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and France. The study aims at assessing common trends or constraints in the spreading of this social innovation in the arts and cultural field.