L’art public, la communauté et les territoires: pratiques artistiques et politiques culturelles dans l’espace public contemporain

This paper presents the outcomes of a qualitative research examining the social aims of public art within regeneration initiatives. It focues on a specific programme for the production of art works for the public space launched in Turin and named Nuovi Committenti. Although urban scholars have widely investigated the role of public art within the urban regeneration processes that undergo the post-industrial transformation of many western cities assessing the positive role of art practices in tackling social exclusion (Laundry and Bianchini 1995; Miles 1997) or, on the other extreme, criticizing a purely rhetorical use of arts as marketing or hygenization tool (Zukin 1991, 1995; Hall and Robertson 2001), the present paper investigates the social impacts of public art within urban regeneration actions that require active citizens’ involvement in the decision-making processes. In order to achieve this goal, the first part of the paper is devoted to an analysis of the literature on post-industrial urban transformation: work by theorists such as Henri Lefebvre (1974) Sharon Zukin (1991, 1995) Edward Soja (1995), and David Harvey (1988), among others, have put space on the map as a locus for social investigation. The second part instead reports the outcomes of on field research. The study includes ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews to experts, curators, mediators, artists and administrators actively involved in the Nuovi Committenti programme and selected through judgemental sampling. Although judgmental sampling is inherently biased and limits the usefulness of the data for statistical interpretation, it has been chosen since it allows selecting information rich-cases for the subsequent in-depth interviews.