Cultural-led Urban Regeneration Policies in Latin-American Cities

Abstract

Towards the beginning of the 1990s, many Latin American cities began to implement public policies to revitalize their deteriorated historical centers, former port and industrial areas. In most of these interventions culture has played a relevant role as an instrument of revitalization. However, this kind of public policy has not been analyzed within the framework of urban cultural regeneration processes, leaving numerous studies outside the international debates on the subject. The central objective of this article is to develop a typology that aims to characterize the different orientations and modalities acquired by urban cultural regeneration policies in Latin America from the 1990s to the present. We affirm the existence of three types of cultural-led urban regeneration policies in Latin America: heritage revitalization, civic transformation, and creative regeneration.