Drawing the Lines: International Perspectives on Urban Renewal through the Arts	Advanced Search | Find People

Conference Abstracts

“The Arts Can Define a Region”
John M. Cain, South Shore Arts
John Cain is not only the leader of a large regional arts organization, but he is also an aficionado of regional art and a collector. He will reflect on his participation in a study trip to Bilbao, Basque County, Spain, in 2005, from the viewpoint of a Region Lifer, as well as local arts leader.  

“Constructed Spaces:  Disney and the Art of Valuing Commodity”
Hillary Cook, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The Disney name is practically synonymous with fun, family, and innocence.  Millions of people each year visit Disney theme parks and resorts.  Times Square in New York City has been transformed by the Disney Company into a tourist-friendly consumer space.  The Disney community of Celebration in Florida is a thriving town built on the concepts of community welfare and interaction.  All of these attractions are constructed on the premise that the American consumer desires the values implicit in the Disney experience.  In this paper, I will investigate questions about these values.  Specifically, what does the Disney experience offer to an audience?  Why and how does the consumer participate and seek out this experience?  Who is excluded from Disney environments?  To attempt to answer these questions, I will examine three of Disney’s constructed spaces—Disney theme parks, Times Square, and the community of Celebration.  By investigating the history, construction, and present use of these spaces, I will show that the inclusion of this commercial cultural / artistic / entertainment power in the process of urban planning and development and has increasingly moved cultural interaction from the public to private sphere. 

“Revive:  Using Art to Help Heal a Superfund Site”
Minda Douglas, Marcia Gillette, and Ann Cameron, Indiana University Kokomo
A 2005 / 06 Freshman Learning Community course at Indiana University Kokomo incorporated a group community service project that involved urban renewal and the arts. The course was team taught by Minda Douglas, Lecturer in Fine Arts; Marcia Gillette, Lecturer in Chemistry; and Ann Cameron, Associate Professor in English. The year long course explored the environment from both a science and humanities perspective. For example, we studied ecosystems, the human impact on the environment, environmental artists, and earthworks. The second half of the spring semester was dedicated to a service project with the city of Kokomo where the clean up of the Continental Steel Superfund site had just begun. While working with the words revive, renew, replenish, reuse, and recycle, the students worked in groups to create artistic proposals for the future park. One group designed a public sculpture for the space, and others worked on artistic gardens, signs, and benches. The proposals included a letter to the city, drawings, models, and PowerPoints. The students presented their proposals to the city engineer and park officials at City Hall. The presentations were well received, and the impact on the students was powerful. We are in the process of taking some of their ideas forward.  

“The Impact of Visual and Expressive Art on Public Policy and Public Voice”
Karen G. Evans, Indiana University Northwest                                         
Daniel Lowery, Calumet College of St. Joseph
All too often the academy is a world where empirical and normative truth claims trump intuitive feeling and emotional expression.  In our presentation, we challenge this priority and examine the importance of expressive and aesthetic truth claims on the development of public policy and the credibility of public voice.  Sincerity of expression can add weight to an argument, and the quality of expression can lend elegance to a truth claim it accompanies.  The utility of an expressive or aesthetic truth claim rests on more than the extent to which it can enhance an emotional encounter or sensory experience.  Expressive and aesthetic truth claims can also contribute to the efficacy of an empirical or normative truth claim.  Significance and meaning can thus be attached to the bare facts of empirical inquiry or a recommendation to act, providing the motivating force to advance a policy or legitimate a voice. 
                                   
“Cool Cities” Through Their “Creative Class”: A Model for Revitalizing Indiana’s Essential Cities”
Bruce Frankel, Ball State University
Deborah Malitz, Indiana City Corp.
Larry Francer, Historic Farmland
Flo Lapin, Goldspace Theater, Muncie
Richard Sowers, Anderson Symphony
David Bowdon, Columbus Symphony, Terra Haute Symphony, Carmel Symphony
Indiana’s cities, all 92 county seats and essential towns, present a strategic imperative for their revitalization.  They offer the conditions fundamental to attract and nurture the “creative class.”  That term was advanced by Richard Florida in his seminal work on The Rise of the Creative Class, wherein he ranked two of Indiana’s cities as within the top five nationally [Indianapolis in the under one million in population and Muncie in the less than 250,000].

The creative class is constituted by those in the performing and fine arts, by budding and bright entrepreneurs not yet ready for the institutional venture capital market, and by nonprofit community development corporations with the business acumen to create the market for infill and inner city investment.  Many within this class presently can be categorized as “starving artists.” 

The ground level conditions for that class are a critical mass of relevant resources in knowledge and culture and a local economics kind to those artists.  In a sense, the market failure of these communities to reflect value in housing and other cost-of-living factors is now a key asset instead of a liability.  This class survives with difficulty in New York or San Francisco, but the table can be set in Indiana for them and their role in community revitalization.

The work of the Indiana City Corporation, a nonprofit planning and community development firm with a demonstrated commitment to Indiana’s “cool cities,” reflects “best practice” case studies of where this model of urban renewal is working inside and outside the state.  Some of the panelists are affiliated with that firm and others have successfully “drawn the lines” within other organizations.  Among the essential ingredients to success are community organization, the formulation of public-private partnerships, and the knowledge of how the public interest and business’s bottom line can be made to work holistically.  The discussion includes a slide show representing a range of case studies, demonstrating the principles of this model.

“The Interstices Between Art and Economic Development”
Michelle Golden, Books, Brushes and Bands
Mary Kaczka, Hammond Development Corporation
John Davies, Woodlands Communications
Daniel Lowery, Quality of Life Council
The panel discussion will involve community members who have been significantly engaged in economic development initiatives in which the arts were featured.  The projects described were of a local and regional nature.  The discussants will address issues pertaining to funding, linkages with the business community and units of local government, and the role of the arts community in spurring economic development

“The Poetics of Space: IU Northwest's Sculpture Garden”
Neil Goodman, Indiana University Northwest
Neil Goodman, Professor of Fine Arts at IU Northwest, will discuss IU Northwest's monumental public art project, the Sculpture and Landscape Garden, from his unique perspective as the creative artist, urban planner, and sculptor working with landscape architect Cynthia Owen-Bergland. Professor Goodman advocates for aesthetics in an urban institution and for making art as a community based experience.

This model of the available is a mode of sustainable design which depends on reformatting modes of consumption in a series of complex tradeoffs, where effects, not purchases, become the metric for sustainability.  Here, value is placed on the full range of outputs and opportunities.  This prosaic alternative to conventional sustainability rests on the assumption that small changes in how we format consumption through design make the most profound differences in the environmental impact of human communities. 

These ideas emerged from a series of studies of the Lake Calumet region.  A tangle of thick intensive ecosystems and thin extensive economies, Lake Calumet is a complex of brownfields, waste management facilities, abandoned factories, decrepit port facilities, wetlands and working class neighborhoods, at the far southeast corner of the Chicago.  In this post-industrial wasteland, the collision of economic and ecological questions force an odd suspension of time.  While there is a nostalgic beauty in that stasis, these intertwined systems of value and exchange also have the potential to catalyze a new mode of post-architectural production.  In this alternative world, urban design becomes an agent for producing new forms of reciprocity between ecological and economic systems, constructing formats for consumption that abandon the machinic processes of industrial production for the swampy profligacy of biological systems.  The presentation will discuss a series of speculative projects developed by a graduate architecture studio at the University of Illinois at Chicago that include a trail system, a system of new ‘town commons,’ and a new museum at the Acme Coal Plant.

“Urban Redevelopment and the Arts:  Flagship Cultural Projects in Los Angeles and San Francisco”
Carl Grodach, University of Texas at Arlington
A now prevalent central city redevelopment strategy employed by municipal governments around the globe is to invest in flagship cultural projects-- large-scale museums and performing arts facilities that are intended to act as catalysts for urban revitalization.  This paper concentrates on an often overlooked facet of cultural flagship projects: their role in attracting smaller-scale commercial and nonprofit art organizations to the surrounding area and their overall relationship to the local arts community.  With the focus on tourism and image, this potentially significant economic and community development role is often overlooked both in the academic literature and by municipal authorities in the planning process.  Through an analysis of cultural projects in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the findings indicate that the large-scale projects have some success in generating urban revitalization through the arts.  However, their ability to do so can be hampered by external factors such as urban design and location and internal factors such as institutional mandate, structure, and budget priorities.  Furthermore, the findings tentatively demonstrate that, under the appropriate conditions, mid-sized institutions are better positioned to realize arts-based redevelopment with a considerably lower investment than their large-scale counterparts.

“Leveraging Culture to Build a City’s External Brand and Internal Cohesiveness”
Tom Jones, Smart City Consulting
In recent years, cultural planning has taken on a familiar, almost predictable approach to cities,  focusing on the need for more money for the arts, more structured support and an emphasis on economic impacts.  Staking out a new standard for these plans is the one announced earlier this year for Delray Beach, Florida, a city of 60,000 seeking its niche in one of the U.S.’s largest super-regions.  The city launched a new approach defining culture broadly enough that it is understood and embraced by city leaders and citizens and set an experiential framework for it.

The anchors for this new context for a plan are sense of place, human scale, authenticity and intimacy.   In addition, the research and planning process defined eight principles in which arts and culture must exist and compete in the future:

• Consumers are being pulled in a multitude of directions by convenient opportunities for entertainment that are increasing exponentially.  More and more, people want what they want when they want it and where they are.  Arts and cultural events are normally place-specific, and because of it, it is hard to compete with entertainment that can be downloaded, podcast and Tivo’ed.  New ways are needed to connect people with culture where they are and to tap into a growing interest by people in being participants, rather than mere observers, of culture.
• Every city is now an island in a sea of accessible, global cultural bounty.  It won’t stake out its place by having a range of average activities, but by identifying a distinctive niche and producing peak experiences in which it sets itself apart for others..
• Cities can use original, attention-getting ideas to call attention to their cultures – the cow sculpture project in Chicago; samba lessons taught to every citizen in Lyon, France, that culminated on a day when the entire city danced in the street; people writing a novel in a store window in New York City; guitars given to every 13-year-old in a Brazilian city; after school poetry classes in city parks in a West Coast city.  These are the kinds of things that contribute to a palpable sense of community, produce a positive energy that infuses the city and its image and tap into the participatory, interactive trends of today.
• There are ways for cities to encourage culture beyond public subsidies and grants. There are tax benefits for artists’ studios, zoning for arts districts, experimentation and innovation districts, sales tax waivers on local art, public space for artists and more.  Artists are often looking for help in finding a place where the creative process can take place, help that can be more important than direct funding.
• Creative enterprises of all types are seeing the ground shift underneath them.  There is the need for reinvention, because audiences seem to be declining across the board for many cultural anchors, including movies, theater, live classical music and dance.  Industries like music are clinging to old models, and in time, they will yield to forces unleashed by technology and consumer expectations.  Mass culture is dominated more and more by commercialization that tends toward generic, derivative products.  Authenticity and intimacy are the ways to stake out a competitive position
• Walker Percy said the problem with culture is that we must wrest meaning from experiences that inevitably come to us prepackaged and disconnected from our own assumptions and expectations.  Ways that connect more viscerally and more personally to experiences of the city produce a binding narrative, jolt the imagination and raise expectations.
• In the U.S., about 44 percent of whites, 28 percent of African-American and Haitian and 23 percent of Hispanics attended an arts / culture event in the past 12 months.  Education and income are the strongest indicators of cultural support.  More college graduates – 64 percent – attended than high school graduates – 25 percent - and the higher the earnings, the greater the attendance at cultural events.  While these groups are lucrative targets, cities must make extra efforts to make culture accessible and meaningful to all citizens.
• Festivals and special events are proven ways to animate and punctuate the life of cities.  These kinds of events offer unexpected surprises to residents and visitors alike.  They also speak to the values of the community and to the symbolic importance of events as rituals of community.

Based on these principles, the plan for Delray Beach targeted the creation of an umbrella arts organization;  new funding process and guidelines; artist-centered strategies such as an Artists’ Co-op and a Tax-free Arts and Cultural District, but more importantly, it recommended two seminal initiatives based in the city’s culture being experiential and authentic: Delray Beach Arts Cabana and Delray Beach Narration Project.

The Arts Cabana responds to the explosion of “amateur culture” in the form of blogs, podcasts and digital photographs.  People are engaging personally in culture purely for the love of creating – millions of people are blogging, and thousands of others are remixing their own songs, making their own digital films and generally participating in the creative process, rather than observing it as passive consumers.   As a result, creativity is something that is accessible to every person, but the real boom is to come.  We are on the cusp of a cultural revolution, and the report envisions Delray Beach’s Arts Cabana as ground zero for this kind of personal, participatory culture by developing a special space where people can learn, develop and stretch their creativity.

For example, rather than being the place where Mahler’s Symphony #12 is performed, Delray Beach is the place where the guest conductor or soloist comes to be part of “Intimate Conversations on Creativity,” where the painter shares techniques, where the dancer talks about her inspiration to dance or the sculptor has a conversation about the creation process.  It becomes the place where people learn and experience culture firsthand.   Each season, artists of all kinds would come to Delray Beach Arts Cabana to enjoy the beautiful surroundings, to recharge their spirits and explore their creativity.  They engage in unique, hands-on learning, presentations, exhibitions and discussions in a broad range of disciplines.  Delray Beach becomes the scene for exciting opportunities to create and imagine, to invent and experiment.

The Del Ray Narration Project honors story-telling, a treasured regional tradition that connects directly with the folklore traditions of African-Americans, Haitians and other ethnic groups who maintained their culture and family history through strong oral traditions.  It takes the concept of a museum and turns it inside out.  Using mobile technology, the city becomes the museum and the curators are its citizens.  The Narration Project collects local stories from citizens, culminating with an event, perhaps a picnic and story-telling celebration at Old School Square.  The stories will be recorded, and with a small investment in technology and signage, they will be available for future generations to hear.  In effect, the project produces an archive of narratives that define Delray Beach’s identity by connecting the stories with the community. 

This project is a distinctive way to create a distinctive narrative for Delray Beach, a tapestry of stories that become an oral museum, stories told by Delray Beach citizens themselves.  It is a cost-effective way to build community spirit and pride and becomes a permanent collection of stories without the overhead of a building and with little investment in technology.  At its heart, story-telling is one of the most creative, authentic and intimate acts. The Delray Beach Narration Project engages everyone in the city to tell their stories and create a collective narrative for the city.  In this way, it breaks down barriers and builds narrative bridges that unite the people of Delray Beach.

Within the new context of creating culture that is intimate, authentic and creative, the report surprisingly recommended against the construction of a new $30 million performing arts center, on the grounds that it would homogenize the cultural experience of Delray Beach and fail to invest in the city’s uniqueness.

In the end, this report elevates culture as the foundation on which Delray Beach’s brand is based and becomes its competitive advantage for the future.  But this is more than a brand for external audiences.  It also becomes the internal force for the identity and cohesiveness of its people.  In this way, arts and culture is not merely seen as a pleasant, positive curiosity of a place, but a distinctive and fundamental element of a place’s core character and plans for the 21st century.

“The IU Northwest Klamen Mural Project”
David Klamen, Indiana University Northwest
Professor David Klamen, Professor of Fine Arts (Painting) from IU Northwest, will discuss the history and the content of his three large-scale public paintings that are part of IU Northwest’s Public Art Project.  He will also comment on the dynamics of public art collections and their influence on the meaning of the works in such collections.

“Art in the Region”
Patricia Lundberg, Indiana University Northwest
The 2005 Quality of Life Indicators Report has awarded the Northwest Indiana Region's art and recreation opportunities the highest grade, a B+, in a category that "outperforms all others.... and should be viewed as an essential component in marketing Northwest Indiana to the wider world. Indeed, these kinds of assets are now being recognized as critical to a high quality of life...." In Lake County, Indiana, more than one hundred non-profit organizations focus on arts, culture and humanities. It is now well established that the arts are a powerful economic driver. How can Northwest Indiana revitalize itself and become one of the places that meet Richard Florida's three key criteria (tolerance, talent, and technology) for attracting a creative work force and realizing the creative potential in all of us? Through the arts. 

“Looking at Urban Renewal Trials”
 Peter Matthews, University of Mar
My paper will focus on drawing various lines of observation and critical questioning around specific sites in northwest Indiana alongside specific sites in the world. My paper will probe into and dilate a carefully  considered handful of contemporary issues surrounding the application of arts into urban renewal initiatives. I am particularly impressed to draw light and attention to the work of Jane Jacobs, a pioneer in the sphere of urban thinking. I will sensitively run with one of her principal fixations of ’mixed-use’ planning and connect it to a centered point of inquiry in terms of urban renewal projects as being not only important for stimulants in regional and economic terms but also, importantly, as powerful ingredients in social revitalization.

I aim to objectively focus on observing key sites in the Calumet region including brownfield initiatives, community efforts to slow urban sprawl and how projects have influenced and affected the region. I wish to galvanize this line of thinking by bringing into the equation critical observations and findings from sites in Africa ( Greenhouse Project,  Johannesburg), Australia (Green Square Urban Renewal Project, Sydney) and Brazil (Rio City Project) and how they have affected their place and people.

“Spaces of vernacular creativity”
Steve Millington, Manchester Metropolitan University
 Whilst it is recognised that Florida's (2002) notion of the "creative class" is an exceedingly powerful idea driving the nature of cultural policy, the use of culture as the basis of state-led community development strategies is highly problematical (Gibson and Kong, 2005).  The "creative class" and much of the substance of cultural policy is often based on the deployment in urban space of a particular set of aesthetic markers of social difference, which are frequently interconnected with exclusive middle class forms of cultural capital or the appropriation and valorisation of selective working class cultural practices and forms.  Furthermore, the propensity of cultural regeneration to fetishize particular and aestheticised spaces of production and consumption, such as the gentrified urban centre or bohemian cultural cluster, serves only to reproduce spatial inequalities in the geography of artistic and creative production.

 Widespread access to tools of creative practice and the growth of domestic creativity afforded through new technologies and communication networks is increasing the potential for new forms of creativity, whereby practices might emerge across a range of sites and locales.  Cultural policy, however, hardly acknowledges everyday spaces of creative practice, such as dispersed spaces of production and performance, decentralised neighbourhoods, small towns, rural landscapes, interstitial realms, or community embedded artistic spaces. Rather, the vernacular realm is often dismissed as the banal opposite of the bohemian cultural milieu, a place where creativity is seen as abject, marginal or even resistant to sustained urban development.

 Drawing on empirical evidence of creative practice embedded within everyday and marginal spaces of non-professional, original artistic production in Greater Manchester (UK), this presentation outlines the case for cultural policy to move beyond the instrumental recuperation of "art" as an economic resource in urban regeneration, towards a more reflective and inclusive position regarding the value of everyday or vernacular forms of creativity. This paper considers how interscalar flows, relations and social dynamics can connect the vernacular to wider and global networks of cultural and economic activity. By accounting for a broader spatial distribution of creativity, the development of cultural policy could move beyond a normative economic framework towards more holistic, diverse and socially inclusive cultural led strategies.

“The Other City Beautiful: Philadelphia and its Avenue of the Arts”
Micheline Nilsen, Indiana University South Bend
Philadelphia’s Broad Street, South of City Hall, was renamed Avenue of the Arts under Mayor Ed Rendell’s administration.  This highlighted the presence of long-term cultural institutions such as the Philadelphia Symphony, the University of the Arts, the Pennsylvania Ballet and the Pennsylvania Academy on this central North-South axis of the original city grid. The name change also reflected a commitment to invest in the cultural resources of the city to re-invigorate the “downtown” area known in Philadelphia as “Center City” within a context of decreasing urban population and economic stagnation.  The economic re-development strategy was also inscribed in Philadelphia’s historic context with highlights such as Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many other cultural attractions.   Most of Philadelphia’s cultural landmarks are located within the 1692 plan for Philadelphia commissioned by William Penn and along the northwestward diagonal of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, added under the auspices of the City Beautiful movement in the early 20th century.

This paper studies the 1990s strategy of cultural investment nested within the historic fabric of the city in order to catalyze urban renewal. It considers both the cultural and economic factors of this program devised by a city determined to fight back.

“Bilbao: a spectacular but somehow disenchanted city”
Antonio Román,, University of Deusto
For nearly a decade, Bilbao's urban transformation has been regarded by many as a new model for industrial restructuring. Even if we question the existence of this model, factors such as the policy of undertaking major public works and the incorporation of leading firms in architectural commissions have undoubtedly benefited the city. Nevertheless, certain aspects of this urban transformation, less quantifiable and thus more difficult to evaluate, are, paradoxically, critical factors when assessing every process of urban change.

I refer to aspects such as how the arrival of a certain type of modernisation, linked to the real estate market, leading firms and the city’s presence in the mass-media, affects other issues: for example, the degree to which citizens identify with the new architectural and urban proposals, and, in turn, their aesthetic experience of the spatial results. The paper inquires into this influence, taking into account the question of urban character in the context of modernisation. In addition to the existing city fabric, references considered are new areas under construction along the river, such as Abandoibarra, Uribitarte and Zorrotzaurre.

“The Creative Class and Urban Economic Growth Revisited”
Michael Rushton, Indiana University, Bloomington
What is the state of evidence that the arts are linked to urban development? Richard Florida has argued that a high concentration of members of the “creative class” is correlated with higher levels of human capital and higher rates of economic growth in urban areas. In one influential paper he uses 1990 U.S. Census data and U.S. large metropolitan areas to demonstrate his results. This paper attempts to clarify the economic theory underlying Florida’s hypothesis, and extends Florida’s analysis, using more recent data in an effort to see whether Florida’s results are robust, or instead simply represent an analysis of a somewhat unique period in U.S. economic history, with the boom of the ‘dot.com’ sector.

“Creating A Vision for International Community Development:  Indianapolis in 2050”
William Plater, Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis
Using the Indianapolis region as a case in point, the presentation will look at the issue of how to create a powerful enough vision to align and focus many different programs, perspectives and practices to achieve a goal—such as making Indianapolis one of the world’s 50 best places to live, to work and to learn—within a timeframe that allows for mistakes, conflict, and revision and yet makes tangible progress evident.  For a region such as Indianapolis--or Northwest Indiana--to build a quality of life sufficient to attract international acclaim, arts and culture must be the foundation for economic prosperity as well as social development.
 
“Projects to Save a City”
Sanjit Sethi, Memphis College of Art
This presentation will explore issues associated with urban renewal and related socio-cultural discourse through the examination of a series of visual art projects both completed and in-progress.  Projects to be discussed include the Building Nomads Project, Bus Garden, and Cover-Up all developed during a recent Fulbright Fellowship to Bangalore, India.  From contending with potholes to destruction of urban green spaces to disenfranchised migrant workers these projects address specific issues that urban areas contend with on a universal level including migrancy, invisibility, unchecked construction, and urban blight. This work utilizes a methodology that combines intuitive, social, conceptual, and anthropological sensibilities.  Through the examination of these projects this presentation will address the role of the Artist / Designer as collaborator, democratic agent, listener, navigator and activist.  Intrinsic to the success of these projects has been the reflection of the varied geographical, social, and cultural territories in which they are located.  Particular attention is paid to the concept of collaboration and the resulting energy that is produced via dialogues, project refinement and final outcome.  Other projects to be discussed include the Urban Defibrillator, Rumble Strip, Mashhad Pool and the Gypsy Bridge Project involving Roma communities in Eastern Europe.

“The ‘Guggenheim Effect’ and the ‘New Bilbao’: On the Social Costs of Bilbao’s Urban Regeneration”
Lorenzo Vicario and Manuel Martínez-Monje, University of the Basque Country.
In less than a decade, Bilbao has gone from being an archetype of a declining metropolis to becoming the new “Mecca of urbanism”. Bilbao’s ‘miracle’ regeneration —with the Guggenheim Museum as its hallmark— has been marketed and perceived internationally as a ‘urban success story’, a unique example of ‘best practice’ and a model for other metropolises. As a result, the so-called ‘Guggenheim effect’ has become a standard reference for urban experts and policy-makers all over the world. Nevertheless, in contrast to prevailing discourses about Bilbao’s model, regeneration strategies in Bilbao can hardly be considered innovative or genuinely original; on the contrary, they are rather a continuation of a model established since the 70s in cities on both sides of the Atlantic, in which emblematic mega-projects (downtown and waterfront redevelopment, cultural flagship projects, arts and tourism-based regeneration proposals) and aggressive city-marketing campaigns are central ingredients of urban revitalization, an array of practices and policies known as “urban entrepreneurialism”. Nonetheless, there is not an exact correspondence between perceived and actual urban success. Actual urban regeneration does not lead necessarily to improvements in the well-being of every city resident. In fact, as has been discussed extensively in the literature, entrepreneurial regeneration strategies have their social costs and negative effects —from gentrification and displacement to exacerbating socio-spatial exclusion to lack of public debate and participation. In the case of Bilbao, the unavailing success of the Guggenheim Museum has been used by the local authorities to build a discourse that presumes the success of the regeneration process, silences its negative aspects and social costs, and does not admit critical evaluations but excludes any sort of public debate. In this sense, the “Guggenheim effect” has become a glamorous veil that, by covering the errors and shortcomings of the “new Bilbao”, contributes to legitimate and consolidate not only the “Bilbao model”, but also the practices and discourses of the “urban entrepreneurialism”. In this presentation we will try to draw back that veil by presenting a critical appraisal of the Bilbao model of urban regeneration.