New Labour?new renaissance

This paper explores the term ?urban renaissance? in relation to the historiography of the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy. It examines the place of the Renaissance in cultural history and considers how it has, since its inception, been utilised by writers to reflect on the present. The paper situates the urban renaissance within the context of New Labour rhetoric at the time of the Millennium. It argues that the idea of renaissance can, in this instance, be connected to a kind of millenarianism that was reflected in public rhetoric regarding the city and in a number of building projects

Aesthetic Family Resemblances between Wittgenstein and Paolozzi

This essay offers a comparison between Wittgenstein’ philosophy and Paolozzi’s collages by considering both as gestures and processes belonging to the family of the aesthetic works. The resemblances are identifiable in two aspects: producing a new way of seeing; showing the link between the new way of seeing and the background. On the one hand, Wittgenstein conceives philosophy as the aesthetic understanding of meaning, that is as the capacity of showing new aspects of meaning by means of the übersichtliche Darstellung and by making them emerge contrastively from occult nonsense. On the other, Paolozzi conceives the collage as a creative process and at the same time as a destructive act realized by means of techniques of cut-up and repositioning that creates vital new contexts against the background of an initial formlessness

Autonomy guaranteed: cultural work and the 'art-commerce' relation

The aim of this article is to examine synthetically the concept of 'autonomy' in cultural and creative industries work. Following brief discussion regarding the definition(s) of autonomy, and its historical linkages to discourses of art, I then rehearse three prominent social science critiques which suggest the possibilities for autonomy in cultural work have been seriously diminished or compromised. Against these readings, utilizing Bill Ryan's work on the 'art-commerce relation', I then discuss how autonomous cultural work is, in fact, impossible to destroy since ensuring its survival is a prerequisite for the production of value in cultural and creative industry production. Finally I consider how this provision of freedom may then serve to underwrite autonomous cultural work of a more varied (critical, aesthetically-driven, socially-embedded or practice-led) character that that conventionally conceived of in the orthodox critiques

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective

Gentrification has become a global phenomenon over the past 15 years and has been understood as an increasingly important strategy within neo-liberal policy-making. Focusing on London and Mumbai, this paper details how public policies and planning regimes have been reconfigured and rescaled to facilitate and encourage new property speculation. However, against more generalised and abstract accounts of the neo-liberal city, the paper uses its comparative perspective to emphasise the geographically and historically specific manifestations and effects of gentrification processes. By highlighting different forms of state intervention and sharper socio-spatial impacts in Mumbai, the paper challenges the Eurocentric framing of a global spread of gentrification and argues that Mumbai can act as an important source of learning for gentrification research