The place of art

reflections on art and urban regeneration in 1980s Britain

K. Crehan

pp. 145-160

in: John Clammer, Ananta K. Giri (eds), The aesthetics of development, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

"Development" is a term that is often used as if its meaning were self-evident. This chapter takes off from Raymond Williams' plea for analysis of the "real practices subsumed by development". The "real practices' it examines, however, are ones normally subsumed under the term urban regeneration (or in the US urban renewal) rather than development. The chapter argues that the difference between "development" and "regeneration" is often more about the geographical location of the problems they name than the substance of those problems. It takes as a case study a Design and Technical Aid Service set up by a British community arts organisation in 1982 as a mechanism to help residents of impoverished neighbourhoods gain access to urban regeneration funds. While this arts initiative was small in scale, it raises interesting questions as to what defines art as "progressive", and the role of the would-be progressive artist in modern, technologically complex societies.

Cited authors

Williams Raymond