ABSTRACT
As we have seen historically, the celebrated cultural city and capital is neither a new phenomenon nor one that necessarily outlives particular empires (Hall 1998) and the effects of social, political and other forces of change. The post-industrial era is however witnessing a more self-conscious and self-styled re-creation of the renaissance city, however superficial or questionable this may seem to residents and outsiders. As discussed in Chapter 7, since the late 1980s the encouragement and assistance given by the European centre to ‘regions’ and regionalism-both economic and cultural-has benefited urban and particularly city-regions, and within cities, major central and regeneration area cultural flagship and quarter projects. Politically this has also empowered city authorities over central and even regional (‘meso’) tiers of government (Balchin et al. 1999), echoing the power of merchant and early industrial cities in the late urban renaissance period, and as representative sites for the European ‘common heritage and inheritance’ to be displayed idealistically for internal (resident) as well as external (i.e. tourist-business, leisure/cultural) consumption. According to Le Gales and Lequesne: ‘This is not surprising… modern Europe was in part invented in the cities of the Middle Ages’ (1998:250), and as Newman and Thornley maintain: ‘cultural displays also serve to reinforce the assertiveness of city governments and highlight the relative weakness of national planning’ (1994:16).
