Conclusion: exploring social change

The neighbourhoods discussed here address different combinations of social issues, technical contexts and design options. Different logics of production are deployed, ranging from total renovation, to ex novo construction, or to incremental change. One could legitimately state that such variety does not allow any conclusive evidence, apart from warning that change follows disparate paths. However, the in-depth discussion of the case studies supports at least some logical and qualitative generalizations. The first of these is that at a closer look, all the solid neighbourhood characteristics “melt into air”. Even the seemingly obvious distinction between newly built and renovated neighbourhoods may get blurred eventually, since different logics of production for built space combine in the same area, as in Warsaw for instance; or because material and symbolic representations constantly interplay and evolve, as in Hvidore-Copenhagen; or because one logic intentionally or covertly evolves into another, as in Lisbon or Marseille. On the contrary, the storylines of neighbourhood development and redevelopment, though often showing argumentative loops, constitute the materiality of places. Bergsli in Marseille, Bøggild and Yde in Hvidore-Copenhagen, for instance, have focused on the ideological discourse that accompanies the actual construction of the neighbourhood. The analysis of the tense interplay between argumentation and power has enucleated the formal and practical logic imbedded in local events. Those discourses have directed the actors in assembling local and global policy repertoires. The resulting places are thus shaped by actions and discourses together. Eventually, the reconstruction of local narratives raises a question regarding the hidden structure of power, the overlap of discourses and policy communities. Such investigation provides an answer to the question of how neighbourhoods conflictually adjust to cities’ strategies. This is the case explored in Marseille, but is addressed also by Karachalis in Psiri, Annunziata in Rome and De Leo in Afragola. Neighbourhoods change, as often happens, as the result of the adaptation of builders' or inhabitants' practice to the cities’ changing context. All of the studies presented here raise questions such as the following. Does “post-modern” urban space offer any ground for the idea of social bonds? How do the new technicalities of sustainability, quality, and design interpret the condition of contemporary citizenships? What political ideas are incorporated in these spaces and designs; what aims, vision and layout are incorporated in the projects; what do they tell about the urbanity of the city to come? What is the place of ideology in building designers’, planners’ and decision-makers’ approach to the new organization of cities (public space, neighbourhoods)? Consumers, visitors and tourists might seem to be the only actors included by the neoliberal agenda, but these projects are actually describing a more hybrid concern, an exercise that apparently requires a challenging reconceptualisation of space. But how are the outputs of these different construction processes turned into a neighbourhood? The renovation of brown fields or former port areas involves a debate on the sustainable design of such an investment, as well as its budgetary and economic balance. All these have been areas of growing involvement for the local authorities over the last 30 years, and several countries’ experiences (albeit quite dissimilar) have been extensively studied and often taken as an example or a model. Flagship projects too, like EuroMediterranée in Marseille and Parque das Nações in Lisbon (Bergsli's and Aelbrecht's chapters), raise issues of culture and design. Both exemplify the process of redeveloping former industrial or infrastructural areas into a strategic part of the new envisioned city. Large urban projects are often viewed as the local epiphany of the "single thought” that lies behind neoliberal urban redevelopments. However, the story of urban projects in Europe -as these chapters show- is far more complicated than the mainstream critique allows, due to the strength of societal intermediate networks and the local state. In fact, all developments show a consistent process of mediation that is subject to all sorts of influences by the state, the local communities, and the technical bodies. And how does the construction of the local public sphere take place in these extremely different urban landscapes? The illegal settlement in the metropolitan area of Naples (De Leo), for instance, has a peculiar epiphany: not just informally built by the inhabitants, but organized or controlled by organized crime. The rehabilitation of old public estates (Bielany, but also Hvidore) is usually achieved through a laborious process, which involves an openly contested and conflict-ridden political dimension. Social housing estates usually carry a concern with social impacts, and with the way urban policy addresses such concerns (Eckardt and Klocke, Górzynska). Relying upon different combinations of public and private ethos, all these case-studies question the emergence of the public sphere in a statu nascendi local community, and the model of urban citizenship incorporated by the organization of space. These processes are often referred to as a new request for urbanity. The central question is apparently that the political discussion needs to reflect on the disappointing results of the promises of the Habermasian “project of modernity” aiming at social cohesion, civic liberties, and general wealth. New residential neighbourhoods have been built that exemplify the contemporary effort to devise a way of living into the 21st century (Trkulja and Annunziata). The model Ørestad neighbourhood in Copenhagen is far different in ambitions from the ordinary, privately promoted and designed and assembled Ponte di Nona district in Rome. Neighbourhoods built by design are a field experiment in linking urbanism and urbanity. Only the social nature of urban space might be controlled by design and planning rules, at least in part; the organization of social bonds, instead, are created and recreated by inhabitants in practical engagements. This link is the basis of a long and sound debate in both planning and sociology. The resulting public space is the main design challenge for those settlements, which differ entirely in purpose and quality. Political scientists and planners share a distinctive, yet not coinciding interest in the public space and the public sphere. The public sphere faces here the same risk of erosion as the public space, and might be rescued by the same process of adapting to the dwelling practices of the inhabitants. Renovated, gentrified, evolving districts, such as the cultural quarter of Psiri in Athens, the modernist experiment of Hvidore in Copenhagen, the transition areas surrounding Bielany in Warsaw, the inner city of in Frankfurt, all address the coexistence of different social groups in a shared space, and the political approach to such processes. A concern is growing with the ideology of places, and the 'political' uses of the image of old and new neighbourhoods. ‘Political’ is used here in the sense that the building of the image is the subject of a large confrontation among a number of factors, which interact strategically in a symbolically mediated field. This is precisely the case in those neighbourhoods labelled as “cultural districts”, or as gentrified or renaissance areas. In these cases we explore the political art of branding, renaming, and selling new products in a very mobile submarket: a submarket made of the investment activities of new agencies, and of the often blurred actions of different tiers of government. “Changing places” reflects the empirical evidence of neighbourhoods, taken as some form of local-societal entity, and against the background of more observations of developments in urban planning, local governance and in particular citizenship, but also of a wide reaching construction of narratives, discourses and ideologies. In doing so, this book is caught up in the paradoxical situation that “change” and the observation of it cannot be separated from the more profound idea of change as such. What really changes, beyond the ideology of change? That is the final question that has motivated this book.