Les territoires créatifs : quelques notions théoriques et une analyse bruxelloise

Young artists and the development of artistic quarters in Polish cities

“…With time, as SoHo began to attract more mainstream artists, art galleries and non-artistic gentrifiers, some artists started to move to other post-industrial, working-class or ethnic neighbourhoods (Cole, 1987;Zukin, Braslow, 2011). This cycle of emergence, growing popularity, boom, and then decline of artistic concentration repeated itself in other New York districts, and has been observed in many other major North American and West European cities such as London (Green, 1999;Ambrosino, 2013;Gornostaeva, Campbell, 2012;Harris, 2011;While, 2003), Paris (Clerval, 2008;Collet, 2008;Vivant, 2009Vivant, , 2010Gravereau, 2013;Chabrol, 2011, Boichot, 2013, Berlin (Heebels, van Aalst, 2010;Boichot, 2013), Brussels (Debroux, 2013a, 2013b, Barcelona (Tremblay, Battaglia, 2012;Ballester, 2013), Montreal (Tremblay, Battaglia, 2012) and Toronto (Bain, 2003;Ley, 2003;Hracs, 2009;Matthews, 2008).…”

“…Such spaces might be dispersed throughout the city, though in larger urban centres there is indeed a clear tendency among artists to cluster in selected quarters (Green, 1999;Ley, 2003, Lloyd, 2004Currid, 2007;Brennan-Horley, Gibson, 2009). As a result such areas often start to be labelled creative quarters or districts (Wedd et al, 2001;Zukin, Braslow, 2011;Gornostaeva, Campbell, 2012), artists' or artistic quarters (Traversier, 2009;Ambrosino, 2013;Debroux, 2013b), or cultural production quarters (Smit, 2011). These spaces should be distinguished (Debroux, 2013b) both from "art quarters" oriented mainly toward cultural consumption and from "cultural quarters' planned and developed by public authorities, within which artistic production and consumption are an essential element of urban policies implemented with the aim of generating an image of a creative city, or urban regeneration strategies (Montgomery, 2003;McCarthy, 2006;Evans, 2009;Vivant, 2009;Murzyn-Kupisz, 2012;Zebracki, Smulders, 2012;Lavanga, 2013;Noonan, 2013).…”

“…These are not necessarily quarters where creatives both live and work (Zukin, Braslow, 2011). They are equally likely to be "lifestyle" creative quarters (Wedd et al, 2001), where artists seek inspiration, socialize, network, and establish professional contacts with art galleries or potential clients, show the products of their creative activities, and admire the cultural achievements of others (Currid, 2007;Heebels, van Aalst, 2010;Ambrosino, 2013), while they may actually do their own work or live in other parts of the city (Debroux, 2013b). Such spaces might be dispersed throughout the city, though in larger urban centres there is indeed a clear tendency among artists to cluster in selected quarters (Green, 1999;Ley, 2003, Lloyd, 2004Currid, 2007;Brennan-Horley, Gibson, 2009).…”

“…For these reasons artists are often drawn to particular urban spaces by the availability of spacious, affordable spaces in dilapidated, lower-income neighbourhoods or post-industrial zones, where there is underused residential and commercial space in or near the city centre (Cole 1987;Green, 1999;Ley, 2003;Lloyd, 2004;Vivant, 2010;Zukin, Braslow, 2011;Lawton et al, 2012;Gravereau, 2013). One aspect of the preference for citycentre locations, in turn, is usually the need to sustain links with traditional cultural institutions situated in the urban core (often despite contesting them at the same time) (Gravereau, 2013;Debroux, 2013b).…”

Equipement culturel et développement urbain : le centre d’art contemporain WIELS, héraut des logiques de transformation d’un quartier populaire ?

“…13 Ainsi, le périmètre d'étude ( Figure 3) reflète des caractéristiques conformes aux quartiers en relégation du « croissant pauvre » bruxellois [Kesteloot et al, 1998 ;Romainville, 2015] : une densité élevée (17 266 hab./km 2 ) nettement au-dessus de la moyenne régionale (7 209 [2009][2010][2011][2012][2013][2014][2015]. Soulignons enfin la fonction de porte d'entrée de la zone d'étude (à mi-chemin entre le ring ouest et le centre-ville, et à proximité de la gare du Midi), ainsi que sa proximité avec la commune de Saint-Gilles en cours de gentrification et connue pour sa forte concentration d'artistes [Debroux, 2013]. 26 Cette ambivalence n'est cependant pas ignorée et est prise en compte par le WIELS :…”