As the Creative City model for urban regeneration founders on the rocks of the recession, and the New Labour public art commissioning frenzy it triggered recedes, Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater take stock of an era of highly instrumentalised public art making.

Focusing on artists and consultants who have engaged critically with the exclusionary politics of urban regeneration, their analysis locates such practice within a schematic history of urban development’s neoliberal mode. Breaking down into a report and a collection of interviews, this investigation consistently focuses on the forms and, indeed, possibility of critical public art within a regime that fetishes ‘creativity’ whilst systematically destroying its preconditions in its pursuit of capital accumulation. How, they ask, is critical art shaped by its interaction with this aspect of biopolitical governance?

“It’s a great book that discusses how public or community arts commissions and creative spaces have often become instrumentalised by various different agents in the service of regeneration and gentrification. Different actors who influence the commissioning process often have widely differing intentions, and this book lays this out really well. Artworks and creative spaces often intend to have a positive impact within the local area, but in the long term can accelerate the displacement of existing communities for more affluent ones, which results in social cleansing of areas of the city. Blame should not lie with the creative use of spaces, but sometimes artists and cultural workers could benefit from understanding the role of their work and practice in the city within wider, interrelated contexts of city planning and housing policy, local and national governance and global free-market capitalism. Ironically, eventually creative communities will get displaced as well, typically having far lower incomes that the professional class that will replace them. The negative impact of these processes on individuals, communities, and families are felt particularly acutely in London. The book also has interviews with artists and examples of projects which seek to critique or explore gentrification and its effects. I thought this might be a useful book for the studio artists at OMPL, artists that come into Rabbits Road in the future, and visitors to the space, as it’s a topic that has come up in various conversations whilst I’ve been involved in the project.”
— Emily Ballard