Discussion on Urban Regeneration / The Post-Consumerist Town. When the Business leaves the City (Center)

The development of the festival Off the Shelf started with a reflection on urban development and how to stimulate processes of collective regeneration for unused parts of the city. We observe how places that have been hosting commercial activities for many years, suddenly become unsuitable for the business, maybe because they don’t have a parking spot nearby or because a giant shopping mall has just opened next to it, and it drags the customers away. In such times the economic tissue of the city changes, making it very difficult for entire areas to recover and regenerate. Despite staying sometimes unused for decades, it is very difficult to strip away the commercial designation of such places and start imagining a different future for them. Art and cultural processes can often be catalysts for such socio-urban-economic renovations, which start with the widening of the imagination of a whole community. How to foster such practices, avoiding the community process of becoming part of new processes of gentrification and commercialization?

In this discursive event, we meet artists, architects and cultural practitioners that, over several years and in various places, have initiated and supported such processes, temporarily changing unused spaces and re-thinking their role in communities in Vienna, Udine, and Maribor.