Urban and Cultural Policies. Matera and New Heritage Processes for Urban Regeneration

Urban culture can once again become an instrument of city transformation thanks to the tourist attractiveness of cities of culture, after cultural policies have avoided that ancillary and passive role attributed by city governments justifying the increasingly stunted funding for reasons of economic crisis. However, the risks of relying only on actions capable of activating economic processes palatable to the entrepreneurial system are now emerging, to the benefit of real estate rent, operating within a logic more of patronage than of activating creative entrepreneurship by pushing public and private investment mainly in the direction of the event often subservient to financial logics. Our idea is that the cultural event of Matera European Capital of Culture 2019, in light of the transformations that occurred during its journey from the candidacy to the proclamation of European Capital of Culture 2019, has interpreted the cultural process as a policy of urban regeneration by trying to question how urban planning can become regenerative through a cultural policy.