Trends, risks and opportunities in current luxury-driven transformations in cities

Historically, urban aristocracy and, after the industrial revolution, a growing upper-middle class based on bourgeois citizens have been reference targets for producers and retailers of luxury goods. For this reason, and luxury-consumption and its impacts on economy and customers’ behaviors have been fields largely explored by many different fields (as geography, philosophy, management, marketing and economics, psychology, architecture and tourism); all these contributions underlined its consolidate relationship with urban culture. This issue is even more evident considering that not only luxury market (for goods, real estate, services) but also luxury productions (art, artisanship, design, creative productions, etc.) belong to the urban domain. Despite this strong connection with the city, luxury has been largely ignored as a topic in urban studies and planning research; or worse, it has been discussed in rather ideological and mono-directional terms (“all about gentrification”). This pre-conceived attitude prevents the exploration of potentials and innovations related with this topic. This lack is particularly serious today, when luxury, as economic sector and as system of values, involves a set of practices that affect the spatial dimension and, therefore, influences the transformation of contemporary territories and the creations of specific lifestyles as well as it impacts on the everyday life of inhabitants and space users, although they are not luxury consumers. The aim of this contribution is presenting the outcomes of a research focused on the recent urban interventions developed by luxury stakeholders, and pointing out several specific features of their actions. Therefore, they exceed the simple retail or real estate approach, developing placemaking strategies and a role as urban agents following some recent trends (from exclusiveness to prestige, masstige, etc.). For this reason, operators and practitioners belonging to this sector show a renovate interest for values and characters of places, they focus on the provision of services and experiences and not only of goods, and they use urban design, art and culture as tools for their global branding. At the same time, their actions have different social, economic and spatial impacts on the city, and a focus on recent cases study points out risks and opportunities related with these operations. In some luxury-driven intervention, it emerges a reinforcement of differences and boundaries within the city, in other cases, inverse processes of opening -sometime temporarily - of gated spaces to the urban population. Sometimes, designed transformations acting as a catalyst for urbanity and regeneration, in others they emphasize processes of polarization. In the conclusions, several open questions about governances will be pointed out and about if (and how) these interventions can produce urban values and competitive advantages for their contexts, and not only economic benefits for developers involved