Localized commons in competing global cities: thinking over spectacularization of contemporary architecture and the urban landscape.

In recent years, cities have been using aesthetically striking urban interventions and giving birth to a sort of contemporary architectural collecting, in which the artistic quality and the media visibility of the pieces of architecture are not for their own sake, but they are interpreted as immaterial competitive factors. Spectacular architectural and urban projects have been intended as global banner for footloose investment, for localizing multinational headquarters, to attract international art-and-entertainment tourism. More recently the design of striving urban environment and workplaces was interpreted as a mean to attract and retain the creative class. The spectacularization of contemporary architecture and the disneyfication of urban space have sometimes not been addressing nor been experienced by local residents or low income users. Despite the fact that these forms of collecting are indeed changing several cities, the global ones in particular, the attention to the decision making mechanisms and the rationalities implied in such processes is limited in the debate. The paper discusses most diffused global cities’ rationales (the city as a growth machine or as an entertainment machine; entrepreneurial cities; the Bilbao effect; star architects acting as artists; etc) and it observes a set of urban development processes involving spectacular architectures and star architects and their effects in Abu Dhabi, Paris and New York. The unique local institutional and economic conditions allowed Abu Dhabi to deploy most of the rationales of the spectacularization of contemporary architecture and of instant urban development. However, the overall impact of the actual urban projects are critical not only in terms of equality and social justice, but also in the induction of the expected development effects. In Paris, the main customer of contemporary signature architecture is the public sector, aiming at interpreting social interests and groups, and at granting proper architectural quality to represent the capital city and the nation. In the global economy, Paris is competitive in services and culture and recently realized important projects, but also made use of star architects for urban policies that were merely symbolical . Currently, the private and nonprofit sectors timidly start to use star architects. Although publicly justified by economic competitiveness rhetoric, in New York City this architecture has been used by actors with different goals. Of course local authorities promoted the city’s image by incentivizing the presence of internationally renowned architects and promoting specific projects, but they are not the sole agents in urban development. Corporations want to distinguish their public image and to have competitive workplaces, especially in the creative and knowledge economy. Cultural institutions make fundraising more appealing and promotion easier through branding. Private developers enhance upscale property value. The use of contemporary architecture as a competitive factor is criticized here and re-interpreted in terms of the composition of localized common goods and extended to similar policy fields concerning landscape, monuments, public art, land art and the like