Can participative arts help deliver (more) socially just creative cities?

Creative City policies have long been portrayed as the new packaging for neoliberal policies. While being widely criticised, the concepts of creative cities and creative class continue to travel around the world in the domain of policy making.That is why some researchers (Pratt, 2011, Ratiu, 2013, Leslie and Cantugal, 2012, Beaumont and Yildiz, 2017) have flagged up that there are other possibilities to conceive a creative city. The dimensions of Justice identified by S. Fainstein (2019), democracy, equality, diversity are at the core of some artists works. While placing my research in the frame of the urban planning literature on the creative city as my hypothesis show, I propose a slight displacement of focus. The specific contribution of my work is to make the link with arts theory and to bring in the debate an analysis of the new conceptions artists have developed of their role in the city, as regards to the city making, in theory and in practice. The theoretical background is provided by Jacques Rancière (2008), who has proposed a new conception of aesthetics. The specificity of art, aesthetics, is that it proposes a new “distribution of the sensible”. The thesis analyses three case studies of participative theatre in Saint-Denis, with the view to determine what the actual input of the artist in the making of the city and how this is relevant for the creation of an alternative creative city model. The three hypothesis of the work are that : 1. More-than-capitalist creative cities visions may already exist (Leslie and Cantugal, 2012) and they may be influenced by the political orientation of the carrier of the visions. (Garcia, 2013). This visions may take into account issues of inequalities (Jakob, 2011) and redistribution (Pratt, 2011). 2. These visions may differ between different stakeholders. There may be an interplay of these different visions on a territory. One needs to construct a situated and contextualised (Pratt, 2011; Prince, 2010) understanding of the way creative cities visions of different stakeholders play in a given location. 3. Artists may play an active role in building an alternative vision and implementation of the creative city, Sharp and al. (2005). A specific focus on the way art works are read by the audience and to the process of making of the art work helps understand its actual impact on issues of social justice, such as equality, democracy and diversity (Fainstein, 2010). The choice of the location has been motivated by its characteristics of being a poor traditionnally communist subburb of Paris, now flagged up as Territory of Culture and Creation in Greater Paris Metropolis. The thesis analyses 3 participative theatre projects in this territory : 1/‘The Football pitch, the player and the consultant’. It is an urban planning consultation participatory art project, commissioned by the local authority, with a duration of two years, co-managed by a theatre collective and an innovative urban planning consultancy, which aimed at stakeholders’ voices to be heard in a different way, using the resources of sports and theatre. 2/ Montjoie! Saint-Denis! by Hoc Momento - An in-situ theatre project commissioned by an independent art institution as regards to the future of a brownfield and its surrounding neighbourhood, led by researchers-artists. 3/ The Ephemeral Troup: a participative theatre project with young people, partly from disadvantaged background and from the area and led by a state financed theatre, the Théâtre Gérard Philippe (TGP) What this PhD brings to the debate on creative city, is the knowledge that it is not because art does not have direct economic impact, nor easily quantifiable social impact, that its specific input should be disregarded. By analysing the details of art projects, one can reveal the many ways artists use creativity to change the city. A new conception of just creative city should aim at encapsulating these types of contribution.