Regenerating urban cultural policy: insights on the role of crafts and small-scale production in three European cities’ visions

Recent planning debates have highlighted the need to move away from standardised creative city models focusing on consumption and leisure, towards more inclusive and diverse approaches able to account for the specificity of local urban contexts and communities, as well as their productive capacity. In this framework, crafts and making practices have been regarded as possibly contributing to a more regenerative and socially just creative city policies. By analysing economic development and sectoral policy documents in the case of Marseille, Turin and Rotterdam, the study makes an empirical contribution to contemporary understandings of how craft and making activities are framed in local urban plans, while advancing our theoretical debates on the role of cultural practices in the transition to regenerative urban environments. The results shed light on the contribution of craft and small-scale production in the implementation of regenerative urban framework focusing on their role as enablers of vital, convivial and resilient urban economic and social ecosystems.