Gruia BĂDESCU- Steel-Town Makeover: Evaluating Urban Regeneration Policy in Sheffield and Bilbao

When one of the songs topping the US charts is about unemployment and disillusion in a steel-factory town, we may imply that society is experiencing some deep changes. Indeed, Billy Joel’s 1982 ‘Allentown’ described a situation that became all-too familiar in the early 1980s: the rapid decline of North American and European industrial towns. As the world recession deepened and manufacturing production moved eastward and southward, industrial towns experienced a severe loss of jobs, social disgruntlement, and population shifts. However, we may find today that many of these cities have reinvented themselves through programmes of regeneration, with a variable degree of success. I will present in Brussels a comparison of two case studies that were deemed “successful” urban regeneration schemes: the internationally renowned case of Bilbao, and one of the English responses- the city of Sheffield.


The cities share an industrial past of being important steel producers. In order to solve the problems created by the loss of industry, they both used a cultural policy focused on iconic architecture and city branding. Bilbao was one of the initiators of the trend in contemporary city-making that asked “what can the cultural bring to the economic” (Garcia, 2004), and Sheffield was one of the followers. However, the main question to be asked is how can this type of cultural policy achieve the goals of urban regeneration? Were these strategies successful or do we have here what David Harvey referred to as a “carnival mask”, which takes the attention away from the real problems of the city?

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