Museums for urban regeneration? Exploring conditions for their effectiveness

Abstract

The traditional mission of a museum is essentially cultural. This is not so for all museums, however. There are a minority, although universally famous museums, such as the Tate Liverpool, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Tate Modern London or the new forthcoming Louvre-Lens (France), Pompidou-Metz (France), Guggenheim Hermitage (Lithuania) and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), whose principal aim is the reactivation (and/or diversification) of the economy of their cities. These strategies are expensive and have a very high operative risk. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the different factors and conditions that determine the degree of success or failure of global art museums used as urban economic reactivators.