More than a decade after the London Olympics transformed large parts of East London, the longer-term effects of regeneration are coming into view. Across London and cities worldwide, former industrial sites are being remade as cultural quarters, with universities and arts institutions reshaping neighbourhoods into creative destinations. These projects promise renewal and opportunity—but they also raise a deeper question: who benefits when culture becomes central to urban development—and does this overshadow cultures already rooted in the communities that live there?

Cultural placemaking has become an influential urban policy, bringing significant investment and redevelopment to cities worldwide. While often framed as benefiting communities, culture increasingly functions as an economic tool—raising land values and rebranding neighbourhoods as desirable creative hubs, while the cultural lives of existing communities risk being pushed to the margins (National Endowment for the Arts).

As culture becomes tied to urban investment, land itself becomes central to redevelopment strategies. Increasingly treated as a financial asset driving growth, urban environments can come into tension with their social role as shared places shaped by the people who live there.

When land is valued primarily through development potential, what happens to the cultural relationships and everyday meanings that have already been created by those living there?

Last year I was invited to see inside the new London College of Fashion in Stratford, in London’s east end—one of the latest cultural destinations that have been springing up over the past decade. It was my first time visiting the newly completed East Bank, described as “the UK’s newest cultural quarter at the heart of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park” (Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, n.d.). The park itself—once shaped by wartime damage and decades of industrial decline—was transformed for the 2012 Olympic Games and has since been repositioned as a major cultural destination. While it is an attractive place to visit—attending performances, exhibitions or events—it may offer less to those living there.

As a resident of Hackney since my teens, this is an area I know well. Stratford’s transformation made me feel like a visitor in my own borough. This led me to question how public space is imagined and who it is ultimately designed for. We often imagine the perfect public space as something carefully designed to fulfil a specific purpose. But where is the space for people themselves to shape the environment around them and maintain connections to their own culture?

Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the “right to the city” understood urban space as something that should not only be accessed but collectively shaped by those who live within it (Samanani, 2017). Cities, in this view, are continually remade through everyday participation—through encounters, shared activity and lived experience. For Lefebvre, space is produced through relationships, routines and collective experience, not only through planning or design. Seen this way, developments like East Bank raise a deeper question: when cities are remade through large-scale cultural regeneration, who retains the ability to shape the meaning and everyday life of the places they call home?

This does not mean cities should be left entirely unplanned. Rather, it suggests a different starting point. Instead of imposing cultural visions onto neighbourhoods, planners and cultural institutions might begin by observing how people already inhabit and use space. The everyday movements of a place—how people gather, socialise, celebrate and share culture—contain valuable knowledge about how urban environments actually function. Recognising this everyday cultural life allows development to grow from existing communities rather than replacing them.

Walking through other parts of Stratford more recently—past streets of near-identical new-build housing and across carefully manicured parkland, it sometimes feels as though I could be anywhere in the world, with row upon row of nondescript new-build housing. The specificity of place—the unevenness and improvisation that gave East London its character—appears increasingly smoothed into a globally recognisable model of homogenised architecture.

When London won the Olympic bid, the redevelopment of the area was presented as an opportunity for local people. Stratford, in the borough of Newham, was listed as one of the country’s most deprived boroughs (Royal Geographical Society; Chakrabortty, 2014). The transformation of the Olympic Park was framed as a catalyst for long-term regeneration—revitalising an area that had experienced decades of industrial decline and economic hardship. Twelve years on, East Bank has emerged as a major culture and education district bringing together institutions including the V&A, BBC studios and Sadler’s Wells East. The development promises opportunity as a way to empower local communities and bring world-class cultural institutions together with residents through jobs, skills training, creative opportunities and youth engagement.

The director of East Bank emphasises the importance of institutions spending time in local neighbourhoods, building pathways into the arts for ‘our’ local communities and a place where people can “bump into amazing art and ideas” (Wharf Life, 2024). These positive intentions sit alongside the prominence of global cultural institutions and the scale of the site itself, which together establish a particular idea of what culture should look like. By the time communities are invited to “come and bump into amazing art and ideas”, the cultural framework has largely been set. What remains can risk feeling less like a shared process of shaping place and more like a top-down gesture—culture delivered to local communities rather than emerging from them. It raises a deeper question that sits at the centre of debates about cultural regeneration: whose culture is ultimately shaping the city?

Stratford is only one example; across London, similar cultural quarters have appeared, including the redevelopment of King’s Cross around Granary Square, where Central Saint Martins is based. Often celebrated as a model of successful regeneration, the area reflects ideas associated with the “creative city,” popularised by urban theorist Richard Florida. Florida argued that young creative professionals—artists, designers, technologists and entrepreneurs—help drive urban economic growth, often transforming neighbourhoods that might once have been seen as a little rough or “grimy” into places that feel culturally vibrant and cool. Yet in practice these ideas have frequently been used to attract a particular kind of creative professional into an area, rather than supporting the creativity already present there. The result can be that the arrival of new cultural capital raises property values and living costs, illustrating how culture can become carefully curated—shaping not only how cities look, but whose creativity is recognised - and whose is being displaced.

South of the river, Nine Elms, the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station combines luxury housing, commercial space and cultural venues, illustrating how high-value property markets have become safe investments for foreign investors. Residents nearby have described the area as disconnected from their neighbourhoods (Unite for Our Society, 2021), creating visible and visceral dividing lines between regenerated districts and long-standing communities (Apps, 2024; Minton, 2018).

Innovation clusters bringing together universities, museums and creative industries are often framed as collaborative placemaking initiatives (Wright et al., 2024). Yet these developments reveal a central tension: culture becomes a driver of urban redevelopment while the everyday cultural life already present within neighbourhoods risks becoming secondary.

In the years following the Olympics, many residents in Newham experienced displacement pressures linked to rising rents and redevelopment (Watt, 2013). Critics argue that regeneration benefits are frequently unevenly distributed, sometimes intensifying social division rather than reducing it.

For those who remain, questions persist about how relevant new cultural institutions feel and what opportunities exist for meaningful participation. Arts Council England initiatives try to target areas identified as having lower levels of engagement. Yet the issue may not be a lack of culture at all, but that much of the everyday culture goes unrecognised within official cultural policy and redevelopment strategies. Cultural life often happens behind closed doors or unofficially—in homes, streets, youth scenes, food traditions and informal gathering spaces. Everyday culture is often overlooked precisely because it is ordinary (Storey, 2014; Miles & Gibson, 2016). As a recent report from Clore Leadership suggests, culture is not simply a sector of organised activities but “the fabric through which places become meaningful,” shaping the shared narratives and relationships through which people understand identity and belonging (Clore Leadership, 2026).

Critics of cultural placemaking have also drawn attention to how redevelopment can marginalise forms of everyday culture that are deeply rooted in place. Research highlighted by Culture Hive notes that when culture becomes a tool of urban branding, organic community life risks being replaced by curated and commercialised experiences designed for external audiences. Similar concerns have long been raised within Indigenous cultural discourse, where displacement from land severs the relationships through which cultural knowledge is passed down. When people are separated from the land that sustains their traditions, the cultural practices and ways of life connected to it can gradually diminish or disappear. While the contexts differ significantly, these perspectives highlight a shared warning: culture cannot be separated from the communities and relationships that sustain it.

Examples of community-led initiatives also demonstrate how culture thrives when space is created for people to share it with others. Being involved in the Fun Palaces movement regularly reminds me that culture is not something waiting to be introduced to communities; it is already happening everywhere. Over a single weekend, people come together to repair objects, share crafts, cook, dance, tell stories or simply make things alongside one another. It becomes a celebration of culture as something ordinary and collective—a recognition that people create their own culture, and always have. Whether through gardening together, sharing food traditions, learning practical skills or organising local gatherings, cultural life emerges from everyday relationships rather than institutional instruction. Experiences like this suggest that the challenge for cultural placemaking may not be how to introduce culture into communities, but how to recognise and support what is already there.

Consultation processes attempt to include communities, yet this approach limits authentic involvement and leaves little space for genuine co-creation (Arnstein, 1969). When involvement stops at consultation rather than shared authorship of space, residents risk becoming audiences of redevelopment rather than creators of place. Jane Jacobs argued that successful cities emerge from observing how people actually inhabit streets and neighbourhoods rather than imposing abstract planning visions. As she famously wrote:

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” — Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Walking through Stratford today, surrounded by cultural landmarks and carefully designed public spaces, it is difficult not to return to the question of whose culture is shaping the area. The buildings signal renewal and ambition, yet the everyday rhythms of neighbourhood life remain far less visible within large structures that dominate the landscape.

Cultural placemaking is not inherently negative. Its impact depends on whether culture is delivered through development or allowed to grow from the relationships already rooted in a place. This requires moving away from models that install cultural institutions into neighbourhoods toward approaches that support the cultural practices, social networks and everyday interactions that already shape urban life. Rather than asking how culture can be brought into areas through redevelopment, the more pressing question is how urban policy might protect, sustain and amplify the cultures people are already creating for themselves. Cities ultimately thrive not because culture is built for people, but because the people who live there shape it themselves—allowing culture to evolve alongside the communities that sustain it.

Sources and Further Reading

Rachel Attfield