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Working out Metropolitan Façades. Istanbul and Marseilles As European Capitals of Cul ture

Nicolas Maisetti

Paris I Univ. Lecturer

IEP Aix-en-Provence

Marjorie Emel Ökmekler

IEP Aix-en-Provence PHD Student

CHERPA

Antoine Vion

Aix-Marseille Univ. LEST, UMR CNRS 6123

LabexMed

Urban Affairs Association 42nd Conference

Pittsburgh, April 18-21, 2012

Panel 85 : The Use of Arts and Culture to Reimagine Cities

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INTRODUCTION

Urban studies too often reify city images as artefacts. The use of expressions like ‘image building’ or ‘city branding’ provides a substantial definition of what a city has become at the presumed end of such a process. This is in line with a long tradition of policy studies based on the common assumption that collective rationales produce social outputs which are valuable as self-meaningful products.

By following an approach that Ulf Hannerz (1980) maliciously called ‘the tales of Goffman’, we rather explore what we call the working out of metropolitan façades, conceived as social fronts (Goffman, 1959), which means for us the process through which groups or individuals interacting on different scenes and with different purposes involve themselves in the common framing of senses of place (Hillier & Rooksby, 2002) they may lean upon in the course of their regular activity. We especially focus on the processes through which some cities become a European Capital of Culture (ECC). Like in the case of hosting Olympic Games (Gold & Gold, 2008), such processes may be seen as ones which condense in short periods the multiple operations through which metropolitan façades are subject to collective recasting. From this perspective, ECC project management is not conceived as a local development resource or an instrument of urban governance (O’Brien, 2011); it is rather defined as a social and political stake.

In the past decade, this social stake has been related to broader political stakes, such as the re-scaling of urban governance (Brenner, 1999). We do not intend to consider that re-scaling metropolitan governance a priori determines projects like becoming an ECC, but we appraise how far urban region integration and cooperation is a facilitator for such social activities. The cases we have selected are the process through which Istanbul became the ECC 2010 and the one through which Marseilles-Provence is going to be the ECC 2013. The two cases are marked by contrasted urban profiles but both experiment a highly fragmented system of metropolitan governance. What we try to understand in the remainders of the paper is how far such a fragmentation is an obstacle onto the production of consent on the salient traits of metropolitan façades.

In the following section, we plead for a relational analysis of conjoint shifts in the working out of metropolitan façades and the re-scaling of metropolitan governance. Then, we examine the comparability of the two selected cases, before comparing the chains of application and management and drawing up a common framework of typical time sequences. We then go back to the assumption that many forces and ingredients affect a process which is too often seen as the simple result of good practices.

METROPOLITAN FAÇADES AND GOVERNANCE : TOWARDS A RELATIONAL FRAME OF ANALYSIS

Working out metropolitan façades, understood as a dynamic process, requires a relational frame of analysis that would link together the two fields of research constituted by studies on city images and studies on metropolitan governance. Let us first survey these fields before drawing up such a relational frame.

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REIMAGING CITIES: REGENERATION AS COLLECTIVE RE-PRESENTATION

Urban studies have for years insisted on the cultural dimensions of post-industrial development and its active role in producing attractive city images and new cosmopolitan lifestyles. Three main trends have emerged in the literature: functional approaches of cultural planning and branding, socio-economic perspectives of creative cities, and socially rooted senses of place and aesthetic forms. In line with the idea of reflexive cities, we consider city images as unending processes of self-presentation, which we call the working out of metropolitan façades.

Cultural Planning and Branding: images as outputs

Approaches of cultural planning and branding commonly focus on the way cultural strategies and related policy instruments produce outputs in terms of urban regeneration and socio-economic attractiveness. As noticed as early as the beginning of the 1990s (Scott, 1988 ; Bianchini & Parkinson, 1993 ; Bassett, 1993), local development policies which have been pursued by urban elites since the end of the 1970s have intensified the promotion of cultural institutions, events or firms in both dimensions of urban planning and city branding. From the perspective of planning, regenerating quarters marked by industrial decline has often led to regenerate factories and warehouses by mixing the development of public housing programmes and the one of museums, libraries, start-ups or non profit arts projects (Montgomery, 2003 ; Evans, 2004). In the field of arts projects, these programmes have been marked by an increasing diversity, from the provision of arts facilities or exhibition centres to live/work and studio building, including all new forms of urban expression (Markusen, 2006). Beyond the regeneration of buildings, the modification of the design of streets and places by public art performance has also been a major matter of concern (Hamilton et al., 2001). As a result, all these cultural instruments of regeneration led to the collective elaboration of new city images (Négrier, 1993 ; Neuman, 1996 ; Bailey et al., 2004).

From this perspective of place-branding, what has been observed is ‘the process of applying the branding process—as applied to commercial products—to geographical locations and is a burgeoning activity within advertising and marketing’ (Olins, 1999). Even though such an activity of promotion has existed for long (Ward, 1998), the main change that occurred is the emergence of strategic grids of image-building based on credibility, visibility, or public targeting, as well as indicators of appraisal in terms of amenities and attractiveness (Hauben et al., 2002 ; Evans, 2003 ; Kavaratzis, 2004). The common background of these approaches of planning and branding is to mainly consider cultural projects and activities from the perspective of policy outputs such as amenities or images, rather than to explore the social grounds of cultural activities (Quinn, 2005). In this literature, outputs are indeed conceived as results of collective rationales and supposed to have self-active power as strategic resources of development. But even if there is a lack of evidence of such a power and such an impact of cultural programmes on regeneration (Evans, 2005), the way new planning and branding instruments have spread and become ready-made solutions for urban regeneration is obvious. The birth of the European Capital of Culture

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programme and the consequent competition of cities to become one exemplifies this phenomenon quite well. In this competition, efforts to build up original and profuse initiatives accelerates and concentrates city cultural-planning processes, and encourages spectacular TV dedicated shows and auto-promotion campaigns. It has become a truism to replace such a phenomenon into the scope of increasing competition between cities through economic globalisation processes. But we still need to clarify the kind of competition and social change that go on through this process.

Creative cities: new patterns of competition and new social hierarchies

Whether one considers the ongoing competition as a sign of post-fordist (Jessop, 1988), postmodernist (Harvey, 1990), or cognitive-cultural capitalism (Scott, 2008), they converge in considering ‘creative cities’ as a new urban pattern of capitalism. The early literature on creative cities has emphasized firstly that creativity as an alternative to instrumental rationality has helped construct new values and bankable urban innovation (Landry & Bianchini, 1995), and secondly that cultural industries such as entertainment, games, fashion, music and so on have become a driving force behind urban development (Verwijnen & Lehtovuori, 1999). From this perspective, cities are involved in processes of distinction, in the sense Bourdieu defined it, that is the production of aesthetic judgments and values which allow to take some distance with common values. This often leads to segment and specialise cultural activities cities would support (Markusen & Schrock, 2006 ; Leslie & Rantisi, 2006). As a result, new cultural elites and new workforce have emerged as a creative class (Florida, 2002 ; Markusen, 2006) whose role in city development is ambivalent: on the one hand, this creative class is dominant regarding the production of new values, new spokespersons of the city, as well as transnational and multicultural public spheres ; on the other hand, it is grounded in highly flexible labour markets, quick de- and disqualification and new forms of gentrification from which economic cleavages and social exclusion may emerge. The Florida magic concept of “creativeness” is as much criticized by social scientists (Graeme, 2009 ; Pratt, 2009 ; Ponzini & Rossi, 2010) as it is hoped for by urban elites. The latter are trying to implement a set of prophetic and self-fulfilling enactments of their own “creativeness” toward the city they are in charge with. This purpose massively calls for public-private partnerships in order to provide cultural goods and services which would help harness transnational capital: such goods and services are indeed perceived as a kind of driving force of more competitive housing, tourism, and employment, all conditions under which middle classes would replace popular ones in declining areas.

Questioning how far the emergence of a creative class generates shifts in urban power supposes to relate them to the type of economic change they correspond to. As Lucien Karpik (2010) points out, goods and services can be homogeneous, differentiated or singular. Economics of singularities consist in ‘valuing the unique’. This supposes to pay as much attention to demand than to supply. Consuming cultural goods, wines, design objects, advice, care and so on is a multidimensional activity characterised by a lack of comparability and commensurability, and thus radical uncertainty on their quality. Karpik stresses that these markets are supported by highly institutionalised ‘judgment devices’:

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appellations (labels, certifications), cicerones (critiques, guides), rankings (prizes, palmares), confluences (welcoming and information skills in sale places), and networks (interpersonal relations through which experiences and knowledge circulate). These devices are supported by intermediaries whose judgment makes choices possible, under three conditions: delegation, cognitive back-up, and the shifting of competition from goods to devices themselves.

As far as creative cities insert urban development into such a regime of coordination, social hierarchies are based on judgment skills; policy-making is thus coordinated by intermediaries (Klein & Tremblay, 2009) who are able to compare, interconnect or disconnect such devices. This means that even if cities are involved in a global competitive economics of singularities, judgement operations are not totally footlose. Choices and identities are contingent upon their effective circulation through their respective designscapes for them to have relevance and interest to a wider population (Julier, 2005: 885). This means that even if Karpik is right in defining singularities as a type of goods and services, one should take into account both the multidimensionality of choices and the heterogeneity of spaces in which judgment is formed. Concerning urban landscapes, for example, ‘noone is in better position to envision the future than urban gardeners’ (Rotenberg, 1999: 135). In the context of the promotion a European Capital of Culture, local controversies about the city singularities that official programmes should promote may not be understood without a more anthropological focus on locally rooted senses of place.

Aesthetic forms and place habitus

As Simmel noted it one century ago, the city as an aestehetic form is a component of social structuration insofar as the cristallisation of this form is produced by reciprocal action under the own constraints of past gesture. The way people share a common identification to a place has been defined as a place habitus (Lee, 1997 ; Hillier & Rooksby, 2002), that is the incorporated local sense of landscapes and urban forms which supports the common belonging to a quarter or a city. This process of identification to a place (Lean, 2002) is itself a condition of consent or dissent toward planning or branding initiatives. Producing consent on landscape change supposes both advocacy entrepreneurs which reframe the perceptions of city inhabitants (Hall & Robertson, 2001) and time for establishing coherent messages (Julier, 2002) and new public history narratives (Hayden, 1995).

In many cases, the apparition of contemporary arts or architecture in urban landscapes provokes social contest. The case of the building of the Bilbao Guggenheim is exemplar to this phenomenon (Mac Clancy, 1997). Nathalie Heinich (2000) explained quite well that dissent and rejection of new aesthetic forms is based on a combination of interrogations toward the authenticity as well as the economic, moral, or even legal value of the artistic work. If we take into account social identification to places, what is at stake with the production of aesthetic judgments also lays in fears to be perceived as being part of a disqualified community. This leads us to explore the production of city identities not only as the making of products/images, but as an unending and unconsensual process of common self-presentation of urban societies.

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Façades: investigating the self presentation of urban societies rather than the self action of cultural productions

Identity is not a reality by itself: it is developed in the course of interaction and repeated interpretation of roles each individual has a particular manner to play and combine. In The presentation of the Self in Everydaylife, Erving Goffamn (1959) develops such a theorisation of identity, and stresses that actors cannot play these roles without getting involved in them and keeping serious. Yet, they can lean upon fronts (personal, social fronts or even décors) to overcome some lacks or defaults which do not fit with social frames. Ulf Hannerz (1980) has extensively debriefed how far Goffman’s dramaturgic perspective could help understand everyday interaction in city life and urban political scenes. Our use of Goffman’s concept of façade relates much more to the idea that social façades are strong fulcra on which the building of broader interaction may lay. Belonging to a particular city constitutes one of these social façades: this can be socially valuing or not. One of the main activities in urban governance is to create the different components of advantageous metropolitan façades under which city inhabitants may interact with other people. These façades, insofar as they refer to ambivalent signs, depend on socio-cultural orders. For example, living in the global capital of slave trade could be valuable in the Seventeenth Century, but would now be considered as infamous. Working out valuable social façades is a very complex activity in a context of competitive economies marked by mobility and reflexivity, where roles change very quickly and impose more and more distance to routines. Let’s assume that metropolitan façades may have a certain stability as far as forms of consent emerge in the common process of identification to the place. Indeed, the working out of a metropolitan façade is marked by a series of confrontations and compromises which may find temporary suspensions in case of succeeding consensus, that is the ongoing common feeling that belonging to that city in particular refers to common economic, political, moral or aesthetic values people may easily lean on in everyday interaction. What is quite interesting in the process of becoming a European Capital of Culture is precisely the fact that it generates an intense collective effort to work this out. And yet, as this cognitive work takes place in broader orders, it cannot be totally disconnected from institutional change. Scholars have stressed that such a collective activity may also be a lever for re-scaling urban governance (Le Galès & Vion, 1998). In the cases we examine, the rescaling of the cities is indeed an important background of such a process.

RESCALING CITIES: THE COLLECTIVE BUILDING OF NEW

METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE AS A POLITICAL PROCESS OF

COOPERATION

The notion of metropolitan governance has been discussed for at least two decades through many angles, such as new forms and new scales of collective action, new stakes of coordination and cooperation, or new patterns of legitimacy which emerge in the management of activities oriented towards producing and providing goods and services to urban citizens.

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Metropolitan governance: from coordination to cooperation

A common basic observation is that territorial boundaries have been constantly blurred by the rise of multi-scalar networks of actors and agencies and polycentric arrangements. As Kübler and Heinelt underlined, ‘these actors usually are heterogeneous conglomerates of actors and agencies with various backgrounds and competencies who define and deliver urban services in a way that is independent from the territorial boundaries of the traditional local government structure’ (Kübler and Heinelt, 2005: 10). This means that multiple independent centres of authority which are not absolute and may be subject to limits (Oakerson, 2004) have gradually substituted for hierarchical and mono-centric modes of government such as strong State control and vertical local government bodies (Goldsmith and Page, 2010). As a result, a strong focus on the social, political and economic dynamics of place is needed to investigate the variety of models of urban governance (Le Galès, 1998). In this context, many scholars have insisted on the diverse patterns of social and political fragmentation and the problems of coordination which arise in related case studies. After a wide range of studies focused on these problems of coordination (from the diverse perspectives of integrative institutions, transaction costs, policy instruments or limits to abilities to govern), a new trend of urban studies inspired by new regionalism or game theory more recently investigated the conditions and the forms of institutional collective action (ICA) in order to move from classical coordination problems to the question of cooperative arrangements. From the starting point that effective metropolitan governance does not necessarily require institutional consolidation (Savitch & Vogel, 2000), these scholars share a common concern towards the conditions under which local actors cooperate. They assume that ‘institutional collective action is motivated by a desire to achieve a collective benefit that could not be realized by solitary action and emerges as the result of dynamic political and local government units facing a collective action problem’ (Feiock, 2004: 7). From this perspective, metropolitan governance can be related to every relation between the construction of a specific stake and the structuration of a collective actor i.e. every situation in which actors ‘decide to decide together’ (Giddens, 1993). This is not investigated through a normative point of view but through the hypothesis that some conditions favour such cooperative arrangements and some do not. Whereas institutional perspectives have insisted on the structuring effects of infra-regional EU policies (Gualini, 2004) as well as EU urban agendas (Le Galès, 2003), the impact of boundary extension rules (Feiock & Carr, 2001 ; Carr, 2004), or the role of alternative regional institutions (Sancton, 2001; LeRoux, 2008), game theory rather explained cooperative arrangements by endogenous factors such as joint gains, preference diversity, or asymmetry of players’ positions and strengths (Steinacker, 2004; Matkin & Frederickson, 2009), or new processes of local stakeholders’ control (Burris et al., 2007). However, studying the dynamics of place of course leads to question the impacts of economic and political changes on diverse scales.

Re-scaling the urbanisation process on supra-regional scales

The way Neil Brenner (1999) approached the re-scaling of urbanisation seems to be still relevant today. First, the inherent place dependency of the

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globalisation process has induced strategies to harness flows of capital and compress space-time gaps by managing new knowledge-based services, global events, more connective and lower-cost transports, and so on, all strategies fitting with observations of the dynamics of global cities (Sassen, ; Scott et al., 2001) or David Harvey’s theorisation of capital’s spatio-temporal dynamics. As Brenner noted, much of this city-research agenda has insisted on global hierarchies and thus focused largely upon a single-scale. An alternative way to do could be to focus on single stakes from a multi-scalar perspective. Second, the fact that cities are turned `inside-out’ and `outside-in’ at the same time has had a deep impact on urban morphology, and especially transformed the inherited models of centrality into more polycentric geometries and territorialized networks. Third, the re-territorialisation of transnational capital within major urban regions has been closely linked to a broader re-scaling of the urbanisation process on supra-regional scales.

In the European context, the process of scalar layering of new regions may be explained by altogether the construction of West-European global city-regions and gateways, non-contiguous intercity networks of virtual regions and the sometimes faltering renaissance of administrative regions (Deas & Lord, 2006). All of this leads to “a patchwork of territories with changing boundaries” (Herrschel and Newman, 2002: 23). A good illustration of such a process is given by the evolution of the European Capital of Culture competition. Initially conceived as a way to “bring people from all over Europe closer”1, the contest was conceived as a way to link cultural development and urban regeneration. After the enlargement of the EU, it has become a way to anchor cities of the new member States in the new continental entity, by promoting their geographical centrality in emerging regional and inter-regional frameworks.

In the case of the rescaling of South-European regions, the complex combination of the EU urban and regional policy-making and new processes of adhesion is also puzzled by a mix of old patterns of interregional cooperation – such as the Euro-Mediterranean cooperation which had been implemented since the beginning of the 1970s –, new and unstable trends of neighbourhood policies, and experimental ad hoc structures of geopolitical integration, such as the Union for the Mediterranean. As a result, inter-city networks and urban programmes are frequently incorporated in a wide range of encompassing projects which may compete with each other.

Linking these two perspectives of regenerating cities by managing cultural projects and building new patterns of metropolitan governance is of course a question which is not entirely new. What is still a methodological stake is to take time into account and draw the processes through which this goes on.

1 The ECC idea was born in 1985 from an informal talk between Melina Mercouri, Greek Minister of Culture and her French counterpart, Jack Lang. In June 1985, under the proposal of the former, the Council of the EU adopted a resolution about a “European City of Culture”. The aim was to “bring people from all over Europe closer”. Four targets were assigned to the title: stress the richness and the diversity of European culture; make the people from diverse European cultures meet as well encourage mutual understanding; and reinforce the sense of European citizenship.

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PROCESSES AS RELATIONAL DYNAMICS

Relational approaches of social processes (Emirbayer, 1997 ; Pettigrew, Crossley, 2010 ; Mendez, 2010) are based on two main postulates: 1. Things "are not assumed as independent existences present anterior to any relation, but gain their whole being first in and with the relations which are predicated of them. Such 'things' are terms of relations, and as such can never be 'given' in isolation but only in ideal community with each other" (Cassirer 1953: 36 quoted in Emirbayer, 1997: ), 2. Institutions proceed from such relations and are not a priori driven by logics of domination. Such logics may exist as effects of the process, but not as substantial properties of every kind of relation. In other words, dynamics of competition may lead to forms of monopolisation (Elias, 1995), dynamics of consultation to collegial institutions (Lazega et al., 2010), conflicts to war or so on. As in Harrison White’s conceptualisation of disciplines (interface, arena, or advising), hierarchies and subordination can only be deducted from the whole set of observed relations and may change throughout time.

In the cases we study, this means that no one a priori determines the way cities should present themselves as European Capitals of Culture, even if they of course have to respect some procedural constraints which were previously defined by the European Commission. Self presentation is thus an open process managed by diverse driving forces who may not share the same attempts toward the outputs of such an event, or the same identification to places. As a result, the comparative framework has to take into account the diversity of actors involved in these processes as well the different temporalities of the processes. After considering how far Istanbul 2010 and Marseilles 2013 are comparable case studies, we have chosen to draw the typical sequences of the two processes and to insist on some striking convergence between them.

ISTANBUL 2010 AND MARSEILLES 2013: TWO COMPARABLE C ASE STUDIES

Istanbul and Marseilles were designated as European capitals of culture for years 2010 and 2013. From many perspectives, comparing the two cities could be done by underlining dramatic contrasts. The characteristics of Istanbul and Marseilles differ as far as demographic contrasts matter : the population of Istanbul represents about 13 millions of people while inhabitants of Marseilles are about 900 000. Moreover, the first city is visited by about eight millions of tourists a year and the second by tenth as less. Recent trends in their portuary activity also diverge: while Marseille hosts the head office of CMA-CGM, one of the three leading liner fleet operators in the world, Istanbul hosts a few secondary companies such as Arkas or Turkon. Nevertheless, though both ports have high manutention fees, Marseille’s weight in terms of freight volumes has constantly decreased for a few years and represents about 1 million of TEU, while Istanbul’s volume of freight has increased and represents about 2,5 millions of TEU, due to lower custom fees. Moreover, both cities have been affected by a lack of metropolitan integration due to political struggles.

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Yet, regarding ECC project management, a focus on some common characteristics such as geographical betweenness, ambivalent relations with State institutions, and the fragmentation of metropolitan governance proves to be meaningful.

GEOGRAPHICAL BETWEENNESS AND COSMOPOLITANISM

The situation of Marseilles and Istanbul as “gateways” – as urban planners learnedly say - into macro-regional spaces is quite comparable : Istanbul interfaces Asia and Europe while Marseilles interfaces Europe and Africa. These interstitial situations in the Mediterranean imply constant migrations and most advanced cosmopolitan lifestyles in their countries of origin. The social history of both cities was marked by waves of transnational mobility, rural depopulation, and consequent coexistence of cultural communities, with contrasted periods of political integration and conflicts of all kinds (spatial clashes, religious struggles or so on). As a result, following the Weberian typology of cities, these two cities cannot be seen as either cities of merchants, leisure class or civil servants, but as cities of migrants, that is cities structured and dominated by social groups coming from high geographical and social mobility.

FRAGEMENTED METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE WITHIN EMERGING URBAN

REGIONS

In terms of economic development, both cities have been affected by industrial decline and dependence on the State interventionism coupled with difficulties regarding the achievement of urban-region governance. In Marseilles, the beginning of the XXth century was marked by the apogee of a marshallian district which organized systemic interdependance between portuary activities, colonial exchanges and trade, industry and local services and was dominated by patronal dynasties grouped in the Chamber of Commerce (Zalio, 2004). After WWII, advances in processes of decolonization provoked a harsh decrease in activities based on the trade or the transformation of raw material from the colonies. This was partly compensated by the implantation of oil and chemical industries on the new portuary area located in Fos-sur-Mer. Afterwhile, in the 1960s, the Gaullian technocracy implemented a new kind of planning called the ‘Métropoles d’équilibre’ program. In this context, Marseilles was supposed to become a big metropolitan area on the basis of a voluntaristic plan called the Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement de l’Aire Métropolitaine Marseillaise. But most of the cities of the outskirts were governed by the Communist Party, and Gaston Defferre, the famous Mayor of Marseilles affiliated to the Socialist Party (SFIO and then PS) rejected any kind of cooperation with these municipalities. This is the main reason why the project of the Metropolitan Area of Marseilles (AMM) failed.

In the early 1990, the gap between a prosperous back-country and a declining post-industrial urban centre has been widen by altogether a multi-polarization of resources, social inequalities and political rivalries. Rather than a process of metropolization, we assist to a process of archipellisation which has weaken the capitale. In sum, Marseilles has suffered from a decline in terms of economy, demography and reputation. Partitions between the city centre and

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the outskirts had become a major brake in the path to the achievement of metropolitan institutions adjusted to functional needs of a growing conurbation (Olive and Oppenheim, 2001). On one hand, the demographic weight and the administrative centrality of Marseilles conferred to its elites a strong legitimacy and a constant control of political resources, though the decrease of national public expenses was weakening the amount of privileges distributed through networks of political clienteles (Mattina, 2005). On the other hand, the dynamic development of peripheral cities favoured autonomous plans and projects which did not fit to or deeply reinterpreted the AMM project. On the Western side (Fos-sur-Mer), which had been left out of the city control, port activities began to compete the ones of Marseilles, and oil industries remained disconnected from the local traditional structuration of trading. On the Eastern and Northern sides, the construction of technopoles specialized in microelectronics (Gardanne), luxury shipbuilding (La Ciotat), computer science and services (Aix), led to sparse economic development and weak cross-capitalisation processes.

Nevertheless, at the end of the 1980s, Robert Vigouroux, the successor of Gaston Defferre, focused on two major projects: the transformation of the warehousing area of the port (La Joliette) and the cultural-led regeneration of an industrial area next to the railway station (La Belle de Mai). The first project was eased by the fact that the old warehouses had been bought by a property developer. It led to the building of a big tertiary block perceived as the symbol of the shift to post-industrial development. The second turned industrial wasteland into a modern complex of cultural programs and industries. With a strong support from the State, these projects were conceived or exploited in the 1990s by a dedicated multi-stakeholder Public Organization called Euroméditerranée. Created in 1995, this organization became the armed wing of the management of urban regeneration programs elaborated by the State and the municipality. Harnessing investments in tertiary activities and gentrifying the city centre with the help of banks and foreign property developers and financial institutions (such as Lehman Brothers) were at stake (Fournier & Mazzella, 2004 ; Garnier, Zimmermann, 2006).

Promoting Marseilles as a European gateway to Mediterranean economies, the new planning strategy implemented since 1995 has been oriented towards a rebuilding of the Mediterranean façade of the city, with architectural projects such as the new headquarters tower of CMA-CGM, a Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MUCEM) on the sea front, etc. However, though it has been a leading force since 1995, Euroméditerranée did not accelerate the structuration of metropolitan institutions. Many professionals in the field of economics, environment and urban planning, engineering, and academics. had grouped in the 1990s in a Club d’échanges et de réflexion de l’Aire métropolitaine marseillaise (AMM) in order to promote such institutions and to support the Left for regional elections. Though these experts presented their thoughts as “depoliticized”, the electoral success of the Left at the regional ballot in 1998 promoted some of them into the Cabinet of the President of the Regional Council. But the building of metropolitan governance has much more been a top-down process than a bottom-up one. Indeed, the implementation of a 1999 law known as the Chevènement Law

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played a major role in the process. In 2000, the Prefect finally created a public organization, the Communauté Urbaine Marseille-Provence Métropole (MPM), thirty years after the creation of similar institutions in the other main cities in the context of the Métropoles d’équilibre programme. MPM does not include Aix-en-Provence and the neighbour towns, which had for long maintained rivalry ties with Marseilles. With a budget of 1,5 billion of euros, MPM is in charge with urban and transport planning, economic development, housing, social policies, water services, hygiene, and environmental policies. In 2008, rivalries between Marseilles and surrounding cities as well as internal division within the UMP party led to the election of a socialist as the Chair of the organization, though the right had a comfortable majority.

Even if Istanbul has had a very different trajectory, with greater integration of metropolitan institutions and planning, political fragmentation is also a characteristic of the urban area.

When the New republic of Turkey was created in 1923 by Ataturk, Istanbul was demeaned of its status of capital of the country in favour of Ankara, in order to manifest the break with the Ottoman past. At this time, Istanbul was affected by a strong demographic decrease, losing half of its population. This process was marked by the worsening of the cultural and economic regression which had started during the Balkan Wars and the First World War. The exile of the Ottoman dynasty, the leaving of central administrations and embassies to Ankara both weakened the economic structures of this over-equipped city. After the exchange of population between Turkey and Greece in 1923, the Greek population began to harshly decrease, followed by the Jewish and Armenian communities. This led to the loss of the majority of shopkeepers, artisans, and non-Muslim businessmen which represented 80 % of national business elites (Bugra, 1995, 67-68). By implementing a planned economy and a strong State interventionism, the New Turkish State then supported the emergence of a new national bourgeoisie whose power was highly concentrated (Sönmez, 1992, 14). The implementation of the Marshall Plan, and the experimentation of multipartism in 1954, with a liberal interlude (1959-1960) and the emergence of a new private sector in the context of the restoration of planned economy (Bazin de Tapia, 1997) opened an era of industrialization and modernization of Istanbul, despite its recurrent backwardness. The economic development was stimulated by the increasing liquidities of these companies and their first foreign investors. During this era, investments in public services, housing and urban planning, were supported and controlled by the IMF. Istanbul thus benefited from rural depopulation, which caused the spread of shantytowns and the development of new districts in the periphery of the city.

After the 1980 coup d’Etat and the support of the Programme of Structural Adjustment of the IMF, Turkey entered global market economy, and Istanbul was incited to compete with European metropolises. The Özal government decentralised some national industries in the extreme periphery of Istanbul, in order to ease investment in central areas of tertiary activities (Sönmez, 1990). In this context, the 1984 municipal law extended the devolution and fiscal resources of municipalities. Istanbul became autonomous enough to define and implement reforms and the building of new infrastructures.

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Bedrettin Dalan (parti Anavatan), the 1984-1989 mayor, initiated urban regeneration projects, especially in terms of public transmission lines and transport networks, and developed tourism. As a result, the city managed to locate more than a quarter of the Turkish firms which were venturing or allying with foreign investors, and developed new quarters for gated communities, which gentrified the city-center. The demographic boom, with the massive arrival of migrants from Anatolia, amplified spatial segregation and integration issues. Urban projects which aimed to develop business and tourism were boosted by the election of Ali Müfit Gürtüna, and were continued by Kadir Topbas (AKP). The attractiveness of the city is now strengthened by the management of congresses, diplomatic meetings, exhibitions, international festivals, sport competitions.

Nevertheless, since the 1990s, the city has been socially highly fragmented, under the effects of tourism and culture-based urban development and recurrent problems of metropolitan infrastructures, pollution, traffic jams, which are quite comparable to the Marseilles ones. Implementing a strategy of competitiveness and trying to solve all these recurrent problems is a very difficult challenge in terms of governance, especially when boundaries and structures evolve. Structures of governance have been affected by numerous transformations. In 2004, the new metropolitan municipality of Istanbul began to be in charge with urban planning.

The Turkish local government system lays on a mix of territorial administrative decentralization (déconcentration), based on the framework of provinces inherited from the Young Turkish movement, and new regional agencies framed on the basis of the European NUTS and dedicated to economic development (Massardier-Tek, 2005 ; Montabone, 2011 ; Lagendik et al., 2009). In some cities, like in French major cities, municipalities are organized through a two-level institutional framework, with districts and metropolitan municipalities (büyük sehir belediyesi). These institutions were created by a 1984 Law. At the smaller scale, district municipalities (ilçce belediye) have been constantly reframed and fragmented, and reached the number of 39 in 2004. These ‘second rank’ municipalities are managed by a mayor and a district council and are in charge of education, health, police and planning permission. Most of them also boast about leading cultural policies. But their room of manoeuvre depends on both vertical transfers from the metropolitan municipality and the extent of their fiscal autonomy. At the larger scale, metropolitan municipalities are considered as the ‘first rank’ ones. They are managed by a directly elected metropolitan mayor and a council which comes from district councils. Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) is called Istanbul Büyük Şehir Belediyesi. The devolution of IMM was extended at the end of the 1990s, especially in the spheres of urban planning, housing and patrimony. Its budget is huge – 2,5 billions of euros, which are trebled by complementary funds provided by private companies. In 2004-2005, the fiscal reform reinforced the autonomy of the IMM, by opening new opportunities such as benefiting from loans on financial markets, easing auction rules, and so on. Such a kind of decentralization had been prayed for by Turkish corporate elites, and supported by the AKP, whose Prime Minister is a former mayor of Istanbul.

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In spite of recent empowerment, Istanbul’s system of governance remains fragmented and complex, marked by redundancy and conflicts in and between the municipal levels as well as with central administrations (Perouse 2004 ; Elicin-Arikan, 2005 ; OECD, 2008), such as the prefect or the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. This confrontational pattern of relations is marked by a high level of enclosure toward citizens and third actors such as professional and non profit ones (Bayraktar, 2007). Nevertheless, a lot of associations (more than 50 000), foundations (more than 2500) and trade-unions developed in the 1990s. This third sector is geographically and socially polarized, with a weak influence on local governance. In 1996, the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements gave them an opportunity to organize a forum on the governance of the city, which was considered as a premiere, with many voices denouncing the IMM leadership. In this context, the Istanbul 2010 project was considered as an opportunity to open the system of governance and strengthen local democracy.

NATIONALISM AND POWERFUL STATES IN THE MANAGEMENT OF

CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

The comparability of the two cases is not only based on common fragmentation of metropolitan governance. It is also related to the role of the State in the development of cultural institutions in the two countries.

In Turkey, national cultural policies have been a major way to build up institutional pillars of secularism and nationalism. Mustapha Kemal’s design of the national cultural policy was based on the political goal of substituting occidental culture to the Ottoman culture. This was characterized by forms of mimetic development of prestigious European museums, academies and troupes, and by the renewal of Anatolian traditions, which were supposed to constitute the new pedestal of Turkish identity. As a result, most of the institutions in charge with national heritage have been governed by national administrations. But, since Turkey has developed and opened its economy, the kemalist heritage has blurred and been more and more oriented toward merchandising (Perouse, 2004). In 2003, the Ministry of Culture was amalgamated with the Ministry of Tourism. Yet, the decline of the State interventionism in cultural matters is relieved by an increasing set of initiatives led by industrial dynasties, associations and foundations such as the powerful IKSV, and more recently by banks (Monceau, 1998). Based on fiscal incentives, these initiatives form a varied but elitist cultural supply (festivals, exhibitions, museums, artists in residence, etc.).

IMM (AKP) has for a few years actively invested in cultural projects aiming at reactivating the Ottoman heritage and transforming the self presentation of the city as an Ottoman one (Lepont, 2008).

In this context, managing Istanbul 2010 was a big challenge, with a third sector calling for democratic alternatives, conservative central administrations, and elitist private foundations (Morvan, Lepont Ökmekler, 2010).

In France, the emergence of national cultural policies after World War II corresponds to De Gaulle’s wish to enforce French influence throughout the world in a context of decolonisation (Poujol, 1991). From de Gaulle to

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Mitterrand, the French Ministry of Culture has constantly been the driving force in supporting and appraising the diverse spheres of cultural development. The process of decentralisation which was initiated by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand has never meant the end of the control of national administrations on cultural institutions. Local government has been incited to fund these institutions but has had to manage it under the constraint of the central administration’s will to maintain its monopoly on cultural appraisal (Friedberg & Urfalino, 1986 ; Mulcahy, 1998). In the case of Marseilles, there has been since the 1980s a kind of division of labour between the traditional institutions controlled by the Ministry of Culture (operas, theatres, museums, academies) and backcountry or transnational initiatives taken by the newly formed Region with EU funds and its own ones (support to festivals, edition, Provençal and Mediterranean culture, etc.). Quite meaningful is the fact that in 2001, when MPM was created, it has not been charged of cultural policy management. Contrary to Istanbul, the emergence of private foundations in the landscape of cultural institutions is a quite recent phenomenon, but the birth of the ECC project can also be located in this emerging social milieu.

COMPARISON OF THE PROCESSES

Running for the ECC contest and managing a final program is a complex process through which social groups embedded in different spheres of activity and levels of governance interact. In this section, we compare the chains of application and project management and replace them in three typical sequences: an initial one rooted in relations between local elites, followed by recasting operations led by European institutions and newcomers from administrations and advice networks, and finally dissents provoked by both the come back of local politicians into the institutionalisation of supervision and the programme-setting process and the divergent views on the coherence of the project.

SEQUENCE 1: LOCAL COMMITMENT

In both cases, advocating the run for the contest has initially been a bottom-up process in which executives of local companies and foundations focused on the opportunity for the city to be recognized as an ECC. In other words, these elites who interfaced local companies and cultural non profit organizations first appraised the achievement of this EU label as a way to earn a star and improve their own business environment.

In Istanbul, executives from big foundations (as IFCA), cultural non-profit organizations and academics, who presented themselves as ‘the civil society’, decided to launch the candidacy of Istanbul for the European Capital of Culture label. They first gained the support of the deputy-governor in charge of Culture and Tourism (the only civil servant for a long time) and progressively mobilized political authorities. This sequence was defined by most of them as a four year training process through which they had to convince Ankara political authorities that their initiative was not only good for a few people but for the whole city as well as the whole country. The project was presented as a way to bring proofs of the European-ness of the country

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and the capacity to fit with EU attempts such as democratic governance and civic empowerment. The lack of support from the national government, combined with debates which arose in the European Parliament (2005) in order to limit the rights to compete opened to EU third parts, provoked a major crisis. During this crisis, the initial promoters simply evoked there wish to give up. In a context of internal controversies, newcomers were called upon the head of the project management team for their ability to lobby EU institutions. Nuri Colakoglu, an influential business man, which was also member of the board of the patronal Tukish organization TÜSIAD, and played an important lobbying role in UE institutions (Visier, Polo, 2008) headed the new team and convinced the Turkish government (with the help from Egemen Bagis, congressman and advisor for the first ministry). The temporary statu quo of the EU Parliament, as well as the official support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which was obtained after four years, encouraged them to go on. Their programme insisted on the grounding of Istanbul in European values such as Aristotle’s philosophy; Based on the idea of the city of four elements, it promoted Istanbul as the common heritage of Europe and Turkey, with joined shows and exhibitions from European and Turkish artists, enlightenment of the Pera European Quarter, the baroque vestiges and the Galata Tower (which had been built by Venitians), or remembering the long time spent in the city by Marco Polo or Franz Liszt. This European façade was combined with more undetermined attempts toward cultural diversity, social cohesion, cultural democratization, or new governance system, all kinds of framing which would build bridges into the major values promoted by European institutions. In November 2006, Istanbul was finally designated as an ECC for 2010, with Pécs (Hungary) and the Ruhr Region (Germany), one year after the offcial opening of the negotiations process. The jury appreciated the European nature of the programme and more particularly this bottom-up process wich was considered as a good practice.

In Marseilles, the « Mécènes du Sud » association, which grouped business elites in a kind of private foundations’ spin off, proclaimed in 2003 their ‘envy to confer to Marseilles its deserved status in the alliance of Mediterranean and European cultural capitals’. ‘To awake the sleeping beauty’ was the first slogan used by them to promote one of their leaders to the Head of the Chamber of Commerce in 2004. As Marseilles had been ranked as the 23rd attractive European city by a French central agency of development (the DATAR) one year before, Jacques Pfister was elected on the basis of a Top 20 ambition. For his supporters, getting involved in inter-city competition implied to spot Marseilles’s assets regarding its position as the main Mediterranean gateway in France. Such a self-presentation was in line with the long-standing history of the Chamber of Commerce whose activity has always depended on the Mediterranean traffic. The run for the ECC competition was also perceived as a way to remove barriers on the path to urban region integration. The mobilisation of local business leaders was expressed as a “territorial commitment” in order to bypass the bad reputation of the city caused by political scandals, repeated strikes, weaknesses of the economic outcomes and failures in the process of metropolitan integration.

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As in Istanbul, a complex signing up campaign began in 2004. But its aims were less to convince the central government than to broaden the territorial basis of the project and present the ECC as the initiative of an original urban region which would encompass the present fragmentation between Aix, Marseilles, Istres, Arles, Salon, Aubagne, and Toulon. All the political authorities from municipal, metropolitan, departmental and regional councils were thus invited to sit on the board of the Marseille-Provence 2013 association.

In both cases, bottom up processes led by managerial groups presenting themselves as the civil society or the representatives of new cultural dynamics gained the closest attention from the cultural administration of the European Commission, who later acted as a facilitator in the process.

SEQUENCE 2 NEWCOMERS AND CONTROVERSIES ON THE METROPOLITAN

FAÇADES

In both cities, the beginning of the concrete work to define an ECC programme opened a second sequence marked by interventions of new institutions and professional groups, confrontations, and recasting initiatives.

In Istanbul, promoters from the "civil society", the IMM, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Governorship of Istanbul created a multipartite ad hoc organization composed of committees and then, wrote a common bill with the newcomers in order to set up a concrete project framework. As political fragmentation was high, presenting a global strategy was difficult. This was all the more unachievable since public authorities had not taken part to the writing of the initial ‘Aristotelian’ programme. In 2007, this project was altered by newcomers into a mix of European culture and global city strategies characterized by a patchwork of projects which allowed to go back to a classical division of labour. Beyond the ambitions to restore the European heritage, managers of foundations and cultural institutions wished to organize some prestigious events which would signal ambitions in modern and contemporary arts while others, rather promoted social or alternative projects. For instance, the History foundation wanted to promote the awareness of the cosmopolitan tradition of the city and a new vision of the Turkish historical background through the project of the creation of a controversial "City museum". For the metropolitan municipality of Istanbul, yet, urban regeneration such as the construction of a spectacular Kanal, consitutted a prior axis (Morvan, 2011). What could be achievable on the board, when all groups had to compromise for winning, then became much more cofrontational. Especially, the urban regeneration of the poor gipsy quarter of Sulukule exemplifies the kind of dissent which is related to place identification. The project developped by the IMM was perceived as a wish to break up the Roms by breaking down their quarter and their dissemination throughout the whole urban area, because of the over-indebtedness generally induced by gentrification. Promoters from non-profit organizations defined and proposed alternative projects and initiated demonstrations and other collective movements to make the IMM give-up. Furthermore, the IMM wished to develop some artistic projects which would promote Ottoman culture, which is generally considered as a religious one by the leaders of the secular world of

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foundations and associations. While the latter denounced populism, the IMM criticized the elitism of the foundations: this was actually less related to a religious opposition than to a clash between the ancient economic elite and the emergent one. Symmetrically, the ambitious projects of patrimony restoration promoted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism did not convince the civil pioneers, who suspected a governmental preference for quick financial returns and unsustainable management.

In the case of Marseilles, newcomers were on one side a new project manager, Bernard Latarjet, who was a former executive of major cultural institutions in Paris, and on the other side European civil servants. The initial project based on a Mediterranean façade fitted with the shifts in French foreign policy led by the new President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was the main promoter of the Union for the Mediterranean in European arenas. Conversely, the experts from the European Commission, who had been consulted before the final application procedure, insisted on the necessity to anchor the project in a more continental belonging to Europe, which meant to ground the project in the urban region. The tensions between the French government and the European civil servants paradoxically favoured Marseilles’s project, as it was competing at the national level with projects held by Lyons and Bordeaux. The selection of the Marseilles-Provence project was made only two monthes after the inaugural Summit of the Union for the Mediterranean which had been organized in Paris by French Government.

Locally, the success of Marseille’s application to become an ECC does not mean that things had always gone an easy way. Indeed, inserting the programme into a virtual urban region named Marseilles-Provence suggested that it could give value to the Provence ‘s traditions and language supported by localities of up-country, while the French Ministry of culture was conversely insisting on noble arts and the role of the most prestigious institutions, academies and performers. For Marseille’s authorities, the relation with the Ministry was focused on national commitment toward the achievement of a museum dedicated to the intercultural dialogue between Europe and the Mediterranean whose opening is planned the beginning of the 2013 festivities. The MUCEM will be located on the old city waterfront, and considered as the emblem of the Mediterranean cultural façade of the city. Its function is suggested by the insider architect Rudy Rucciotti when he describes the Mucem gesture. It reveals the Mucem provides a both physical and symbolic Mediterranean façade to the city : “The Mucem is a fragile structure. It is a structure which has not only the skin and the bones, it is also a muscularian structure, it is a nervous structure. Placed before this metaphisycal horizon, which is the Mediteranean, it scrutinizes it, it is sent back to its continuous paranoia. I am expecting from the Mucem that it will accomplish the goal of each museum, which is a political goal. I think the Mucem will be at the heart of the Mediterranean and European debate”. The concretisation of a Mediterranean façade by a material one on the waterfront is explicit in the urban planners discourses : “the architectural culture can not be separate from the urban culture. It plays the integral part of the birth and revitalization of the urban identity” (Brunner, 2007). As a result, the executive manager of the project, Bernad Latarjet, and the Chair of the association, Jacques Pfister, had

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to act as perpetual intermediaries between the promoters of up country rooted and folkloric culture, professional groups recognized and supported by the Ministry of Culture, and promoters of the most geopolitical perspective of Euro-Mediterranean transnational integration.

In both cities, writing the final project implied to recast it by building some consent on the basis of a compromise between the EU Commission’s attempts toward European history and values, self presentation of cultural institutions’ executives as the prior spokespersons of the project, managerial ambitions regarding the geopolitical positioning of the city, and political authorities concerned with fund-raising of new infrastructure.

SEQUENCE 3. POLITISATION, LEGITIMACY PROCESS AND DISTURBANCES

Implementing new forms of metropolitan governance is something uneasy for any kind of city. In the cases of Istanbul and Marseille, where political fragmentation is high, the project management phase which succeeded to the designation of the cities as an ECC was marked by an intense come back of local political leaders and a sequence of stronger politisation and dissent.

In the Turkish case, a Law was voted in 2007 in order to reform the management of the project, with the creation of a big bureaucratic agency and the consecration of central and local public administrations.

Though Nuri Colakoglu remained the top manager of the project, the weight of NGO in governance structures harshly decreased. In 2009, in a context of municipal election, Nuri Colakoglu and some of his collaborators finally resigned for ‘ethical reasons’. This was the final result of both a big dissent about the allocation of the budget accumulated on the basis of a special oil tax, and a political conflict between the AKP and the Holding Dogan Publication in which Nuri Colakoglu was n°2. Sekip Avdagic, Vice-Chair of the Chamber of Commerce, who was closer to political elites replaced him. But this did not mean that the IMM, the prefect of Istanbul, and the Ministry of Tourism and Culture began to work hand in hand. In August 2008, the IMM created its own « Istanbul 2010 » section in order to manage an autonomous project with its own budget (Morvan et al., 2010). In the final project, the theme of the four elements had completely disappeared in favour of a disciplinary division of labour: literature, music, urban projects, traditional arts, visual arts, etc. 537 projects were thus labellized «Istanbul 2010» (February 2010). Furthermore, more than 70% of the budget was allocated to the restoration of patrimony, especially in the old city peninsule. This shift from a European façade to the one of an Ottoman global city was eased by, on one hand, the decline of Turkey’s chances to join the EU, and on the other hand, the economic boom of Turkey. As Goffman noted it, social frames are grounded in sociocultural orders which may change from one time sequence to another. The ability of local politicians to take over the process at its phase of achievement is less an usurpation than a power to recast operations from both the perspective of financial and political constraints.

In Marseilles, metropolitan business leaders had managed to impose a self presentation of the city as an urban region reconciling Marseille and its provençal back country and opening a gateway to the Mediterranean. Yat, a

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few monthes after the official success of the project, a politcal episode marked the taking over of the project by Marseille elected representatives. Renaud Muselier, former State Secretary of Foreign Affairs and former first deputy mayor, was charged by the Mayor of Marseille of a new reflexion about Marseille’s strategy about Marseill-Provence 2013, just before being charged by the President of the French Republic to create a Cultural Council of the Union for the Mediterranean. More recently, he was appointed to the Head of the Institut du monde arabe, a governmental fondation designed to “let know and spread the arabic culture” and to “bridge the gap between France and arabic world”. In this context, Renaud Muselier then intended to promote a new device called ‘the unique box office’, dedicated to the support of cultural projects, urban regeneration, transports and hygiene plans. This device is perceived as a war machine against the methodology proposed by the executive committee of Marseille-Provence 2013. This imposed to Jacques Pfister to edit a contradictory press release in order to defend the monopoly of the association concerning the selection of cultural projects, and the related official spendings. He then was supported by press editorials and open letters from the Left notables. Then, a few monthes after this episode, the metropolitan community of Toulon decided to withdraw from the project for financial reasons, while the Mayor of Aix-en-Provence suspended part of her official financial commitment in order to protest against location choices concerning the Head Quarters of a future common University. In 2011, the resignment of the executive manager Bernard Latarjet was announced in the night of the first round of local elections. Afterwards, in the context of the budget cuts implemented by the French government to solve the debt crisis, a series of controversial decisions opposed local authorities to the Ministry of Culture in terms of nominations and subventions. The 2011 year was marked by a series of events of resigning, oppositions, political blackmail, which are comparable to the ones which occured in Istanbul in 2008-2009.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Usual success stories of cities whose selection as ECC may have boosted their development and the rescaling of their governance provide interesting assumptions about cultural projects as factors of political change, but can’t see the wood for the trees. As noticed in the EU official report about ECCs (Palmer, 2005), dissent and executive managers’ resign has become the standard of project management in this domain, and generally occur between the official designation and the inauguration of the ECC year. This indicates that sequences of intense recasting of the self presentation of cities operated by a wide range of groups and individuals can be seen as usual sources of dissent. What is striking in the two cases presented here is the gap between relations of compromise on what should be the metropolitan façade in a context of inter-city formal competition and relations of political conflict when political priorities have to be drawn by future ECCs. It is quite evident that the working out of metropolitan façades in the context of ECC contests is not self sufficient in terms of rescaling metropolitan governance. Conversely, long-living routines in political processes of cooperation might be a structural condition of achievement of a more or less consensual identification to the place and the event, which would give value to it.

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The comparison we drew between Istanbul 2010 and Marseille 2013 helps understand how far changes in urban governance and political regulation are at stake in the management of ECC projects. Though scholars generally consider such projects as urban regeneration projects and new social conditions of creativity and attractiveness, we have intended to focus on the frames of collective action and the way they compete in common entreprises to re-present the city. We have shown that rather than considering a fictional final product of a campaign, it is worth analyzing the process of mobilisation through a series of sequences which could vary from one case to another, eventhough convergences were striking in our study.

It is never easy to conduct investigations on ‘identity’. Paying attention to façades, in the line of Goffmanian urban sociology seemed to us a good way to understand how a wide range of actors try to elaborate a common self-presentation of their city. Indeed, one should not postulate the existence of a collective actor (Le Galès, 1998) on expressions and impressions (Goffman, 1950) would be hegemonic. Following Ulf Hannerz when he claims that the Goffmanian approach of self-presentation may contribute to a better understanding of interactions on political scenes, our use of the notion of façade rather intends to provide a dynamic view of « the division of the work of definition » (Goffman, 1950).

Even if designating actors and groups who lead the process in the diverse sequences is achievable, understanting the bifurcations in the process of project management is far less easy. In Marseilles and Istanbul, such bifurcations seem to have led to a mix of intense coordination and weak cooperation. Actors commited in the building of urban region projects have had to face the political fragmentation of metropolitan governance. In the first case, buiding broader metropolitan institutions was at stake, though in the second one the preexistence of the metropolitan municipality had eased the integration of the peripheries. But in both cases, unstable cooperation can be linked to conflicting scales and skills which structure social relations (Brenner, 1999).

What is quite interesting in these two cases is that the managerial driving forces of the ‘European Istanbul’ and the ‘Mediterranean Marseilles’ were both confronted to major shifts in the macro-political orders which supported the reframing of metropolitan façades. On the one hand, urban political take over was eased by the beginning of a ‘mourning process’ toward Turkey’s adhesion to the EU, and on the other hand, getting back into old ways of local wars of attrition was all the easier since the political consequences of the Gaza war and the rise of Mediterranean revolutions was mortgaging the future of the so called Union for the Mediterranean, which could be seen as a driving force of rescaling. This imposes to keep critical distance toward assumptions about the direct effects of good practices or good tools of management on urban development. When the macro-political orders in which social frames are grounded collapse, no magic recipe can lead to the achievement of success stories. The example of London 2012 in the context of the UK financial crisis and the rise of urban riots indicates quite well that multi-scalar approaches are once again needed when considering the simple question on how urban societies may intend to present themselves to the rest of the world.

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As far as the working out of metropolitan façades consists in defining urban singularities, the heterogeneity of spaces in which judgment is formed matters. In the context of the promotion a European Capital of Culture, these spaces are not only the central city but up-country cities, regional public spheres, national cultural administrations, European institutional arenas, all spaces in which a wide range of intermediaries ground the legitimacy of their appraisal and the cognitive background of their critical judgment. Paying attention to the consent they form leads to insist on the coherence of social façades rather than their multiplicity, and to underestimate political factors which determine the tangibility of the adequacy of urban forms to these façades. Focusing on the complexity of processes rather than postulating intrinsic power of products allows to ground theory in social dynamics, and not only in urban management modelling.

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