There’s an idea that culture can be used to “revive declining places, and the idea of urban living in general.” But does it really work? “The origins of this vigorous, commercially-driven view of culture in cities are in the wider free-market revolution of the 70s and 80s. Large, abandoned city buildings have been converted into cultural facilities at least since the French Revolution, when artists took over empty churches and mansions. But the idea that such conversions should be centrepieces of urban renewal only took root, in Britain at least, with the discovery of the ‘inner city’ as a political issue in the late 70s and the growing official reluctance to address its problems through more traditional, and expensive, social reforms.”