Èlia Casals-Alsina graduated in Musical Performance at ESMuC (Barcelona) and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Humanities and a master’s degree in Cultural Management at the UOC, in all three cases with honours in the final thesis. In 2020 she was awarded a Santander-UdL pre-doctoral scholarship and began her PhD studies at the UdL (University of Lleida) as part of the “Territory, heritage and culture” programme under the direction of Dr Paül i Agustí. Since then, she teaches the subject “Cultural and city tourism” at this university. She has done study stays and internships in Germany and Italy and has professional experience in the fields of music performance, teaching and cultural management. In the academic field, she has been awarded mobility grants to perform fieldwork in the Ruhr Valley (Germany) and in Torino (Italy) in order to develop a transnational comparative study for her thesis, that examines the role of cultural policies and urban regeneration in postindustrialised contexts. She has presented part of her research in the 2022 TICCIH Congress in Montréal (Canada).

Email: eliacasals.acad@gmail.com

Project description

Culture-led policies and adaptive reuse in Europe’s post-industrial urban regions. A sustainable way to face deindustrialisation?

Her thesis examines the implications –and potential –that culture-led policies, urban regeneration and adadaptive reuse have in managing industrial heritage. Specifically, it analyses the effects that the resignification of former industrial buildings and their transformation into cultural facilities have for social, urban and economic regeneration in European postindustrial regions. The research aims to assess the positive and negative outcomes of this approach through three different case studies (Barcelona, Ruhr valley and Torino) in order to determine whether these transformations can be considered as sustainable. Some of the matters that are examined include: how this process might have pushed out the labour class from the areas where it used to live and work; the current engagement between the cultural sector and the territory; the real impact of creative industries in those regions; or an estimation of the degree of touristification and gentrification due to this transformation.