Regenerating what? The politics and geographies of actually existing regeneration

Since the late 1970s urban regeneration has become a powerful catchword associated with processes of neo-liberalization, post-modernization and globalization in a context of increasingly immaterialized capitalism. In Europe and most notably in continental Europe, the advent of the European Union has intersected with the aforementioned structural processes at the global scale. The resulting experiences of urban regeneration in Europe reflect the intermingling of European models of urban governance with broader processes of globalization and neo-liberalization. As a result, the term urban regeneration in continental Europe appears to be rather indeterminate in its outcomes compared with the Anglo-American context in which this and related terms were originally coined. The Chapter develops this argument by using the illustrative cases of the regeneration processes in central areas of Turin and Naples, two sized cities in Italy located in the prosperous North and the less advantaged South, respectively.