The “democracy cube” revised: Assessing a culture-led regeneration process in Bergamo City

Reflecting on the threats of the commodification of art and culture, often driven by top-down cultural policy designs, the paper analyses a collaborative administration procedure between a local public authority (the Municipality of Bergamo) and a social cooperative (Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo). The “Special Public-Private Partnership”, a recent regulation activated for the first time in Italy, led to an effective and participated culture-led urban regeneration process, still acting in Bergamo city (North-east of Italy) and resulted in a best practice of active citizenship in support of social needs. The research question is to understand how far these participatory processes result in a wager democratic space concerning traditional public procurements. We analyse three dimensions strictly connected with the framework of the Democracy Cube developed by Anchor Fung in 2006 to represent the institutional space in participatory governance processes: public engagement mechanism; decision-making power; and skilling of actors involved. The visual representation lets us understand the added value of collaborative administration practices and where they could be optimized. The long run of the agreement (20 years) helped the social cooperative to be itself an aggregator of further cultural and social regeneration process, connecting other stakeholders and activating new relationships within the local community. •Bottom-up culture-led urban regeneration process can avoid the commodification of culture.•Italian recent devices of collaborative administration help to spread participatory co-planning practices.•The ‘democracy cube’ can be adapted to measure the effectiveness of public-private partnerships.•The ‘Special Public-Private Partnership’ is a valid regulatory scheme that allows effective co-planning procedures.