The Creation of a Second Centre Pompidou in Metz: Social Embedding of a New Regional Cultural Facility and Formation of a Strategic Action Field

The present article analyses the process of the creation of a second Centre Pompidou outside Paris, based on the hypothesis that the success of the project depends on its social embeddedness. It is argued that a strong indicator of this embeddedness is the emergence of a new strategic action field--crystallizing the meeting and linking of different actors with divergent interests, but shared understandings about the common stakes. The process starts from a coincidence of cultural, political and economic motives that have their origins in related fields. These different interests are promoted by a few key protagonists who negotiate a preliminary, but still fragile social order, mixing idealistic ideas and values with political and economic issues. The analysis reveals that social institutions of French culture exert a strong influence, while internal governance units in Paris retain significant powers of control. Although new network connections seem to form smoothly around the Centre Pompidou-Metz globally in the region, in both the cultural and the economic domain they have developed quite unevenly .