The Neoliberal Conception of Cultural Spaces in European Cities, A Pragmatic Fatality?[La conception "néolibérale" des espaces culturelles dans les villes européennes, une fatalité pragmatique ?]

From museum cafés and pop‑up boutiques in temporary "event" exhibitions, today's institutional cultural venues have taken on a new look since the 1980's. While catering areas and branding logos have multiplied inside museums, library-shops are being spatially reorganised into merchandised gift and souvenir stalls. This visible makeover can be viewed as the concrete face of a deeper neoliberal logic that reshapes how cities produce, manage and experience culture. Building on an interdisciplinary, critical review of urban‑studies literature, we question the claim that the neoliberal configuration of cultural spaces - particularly public institutional venues - is a pragmatic or inevitable development. In this article, we consider neoliberalism as a current paradigm that permeates our societies, where the state's role promotes development through market-driven mechanisms. It constitutes an ideological discourse which has become a hegemonic narrative, legitimising a set of normative rules and practices extending across multiple layers of social life. Using French public museums as a case study, we trace the historic shift from the welfare‑state model of cultural provision at the very beginning of a consumption‑driven leisure society to a society that progressively develops on market oriented policy, imperatives and metrics, in which cultural institutions compete more than ever for resources and public attention in a leisure-market society. Through development of tax incentives, public‑private partnerships (PPPs), and market performance‑based management (KPIs, branding, service diversification, outsourcing, financialisation), the public sector as multi-scalar entities, more or less directly fuels a proliferation of private initiatives that it simultaneously endures. In fact, these managerial logics applied at each scale of public actions, reconfigure museums into hybrid entrepreneurial entities that aim to capture very differentiated private capital (patronage to merchandising) and, in the process, amplify socio‑spatial inequalities by promoting individualisation and distinction dynamics, thus reallocating for instance public (seen here as public sector and also people) economic and attention resources toward private economic and reputational or symbolic capital. While acknowledging the existence of a certain degree of organisation and legislative protection in France that may challenge the 'neoliberal' label, we emphasise that these same market-oriented dynamics, which are aimed at enhancing an institution's attractiveness and diversifying its revenues, are also found at the European level, and now almost everywhere. Furthermore, historically, the appropriation of cultural resources by state institutions has always been the dominant logic with the constitution and accumulation of "legitimate" cultural capital. In reality, it is more about the continuity of practices and a certain illusion of a cultural heritage that is widely accessible - in every sense of the term - and, in a word, universal. Although some may dispute the very existence of 'neoliberal' cultural policy shifts, a porous and progressively normative market approach has material substance. Its spatial production, management and use are inextricably linked to the development of ideologies, practices and collective identities, as well as their normalisation. We use 'neoliberalism' here as an intelligible term from a critical perspective, as we consider it deeply necessary in creating the conditions for the emergence of more equitable alternatives that focus on the common good and as broadly as possible.