Abstract

Cultural instruments can be important agents of urban regeneration processes, but this is true only according to an ex-post interpretation: it is like the well known joke about economics, the science which explains the past. The Guggenheim museum has not been a fragment of an urban strategic mosaic. It has certainly been an «engine» which favoured a changing process - and the effects were much more powerful than it has been foreseen - and it was also an incomparable, stimulating element of Bilbao urban regeneration and economic development. Nevertheless, although it cannot be said that it was build by accident, it certainly does not belong to a predefinite and deliberate urban and political programming.