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Waterfront development has become a sign for the post-industrial city. Cases such as Baltimore’s Harbor District, London Docklands, Cardiff Bay, and Barcelona’s Port Vell represent the transformation of districts of industrial decline into areas of new prosperity, as redundant industrial buildings are re-coded as sites of culture. But if the post-industrial city is a post-modern site of abundance, its benefits are unevenly distributed; centres of affluence construct margins of deprivation. Just as public art lent a veneer of cultural value to urban development in the 1980s, so the re-coding of industrial buildings as sites of culture in the ’90s contributes to a continuing aestheticisation of the city which affirms a dominant spatial order. What strategies, then, are appropriate for art in post-industrial cities?