ART AND THE CITY: URBAN SPACE, ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Art and the City: Urban Space, Art and Social Change conference series bring together a team of international scholars with an interest in art and 'right to the city', aesthetics and politics of the urban environment, artistic rebellion on the streets, aesthetics of urban social movements and art activism in the urban space. The central goal of this conference series–each year in a different city in Europe –is to engage in a multifaceted, multi-disciplinary, and multi-geographic perspective to articulate and promote a richer and more integrated understanding of the ideologies, relationships, meanings, and practices that arise from the diverse interactions among the three social spheres: urban space, art, and social change. 

Participants in the Art and the City conferences investigate the hypothesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow for a hegemonic restructuring of the urban environment but also facilitates the growth of counter-hegemonic resistance. The questions discussed are including but are not limited to:

How does the spatial politics of late neoliberalism demand and alter new interactions of the way artists and urban dwellers approach daily life in the urban space?

How could artistic expressions in the urban space reveal, delimit, question, and resist the complexity of neoliberal urbanization?

What kind of political and aesthetic possibilities could emerge at the intersection of dialogical premises of art and ideological premises of political mobilization?

What kind of role do urban art narratives play in incorporating marginalized subjects and voices for a more democratic city?

Under what conditions could art become effective in reclaiming the cities as sites of resistance and change?

To what extent can public arts increase social empowerment and be an important resource for enabling civil society engagement?

Which potentials, dilemmas and challenges characterize art’s role in transforming urban landscape towards the formation of an inclusive culture and inclusive urbanism?

How does art engage in, facilitate, and make visible the actions and strategies of grassroots anti-gentrification activism?

How have the artists interpreted and developed the knowledge, discourses, and tactics that the recent urban social movements produced?

How are the artistic strategies and performances in urban uprisings transmitted to other local contexts ( e.g Las Thesis)?

Could aesthetics of occupation, communing and communality deployed in urban social movements be the arena and context for political transformations?  

How can art transform our understanding of the politics of the urban public space?

How can art in the urban space contribute to the struggle for urban commons as social practice and as means of imagining alternative political communities?

 How could street art be a critical tool for the visibility of a community in a time of crisis?

Could aesthetics of occupation, communing and communality deployed in urban social movements be the arena and context for political transformations?  

How can the plurality of competing publics be a political and aesthetic reality of the urban public realm in late-capitalist societies? 

Which potentials, dilemmas and challenges characterize art’s role in transforming the urban landscape toward the formation of an inclusive culture and inclusive urbanism?

To what extent can participatory public arts increase social empowerment and be an important resource for enabling civil society engagement?

What role does public art have to play under the precariously situated environmental consequences of neoliberal urban development?

How can we develop ecocriticism towards urban landscapes?

With 30 presentations and 3 keynotes every year, Art and the City conference series serve as a hub for researchers across social sciences and humanities to engage in transregional dialogues and collaborations such as edited volumes, special issue, exhibition, and joint funding applications.