Call for Papers 2025

7th International ART and the CITY Conference 

Côte d'Azur University 

Villa Arson 

Nice-France 

05-08 June 2025

Since its inception in 2019, the Art and the City conference has traveled across several cities, including Tours, Berlin, Aarhus, Amman, and Göttingen, facilitating an ongoing exploration of art’s role within the urban environment. In 2025, the 7th iteration of the conference will take place in Nice, France.

The conference seeks to foster an interdisciplinary platform where scholars can engage in dialogues and collaborations that examine the intersections of art, aesthetics, and urban politics. The aim is to illuminate critical aspects of urban art practices, such as street art as artistic rebellion, the aesthetics of social movements, and art activism in urban spaces. This diverse focus allows for a rich examination of the ideologies, relationships, meanings, and practices that emerge from the interaction between art and the urban landscape, ultimately contributing to a deeper understanding of urban life, art, and social transformation.

The role of art within urban spaces involves complex spatial and temporal dynamics that give rise to aesthetic, dialogical, and political interactions. On one side, art is a catalyst for urban development, tourism, public health, race relations, and general well-being. Conversely, it plays an instrumental role in urban activism, advocating for social change through movements such as the "right to the city," anti-gentrification efforts, and urban social movements with their spatial, ideological, and ecological agendas. Such movements have been extensively analyzed from politico-aesthetic perspectives, encompassing plural forms of resistance against authoritarian regimes, contests over public space, and issues of social and structural inequalities and human rights. Yet, there remains a need for a more specialized framework within contemporary art practices—one that places urban spaces and their social urgencies at the core of artistic production.

This year’s conference theme, “Art, Urbanocene, and the City,” centers on the emerging paradigm of the Urbanocene and its implications for urban artscapes. We invite scholars, artists, and practitioners to reflect on the following interdisciplinary points of inquiry:

• The potential and challenges posed by eco-art’s interaction with urban ecologies
• How urban art redefines ecological and urban relationships within the Urbanocene paradigm.
•  Art’s role in galvanizing public consciousness and action on issues of ecological justice
•  Real-world examples of art in urban spaces that promote environmental resilience.
•  How art mobilizes urban communities and fosters an inclusive ecological consciousness
• Architectural approaches to equitable sustainability and ecological consciousness in urban settings
• How art redefines and confronts public space, fostering novel interpretations and forms of engagement
• The potential of art to create innovative, transformative spaces for citizen participation in urban environments
• Art’s capacity to activate, capture, and subvert urban experiences, challenging traditional perspectives on urban space
• The role of art in empowering marginalized voices and subjects within the city to assert their presence and agency
• Artistic narratives that emerge around social organization within gentrified urban spaces
• Art’s ability to reshape sensory and perceptual engagements with the city
• The aesthetic dimensions of urban social movements and their commitment to participatory democracy

We welcome contributions from diverse academic fields, including but not limited to urban studies, art history, political science, sociology, architecture, and environmental studies. This conference aims to gather a broad spectrum of insights that will enrich our collective understanding of how art interacts with and transforms the urban sphere in an era increasingly defined by ecological and social crises.

The conference functions as a hub for scholars across humanities and social sciences with exhibitions, special issues in journals, edited books, and joint grant applications.

Keynote

PD Dr Sacha Kagan, Center for World Music, University of Hildesheim

Interdisciplinary Scientific Committee 2025

Sabina Andron, Architectural History, University of Melbourne 

Constantinos Diamantis , Culture, Creative Media and Industries, the University of Thessaly

Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández, Art History, University of Nevada – Reno

Andrew Hewitt,  Art and Design Research Centre, University of Northampton

Mel Jordan, Center for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University

Panos Leventis, Architecture, Drury University

Leah Modigliani,  Visual Studies, Tyler School of Art and Architecture 

Sacha Kagan, Sociology of Art, Leuphana University

Vittorio Parisi,  Aesthetics, Villa Arson

Tijen Tunali, Art History, University of Rennes 2

Contributors are invited to submit abstracts that should be 500 words maximum. Along with the abstract, please include a brief, recent Curriculum Vitae (no longer than one page) and send it to the conference convener, Tijen Tunali, at tijen.tunali@univ-rennes2.fr by January 15, 2025.  

There will be no online presentations.

The fourth day of the conference will be city trips in Nice and Monaco.

Selected papers will be invited to contribute to  a special issue in the  Urban Studies  Journal.