For the last four decades, art has been integral to the neoliberal governance and policies for new urban planning: to aid social and economic outcomes, to boost the economic environment of post-industrial cities, to energise communities and neighbourhoods and to raise real estate values.

The studies of culture and neoliberal urban planning have acknowledged a straightforward role of the artists in the changing urban landscape, often disregarding the complex relationship of art to power and resistance. They have also often overlooked the actual aesthetic practices and their effects on the public’s perceptual, physical and political encounters with the urban space. A rigorous research into art’s emancipatory properties in urban struggles for ‘right to the city’ deployed during campaigns, protests and creative strategies in daily life in the urban ‘public’ space is urgently needed.

This session will extend the discussion about the complexities of aesthetic disposition in the gentrified urban environment and art’s relations to both cultural capital and the bottom-up resistance in the city. We seek papers that engage in art’s critical, aesthetic, communicative and creative powers from the perspective of social mobilisation and urban activism, especially in the gentrified neighbourhoods. Papers might address the following concerns: What kind of political and aesthetic possibilities could emerge in the intersection of the spatial and dialogical premises of art and the ideological and economic processes of the new urban planning? How could artistic expressions in the urban space reveal, delimit, question and resist the complexity of neoliberal urbanisation?

• Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor Dr. Tijen Tunali.
• Please provide a title and abstract (500 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name, institutional affiliation and a 2-3 page CV.
• Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because it will appear online, in social media and in the printed programme.
• You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks from the session convenor.

Deadline for submissions: Monday 5 November 2018