Art and the City: Urban Space, Art, and Social Change conferences bring together a team of international scholars with an interest in art and the right to the city, urban creativity, aesthetics and politics, cultural and artistic rebellion, aesthetics of urban social movements, and rebellious art in the urban space. The central goal of this conference series is to critically 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 society.
Art’s role in the urban space involves in a multitude of spatial and temporal dynamics and constitutes emotional, dialogical, and aesthetic interactions. On the one hand, art assists in the improvement of urban development, tourism, public health, race relations, and even welfare. On the other hand, we observe that art lends its competencies to urban activism and social change from the 'right to the city' and anti-gentrification movements with their spatial, ideological, and ecological agenda to the struggles of civil rights, individual and collective freedoms.
Art has also essential part in urban social movements, what are also referred as ‘square movements’ during the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions (Abaza 2016, Le Vine 2015), the Greek Aganaktismenoi movement (Tsilimpoudini 2016), and the Gezi Uprising (Tunali 2018). It is even argued that the civil war in Syria is triggered by graffiti work in Dara’a (Asher-Shapiro 2016). Recently, the Black Lives Matter movement leaves its mark in the urban space with street murals in over 550 places across the US (Shirey, Heather, et al., 2020. The politico-aesthetic character of these movements has been explored extensively from the point of plural resistance against the authoritative government, the struggle over the appropriation and use of public space, structural and social inequalities, and human rights issues. However, these debates lack a specialised framework and language for contemporary art practice, which places urban space and its social urgencies at the center of its production.
Crucially, the recent discussions on the sociality of art emphasize the therapeutic, ethical, unitary, reconciliatory, and functional attributes of art, focusing on how art contributes to ease tensions between communities and city authorities. Although such criticism for art's engagement with social change is sound, it undermines art’s capacities of struggle and agonism, of contestation and re-appropriation that emerge through the creation of common and shared spaces for socialization, mobilization, and political action.
To push forward the dialogues and widen the debates on art’s relationship to the political and the social, Art and the City conferences interrogate what it is to aesthetically experience the city from the perspective of social dissensus and democratic citizenship.