Special Issue: Art and Urban Social Struggles

Journal of Urban Cultural Studies , 2020

Street art, with its subcultural character and sociability, has been looked upon for its anti-cultural potential. While some accounts have diverted attention to street art's utopia with its creative dissidence and regenerative potential, others have insisted that street art has already been coopted by the aesthetic and institutional order of the neoliberal economy. This special issue aims to contribute to the critical perspectives of cultural geography, urban sociology, art history, visual studies and critical theory through analyses of the urban space and street art. The prolific significance of this issue is in its multi-perspective approach to bring together social, political and aesthetic dimensions in the intersection of art and the changing urban environment. Recently, activist art, social practice and socially engaged art are just a few terms that have been popular for describing art that attempts to attract public attention to the current social and political landscape. This thematic journal issue explores the potential theoretical and empirical inputs that a spatial and urban approach of art can bring to the understanding of both arts and the urban space. It offers a multi-geographical, multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary perspective to analyze how street art, as an aesthetic dispositive, functions as an integral part in the socio-political space of the urban landscape. Street art contests two main regimes of visibility-legal and governmental on one side, and artworld or social aesthetic on the other-which creates the conditions within which it must compete for visibility. How can we interpret the politics of street art from the perspective of subcultures, freedom of expression, and limits of criminality? Are street artists obliged to be a part of the urban resistance against neoliberalism? How does street art reveal, delimit or question the complexity of neoliberal urbanization? How is street art activism perceived by the authorities, politicians, businesses, and the wider public? What prompts street artists to communicate with urban dwellers with their marks on the city's surface? How does street art partake in social movements? This special issue hopes to continue academics' and artists' conversations on street art's relationship with the urban space and the public as a defining element of urban culture, but also offers a critical look at the spatial and political dynamics that reflect territorially embedded mechanisms that generate particular social and cultural processes.

Conference Catalog, 2019

Art’s practical place in reconstituting the urban space as one of the defining elements of urban culture renders a twofold role. The role of art in the neoliberal urban planning shows that art is an integral part of current capitalist processes that are turning the neoliberal art subject in a source of capital—both as a resource for tourism and a real estate investment. However, recent research has found that arts and art establishments are not as significant in gentrification processes as before (Grodach, Fostor, Murdoch 2018). Indeed, art has been both a product of and a response to the unequal distribution of resources and visibility in the city through the processes of new urban planning. For example, a growing resistance against neoliberal urbanism in Europe (Colomb & Novy 2016) demonstrates the relationship of artist communities and neighborhood organizations and challenges the prescriptive approaches to art’s role in neoliberal aestheticization.

Space and Culture, 2018

City, 2010

Journal of Urban Creativity, 2023

This special issue delves into the profound and transformative influence of a variety of artworks within urban environments characterized by political contention, with a particular emphasis on their capacity to facilitate activist engagement and dialogue. By challenging prevailing power structures, advocating for inclusivity, and reshaping the dynamics of public spaces, street art emerges as a potent political force in the process of democratizing public spheres. These unconventional modes of artistic expression, when situated in the public domain, serve as influential platforms for amplifying the voices of marginalized communities, thereby promoting civic engagement and reimagining the contours of the public sphere. Through an in-depth exploration of the communicative, participatory and political potential of street art this thematic issue entitled Street Art and Political Aesthetics in the Contested Urban Contexts seeks to shed light on the intricate interplay among. art, urban culture and civic rebellion. This exploration delves into the unique capacity of art to thrive within urban spaces that are perpetually fraught with uncertainty, challenges, and political instabilities. It encompasses discussions pertaining to the critical domains of freedom of expression, public protests, social critique, political engagement, aesthetic tactics, and urban commons in the realm of street art. These discussions underscore the remarkable ability of street art to nurture the aesthetic foundations of political and social actions within the public sphere.

2019

Lisbon Street Art & Urban Creativity 2014 International Conference (edited by Pedro Soares Neves and Daniela V. de Freitas Simões), 2014

In the wake of the complex state of crisis Europe has been experiencing in the past five years, a wave of new urban social movements has erupted and transformed cities all over the region into dynamic laboratories of a new spatial activism. Street Art and other forms of Urban Intervention have become important political practices in these struggles constituting a new aesthetics and culture of protest committed to the Lefebvrian claim to the Right to the City – the right of urban citizens to actively participate in the creation and reinvention of cities according to their own human needs and desires. I examined these connections empirically in my M.A. research, a case study of the discourses and iconographies sprawling on the walls of Athens. Relating my own empirical materials to theoretical observations about the relationship of the crisis, austerity politics, urban space, and social movements I propose that, particularly in the European periphery, street art forms part of a larger project of reimagining and reappropriating urban space in the context of the crisis. Consequently I argue that profound analyses of street art – its symbolisms and vocabularies, the actors engaged in the field, its dialectic oscillation between local and global dimensions, the spaces occupied etc. – are crucial for understanding the interrelation of the crisis, urban space and social and political movements.

Public Art Dialogue, 2018

Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2020

Street art has been both a product of and a response to the unequal distribution of resources and visibility in the city. A dialectical study that investigates both sides of the coin showing art’s aesthetic, spatial, social and political situation in the changing neo-liberal urban landscape is needed. Analyzing simultaneously the hegemonic restructuring of the urban environment and the growth of counter-hegemonic resistance on the streets requires taking into account the plurality and complexity of the links between the urban environment, society and arts. This article discusses how street art, as an aesthetic dispositive, functions dialectically as both resource and resistance in the sociopolitical make-up of the urban landscape.