The public space is a contested space. Different actors have strong interests, many others have no chance to voice their interests or to make their opinions heard or to play an active part in the shaping of their community, of their urban surroundings. Ever since the 1960ies art practices have emerged playing an active role in allowing the public, in allowing communities to partake in the development and transformation of urban space or to question urban development in which they have no say or are not represented as urban citizens in their own right. Art is not the only actant in the field of pushing urban change forward and at the same time reflecting or critiquing it. Amongst the other – strongly connected and interrelated – cultural practices advocating this there are anthropology, social activism or cultural theory. All these fields are seen as agents of urban change.

Critical issues of social exclusion and participation in public life can be dealt with via artistic practice. Bringing together specific cities with their specific local issues, determined as well by the past and the current developments, will allow to understand the role socially engaged art practices can play as an actant in urban transformation in an emancipatory way. Learning from each other will show how collaborations between different fields and disciplines can be put to work, namely art, social activism, urban planning, architecture, curating, landscape architecture, experts, lay people, local institutions in neighbourhoods.

Based on the observation that at the moment Europe is undergoing strong rifts of desolidarization community art practices can play the strong role of a social catalyst to allow for articulation, representation and another sense of community and belonging. How to act in public space is more and more not an issue of the physical or built environment only but an issue of the social production of space, as the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre analysed it, and an issue of the art as a possibility of having a socio-economic impact rather than bringing about a merely aesthetic transformation of city surfaces.

Through the method of learning from each other different European cities and their regions enter an exchange and compare their current situation alongside with their heritage. What works well in one specific local context can be tested out in another one, what works well in one given situation might not be applicable to another context: These differences will be worked on through debate, discussion and joint production as part of the whole project.

Strategies of alternative place-making will come into play as well as the collaborative approach with other disciplines. Engagement is the key and the mindset the whole project is framed in. By sharing strategies of publicness the engagement instilled into communities as a sense of possibility brings back the long lost notion of utopia being a motor of change and of things yet to come. Analysing what needs to be done together with the local inhabitants, what can be done and how to interact a sense of belonging, will in itself be a different kind of transformation. Alternative place-making adresses the issues of togetherness and conflict, of possibilities of meeting and exchange, of devoting time to things other than mere survival and selfness. In counteracting the fragmentarisation of society, art and cultural practices will try to engage the public as a social entity. Public Art is in this sense not art in public space but art as public space. Curating is not an indoor practice of the white cube and gallery walls but urban curating, to follow the term of Meike Schalk, mediating between the different, at times contradictory, social, cultural, economic and political forces. In seeking collaborations outside of the art field, with NGOs, with urban planning, with city officials, with neighbourhoods and communities, art is also a testing ground for possibilities of alternative place-making.

Starting a place can mean different things – starting from scratch or starting anew in a given situation or starting over in a situation in transformation. But the notion of starting as a catalyst, as a promise to open up strategies of empowerment will be of high importance. Since public space is to a high extent either determined by overdetermination through commercialisation or through the underdetermination of lacking infrastructure, it will be of utmost importance to find new hybrid spaces that might incorporate a variety of traits in their own right interrelating as follows: the social, the cultural, the aesthetic, the commercial. A consumerist society marked by the effects of globalisation and neo-liberalism is in search of new places of meeting. Art and cultural practices, based on experiences of the last decade, can now develop alternative places, be they physical or immaterial. Such new hybrid meeting places or places of engagement could become hot spots of urban transformation in a sense of urban responsibility. Self-reflexivity is one of the methodological approaches to consider one's own role in the process as an actant and to reflect on art practices as part of urban regeneration or urban transformation in contributing to possible gentrification.

An emphasis will be placed upon equal access and equal opportunities in participation and cooperation: be it minorities, marginalized groups or women. Issues of class and gender will be addressed from an emancipatory and critical perspective.


<<