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This paper problematises public artopia, in other words the collection of claims in academic literature concerning the allegedly physical-aesthetic, economic, social, and cultural-symbolic roles of art in urban public space. On the basis of interviews with public-art producers (artists, public officials, investors, and participating residents) in a flagship and a community-art project in Amsterdam, we analyse the situatedness of their public-art claims according to actors’ roles, geographical context, and time. The research suggests that public-art theory and policy suffer from three deficiencies. Theoretical claims about public-art and policy discourse feature, first, a failure to recognise different actors’ perspectives: claims fail to locate situated knowledges that are intrinsically (re)constituted by actors’ roles articulating with one another in time and space. Second is the lack of geographical contextuality: claims do not elaborate appropriately on distinct discourses about art projects’ spatial settings. Third is the lack of temporal perspective. Claims neglect the practice of public-art realisation: that is, the evolution of claims and claim coalitions over the time horizon of the art projects: preparation, implementation, and evaluation.

Recent debates around urban encounter, integration cosmopolitanism, and renewed engagement with contact theory have raised questions about the spaces of interaction that may enable meaningful encounters between different social groups. Reflecting on a participatory art project with young people of African and British heritage in northeast England, we argue that discussion and practice around participatory action research, including the deployment of contact zones as theory and method, can cast some light on what fosters transformative spaces. Through analysis of two different approaches to community art used in the project, we show how elements of each enabled and disabled meaningful interaction between young people. We draw attention to the materiality of art (the tools) within participatory practices (the doing of it) in contributing to a space where interactions might take place, emphasising a complex interplay across/between actors, materials, and space that frames encounters as emergent, transitory, fragile, and yet hopeful. We examine the potential of a focus on the material in thinking beyond moments of encounter to how transformative social relations may be `scaled up' before considering the implications for research and policy.

The focus of this paper is the strategies of civic actors in a central Tokyo neighborhood to claim a voice in managing changes to their community and creating shared meanings for neighborhood streets and public spaces. In Yanaka an active community movement has worked to protect and improve shared community spaces by celebrating them as a historic legacy and a shared community resource, investing new and more complex values and claims on shared spaces, and redefining public streets as civic spaces in their neighborhood. They assert the rights of community participation in managing urban change by creating a neighborhood constitution, organizing art events and festivals in the streets, engaging new participants in shared property rights, proposing new criteria for evaluating urban change, and telling stories of a strong and distinct community. Claiming ownership of the meaning and management of local public spaces is a political strategy of self empowerment by community groups that has been relatively successful in this case.

Temporary uses of vacant urban spaces are usually not foreseen in conventional urban planning and have often been linked to economic or political disturbances. In New Zealand, Christchurch’s vacant spaces came into existence after the city was hit by several devastating earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. Parallel to the ‘official’ rebuild dis- course, temporary uses have emerged on vacant post-earthquake sites including community gardens, urban agriculture, art installations, event venues, eateries and cafés, and pocket parks. Based on the review and analysis of exemplary transitional community-initiated open spaces and correlated literature, the paper looks at how the post-disaster urban context in Christchurch has influenced particular aspects of temporary urbanism in comparison with case studies in non-disaster environments. By focusing on the anticipated benefits of community-initiated open spaces, the paper dis- cusses the relevance of temporary uses of vacant urban spaces for urban sustainability in relationship to concepts of community resilience and raises questions about possible long-term values.

Art festivals are a feature of many urban districts undergoing gentrification; they help to catalyze change by drawing a set of consumers with particular cultural interests. This article examines whether the arts produce racial exclusions by examining long-term Black and White residents’ participation in and perceptions of the monthly Last Thursday Art Walks in Portland’s gentrifying Alberta Arts District. We use surveys to measure arts participation and follow-up, in-depth interviews to understand whether long-time residents feel excluded by the arts, and if race is a factor. We find that Black residents participate less in Last Thursdays than White residents, and they often feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. We conclude that the arts-anchored symbolic economy results in racial exclusions that have little to do with differences in arts appreciation, but much to do with perceptions of people associated with the arts, and with residents’ abilities to use the arts to identify with neighborhood changes.

In a context of increased urban competition, art and culture are often used by cities world-wide as tools to improve their image and make urban spaces attractive. In that process, art is—as we will argue—becoming a new urban norm, which is normalizing not only urban space and experience, but also art itself. By contributing to the pacification or securization of public spaces, art could encourage some behaviors or, on the contrary, discourage others. Reversely, this normative dimension of urban art could impact art itself, especially by redefining the limit between artistic forms that are either inclusive or exclusive, dominant or subversive. Through examples found during PhD fieldwork in Montreal and Johannesburg, we will demonstrate that this normalization of the city through art and of art through the city takes place in various urban contexts, that it questions the distinction between Northern and Southern cities, and the definition of a (global) city itself.

Public monuments traditionally appear in high contrast to their landscapes, an effect that sets aesthetic, ideological and social distances. However, Manmale, counter-monuments, and counter-hegemonic monuments (eg the AIDS quilt, Rachael Whiteread’s House, Melbourne’s Another ViewWalking Trail, Tiananmen’s Goddess of Democracy, or Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial), challenge the norms of monuments in visuality, fixedness, and permanence, and suggest intricacies which mediate the interactivity of art, site and passers-by. In this paper, I consider three counter-hegemonic monuments in Vancouver, British Columbia – all installed in 1997/98 and all dealing with the issue of violence – sited within one neighbourhood. Via archival research, interviews, and extensive participant observations investigating how the monuments actually function in social memory rituals, I discovered that the characteristics of publicness in the landscapes that lay ‘beneath and before’ the monuments deeply affected their origins, designs, and current uses.

The present study investigated the effects of public art on visual properties and affective appraisals of landscapes. Undergraduate and graduate students sequentially viewed landscapes with or without public art and rated each one for visual properties and affective appraisals. Study 1 revealed that the presence of public art reduced pleasantness of the natural scene, but did not reduce that of the urban scene. In Study 2 focusing on the urban landscapes, the t-tests showed that public art consistently yielded greater arousal and the visual properties related with arousal level (e.g., complexity), whereas for pleasantness and the visual properties related with pleasantness (e.g., legibility) the scores varied with the public artworks. Adopting the experimental design that systematically combined 4 landscapes with 2 pieces of public art, Study 3 revealed that the affective quality of public art had more influence on the landscapes than the compatibility between public art and the landscapes.

Empirical urban design research emphasizes the support in vitality of public space use. We examine the extent to which a public space intervention promoted liveliness and three key behaviors that enhance well-being (“connect,” “be active,” and “take notice”). The exploratory study combined directly observed behaviors with self-reported, before and after community- led physical improvements to a public space in central Manchester (the United Kingdom). Observation data (n = 22,956) and surveys (subsample = 212) were collected over two 3-week periods. The intervention brought significant and substantial increases in liveliness of the space and well-being activities. None of these activities showed increases in a control space during the same periods. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of the research methods, and the impact of improved quality of outdoor neighborhood space on liveliness and well-being activities. The local community also played a key role in conceiving of and delivering an effective and affordable intervention. The findings have implications for researchers, policy makers, and communities alike.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Jakarta and Yogyakarta, this paper investigates the recent surge in the production and circulation of street art through technology and media in post-New Order Indonesia. The global style of street art communicates how public space and the street have become emblematic of changing discourses of individual rights, urban aesthetics, and the practice of citizenship in urban Indonesia. While the history of Western graffiti as a form of defacement and resistance continues to exert a powerful hold on the imagination of Indonesian street artists, I argue that the vernacular meaning of street art and graffiti refuses an easy bifurcation of public and private spaces, while blurring the lines between commercial and cultural urban interventions.

There are numerous ways in which people make illegal or unauthorized alterations to urban space. This study identifies and analyzes one that has been largely ignored in social science: explicitly functional and civic-minded informal contributions that I call “do-it-yourself urban design.” The research, which began as an investigation into more “traditional” nonpermissable alterations, uncovered these cases—from homemade bike lanes and street signs to guerrilla gardens and development proposals—that are gaining visibility in many cities, yet are poorly accounted for by existing perspectives in the literature. This article examines the existing theories and evidence from interviews and other fieldwork in 14 cities in order to develop the new analytical category of DIY urban design. I present findings on the creators of these interventions, on their motivations to “improve” the built environment where they perceive government and other development actors to be failing, and on the concentration of their efforts in gentrifying areas. This introduces the possibility of conflict and complicates their impact. I argue that DIY urban design has wide-ranging implications for both local communities and broader urban policy.

The purpose of this paper is to take part in the debate about power relationships in contemporary cities between the agents of urban renewal and the local communities, as mediated by cultural and artistic interventions and projects. Our study proposes a new conceptual frame, focused on the comparison between two notions of heterotopia as theoretical alternatives for the interpretation of cities as social and participatory spaces. The notions we consider may be traced to two key thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, and lay the foundation for alternative analytical paradigms of the contemporary urban condition, in relation to artistic and cultural practices in the public space. We draw upon these two alternative readings of heterotopia to explore the implications of the interaction of artistic practices with the urban space as a contested terrain from the viewpoint of power relationships. In our analysis, we find that Foucault's notion of heterotopia is potentially conducive to top-down planning processes and to gentrification. Lefebvre's notion is instead possibly more suited to participatory practices as strategies of reactivation of the right to the city.

Public art is an artistic expression created in streets, squares and other public spaces, including parks. Using the two popular public parks in the New York City, Central Park and the High Line, this paper explores the affordances offered by public art in these two urban environments, with a focus on physical, intellectual and emotional connections between the visitor, the artwork and the landscape setting. Using affordance theory as a framework, it considers the design of the landscape as a behaviour setting that affords viewing, acknowledgement and reflection of the artwork within the contemporary cultural context. Using preliminary qualitative observations of six artworks within the two parks, this research suggests that public art has the potential to afford such diverse opportunities for public park visitors. In order for these affordances to be actualised, the design of the park and the artwork’s intentions should be coordinated to ensure that the experiences of the visitor align with the claimed benefits of public art.

This article explores the public spaces of Laredo, a city situated on the border of the United States and Mexico along the Rio Grande. The construction of urban history is shaped by changes in public space—its physical settings, access to residents, and utilization by people. The author analyzes the transformation of public spaces and public events of Laredo to trace how amnesia and remembering are reflected in the cityscape. Public events reproduce assorted versions of urban history and help scholars to locate what part of history is preserved and what part is erased in the collective psyche of the community. The visual history of public spaces and events thus conserves a narration of the past, one that shapes collective memory and self-image.

The recent flurry of research about arts‐led regeneration initiatives illuminates how contemporary arts festivals can become complicit in the production of urban inequality. But researchers rarely engage with detailed empirical examples that shed light on the contradictory role that artists sometimes play within these spectacularized events. Similar research in performance studies connects the political limits and potential of social practice arts — interventions that encourage artists and non‐artists to co‐produce work — as civic boosters strive to stage cities in order to attract investment. In this article, I explore the case study of Streetscape: Living Space at Regent Park, a participatory artistic intervention programmed in a public housing neighbourhood that is undergoing redevelopment in Toronto, Canada. Streetscape was part of the Luminato festival, an elite booster coalition‐led festival of ‘creativity’. I refer to these arts interventions to demonstrate how artists engaging in social practice arts can become complicit in naturalizing colonial gentrification processes at multiple scales. But I also reveal how artists can leverage heterogeneous arts‐led regeneration strategies to make space for ‘radical social praxis’ (Kwon, 2004), interventions that challenge hegemonic regimes. I conclude by interrogating the effectiveness of place‐based efforts in unsettling the ‘creative city’.

In the 1990s, the Georgian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli triggered a furor over the millions of tax dollars the Moscow city government paid him for his monumental art installations around the Russian capital. Critics have assailed such gross expenditure in a period of economic privation, questioned the propriety of Tsereteli's ties to power, and ridiculed his often cartoon-like aesthetics. In the embattled new Russian state, this infantilization of public space through government-sponsored art reprises a familiar discourse of timeless innocence in the service of state power.

Public spaces have a central role, both physically and functionally, in urban planning and development. Many urban theorists state their significant role as one of the principal components of a healthy urban setting. This is in addition to their functional role, when they increase a sense of community when intensive social interaction takes place in these areas. However, recently, they have started to lose significance, when they are neglected in the urban planning process, or when existing spaces are lost. Additionally, accessibility and utilization of these areas decreases, since public spaces are neglected in urban planning and development processes. In this study, public spaces are assessed in terms of accessibility and utilization, regarding the effects of rapid urban growth on their physical and functional structure. This study first evaluates the significance of public spaces in an urban setting; second, determines the variables effective in terms of their accessibility and utilization; third, assesses the factors affecting the accessibility and utilization of public spaces through a questionnaire survey on the role of public spaces in social interaction, and concludes with an evaluation of the results and suggestions for further research.

Art in public space in South Africa is increasingly a more visible locus of sociopolitical resistance and recalibration of the public sphere. This article focuses upon an emblematic example: the sculpture of a former colonialist, removed from its public university site in Cape Town following sustained protests. Since April 2015, the empty plinth of Cecil John Rhodes has become a site of re-imagination – from graffiti interventions to performance and installation art. While the plinth continually morphs in symbolism and significance, its ousted artwork waits at an undisclosed location for its fate to be decided. This interregnum represents a liminal condition that theorists call ‘third space’, extended in this research towards a fourth dimension of performativity. The physical disappearance of the artwork has triggered a second life, its apogee a national protest movement with global resonance. Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall are student-led calls for university decolonisation and free education arguably best understood as provocation around systemic issues in society. As this deeper work ensues amid fractious contestations, the artwork's re-animation of the public sphere is clear. Its leftover plinth is political, making visible other kinds of structural voids. It is also poetic: a zombie monument demonstrating through its reinventions public space as common space – contested, negotiated and performed in the daily creation of city futures.

Geographers have made important contributions to scholarship on the lived experiences of masculinity, highlighting the ways in which identities emerge through embodied and emplaced performances that are shaped by intersecting dimensions of gender, sexuality, race, class and religion. While a small number of studies have considered masculinity in relation to physical disability, more work is needed to examine other experiences of disability and the ways that they intersect with gender. In this article, we draw from feminist and queer disability theory to explore the social geographies of men with intellectual disability. We draw on in-depth, participatory research in Toronto to examine how men labeled/with intellectual disabilities imagine and enact masculinity in domestic settings and public places. Our analysis highlights that men confront multiple constraints and pervasive paternalism in public and domestic settings that frustrate their efforts to craft an adult identity. Partly in response, many men aspire to a normative heterosexual masculinity as a way to militate against the disabling conditions of everyday life. This reflects the tremendous pressure the men confront to ‘fit in’ but it also forecloses opportunities to imagine and enact other forms of disabled masculinity.

This essay considers public art practice in post-apartheid Cape Town within the notion of symbolic reparations—a concept deriving out of South Africa’s Trust Reconciliation Commission. The paper situates developments in public arts practice in the context of developments in cultural politics in South Africa and globally. More especially, it discusses new genre arts projects, which focus on a range of issues related to identity, space and place. The projects—the District Six Museum, District Six Sculpture Project, PTO, Y30, BLAC, Returning the Gaze, and the In Touch Poetry Bus Tour—focus on issues such as rethinking monuments, the memorialising of ‘hidden histories’, engagements with racism and the abuse of power, and the reimagining of the city. The paper asks how these contemporary and often ephemeral projects, critically engage with issues of history, geography, memory and transformation and, in so doing, mark the landscape of Cape Town, making spaces for dialogue and/or standing as poetic symbols and challenges to the inequalities of the city.