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This course aims at training your:
- Knowledge of and insight in current debates on art and activism in public spaces at advanced level
- Ability to critically observe, interpret and evaluate interventions and to communicate about the findings at advanced level
- Awareness of the implications and concrete effects of interventions in public space by designing and executing a small-scale intervention in public space (methodological skills) at advanced level
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In times of increasing neoliberal privatization, homogenization and control of public urban spaces in today’s cities we witness various attempts to reclaim and reconfigure the city: urban farming; guerrilla gardening; pop-up stores; occupying abandoned sites for new purposes, freestyle running and so on. These raise interesting questions: Who owns the city, how do we shape the urban landscape? Where and when does the city truly become a ‘public space’? How can we appropriate it in new ways?
This course focuses on cultural and artistic interventions in urban space and how they actively re-think and reconfigure the city. It investigates how cities can be used as platforms where new notions of citizenship, community and public sphere are being performed.
Using concepts and theories from performance studies, urban studies and public sphere theory we will discuss how power relations are performed in cities on a daily basis, how these can be critically revealed and (temporarily) disturbed through artistic interventions in public space.
Next to discussing a variety of specific cases of public space intervention in class, you will be invited to design and execute a small-scale intervention in public space yourself in a small group of fellow students.
This course is part of the minor Creative Cities.
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