Third Text, 2014
Vol. 28, No. 6, 529– 544, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2014.970771
1. For example, Jeb
Brugmann’s Welcome to
the Urban Revolution,
Bloomsbury, New York,
2009; Richard Florida’s
celebration of urban
creativity and place, most
recently arguing for post-
economic crash urban
reinvention in The Great
Reset, Harper, New York,
2011; and Edward
Glaeser’s accolades in The
Triumph of the City,
Penguin, Harmondsworth,
2011.
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri, Commonwealth,
Belknap, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2009
3. UN-Habitat (United
Nations Centre for Human
Settlements), An
Urbanizing World: Global
Report on Human
Settlements, Oxford
University Press for UN-
Habitat, Oxford, 1996;
since 2005, the London
School of Economics has
conducted a Deutsche
Bank-sponsored Urban Age
project as part of its LSE
Cities initiative.
4. See Neil Brenner, ‘Theses on
Urbanism’, Public Culture,
vol 25, no 1, 2013, p 85, doi:
10.1215/08992363-
1890477
Contemporary Art’s ‘Urban
Question’ and Practices of
Experimentation
Saara Liinamaa
Our contemporary moment is intensely focused on cities. The 2010
Shanghai World Exposition proclaimed, ‘A Better City, a Better Life’,
which neatly captures the spirit of optimism accompanying urban
problem-solving, and this popular embrace of urban themes and issues
is well supported by a brood of media-savvy urbanists promoting
cities.1 But at the same time Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Com-
monwealth emphasizes the city as a premier site within socio-political
mobilization.2 Occupy keenly dramatizes how physical sites and city
spaces feature within larger, interconnected issues and challenges, and
Tahrir Square is an emblem of the strength of collective resistance. In
this regard, the city has become a strategic site within market-driven
policy agendas and activist interventions alike: the city has captured
both the neoliberal and radical imagination. Thus, with the ‘Urban
Age’ upon us, the stakes of nurturing critical urban practices could not
be higher.3 With this in mind, how do we position the innumerable
contemporary art practices undertaken in the name of the city alongside
a contemporary moment that treats urbanization as one of our most
powerful ‘dominant metanarratives’?4 This article argues for an
ongoing interrogation of the place of contemporary urban artistic
practices within competing narratives of urbanization and collective
futures.
From the Creative City’s celebration of art’s contributions to econ-
omic health and social cohesion to smaller-scale appeals for creativity-
based participatory democracy, artists are regularly included as part
of the team of urban problem-solvers.5 As urban planner and theorist
Margaret Crawford writes of the 124 urban interventions featured in
the US Pavilion for the 13th International Architecture Biennale in
Venice:
Spontaneous Interventions presents merely a small sampling of the
informal, improvisational urban projects that are proliferating around
# 2014 Third Text
530

‘Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good’, 2012, US Pavilion, Venice, 13th International Archi-
tecture Biennale, Lead curator Cathy Lang Ho, photo: courtesy Spontaneous Interventions, photo credit: Interburo

the world today, a number that is expanding almost exponentially. These

5. For example, from Charles
Landry, The Creative City:
A Toolkit for Urban
Innovation, Earthscan,
London, 2000, to Chiara
Camponeschi, The Enabling
City: Place-Based Creative
Problem Solving and the
Power of the Everyday,
Creative Commons, 2010,
http://enablingcity.com/en/
read. Websites cited in this
article were last accessed in
early September 2014.
activities represent a movement where thousands of artists, activists,
architects acting outside of the profession, and many different kinds
of citizens are imagining and trying to create a more humane, just, and
creative city.6
The tidy pairing of an urban issue with a solution in the exhibition is
appealing, where each of the 124 examples identifies a problem that a
small-scale creative action seeks to solve. Urban isolation? Try flexible
furniture in public spaces. Exploited workers? Create a service station
for undocumented day labourers. Homeless populations? Encourage
squatting in foreclosed properties. Artists have become exemplary

6. Margaret Crawford, ‘Urban
Interventions and the Right
to the City’, August 2012,
http://www.
spontaneousinterventions.
org/statement/an-essay. The
exhibition catalogue is
available online and was
originally published in a
special issue of Architect,
August 2012.
7. Manuel Castells, The Urban
Question: A Marxist
Approach (1972), Alan
Sheridan, trans, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1977, p 73. Castells’ analysis
interrogates urban sociology
as a discipline and the
mythic construction of
urban culture that masks the
work of capitalism and
ideology, but we can extend
his consideration beyond a
strict Marxist interpretation.
8. reArt:theUrban,
interdisciplinary conference
organized by Imanuel
Schipper and trans4mator,
Institute for Critical Theory,
Zurich University of the
Arts, Zurich, 25 –27
October 2012, http://www.
rearttheurban.org/info/
Concept.html
531
urban advocates, agitators and interventionists, but, as Manuel Castells
established four decades ago in The Urban Question, we are well
reminded that to speak of the city always risks dramatic ‘imprecision’:7
to focus too much on the city can be a way to ignore the formations
that produce and reproduce the city as unstable, unjust. We lose the
sharpness of analysis if we indiscriminately gather all these strategies
together as a solution to a vaguely defined urban problematic. Without
renewed attention to both the terms of art and the urban, too often the
assumptions that accompany the circulation of the ‘urban question’ in
art’s expanded urban practices remain unquestioned.
This article proposes the following as one contribution to remedying
this current uncertainty surrounding art’s urban contributions. First, we
need a clearer sense of how to gather the strategies at work within art’s
recent urban turn in order to return to the central urban question that
animates its diverse undertakings: the city as the concentration of
myriad inequalities. Second, in order to build on scholarship that has
long identified art under urbanism as a complicated endeavour, we
need to reconsider the benefits and risks of art’s modes of response.
Art’s urban practices can reproduce and reinvent the dominant urban
order; they can realize the city as surface and depth, and they can work
with and against hegemonic cultural globalization. But by working
with the entanglements of art’s urban investigations we can identify
measured ways to frame its contributions and processes. In this regard,
this article presents ‘ambivalent urbanism’, ‘thick urbanism’ and ‘soft
solidarity’ as concepts that capture the critical labour of contemporary
art without setting proscriptions for practice or defaulting to unwar-
ranted optimism. Finally I turn to shifting cities and expansive urbaniz-
ation and reflect on the future of art under a planetary urbanism that
challenges our contemporary intervention toolkit.
ART AND THE CITY:
FROM REPRESENTATION TO EXPERIMENTATION
While people agree that the arts and artistic competences may contribute
decisively to the way we organize and live in our cities, there seems to be
a lack of understanding of how, why and in what fields of our social
lives it may do so.8
The city now regularly surfaces as a structuring theme within contempor-
ary art, where the provocation of the city is a way of gathering artistic
practices and concerns and a catalyst for such practices and issues. As
an organizational or curatorial impulse, the approaches vary consider-
ably. Some examples emphasize a specific city, like ‘ciudadMULTIPLE-
city’ (2003), which directed its attention toward Panama City, while
others use a broad urban banner to include innumerable urban themes
and practices, like the Ninth Havana Biennial, ‘Dynamics of Urban
Culture’ (2006). Or, there are exhibitions that target a specific genre of
practice, like ‘Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991 – 2001′ ,
Mass MoCA, 2011, or issues, such as suburbanization, which was
addressed by ‘The Leona Drive Project’ (2009) in situ in Toronto.
Many recurrent exhibitions also assume a strong urban focus, such as
532

Conference poster image for ‘reART:theUrban’, Zurich, 25 –27 October 2012, organized by Imanuel Schipper and
tran4mator, image: MacGhillie _ just a void, courtesy knowbotiq 2008, photo credit: C Oeschger

9. For example, tackling
urban problem solving in
San Sebastián, Spain, for
Manifesta 5; Manifesta 6′ s
thwarted efforts to build an
art school in the divided
city (and at the dividing
line) of Nicosia, Cyprus; or
Documenta 11′ s analysis of
African urbanization in
Lagos for Platform4,
‘Under Siege: Four African
Cities’, 2002.
10. And which often challenge
urban– rural binaries, as is
the case with Huit Facettes.
the night-long multi-city urban art party Nuit Blanche, biennials like the
nomadic Manifesta, or the bi-national San Diego – Tijuana collaboration
InSite.9 In another direction, there are innumerable artist collectives, such
as Huit Facettes (Senegal) or WochenKlausur (Austria), that target small-
scale solutions to urban socio-economic problems.10 Or, there are inter-
national activist movements that draw on aesthetics and politics like
the cycling intervention Critical Mass or different incarnations of
Reclaim the Streets. Emerging collaborative networks expand beyond
one group to outline a common commitment to urban issues bound by
a certain set of principles or means of investigation. These are usually col-
laborations amongst artists, urban researchers and other related pro-
fessionals. For example, the multi-city European group City Mine(d)
acts as a network that fosters artistic interventions into urban spaces
and other initiatives for urban change and research; and the New
 533

Public Access and LOT, The Leona Drive Project, Toronto, 22– 31October 2009, installation projects/exhibition in six
vacant houses scheduled for demolition, photo: courtesy curatorial team, Janine Marchessault and Michael Prokopow,
photo credit: Steven Payne

Delhi-based urban organization Sarai joins art and new media practices
and research with urban issues and public spaces. And while city life,
space, places and experiences are a way to collect and organize exhibitions
and interests, this brief list does not begin to address specific projects.
As the quotation from Margaret Crawford cited in the introduction
indicates, the possible examples are ‘expanding almost exponentially’.
To this end, some clarification is required in light of the unwieldiness
of the urban category itself, which could be an argument either for or
against its interpretive value. To be clear, this is not a new phenomenon;
precedents abound throughout the twentieth century. The usual suspects
included in this history of urban practices are movements like Dada,
Surrealism, the Situationist International, Fluxus, but the genres of prac-
tice include lineages from performance art, site specificity, community
art, public art, social practice art and activist art. Theoretical approaches
534
11. Certainly, more diverse
histories of these practices
are emerging. For example,
Blake Stimson and Gregory
Sholette, eds, Collectivism
after Modernism,
University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, 2007, and its
many urban and public
practices; or, Erin Aldana,
‘The Independent
Aesthetic, Urban
Interventions and Other
Forms of Marginal Art in
Abertura Period São
Paulo’, Third Text 121, vol
27, no 2, 2013, pp 229 –
224, doi: 10.1080/
09528822.2013.772346
12. Brendan Gleeson, ‘The
Urban Age: Paradox and
Prospect’, Urban Studies,
vol 49, no 5, 2012, pp
931 –932, doi: 10.1177/
0042098011435846
13. Different categories for
methods are: Alternative
Economies and Markets;
Alternative Organizations,
Networks and NGOs;
Broadcast and Printed
Matter; Campaigns,
Protests and Advocacy;
Design and Architecture;
Food; Public Events; Public
Art, Street Art, Sculpture
and Monuments; Reuse,
Social Experiments and Re-
enactments, Web-based
Projects, Workshops and
Educational Activities. The
organization of topics or
themes is as follows: Art
System; Environment;
Urban Development;
Community-Building;
Economics and
Consumerism; Health
Care; History and
Memory; Human Rights
and Social Justice; Identity
Politics; Immigration,
Nationalities and Borders,
http://creativetime.org/
programs/archive/2011/
livingasform/archive.htm.
See also Nato Thompson,
Living As Form: Socially
Engaged Art from 1991 –
2011, MIT Press,
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2012.
14. The categories are as
follows: information,
accessibility, community,
economy, sustainability,
and pleasure. The broad
are often shadowed by references to Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau,
Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre – just to make the canon of Western
references populating many North American and European discussions
clear.11 However, there has been a steady intensification of urban inter-
ests and practices over the last two decades, and in keeping with the
wider cultural trend and recognition of the predominance of global
urbanization. This concentration of interest raises another question,
and to return to Castells’ provocation with an eye to its new life in the
contemporary context: What is contemporary art’s diversely understood
‘urban question’? Is ‘the urban’ a useful way of connecting what are over-
lapping genres and practices, particularly given the flourishing ‘urbanol-
ogy’ that so often intersects with these forms?12 It becomes increasingly
difficult to make sense of the range of strategies and interests that fall
under the urban umbrella.
The Archive of Socially Engaged Practices from 1991–2011, an off-
shoot of the ‘Living As Form’ exhibition and publication, offers thirteen
different categories of method and ten different topics.13 The exhibition
‘Spontaneous Interventions’ in the US Pavilion at Venice, mentioned
earlier, suggests six categories and four broad themes.14 These attempts
to map and categorize demonstrate a need to collect diverse but
connected approaches. In order to carve out a common ground, I am
proposing a more general set of shared characteristics that represent the
mixed traditions of urban practices, from Conceptualism to community art:
. A portion, if not all, of the work is conducted, performed or exists
outside formal gallery spaces – usually in everyday urban spaces and
common/public spaces; often, a particular city or neighbourhood is
central to the project.
. The project solicits collaboration, participation, or at the very least a
reaction, from a wider public, be it a specific group or anonymous
passers-by.
. The project is process- rather than product-oriented; it has an
ephemeral or situational component. That said, the process may
result in a tangible contribution or object of urban problem-solving.
. The project addresses a central, often marginalized, urban theme or
issue. This, of course, relies on an amount of interpretation and empha-
sis, but includes a range of possible topics within general categories
such as: everyday life, space and place, community, circulation,
migration, consumption, identity and belonging, memory and history.
However, these descriptive characteristics do not capture the heart of the
issue. What distinguishes these practices is how they direct us to think
beyond representations of the city or in the city – the city as object, the
city as a site – to the ‘city as protagonist’.15 The city as a protagonist
stresses that the city is a multidimensional and active agent within its rep-
resentation, and this is where the strength of ‘urban’ as an artistic cat-
egory resides. This distinction rests on a shift away from the artistic
representation of urban life to artistic experimentation with urban life:
this is the difference between urban art as a general category and the
urban practices that constitute the field under discussion. Urban art as
a cross-disciplinary set of intervention strategies features the city as a
relational, representational structure that shapes the spaces, patterns

themes: citizenship, equity,
protest and participation.
15. Gerardo Mosquera and
Adrienne Samos,
ciudadMULTIPLEcity,
KIT, Amsterdam, 2004,
p 22
16. James Donald, Imagining
the Modern City,
University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 1999,
p8
17. See Saara Liinamaa,
Experiments in Urban
Knowledge: Contemporary
Art as Urban Research,
PhD dissertation, York
University, Toronto,
Canada, 2010.
18. State of Sabotage
disbanded after ten years
on 30 August 2013. See
http://www.sabotage.at/
sos/index.php.
535
and processes of the project; the city, in this context, becomes what James
Donald has referred to as a ‘category of thought’.16
In this respect, for example, through the presentation of central urban
dynamics in these works, such as play, work and memory,17 the city is
able to intervene in and direct the artistic project just as the artists and
participants intervene and produce urban representations and relations
within the work of art. For instance, playful urban experiments take
‘what happens if’ to the activities, patterns and contexts of the city,
often acting as an antidote to the rigidity and hierarchy of urban life.
For Iwona Majdan’s year-long Montreal series The Dinner Project
(2004 – 2005), the artist approached strangers in public spaces and
offered to cook dinner for them in their home, with an emphasis on
the awkward yet rich moments of coming together. In contrast, Robert
Jalenik’s innumerable and diverse ‘public sabotages’ include interven-
tions such as changing public telephone books or preventing access to
public telephones, which are disruptive acts prone to generate a range
of responses; in this case, playful experimentation becomes prankster-
ism.18 Other examples in this area might include Complaints Choirs
Worldwide’s network of choirs, Newmindspace’s urban games or
Jeremy Deller’s Social Parade (2004). Further instances are best captured
under the domain of social ‘work’, where projects support models of
urban communication and participation as well as develop solutions
and tools for urban problem-solving structured around specific issues,
such as homelessness, racism or public space and access. For example,
Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrč’s Dry Toilet (2003), a collaboration
with a neighbourhood association, an urban think tank and two archi-
tects, installed two dry toilets in the outlying barrio La Vega, Caracas,
a district without access to municipal water. WochenKlausur’s City
Talks (2005) provided a number of open discussion platforms with
urban experts that allowed residents to discuss their concerns regarding
the Tranvsaal district of the Hague, an area with a high immigrant popu-
lation, high unemployment and a below-average standard of living. We
could add to this list Superflex’s Superchannel or Cuban artist René
Francisco’s Havana home renovation projects. Urban memory is
another key category of concern, with artists collecting urban detritus
and creating eclectic archives, delving into the richness of storytelling
and counter-histories, and pinpointing the layers of mediation and rep-
resentation that structure urban experience. For example, Shaina
Anand’s seven-part installation Khirkeeyaan (2006) intervenes in the
Khirkee Extension, New Delhi, with simple yet effective open-circuit tel-
evision technology to facilitate communication amongst the area’s
inhabitants; the project documents and highlights various social affinities
and tensions in an area symbolically and physically at the urban fringe
and creates a unique testimony and archive of everyday life. Canadian-
Anishinabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s piece Vigil (2002) is a troubling
and evocative memorial performance piece devoted to dozens of
women (many First Nations) who had disappeared (likely murdered)
from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Despite widespread knowledge
that women were regularly disappearing, the city did not remember.
Belmore is challenging the ‘official’ archive that forgets and erases.
Well-known projects like Mark Dion’s various archaeological digs or
Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001) could feature here as well. That
536

Shaina Anand, Kirkeeyan 3, 2006, seven-part participatory media installation project in Kirkeeyan extension, Delhi, photo:
courtesy Shaina Anand

said, acknowledging that these urban practices underscore the agency of

the city does not in itself account for the question of why art engages
with the city and urban terrain. For this, we must return to the larger
stakes at issue.
When collected together, we can locate a binding thread within art’s
diverse urban actions. At core is the recognition that urbanization
represents the dramatic concentration of everyday inequality. This,
ultimately, is the abiding issue, the urban question. It is this question
that often becomes diluted within the contemporary narrative pull that
celebrates the city for its creative resources and problem-solving
capacities, and this is where the conceptual wealth and, at times,
peculiarities of art can act as a counterpoint. If Castell’s classic text
underscores a Marxist interpretation of inequality, ideology and the
city, then contemporary art exemplifies a very diverse understanding of
inequality’s multifold features, manifestations of the larger puzzle of

19. Rosalyn Deutsche,
Evictions: Art and Spatial
Politics, MIT Press,
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1996. This
collection includes essays
written during the 1980s
and early 1990s, so that
Deutsche’s work
importantly foreshadows
the expansion of urban
questions, issues and
practices to come.
20. Ibid, ix
21. George Yúdice, The
Expediency of Culture,
Duke University Press,
Durham, North Carolina,
2003
22. Ibid, pp 287 –337; and
Yúdice, ‘Urban
Interventions’, Public 32,
pp 8 –21
23. Joanne Sharp, Venda
Pollock and Ronan
Paddison, ‘Just Art for A
Just City’, Urban Studies
vol 45, no 5/6, 2005, pp
1001 –1023; John Grundy
and Julie-Anne Boudreau,
‘Living with Culture:
Creative Citizenship
Practices in Toronto’,
Citizenship Studies, vol 12,
no 4, 2008, pp 347 –363
537
the city as the social, political, cultural and economic organization of
marginalization, division and scarcity. Art’s urban techniques are not
equal to activism, but sometimes coincide with recognizable activist strat-
egies and projects. In different measures, they can provide for mechan-
isms of recognition, exposition, alternative realizations or critical
elaborations, but not necessarily in the same project. Inequality does
not necessarily appear front and centre, but this is important to untan-
gling the range of art’s contributions to the everyday character of its
urban manifestations. By creating conditions for sociability with stran-
gers, as in Majdan’s The Dinner Project and the Complaints Choirs
Worldwide, many projects tackle social boundaries and the subtle
dynamics of difference– indifference, a small part of everyday urban
inequality. However, a mourning ritual for murdered and disregarded
sexworkers brings the question clearly into focus. But if inequality is
the question, then the issue of response is more complicated.
FROM THE URBAN QUESTION TO
THE IMPLICATIONS OF RESPONSE
In terms of scholarship, contemporary art’s urban practices have
attracted more and more attention as a counterpoint to prevailing dis-
courses on urban culture, and these discussions are broadly framed by
two overarching concerns: (1) the place of contemporary art within the
urban cultural field and economy; (2) art’s capacity for questioning and
subverting, if not changing, the status quo of the city. For example,
Rosalyn Deutsche’s influential collection of essays in Evictions links
urban planning and spatial discourses to artistic practices, and unravels
the complicity and complications of the alignments of art and the new
urbanism in the United States.19 Deutsche refers to the relation between
art, space and politics as the interdisciplinary ‘urban-aesthetic’ field,20
which conjoins art, architecture and urban design with the city, social
space and public space. In her formulation, art can become a tool for gen-
trification as much as it can act as a source of provocation that targets
contemporary urban exclusions. Cultural theorist George Yúdice’s The
Expediency of Culture argues that culture is a resource most often
invoked for economic and political efficacy; but at the same time he
emphasizes the flexibility of cultural practices and illustrates the need
to reconfigure how we conceive of agency within the political economy
of culture.21 In his attention to contemporary art’s urban and public prac-
tices, Yúdice recognizes how these projects negotiate multiple cultural
levels of activity and engagement, from control and management to
areas of resistance and reshaping.22 Deutsche’s essays delineate the
uneasy intersections between art’s capacity for essential urban commen-
tary and intervention and art at the service of gentrification and social
stratification – a theme which continues in Yúdice’s work. These texts
make clear the contradictory status of urban art and represent a key tra-
jectory of work that continues to identify its complex role as a contributor
and antidote to neoliberal cultural policy agendas such as the Creative
City.23
Other texts tend to place more emphasis on practices of critique and
transformation. For example, cultural geographer David Pinder’s interest
538
24. David Pinder, ‘Arts of
Urban Exploration’,
Cultural Geographies, vol
12, no 4, 2005, pp 383 –
411; and ‘Urban
Interventions: Art, Politics
and Pedagogy’,
International Journal of
Urban and Regional
Research, vol 32, no 3,
2008, pp 730 –736
25. Emphasis in the original,
Pinder, ‘Urban
Interventions’, op cit, p 731
26. Malcolm Miles, Urban
Avant-Gardes: Art,
Architecture and Change,
Routledge, London, 2004,
px
27. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic
Activism and Agonistic
Spaces’, Art and Research,
vol 1, no 2, 2007, p 5
28. For example, Claire Bishop,
Artificial Hells:
Participatory Art and the
Politics of Spectatorship,
Verso, London, 2012;
Shannon Jackson, Social
Works: Performing Art,
Supporting Publics,
Routledge, London, 2011;
Grant Kester, The One and
the Many: Contemporary
Collaborative Art in a
Global Context, Duke
University Press, Durham,
North Carolina, 2011.
29. Deutsche, Evictions: Art
and Spatial Politics, op cit,
p xi
in ‘arts of urban exploration’ and practices of urban intervention high-
lights the significance of contemporary artistic practices to critical
urban insights.24 He describes the work of urban interventions in the fol-
lowing manner:
. . . practices that are critical and politicized in relation to dominant power
relations and their spatial constitution, that are involved in but frequently
disrupt everyday urban life, that make use of artistic and creative means to
question and explore social problems and conflicts without necessarily
prescribing solutions, and that resist the processes through which urban
spaces are currently being produced in the interests of capital and the
state as they seek out and encourage more democratic alternatives.25
Pinder emphasizes the political, democratic potential of these practices as
a remedy to the restrictions of predominant models of urban organiz-
ation. Similarly, Malcolm Miles claims that art and related cultural prac-
tices provide a necessary correction to conventional dialogues on urban
renewal; he argues:
. . . much of what has been published in urban studies, cultural and
urban geographies, and cultural policy emphasizes the role of cultural
institutions in urban regeneration while ignoring more radical forms of
practice that irritate those institutional structures.26
Chantal Mouffe recognizes the importance of artistic contributions to
envisioning an agonistic public space that challenges what is repressed
by the politics of dominant consensus, but tempers this with the acknowl-
edgement that ‘It would be a serious mistake to believe that artistic acti-
vism could, on its own, bring about the end of neo-liberal hegemony’.27
Similar threads emerge within recent scholarship on practices that often
fall under the urban domain, such as collaboration, participation and per-
formance; there is a move toward stronger historical elaboration and
more varied contemporary analysis that attends to specific projects and
offers a measured approach to understanding art’s critical possibilities.28
This sampling of texts demonstrates what is an ongoing project – how
to position art within sustaining structures and intricate networks of
urban culture, politics and economy. On the one hand, art is a critical
urban resource, one that can ‘irritate’ (Miles) prevailing models, if not
build an ‘agonistic public sphere’ (Mouffe) or ‘more democratic alterna-
tives’ (Pinder); but, on the other hand, it must be located within the struc-
tures, spaces and relations of urbanization that also reward the
‘expediency of culture’ (Yúdice). Experimental practice always intersects
with a prevailing ‘urban-aesthetic’ discourse (Deutsche).29 I would prefer
to present a sober picture of art’s contribution than one of unfounded
optimism, and with that in mind in this section I pursue the always
present perils of art’s urban investigations. Art’s urban practices risk
reproducing the urban order even as they seek to reinvent it; they can
easily veer toward thin versus thick modes of description, and the wide-
spread circulation of such projects collides with dominant modes of cul-
tural globalization as well as its alternatives. At the same time I argue that
these risks can be used to underscore necessary addenda to prevailing dis-
courses of urbanization. In this respect, I develop three concepts (ambiva-
lent urbanism, thick urbanism and soft solidarity) that strive to connect
the two threads of scholarship noted above. I present the following

30. The points in this section
can serve as a guide for
sustained analysis of the
work of individual
examples, but such analysis
exceeds the format of this
investigation.
31. Walter Benjamin, The
Arcades Project, Howard
Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin, trans,
Belknap Harvard Press,
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2002
539
points purposely at a remove from a discussion of specific projects,
however frustrating this measure of abstraction may be, to demonstrate
the need to examine risks and presumptions that too often find cover
under the urban banner but not to create quarrels regarding actual
projects when examples can be only briefly mentioned.30
AMBIVALENT URBANISM
Contradiction is a familiar motif within the writings of modernity,
where the city facilitates as much as it isolates. For example in
Walter Benjamin’s work this translates into, on the one side, a poignant
demonstration of the city as the concentration of social and historical
tragedy, as well as, on the other, a testimony to the city’s potential
to guide the work of collective transformation.31 The ground of con-
temporary art practice must work between how the city intensifies
and highlights the failures and injustices of contemporary life and the
insight that the city itself provides into how to address these dilemmas
of collective inhabitation. Thus art’s strategies of interrogating prevail-
ing features of urban life are necessarily double-edged. Taken together
these practices point to a complicated series of ambivalent formations
of possibility – material, social, political and aesthetic – as well as
peril, such as co-optation, social reproduction and social engineering.
Consider, for example, the role of the central urban relations discussed
in the previous section: play, work, memory. The play character of
urban experimentation moves between control and freedom, whimsy
and even aggression. As play directs art’s methods, it unleashes the
freedom to create an alternative realm, a playground in the city that
can, importantly, play at alternatives. But it can also reproduce the
urban order or provide a fleeting escape that only makes the rules,
rigidity and exclusions of the city easier to accept. Social work relies
on principles of labour, and art’s social work methods struggle over
versions of the collective good and responsibility to others and prin-
ciples of experience, exchange and action. This being so, social work
practices must negotiate a tension between activism and reform.
Social work as exchange and advocacy voices urban needs and stresses
the importance of urban change through multifold interventions that
also act as a critique of the contemporary city, yet art as means to
social reform relies on a notion of betterment that can serve to
reinforce the structural inequalities of the city. Contemporary art’s
urban archival and archaeological methods unravel the city as the pre-
dominant site of innumerable losses and tragedies, inexcusable forget-
fulness, but also as the site of persistent hope for the future of the
city, of the ability of memory to remake, but only when the past is
part of this future. But memory can be invoked to excuse, even
forget, and nostalgia or celebration can replace critical reflection. It
can easily become meaningless in its expansiveness or malicious in its
selectivity.
These examples suggest how art’s urban tactics underscore an ambiva-
lent urbanism that dramatizes but does not resolve the precarious work of
urban transformation; however, this is both a risk and an important
feature of art’s treatment of urban life, and something that is too easily
540
32. For a few different
perspectives on this point:
Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello, The New Spirit
of Capitalism, Gregory
Elliott, trans, Verso,
London and New York,
2005; Angela McRobbie,
‘“Everyone Is Creative”:
Artists as Pioneers of the
New Economy?’, in Tony
Bennett and Elizabeth
Silva, eds, Contemporary
Culture and Everyday Life,
Routledge, London, 2004,
pp 186 –199; Andrew
Ross, Nice Work If You
Can Get It: Life and Labor
in Precarious Times,
New York University Press,
New York, 2009; Richard
Sennett, The Culture of the
New Capitalism, Yale
University Press, New
Haven and London, 2009.
33. For example, James
Clifford, The Predicament
of Culture. Twentieth-
Century Ethnography,
Literature and Art,
Harvard University Press,
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1988; Hal
Foster, The Return of the
Real, MIT Press,
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1996; Alex
Coles, Site Specificity: The
Ethnographic Turn, de-,
dis-, ex-., vol 4, Black Dog,
London, 2000; Arnd
Schneider and Christopher
Wright, Contemporary Art
and Anthropology, Berg,
New York, 2006.
34. This is what Foster terms in
his discussion of the artist as
ethnographer ‘parallactic
work’; The Return of the
Real, op cit, p 203; or,
Miwon Kwon in her
discussion of artists and
community-based art
‘collective artistic praxis’,
One Place After Another:
Site Specific Art and
Locational Identity, MIT
Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 2002, p 154.
35. Grant Kester, ‘Aesthetic
Evangelists: Community
and Empowerment in
Contemporary Community
Art’, Afterimage, vol 22, no
6, 1995, pp 5–11
36. Bennett Simpson, ‘Multiple
City Arte Panama, 2003′ ,
dismissed in the popular embrace of cities. If we foreground ambivalent
urbanism as inescapably part of working with the agency of the city
within the work of art, art is better positioned to realize and explore
important questions of urban organization, participation, experience
and negotiation in relation to specific processes and projects.
THE CITY AS THICK AND THIN
Art’s heightened engagement with the city translates into another role for
the artist: urban researcher. The artist as urban researcher testifies to the
disguises, performances and roles, as well as expectations, that the figure
of the artist assumes within contemporary culture, from administrator to
facilitator, social worker to labourer. There is good reason to be con-
cerned about this ever-expanding repertoire, with the artist as another
service provider in the new flexible urban economy.32 On the one hand,
the artist as urban researcher takes seriously the role of culture and its
contribution to urban issues, stressing a complexity of insight around
ways of inhabiting and acting in the city. On the other, artists can
compile research practices and draw on strategies with impunity, assum-
ing new centrality as the arbiters of (urban) knowledge. In this regard, we
can discern a useful parallel within previous discussions regarding the
artist as ethnographer,33 where the challenge is also to adopt a self-reflex-
ive relationship to the authority that always accompanies investigation.34
If we unthinkingly accept the role of the artist as urban researcher and
exemplary problem-solver, we risk championing an urban exotic with
the artist-as-explorer enacting a contemporary urban primitivist
fantasy. This acts as a reminder of a history of aesthetic validation pre-
mised on the centrality of the artist to meaning and intention, and the
artist can become a backdoor to promoting the ends of new urban econ-
omies of flexibility and cultural commodification while often giving the
appearance of acting in the interest of urban betterment, neighbourhoods
and communities; an updated version of what Grant Kester termed ‘aes-
thetic evangelism’ in community art.35 The emergence of the artist as
urban researcher is a way to measure as well as problematize what are
diverse methods of urban engagement, in which artistic methods are
not neutral, but emerge out of different contexts and histories of practice.
To this end, art’s urban experimentations must contend with the
construction of thick versus thin urbanism. As Bennett Simpson
notes, the question that remains with any project or urban-themed
exhibition is whether or not they ‘provoke a dialogue about the city
and the social conditions of its people capable of sustaining anything
more than spectacle, spontaneous public diversion, or art whimsy?’.36
In keeping with the ethnographic thread in this discussion and the
question of research, we can update the notion of ‘thick description’
in ethnography and its attention to layers of context and signification,
practices of interpretation and re-interpretation.37 Drawing on this,
thick urbanism is a way to acknowledge the process of art’s immersion
in the environment, to recognize the complexity of forms of communi-
cation between participants, and reckon with the fullness and partiality
of the documentation and representation of ideas, actors and issues.

Third Text 64, vol 17, no 3,
September 2003, p 289
37. Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick
Description: Toward an
Interpretive Theory of
Culture’, in Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures,
Basic, New York, 1973, pp
3– 30
38. For example, see Kester,
The One and the Many, op
cit, pp 125 –140.
39. Fuyuki Kurasawa,‘A
Cosmopolitanism from
Below: Alternative
Globalization and the
Creation of a Solidarity
without Bounds’,
European Journal of
Sociology, vol 45, no 2,
2004, pp 233 –255
40. Mervyn Horgan, ‘Strangers
and Strangership’, Journal
of Intercultural Studies, vol
33, no 6, 2012, p 619
41. Nicolas Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics,
Simon Pleasance and
Fronza Woods, trans, Les
presses du réel, Dijon, 2002
42. For example, Pierre
Bourdieu, The Field of
Cultural Production,
Columbia University Press,
New York, 1993; and
Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgment of
Taste, Routledge, London,
2013
43. Horgan, ‘Strangers and
Strangership’, op cit,
pp 619 –620
541
Thick urbanism makes clear the challenge of addressing the city as both
surface and depth.
GLOBALIZATIONS AND SOFT SOLIDARITY
The invocation of the term ‘city’ always veers toward specificity as
much as generality: The City, a general category based on shared
characteristics of urbanization, versus a city, a specific place with dis-
tinct associations. And each emphasis comes at a certain cost. There is
undeniable centrality granted to art and artists from major global
cities, a reinforcement of Western norms and patterns of urbanization,
and a generally imbalanced international traffic of artists and ideas.
Artists often conduct similar projects in many locations, transferring
projects from city to city, institution to institution. Artists become
renowned for a practice, a brand that has achieved the success and rec-
ognition that appeals to institutions and funding bodies. When paired
with the successful internationalization of certain practices, we must
contend with the implications of contemporary art that mimics the
operations of an eclectic NGO.38 Nonetheless, these nomadic projects
still respond to specific locations, histories and communities. Further-
more, so many of these actions are modest in scale and resources
and not necessarily part of the professional art world, which the
range of examples in the previous section demonstrates. In this
regard, what we have is a tension between hegemonic and alternative
globalizations. On the one hand we can locate this urban turn as a
manifestation of the globalization of specific art practices and
markets, from biennial art circuits to elite markets and heightened
demands; we know that art is not autonomous from the global flow
of culture and capital. On the other these practices, when taken
together, also point to a counter-project of global urbanization, a com-
panion to the alternative globalization movement and its important but
necessarily fragmented series of practices and interventions.39
Certainly, this is where Hardt and Negri or Mouffe position art
within practices of urban resistance.
In this regard, I am putting forth what Mervyn Horgan has termed
‘soft solidarity’ as a useful concept that accounts for the complicated
work of coming together that cities readily illustrate.40 In the critical
analysis of art’s urban practices, we are often left grappling with a
version of practice that does not slip into an easy celebration of the
‘micro-utopia’,41 but at the same time does not remain solely relegated
to the constraints of the cultural field.42 Soft solidarity is a partial
answer to the larger issue of inequality. Soft solidarity speaks to a
need for collective recognition and action, but as a construct it is one
that emerges within the everyday through more informal bonds, alli-
ances and even conflicts; this is a solidarity that depends on a
measure of ‘mutual indifference’ that has always been a central
feature of urban life.43 Soft solidarity is a project in which contempor-
ary art’s diverse urban efforts can share because of its recognition of
immediacy and locality, spatial formations and interactional landscapes
without portending reconciliation with or erasure of structural con-
straints. Foregrounding soft solidarity as part of the work of alternative
542

globalization cannot erase the significance of political solidarity, but it

can be a supporting feature of this wider project.

TOWARDS A PLANETARY URBANISM

This entire article rests on a plea that we tread with caution when we
align art and the city. If the city represents a dizzying array of contradic-
tions, we do well to remember that serious practices of urban engage-
ment are working inside and not outside this realm. In relation to this
I have argued that ambivalent urbanism, thick urbanism and soft solidar-
ity are concepts that underscore art’s contributions without obscuring the
abiding tensions. Certainly the reason for the most recent surge of inter-
est in urban life is all too clear. With urbanization as the foremost model
of global dwelling in the twenty-first century, to focus on cities as hospi-
table and sustainable is of no minor importance; cities are becoming
larger and more fragile, more sensitive to global shifts and insecurities.
But whether economic, social, political or ecological, there is always
the temptation to use the city as a palimpsest or as a catchall that
explains what is otherwise a daunting array of conflicts and intersections.
And this is why the larger question of inequality as the target of art’s
undertakings must be kept firmly in view, but, in keeping with art’s
conceptual and critical capacities, the very representation of this question
relies on diversity not rigidity. With the multidirectional pull of
global urbanization, it is timely to reassess the contributions of art to
urban themes and dialogues and the different measures of experimen-
tation, confrontation, participation and problem-solving such examples
involve.
My final point of reflection rests on how to expand our address of
urbanization: how do we capture the networks of governance, economies,
commodities, communication and transportation that feed the concen-
tration of inequality within cities, and also represent the achievements
and expansion of contemporary urbanization? While this article has
pointed to the ways in which art is adept at pursuing the multifold fea-
tures of urbanization, we should remain aware that twenty-first-century
urbanism does not resemble – conceptually, spatially, cartographically
– twentieth-century urbanism. As Neil Brenner argues in his recent
article in Public Culture, ‘Theses on Urbanization’, our methods and
tools of analysis remain out of step with the variations on urbanism
that defy the classic rural – urban concentric divide and instead form
elaborate networks, forces and fringes: this is a planetary urbanism. As
Brenner explains:
. . . extended urbanization is producing a variegated urban fabric that,
rather than being simply concentrated within nodal points or confined
within bounded regions, is now woven unevenly and yet ever more
densely across vast stretches of the entire world. Such a formation
cannot be grasped adequately through traditional concepts of cityness,
metropolitanism, or urban/rural binarisms, which presuppose the coherent
areal separation of distinct settlement types.44

44. Brenner, ‘Theses on An emerging responsibility of art is to address this expansiveness, the
Urbanism’, op cit, p 90 distinct patterns of growth, inhabitation and communication that are
 543

Brenda Longfellow, Glen Richards and Helios Design Labs, Offshore, 2012, photo: courtesy Brenda Longfellow, Glen
Richards and Helios Design Labs, photo credit: Helios Design Labs

not limited to city regions but instead extend to the depth of the ocean, the
high arctic. As Brenner argues, ‘a new cognitive map is urgently needed’,
and certainly art can share in this project.45 To this end, a project like the
interactive web documentary and installation project Offshore (2013,
Brenda Longfellow, Glen Richards, Helios Design Labs) is illustrative.
Offshore is an elaborate reconstruction of a fictitious deep sea oil rig,
The Spartan, based in the Gulf of Mexico, after a disastrous oil leak.
The representation of the oil rig is based on various visual sources, fic-
tional and documentary elements, and enhanced with interviews and
other forms of testimony that create – re-create undersea resource extrac-
tion. This example presents a practice of urban investigation into the
largely invisible processes of urbanization, such as resource extraction,
and on a terrain that is most often left out of discussions of urban locality
because the space itself is inaccessible – certainly, the artists were unable
to secure access to a real oil rig.46 Oil rigs, deep water ports like the ‘oil
capital’ Port Fourchon, Louisiana, confront us with a colonization of the
45. Ibid, p 95
ocean, the prospects of a deep water Oil City, but without accompanying
46. Brenda Longfellow, public spaces that are part of the domain of the city as we know it. How
‘Offshore: Extreme Oil and
the Disappearing Future’, do we bring the contemporary toolkit of art’s urban interventions to this
Public, 48, pp 95 –103 version of planetary urbanization?
544

I bring this spectre of planetary urbanism into this discussion after

writing an article that intends to make the stakes and diversity of urban
practices in contemporary art clearer. But to foreground clarity, to be
sure, would be a misrepresentation, particularly in light of the version
of the city and art that I have sketched out above. We must continue to
rethink our understanding of urbanization and urbanism by definition
and implication. In order to nurture the alternatives that art might
provide we must do so with a reinvented model that both underscores
the immediacy of urban dynamics so often targeted by art’s urban prac-
tices and recognizes the strands of interdependency that shape the
forces of a shifting urban life. And so the ongoing task for art’s urban
investigations is one of recognizing and working with the new agency
of an expansive, planetary urbanism.

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship.
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