The utility of beauty: The antinomies of street art in Delhi

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 225-242
Author(s):  
Sanchita Khurana
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Indian City ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The City ◽  
Indian Cities

In the last decade, the city of Delhi has witnessed a surge in urban artistic practice – particularly street art – that draws its conceptual and art-historical ‘virtue’ from being in the public sphere. The changing socio-economic, infrastructural and aesthetic set-up of the city bears many similarities to what has been called the cultural regeneration of cities across the globe. Interpreting it as symptomatic of the neo-liberalization of the Indian city, this article examines the spatial implications of the burgeoning contemporary street art movement in Delhi. It contextualizes the art movement within place-making initiatives in Indian cities that have been attempting to attract the middle-class to city spaces to cater to their consumption patterns. The article suggests that there are two ways in which commissioned street art in neoliberal Delhi closely ties up with the neoliberal agenda of uneven redevelopment and regeneration in the city: (a) by instrumentalizing its form to revitalize decrepit areas that need capital investment in order to garner cultural tourism and trigger capital investment; and (b) by invoking a narrative of beautification and cleanliness that has been seen to emerge from a dominantly middle-class perspective in Indian cities. Looking at the unique ways in which urban space in Delhi interacts with local-political situations and responds to such place-making initiatives, the article attempts to interrogate what art-led gentrification implies in the economic and sociopolitical context of cities of the global South.

Marketplaces and central spaces: markets and the rise of competing spatial ideals in Danish city centres, c. 1850–1900

Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENS TOFTGAARD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Fish Market ◽  
Open Air Markets ◽  
The City ◽  
City Centres

ABSTRACTThe traditional open-air markets on the central squares of Danish cities were thriving in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, the markets were soon challenged by new urban ideals of the city centre as a place for shopping and capital investment. At the same time, urban reformers made efforts to improve the market trade to meet modern standards. The rivalling interests struggled over the question of modernization or relocation of the central square markets and ultimately the definition and use of the central urban space. In particular, this article will examine the struggle over the construction of a fish market hall in Odense as it serves to reveal the different conceptions of the central urban space that affected the fate of the street markets.

scholarly journals Formation of Subcultural Entity under the Influence of Public Sphere

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuliya Kuzovenkova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
The Public ◽  
Youth Subcultures ◽  
Long Time ◽  
New Space ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Short Time ◽  
The City

The last two decades have been a time of serious transformation of youth subcultures. Researchers speak about the formation of the postmodernism paradigm of subculture and the virtualisation of sociocultural phenomena. The subcultural subject and the power that formed it continue to exist in the new realities, but are undergoing a transformation. Changes having occured to the public sphere were especially significant for a subcultural entity since it is the public sphere where a subcultural entity can present itself to authorities, thereby maintaining its social subsistence. Our research was aimed at studying how the transformation of the public sphere has affected the entity’s subculture. For the study, the authors employed the method of a qualitative half-structurated interview and draw on the disciplinary authority concept suggested by M. Foucault. The analysis was based on materials of interviewing some representatives of the graffiti subculture in the city of Samara (twenty-two people) from 2016 to 2018. The author has established that the subcultural subject is processual and dependent on the practices in use; a change in practices leads to a change in the subject. Changes of practices in the graffiti subculture were a result of the virtualisation of culture. The author has identified the changes that have taken place in the subcultural subject under the influence of the transformation of the public sphere (the ‘short time’ of instantaneous fame prevails over the ‘long time’ of the symbolic capital of the nickname, new space-time coordinates within which the entity exists, the ‘digital body’ of the subcultural entity becomes ever more informative rather than that which was created via sketches placed in urban space). Unlike the public sphere, the private sphere under the influence of a subculture ideology remains unchanged.

scholarly journals The Contested Gallery: street art, ethnography and the search for urban understandings

AmeriQuests ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
The Road ◽  
The City

This is a paper on street art and its role as a form of artistic insurrection that challenges popular understandings of public space and urban visual culture. I would like to think of it as a field guide to urban seeing, a means of revising the way in which we view the cityscape and its imagery. It is a way of imagining the city as a canvas onto which ideas may be inscribed and reinterpreted, where resistance percolates up to those who look for it. It is here, in what Kathleen Stewart has called a “place by the side of the road” that the work of the street artist exists, slowly gurgling up through the cracks in the sidewalk and briefly illuminated by the yellow-white glow of the street lights. Street art most often takes the form of adhesive stickers, spray-painted stencils, and wheat-pasted posters, and while it shares many similar aesthetic and cultural characteristics with graffiti, street art embodies a unique ideology. Graffiti represents a territorialization of space (‘tagging’, or reclaiming urban spaces through the use of pseudonyms as territorial markings); street art represents a reterritorialization of space. Rather than taking space, street art attempts to re-purpose the existing urban environment. This paper seeks to reflect the changing dynamic of urban space through an analysis of the practice of street art. By examining the roles that street artists play in disrupting the flow of visual noise in the city, I will illuminate the cultural value and significance of this form of urban artistic resistance.

scholarly journals « Nous, maintenant, on veut poursuivre cette occupation de la rue » : les catholiques attestataires entre contre-culture, mission et défense patrimoniale

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-74
Author(s):  
Marie Balas ◽  
Josselin Tricou
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
Real Place ◽  
The Law ◽  
The City ◽  
Logics Of Action

The debate about the same sex marriage bill in France has launched a significant sequence of politicization and assertion in the streets for the conservative Catholics. Though mobilization declined after the law was passed, these initiatives still arouse differentiated appropriation of public urban space. Relying on ethnographic work, this article analyses two logics of action emerging complementarily and organizing these post-‘Mariage pour tous’ demonstrations in Paris. In both cases there is a real ‘place-taking/place-making’ at work. Extending the study of recent Catholic mobilizations to the different activists still active after ‘La Manif Pour Tous’ makes it possible to understand how central the issue of drop in status seems in order to analyze these protest repertoires and their evolutionary inscription in the city, especially in the direction of the ‘peripheries’.

PLACE-MAKING: APPLICATION IN THE CITY PLANNING PROCESS

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
pp. 47-54
Author(s):  
A. A. Lekomtseva ◽  
◽  
A. N. Khatskelevich ◽  
G. A. Gimranova ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
City Planning ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Place Making ◽  
City Administration ◽  
Business Structures ◽  
The City

Currently, there is a significant increase in the need to include residents in the urban planning process, in which they, along with other actors (for example, the city administration, developers, business structures) will become participants in making decisions about the fate of urban space. Interacting with the residents, the authorities directly receive feedback that helps to prevent the discontent of the population with respect to those or other decisions. The article considers some aspects of population involvement in urban planning as one of the primary tasks of urban planners.

City as Performance

2014 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 18-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imanuel Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
The Public ◽  
Living Together ◽  
Artistic Interventions ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

While artistic interventions in urban space multiply continuously, there seems to be a lack of knowledge about what is really happening in and with public spaces in such processes. David Harvey’s proposition that “the right to the city” means the “right to change ourselves” begs the question: Who is producing the city, and in turn, what new ways of living together are they producing? Artistic productions in urban environments produce new modes of engaging with public spaces and initiate a process in which a city’s inhabitants and users make and remake the public sphere.

scholarly journals Preserving the (right kind of) city: The urban politics of the middle classes in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (10) ◽  
pp. 2163-2180
Author(s):  
Mara Nogueira
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Continuous Process ◽  
Belo Horizonte ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

Since re-democratisation, Brazil has experienced a slow but continuous process of urban reform, with the introduction of legal and institutional developments that favour participatory democracy in urban policy. Legal innovations such as the City Statute have been celebrated for expanding the ‘right to the city’ to marginalised populations. While most studies examine the struggles of the urban poor, I focus on middle-class citizens, showing how such legal developments have unevenly affected the ways in which different social groups are able to impact the production of urban space. The two cases explored in this study concern residents’ struggles to preserve their middle-class neighbourhoods against change triggered by projects related to the hosting of the 2014 World Cup in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The first looks at the Musas Street residents’ fight against the construction of a luxury hotel in their neighbourhood, while the second examines the Pampulha residents’ struggle against the presence of street vendors and football fans in their streets. My findings show that through the articulation of legal discourses, middle-class claims on the need for preserving the environment and the city’s cultural heritage are legitimised by the actions of the local state. The article thus looks beyond neoliberalism, showing that socio-spatial segregation and inequality should not be regarded solely as the product of state–capital alliances for engendering capital accumulation through spatial restructuring, but also as the result of the uneven capacities of those living in the city to access the state resources and legitimise certain forms of inhabitance of urban space.

Guardians of the Bourgeois City: Citizenship, Public Space, and Middle–Class Activism in Mumbai

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Neoliberal Governmentality ◽  
Vested Interests ◽  
Indian State ◽  
The City

This article examines the new phenomenon of “citizens’ groups” in contemporary Mumbai, India, whose activities are directed at making the city's public spaces more orderly. Recent scholarship on Mumbai's efforts to become a “global” city has pointed to the removal of poor populations as an instance of neoliberal governmentality as espoused by the Indian state following the “liberalization” of the economy in the early 1990s. However, in this case, it is these civil society organizations, not the state—whose functionaries in fact benefit from a certain element of unruliness on the streets—who are the agents of increased control over populations and of the rationalization of urban space. This article, based on fieldwork–based research, argues that the way in which citizens’ groups exclude poor populations from the city is more complex than a straightforward deployment of neoliberalism, and is imbricated with transnational political economic arrangements in uneven and often inconsistent ways. in particular, this article explores how civic activists in these organizations envision their role in the city, and how their activism attempts to reconfigure the nature of citizenship. for instance, civic activists consider themselves to be the stewards of the city's streets and sidewalks, and wage their battles against what they consider unruly hawkers, a corrupt state, and a complacent middle–class public. Moreover, civic activists render street hawkers’ political claims illegitimate by speaking on behalf of the abstract “citizen”of Mumbai, thus implying that hawkers’ unions speak only on behalf of the vested interests of a single population. in this way, they mobilize a normative notion of civil society in order to exclude the vast segment of city residents who either sell or buy goods on the street. in doing so, the civic activists transform the discourse and practice of politics in the city, so that, ironically, while on one hand using the rhetoric of citizen participation, they in fact undermine the radically heterogeneous forms of democratic political participation the city offers.

An emerging art world: The de-subculturalization and artification process of graffiti and pixação in São Paulo

2021 ◽  
pp. 136787792110184
Author(s):  
Ricardo Campos ◽  
Gabriela Leal
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Art World ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Urban Art ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

Graffiti art and street art have been increasingly described as an artistic movement, with a constant presence in the streets, but also in galleries and museums. In this article we use the term urban art to define this institutionalized category, originating from informal street expressions. In the specific context of the city of São Paulo (Brazil), most of the social actors that make up this art world have backgrounds linked to graffiti and pixação. These two urban subcultures are linked to informal forms of appropriation of the urban space through illicit inscriptions. In this article, we aim, on the one hand, to describe the features and singularities of urban art as an emerging art world and, on the other, to understand how careers are developed in this universe. The empirical data derives from a qualitative research (in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation) developed during the past three years.

scholarly journals Sleep in the City. Private Experience of Beauty and Its Urban Implications

2017 ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
Bartosz Pokorski
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

In my paper I try to trace and understand the reasons for the birth of the 24/7 world as it is described by Johnatan Crary in his book 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. He proposes a grim vision of late capitalism in which sleep deprivation and the disintegration of public and private spaces will become a market necessity. My attempt to understand is supported on two other authors. First, Hannah Arendt provided me with an analysis of origins, transformations and somewhat present version of the relation of private and public spheres. Second, Fredrich Schiller delivered an interesting theory on the aesthetic ideal, art, beauty and human experience of beauty. These three analyzes stand as basis for my attempt to present a proposal to overcome the crisis described by Crary and the answer is related to the issue of aesthetic experience of street art in urban space.

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