This module considers how urban spaces are imagined, represented, performed and contested through artistic practices. It focuses on a range of artists and cultural practitioners whose work explores and intervenes in the geographies of cities. Through an engagement with primary materials, it aims to introduce the activities of these practitioners, to set them within broader contexts, and to provide means for assessing their significance as urban explorations and interventions. Furthermore, through practical fieldwork in which the students will develop their own urban interventions, students will directly engage and intervene in current discourses on urban processes and development in order to understand how artistic and creative practices can be used as a platform for the performative disruption and reconfiguration of urban space.

Terms such as ‘urban interventions’, ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘arts of urban exploration’ have been among those mobilised recently to refer to art practices engaging critically with urban spaces, places and sites. Other significant terms include ‘new genre public art’, socially engaged art, site specific art and performance. This module takes a specific path through work associated with such terms through an interest in intersections and exchange between geography and performance, as well as urban studies and art practice. A particular focus will be on the theoretical concept of ‘performativity’ as a way to understand both how power relations are performed in cities on a daily basis, but also how these can be critically revealed and (temporarily) disturbed through artistic interventions in urban space.