In times of increasing neoliberal privatization, homogenization and control of public urban spaces in today’s cities we witness various artistic and creative attempts to reclaim and reconfigure the city, be it for the moment or for the longer run: street art; urban farming; parkours; flashmobs; guerrilla gardening; pop-up stores and restaurants; occupying abandoned sites for new purposes. 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?

During this course, you will reflect on these questions not only by discussing texts, but also by going into the city of Utrecht and working through these questions in more experiential and creative manners. This course celebrates the motto: thinking by doing. Furthermore, the course invites you to explore and define your personal and individual engagement with respect to issues of public space and the city. Therefore, this course requires a genuine interest in the topics of the course, and an open and curious attitude.

The 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 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.