The Artist as Urban Planner – A Glance at the Cooperation of Artistic and Urban Practice

Project Funding: OEAW Austrian Academy of Sciences (DOC-Team)
Project Duration: October 2012 – September 2015
Project Team: Anamarija Batista (Akademie der bildenden Künste, Wien); Szilvia Kovàcs (Technische Universität Wien); Carina Lesky (LBIGG, Dissertationsprojekt „Stepping into the Street: Cinematic Conversions of Public Spaces“)
Project Partners: Institute for American Studies, University of Innsbruck; Institute for Art and Cultural Studies, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna; Department of Urban and Regional Research, TU Wien

The integration of art projects into urban planning techniques currently produces an attractive field of research and has caught the interest of various disciplines. The project responds to current developments and the ongoing discourse, analyzing possibilities to integrate art into the planning and creation of public space.

To enable a more in-depth analysis, the part of the project based at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society (LBIGG) focused on developments in the field of film. In addition to examining recent art projects in the urban context as well as their classification within spatial planning research, but also social, cultural and media studies, the project focused on the study of historical precursors of these phenomena. These served as points of reference for the analysis and contextualisation of current developments and as a basis for the elaboration of theoretical concepts as well as necessary definitions of terms, which were deepened in 2015 during a research stay at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis in exchange with the “Cities Project” working group.

As part of the project results, the anthology “Rethinking Density. Art, Culture, and Urban Practices“, which approaches the topic of urban densification from an art and cultural studies perspective.