Art and the city: urban aesthetics in the changing neoliberal landscape

Art’s practical and political place in reconstituting the urban space as one of the defining elements of urban culture render a twofold role. Urban aesthetics is an integral part of current capitalist processes that are turning the neoliberal art subject to a resource for tourism and a real estate investment. Indeed, art has been both a product of and a response to the unequal distribution of resources and visibility in the city through the processes of new urban planning. Art’s presence in the urban space is dynamic and interactive that communicates the complex forms of globalization, cultural hybridity, and plurality in contemporary daily life—where we experience politics. The new types of agencies and strategies of urban creativity in the form of graffiti, wall paintings, yarn bombing, stickers, urban gardening, street performances, tactical art, creative campaigns and theatrical actions—among others—demand an active spectatorship and have a growing power to renegotiate space for new forms of political participation. My discussion of urban aesthetics will contribute to the understanding of the scope and complexity of the new urban development from the point of ‘political aesthetics’ of the urban space that contests the ‘politicized aesthetics’ of the changing neoliberal landscape.