Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

In heterogeneous cities, how do individuals and communities learn to communicate and collaborate across dimensions of difference? Social practice has long taken the neighborhood as both terrain and topic. Through analysis of selected social practice projects in the United States over the last five decades, I explore social practice’s potential to deepen civic engagement in urban change. I connect scholarship from the fields of art and planning (Bishop 2012, Metzger 2011, Sandercock 2004, Kester 2004 and others) to build three categories – encounter, dialogue, and transformative engagement – that demonstrate how social practice embodies a form of communicative planning that can transcend the limitations of discursively bounded participatory processes. Examples include intimate encounters of personal witness (Solga 2010) or drama-based third spaces that articulate epistemological challenges (Greenwood 20001). These micropublics or temporary communities invoke a city in which differences are negotiated. With the recent rise of “placemaking,” artists have been explicitly invited into the urban design process. This codification of creative engagement, however, may serve to reify conceptions of “the public” and enact a governmentality of participation that excludes in the name of inclusion.