Urban spaces between norms and dreams

Abstract

Urban space is not a predetermined order, but a relative space-time that evolves and becomes created and re-structured in a polemical relationship between different actors, interests, and goals. City space is increasingly an effective space for production and transition, as well as norms and practices that govern them. But before many things, a city is its inhabitants’ space, and an object of utopian thinking, memories, and dreams. This chapter brings forth the perspectives of art and law in urban space. Law, too, is manifested in a variety of material and spatial dimensions – in architecture, walls, squares, and thoroughfares. Discussing affective urbanism and cases concretizing art’s interventional-experimental practices, the chapter highlights the multisensory and imaginary aspects that remain overlooked in the regulation-driven urban processes. It looks at the city in a way that makes some of the mechanisms and conceptions of both art and law visible and contestable through acknowledging confluences with their practices. In this endeavour, the chapter proposes a scenario where an approach to urbanism, attentive to how affects and emotions compose urban space, is put into practice in such a way that acknowledges both the regulatory forces and the aesthetic and sensuous.