Special Issue on “Arts and Urban Development”

When I set out to edit a Special Issue in Arts on urban development and the role of the arts, I wanted to harvest a different perspective on the advantages of culture for urban development. In an era when creative placemaking and cultural districts have become buzzwords and subsequently established vocabulary in urban planning circles, what would researchers who focus on the arts think about these issues? How would they approach what the artist’s role in urban development could be? I hoped to find that artists are engaging in urban development in a variety of ways and to chronicle this diversity for the benefit of urban planners. More significantly, I aspired to shift the terms of the debate away from top-down solutions to consider bottom-up alternatives and, through this lens, to open up the conversation on how we look at urban development and the role of the arts.

I imagined that I would receive a number of articles on artistic interventions in cities and on the opportunities created by cultural producers in the economic life of metropolitan areas. In other words, I had a fairly strong idea of what urban development was and what the arts could contribute to it. There are classic examples, like the remaking of SoHo then Chelsea in Manhattan, or the development of the South Bank Center in London, and these resonate with, for example, the rise of the West Bund Cultural District in Shanghai or the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town. However, reading the submitted articles for publication in this Special Issue, I find that the contributions of the arts to urban development are myriad and contribute to urban culture in ways that are far beyond what urban development terms such as “public participation” or “economic impact” might cover. What I have reflected upon in the process of putting this Special Issue together is that artists of all sorts—musicians, filmmakers, architects and visual artists—mediate urban life and transform it, but they also lay claim to the urban environment for their own ends. What is more, the contributions of artists to cities are not always fixed, such as a public monument, but are often transitory and can take many forms over time. The difference between traditional ideas of urban improvement and what the reader will discover in this Special Issue could be explained by the fact that there is a difference between fixed forms of visual art, the placement of a mural or a museum in a redeveloping neighborhood, for example, and the more fleeting experiences of the performing arts. Performing artists sometimes work in buildings designed for their use—a symphony hall, a theater—but their urban interventions in the city can be more dynamic and elusive. While this is a complexity to reflect upon when thinking about the arts and the urban, the difference between time-based performing arts and object-based visual arts is not the only gap that emerged through the research collected here.

Another point to make is that the city’s spaces are not always the final outcome of artistic interventions. Artists use cities to develop their work and, since such a large portion of artists inhabit metropolitan spaces, cities often turn up as subjects in their work, or inflect the identity of the art work in question. Think, for example, about the way the adjective “urban” is used to categorize and/or promote music or fashion in the US or Europe, and you have opened the door to racial and historical analysis about the kinds of culture that are associated with cities. In other words, urban is a term that has no more of a fixed meaning than art, and while cities need artists to revitalize them, artists need cities for the same purpose; one perceives a reflexive play between art and cities. There are as many imagined cities as there are potential art projects, but the work of imagination is clearly underneath both of them; thus, it could also be said that art and cities are not only integrated but interdependent works of human conception.

Of course, the use of the term arts in Urban Studies suggest a utopic impulse at the core of a particular posture on urban development. Everyone knows that developers build cities for profit and city officials govern them for order, but the presence of the arts suggests that cities aspire to something grander than warehousing workers and managing companies. This is not the place to consider the long history of the symbolism of cities in cultural representations or the long-held aspirations for a more perfect urban form. But when artists are involved in planning a development or when they activate an urban space, we feel that they are imparting an aesthetic sensibility, making it more engaging, desirable, or complex for the denizens of cities whose experiences not only reflect, but also compose, the urban interface. Richard Florida’s assessment of creative cities, Cities & the Creative Class (Florida 2004) suggests that artistic services actually create value and desirability for cities as they compete to lure companies and industries because creatives (and his definition is much broader than artists) seek environments that possess these dimensions. If your city does not have a cultural district, Florida’s model avers, good luck getting a Fortune 500 company to set up a headquarters there.

In a word, art, artists, architects, etc., make the city more human, by which I mean more sensible and more tangible, to humans who built and inhabit the city. The humanistic impulse here is that cities are not just streets and buildings, power generation and transportation routes, but that all of these technologies are here for the benefit of the people who inhabit cities. What is more, the arts make people’s lives more fulfilling by reflecting the human element back into the urban infrastructure so we may begin to perceive that, in reality, human dynamics are the actual infrastructure that powers the city itself. That is the utopic dimension that the arts confer onto cities, though the idea of people as infrastructure has its own trajectory in the Urban Studies field and has gradually been understood to be more structurally significant in a variety of ways (Simone 2004; Wilson and Jonas 2021). In most incarnations, this concept is used to describe the way denizens of cities in the Global South, though they do not have political or economic power, nevertheless produce the city through their actions. Such a concept is designed to change the way we understand both urban infrastructure and human participation in developing cities. Artists have brought a similar concept to their work without being influenced by this discourse specifically. If the project of aesthetic contemplation of a work of art is to reveal the true nature of the world, artistic practice can push us towards a similar realization about urban life.

The obverse of this conception of people as infrastructure is that the city imprints itself onto those who inhabit it and shapes them as well as their imaginations and their self-understanding. I live in Oakland, California, a city which has a very particular reputation that has inspired countless artists from Tupac Shakur to Ryan Coogler. Three of the papers in this Special Issue consider the way artists situate themselves in relation to the cities to which they lay claim. Nasim Naghavi’s paper “Navigating Class Gender and Urban Mobile Spaces: Dissecting Iranian Car Social Spaces in Cinematic Narratives” (2025) analyzes two films, Ten by Abbas Kiarostami and Taxi by Jafar Panahi, “to pave the way for novel social interpretations of these spaces [in Tehran]”. The paper develops some very compelling tools for considering the intersection of individual subjectivity and the social and political dimensions of urban spaces, including “mobility space”, a concept first theorized by sociologist John Urry in 2004 but adapted to an interpretation of these films. Another is “diegetic cabinography”, a term coined here to describe the internal focus of a film that takes place in a car, contrasting with an external focus of a road trip movie. Mobility space, as seen in these films, is defined as a fluid, in-between space imbued with social interactions. It is indeed a dwelling in motion that disrupts traditional social roles and boundaries and embodies movement, experience, and subjectivities that are politicized, marginalized, and enculturated (Naghavi 2025, n.p.).

Such a representation of urban space is bound to break down barriers since the characters and everyday life of the city as seen from a taxicab moves between fixed locations and allows unexpected social interactions. In the context of these two films, Naghavi finds, for example, feminist subjectivities emerge that conflict with normative political culture in Iran yet allow for emotional healing among the denizens of the city. Originally proposed as an “assemblage” by Urry, mobility space in Naghavi’s terms transforms both driver and passenger subjectivities, offering the car as a site of political, personal, and gender expression. This is enabled by diegetic cabinography because it draws out the many immediate and direct informal interactions between residents in cars and the spaces of the city. The author suggests that such films can help guide planners by modeling mobility environments that are managed and designed by them. Such a conclusion provides some context for understanding how “humans as infrastructure” can guide the production of mobility infrastructure in urban spaces.

In a similar vein, Matthew Oware presents the notion of a “black urbanity” in relation to multi-racial rappers Drake, Logic and J. Cole. The author finds that, while two of these rappers employ similar tropes of urban risk as authority figures—politicians and planners—their deployment of these themes serves to substantiate their identities as both resilient and authentic. As Oware conceives it, “racial identity is shaped by and shapes city residency. In this context, authentic rap identities emerge from city environments depicted as menacing, one of many tropes in rap music,” (Oware 2025). In the findings that emerge from his content analysis of rap lyrics, music is a means of laying claim to a shared urban subjectivity, one impacted by a hard life experienced by Black men in American cities. As a cultural representation, the music these rappers generate does not merely reflect the urban experience of the underclass, but also reinforces a shared perception that cities marginalize racial minorities putting them in danger; neither planning nor politics seems capable of resolving these inherent injustices. If people constitute urban infrastructure, it is possible to perceive the intentional neglect of this infrastructure, which is a persistent exclusionary practice among cities in the United States and elsewhere. If the music of these artists is not a call to action for urban planners, it is at least a reminder that utopic urban projections do not reach many, if not most, urban denizens, so the experiences of menace and racial subordination remain a fundamental component of the urban fabric. The brilliance of Oware’s contribution is that he has found a means of analyzing rap lyrics that constitutes a new way to connect urban experience to racial and multi-racial identity.

In her contribution, “Melomaniacs: How Independent Musicians Influence West Hollywood’s Cosmopolitanism” Caroline Nagy (2025) sets out to discuss the dynamic relationship between musician residents of West Hollywood and the city’s identity. As a cultural sociologist, Nagy has recruited a group of professional musicians from West Hollywood (WeHo) as subjects for her study, beginning with an analysis of their experiences and ideas about their work and its connection to location. Her study finds that there is an emphasis on authentic musical experiences and an advantage to the diverse audiences available in this location that drives their interest in settling in WeHo. She takes the analysis further through inversion, drawing out their specific contributions to what she terms the cosmopolitanism of the city. One of the important distinctions she makes is to separate this small city (1.9 sq miles or 5 sq km) from the larger metropolis of Los Angeles which is a center for the music industry and a magnet for professional musicians from around the world. The microcosm of West Hollywood is unique, as the author notes “…beyond securing its annals in music history, WeHo has routinely challenged the status quo and boundaries of the Arts, which continuously helps to attract and protect artistic individuals of all backgrounds—including the more than 40% of WeHo residents who identify as LGBTQ+” (Nagy 2025, n.p.). The diversity and character of the city attract professional musicians whose musical ambitions are scaled to human connection, not stadium shows or concert halls. Nagy’s findings locate among her subjects a sense of “musical legitimacy” as a result of the opportunity to present authentic versions of their work to “genre-crossing” audiences.

This dynamic, in turn, nurtures a unique cultural geography and draws audiences to its storied musical venues, where many a pop music career has been launched. Employing Petersen’s cultural omnivore theory (Peterson 1992), Nagy relates both production and consumption to this model of musical taste, suggesting that artists enjoy playing diverse kinds of music, just as listeners enjoy listening to many styles. This not only improves their own practice as musicians but it generates a sense of progressive values, an embrace of diversity. She joins to this the postmaterialist theory of Inglehart (1988), “a thesis emphasizing a lifestyle of self-actualization, autonomy and quality of life as opposed to more traditional needs and economic security”. Such a model applies effectively to her musician research and prompts an assessment of the interaction between musical production and urban experience. While the city contains many venues for small-scale performances (capacity of 500 or less) and fosters networks through commissions, grants and media, artists provide a sense of collective identity and the interaction between artists and audiences provides a moral dimension to musical performances connected to postmaterialism. She concludes that a creative city results not from top-down planning but from mutual participation in composing a locality characterized by cosmopolitanism. As Nagy frames it:

“By constructing our municipalities as vehicles that structurally enhance moral capital and cultural prosperity, we create tolerant and inclusive cosmopolitanisms that “show up” in voices and venues for its musicians (and other artists), and not just to stimulate the economy or demonstrate the financial rewards of the Arts—but because they realize the common good that working musicians bring to their communities”.

(Nagy 2025, n.p.)

The articles in this Special Issue by Lily Song/Heang Leung Rubin and Natalia Bursiewicz explore community-based practices or artist-led regeneration in Boston and in Polish cities, respectively. While their research models are exemplary of the concepts discussed at the beginning of this introduction—artists participating in community-engagement and generating value-added experiences in formerly neglected neighborhoods—both of these authors introduce new elements to consider about artist-led regeneration from their case studies. Song and Rubin investigate the Residence Lab, “a community-based arts residency program initiated by the Pao Arts Center and the Asian Community Development Corporation that brought together multimedia artists with residents to collectively preserve Boston’s Chinatown through creative and artistic activation of underutilized sites in the neighborhood from 2019 to 2022” (Song and Rubin 2025, n.p.). But their history of artistic and community engagement traces past struggles and organizations such as the Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW), founded in 1979, that promoted Asian artists and community-based political actions. Thus, the history of artists’ activation in the Chinatown neighborhood precedes both theories of the creative economy and creative placemaking in Urban Studies/planning literature. This is a significant finding in itself.

The ResLab, as it is known, was a project to recruit artists by the community to engage in community-directed efforts. This is an important innovation because an art center that was spawned by community organizations partnered with a community development corporation to bring artists into Chinatown in order to create projects that would generate placekeeping for the benefit of the community. “Placekeeping” represents the opposite of gentrification where artists sometimes form a bridgehead for developers from outside of the community to transform a neighborhood to more capital-intensive uses, eventually pricing out the artists but also others who resided in the community (Smith 1982; Zukin 1987). In this case, artists are invited in for specific residencies that allow them to develop relationships in the community and plan a project collaboratively. As the authors write, “ResLab’s community-engaged arts residency program expands art activism in Chinatown by recruiting neighborhood residents and local artists who may not have been previously involved in the community and supporting them to become civic designers and leaders.” (Song and Rubin 2025, n.p.).

Bursiewicz’s contribution to this Special Issue looks at revitalization in the context of cities in post-socialist countries, focusing on the 2015 Revitalization Act in Poland that planned for a combination of top-down and bottom-up programs in degraded neighborhoods of Polish cities. Such projects often result in the aesthetic improvement of neighborhoods which can have negative impacts on community members due to unprecedented tourist traffic and increased rent prices. So, Bursiewicz examines eight projects as case studies in order to determine whether, first, “artistic interventions in public spaces contribute to strengthening social ties and building community”, and second, whether “artistic interventions in public spaces contribute to enhancing the subjective sense of security and well-being of the user” (Bursiewicz 2025, n.p.). While the author applies these two hypotheses to different cases (four of each) her results blend an analysis of institutional and grassroots projects. She determines that “effective revitalization draws on grassroots practices, while grassroots initiatives can gain greater support and expand their reach by entering into relationships with institutions and municipalities.” In the process, artists create bonds and negotiate with communities for the benefit of both. The best example of this process was Iza Rutkowska’s “Hedgehog” project in the backyard of a housing estate, Przedmieście Oławskie, a “neglected and notorious neighborhood” of the city of Wroclaw.

The artist was selected for a project in 2017 under the rubric of the city’s election as the European Capital of Culture, but she began her work by engaging with local residents to learn about the neighborhood and the problems residents perceived there. The result was the design of a Hedgehog, made of a dozen inflatable, colorful pieces deployed by the artist and residents in various locations around the housing estate. This intervention encouraged new social practices to emerge, including encouraging children to play in the estate’s backyard. One notable feature of this project was the artist’s continued engagement with the neighborhood and the project over a ten-year period, leading to many new manifestations of the Hedgehog over time. The author notes that “a community that begins to notice and cooperate with each other contributes to changing the perception of space from an unsafe place to a tamed and thus much safer, ‘familiar,’ ‘our’ place” (Bursiewicz 2025, n.p.). The author concludes that revitalization in post-socialist cities must proceed not by masking problems but the process should lead to addressing them collectively.

While these two articles focused on lived spaces in cities in the US and Europe, Ilona Szustakiewicz’s study focuses on the revitalization of post-industrial brownfield sites in Nantes, France, on an island in the center of the city which has been transformed by permanent and recurring artistic interventions. Her contribution represents a deep dive into how a decaying post-industrial city transformed itself through arts-focused revitalization into one of the top-ten most livable cities, according to a report by Oxford Economics. Szustakiewicz’s contribution is wonderfully descriptive, capturing the vitality of various permanent installations at les Machines d’Ile as well as workshops and performing arts events, but she also chronicles the development of a creative cluster on the island that supported the urban revitalization efforts and provided a new visibility for the city.

In the second half of the 1990s, the city began to “consolidate ephemeral artistic practices in the city” by providing permanent homes and rehearsal space in unused warehouses for performance groups while preserving and highlighting cultural heritage and the historical dimension of existing architecture. One Art Nouveau building was selected to house an art center and was renovated by the city. The architect Alexandre Chemetoff was hired to develop a plan which stressed the interaction between the island and the city and between the city and the river. This is the era when les Machines d’Ile won a competition for the main project on the island, planning to maximize cultural heritage and existing structures while also adding elements that provided focus for visitors and tourists. The Great Elephant was a centerpiece and functioned like the Hedgehog in Wroclaw, but in a wider field, as this revitalization scheme was focused on the whole city rather than a single neighborhood. One of the main findings of this case study is that “Temporary art practices influenced urban planning and permanent architecture” (Szustakiewicz 2025, n.p.) in Nantes and led to further investment and revitalization of existing heritage buildings, underscoring the relationship between ephemeral art events and the permanent transformation of urban infrastructure to reveal heritage and open new opportunities for interaction and discovery for visitors. Szustakiewicz cautions that, while the overall image of the city has been significantly improved, the benefits of the revitalization process were not shared by all groups, and community participation was not actively engaged but limited to consultation. Further, upgrading and gentrification have resulted, leading to unintended consequences.

Christos Makridis’ paper on collaborations between arts organizations provides a divergent view from a cultural economist. His focus is an emerging trend of organizational collaboration in which artistic organizations work together in order to improve audiences and visibility as well as share costs and services in cities in the US and Europe. Looking at examples in New York, San Diego, and Paris, among other cities, his paper examines what happens when art organizations build cross-sector audiences in urban environments and considers what benefits these innovations in cultural engagement result in for city dwellers. The benefits are clear: “By working together, the arts can not only enhance their resilience in a challenging environment but also redefine how cultural experiences are created and consumed, ensuring their relevance and vibrancy for future generations” (Makridis 2025, n.p.).

The author first outlines what the barriers are to collaboration in arts nonprofits, considering the silos which organizations find themselves in based on the focus of their programming and the lack of alignment on their incentives, as well as economic constraints and logistical and creative challenges. He provides examples of some of these limitations by looking at existing or past collaborations at institutions in Europe and the US. The focus of this analysis though is the means to achieve cross-sector collaboration and an examination of the benefits that it can deliver. The first section is on shared resources and management commons, looking at ArtsPool in New York City as a model for housing shared services for nonprofit organizations, as well as the Balboa Park Online Collaborative that aimed to provide digital services for the many different cultural organizations in Balboa Park of San Diego. After taking on digitally forward projects, Makridis moves on to programming collaboration, discussing the Getty’s landmark regional series, Pacific Standard Time, which drew together a wide variety of arts institutions to present a synchronous city-wide exhibition that reflected on Los Angeles’ unique contribution to contemporary art. In other contexts, collaborations between institutions can serve the purposes of cultural diplomacy, forging new international bonds across borders. Finally, audience engagement strategies can be enhanced through collaboration because these collaborations engage audiences in multiple sectors and encourage them to discover new opportunities through shared program opportunities. In sum, Makridis’ research contributes to a broader understanding of the arts’ sphere of and its opportunities to spur urban development through an analysis of what happens when institutions work together to generate cross-sector programming that promotes broader public engagement.

In response to these varied contributions, there is an argument to be made for a need to refocus the way planning conceives of urban development. The ingredients of culture-led regeneration are not schematic, nor are there a clear set of elements that can be combined to achieve net effects. While the creative element provides added value to cities, it is the human component of creativity that generates meaning and prompts identification, as several of the authors have shown. To consider humans as infrastructure suggests that cities need artists, but they also need to support the maintenance of this infrastructure. This requires not only ensuring that artists have the capacity to remain in the city (affordability) but to allow their creative impulses to generate new manifestations of urban space and experience. This would require not only grants and commissions but a means to bring artists, as well as arts institutions, into the redevelopment process.

While artistic projects that accompany urban development may be temporary, it is important that some should be permanent or semi-permanent and, further, that residents should be part of the process of inhabiting and co-habitating with these projects, as in Boston and Wroclaw. The dynamics of collaboration, unleashed by artists and arts organizations and analyzed in a number of these publications, also seem essential to urban development. The artists’ work with residents, governments and each other often generates a dynamic process that can lead to development, broadly understood. While modernization is often the goal of redevelopment, along with the upgrading of buildings and infrastructure, it would be productive to situate this process within a humanist frame to ensure that it serves the denizens of cities rather than replacing them with more capital-intensive mechanisms for urban growth.