This publication has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley.
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P[art]icipatory Urbanisms is a compilation of interviews with urban practitioners and a critical anthology of peer-reviewed articles, examining the triangulation of urban participation, aesthetics, and politics. It interrogates the “participatory turn” in contemporary urban studies, performance studies, and art practice. The current revival in participatory, collaborative, relational, and democratic practices in the realms of urban art and planning is, in some ways, a harkening back to participatory ideas of the 1960s. However, given the diverse arenas in which participatory urban activity has been proliferating in the past two decades—including within a range of public, private, civil society, and hybrid formations—participation itself as mode of engagement must be examined as a critical terrain of negotiation between state, society and market forces. The articles in this anthology track the form such negotiations take across divergent sites and from interdisciplinary perspectives, to assess the radical promise and potential pitfalls of ‘participation’ in the realms of urban art and politics today.
