UC Merced

My dissertation underlines the fundamental link between culture, societies, and urban environments, with a deep exploration of new approaches to cultural policy, such as cultural planning. Mapping and planning new aesthetic scenarios, I defend street-urban expressions as forms of social re-action, against a regime of power that controls and determines human behaviors and impoverishes culturally and economically cities.

Reflecting on interdisciplinary processes -the collection, cataloging, and sorting of pictures, travel, writings, photographs, knowledge and experiences- of exploration into the relation between space, place and self, I promote the construction of new personal identities. I also analyze how the experiences and memories of citizenships, neighborhoods, and even streets and walls, begin to define a shared identity with regard to place through a reflexive social-collective process.

My dissertation attempts to turn upside down the connection between art and society, by providing a change of perspective that allows us to see our urban environments in different ways, re-contextualizing urban public art within a larger cultural studies framework, and underscoring the complex web of social processes that brings together artivists, social thinkers, researchers, and glocal residents.