Art-Based Urban Inquiry

In Pensar la ciudad desde la investigación en artes, Patricia Mayayo and Beatriz Cavia argue for the transformative potential of artistic research as a mode of urban inquiry capable of contesting the epistemic closures of technocratic urbanism. The authors examine how artistic methodologies—installation, performance, spatial intervention, audiovisual ethnography—can reorient how cities are perceived, problematised, and reimagined. The text operates at the intersection of visual culture, critical geography, and feminist urbanism, framing the city not as a finished product but as an ongoing process of negotiation and symbolic contestation. Drawing from their experience as curators and researchers in art-activist projects, Mayayo and Cavia underscore the capacity of artistic practices to reveal invisible urban dynamics—affect, care, micro-politics of space—that elude traditional analytical tools. Artistic research, they propose, is inherently site-specific and situated, privileging embodied knowledges and intersubjective engagement over generalisation or objectivity. In a context marked by gentrification, displacement, and commodification of space, the aesthetic becomes a tool of urban critique, not by illustrating problems, but by reconfiguring spatial experience itself. The article also reflects on pedagogical practices, showing how collaborative art-based research can activate new urban pedagogies, fostering civic dialogue and critical spatial literacy. Rather than merely inserting art into the city, the authors advocate for turning the city into a laboratory of collective imagination, where research is a form of making and knowing that resists appropriation by dominant urban regimes.

Mayayo, P. and Cavia, B. (2020) ‘Pensar la ciudad desde la investigación en artes’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 10(2), pp. 105–113. Available at: http://www2.ual.es/urbs/index.php/urbs/article/view/mayayo_cavia (Accessed: 1 August 2025).