The proposition “Urbanism Meets Art” is not a slogan but a disciplinary condition. The corpus presented—projects, exhibitions, seminars, and theoretical devices—constructs the city as a cultural artifact rather than a neutral container. From the classical rationalism of Hippodamus of Miletus to the contemporary dispositifs developed by URBANAS, urban form is treated as an epistemic field where power, narrative, and materiality intersect. The practice does not aestheticise the city; it problematises it. Art here operates as an analytical instrument capable of revealing latent structures—social, spatial, and symbolic—embedded in urban systems. This lineage extends the humanist project of Leon Battista Alberti, yet displaces harmony with conflict, proportion with friction, and ideal form with situated experience. Urbanism becomes performative: an open script enacted through installations, exhibitions, and pedagogical formats that expose how cities think, remember, and exclude. Across the projects listed—ranging from Museum Park Rotterdam to Firestation Oslo—the city is staged as a testing ground. These works operate neither as autonomous artworks nor as conventional planning proposals, but as intermediaries. Their strength lies in producing conditions rather than objects: situations where perception, movement, and discourse are recalibrated. This approach resonates with the critical urban imagination articulated by Walter Benjamin, for whom the city is read through fragments, thresholds, and experiential shocks. The recurrent emphasis on walking, squatting, temporary structures, and performative acts suggests a politics of proximity. Urban space is not mastered from above but negotiated from within. In this sense, URBANAS advances a form of operative criticism: spatial practices that think through making, and artworks that function as urban hypotheses.
The theoretical construct of Socioplastics crystallises this ambition. It frames urbanism as a plastic medium—malleable, contested, and narratively charged—shaped by social forces and symbolic regimes. Here the city is not merely designed; it is authored and edited. This aligns with the production-of-space thesis of Henri Lefebvre, yet extends it into the curatorial and artistic domain. Exhibitions, seminars, and publications become urban acts in their own right, redistributing visibility and agency. The extensive pedagogical dimension—doctoral seminars, lectures, and transdisciplinary councils—confirms that knowledge production is central to the practice. Urbanism Meets Art thus functions as a research ecology, where theory, making, and teaching are mutually constitutive rather than hierarchically ordered. Ultimately, the significance of this body of work lies in its refusal of closure. Instead of proposing definitive urban models, it cultivates critical literacy: the ability to read, question, and re-script the city. Art is mobilised not as decoration but as method; urbanism not as regulation but as cultural critique. This positions URBANAS within a tradition that understands the city as a living archive of desires, conflicts, and imaginaries. In an era marked by planetary urbanisation and epistemic uncertainty, such practices are indispensable. They do not offer solutions in the technocratic sense, but they sharpen our capacity to perceive and act. Urbanism Meets Art, in this sense, is less a field than a stance: an insistence that the city remains open to interpretation, dissent, and reinvention.
Urban Squad (2019) URBANISM MEETS ART: URBAN SQUAD. Ciudadlista. Available at: https://ciudadlista.blogspot.com/2019/09/urban-squad.html
