Urban Interventionism

Urban Interventionism is a name sometimes given to a number of different kinds of activist design and art practices, art that typically responds to the social community, locational identity, the built environment, and public places. The goals are often to create new awareness of social issues, and to stimulate community involvement. Such practices have a history that includes certain street artists of the 1960s, such as The Diggers of San Francisco, or the Provos of Amsterdam, among many others. Contemporary artists often associated with urban interventionist practices are Daniel Buren, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alÿs, Harrell Fletcher, the Red Peristyle group, Banksy and many others. Urban Interventionism has been associated with a changed understanding of the relationship between the social and the spatial, called the "spatial turn" of the arts and sciences in the 1980s. In this turn a new viewpoint was taken on public and urban spaces "...whereby urban spaces are seen not merely as containers for or outcomes of social processes, but as a medium through which they unfold and as having constitutive significance themselves." According to this train of thought the spatial sights of a city have the power to shape interactions and create new experiences. This power is utilized by urban interventions through the works created by the artists.

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