Search

Culture is (as Raymond Williams argued) a way of life, evidence and expression of a set of mutable values produced in but also conditioning people’s encounters with the world. The question, now, is: what ways of encountering the world will produce sustainable urban development? The challenge for policy and planning, then, is that change is produced in everyday life and often despite policies developed in political, social and cultural institutions to be delivered from a position of authority. This is not to say that policies have not at times been progressive; indeed, the planners and designers responsible for the concrete housing projects on the peripheries of many European cities were progressive, often socialists, and inspired by the modern promise that a new society can be engineered through design. The difficulty is, as Marvila demonstrates, it cannot be done through design alone, and perhaps does not begin there at all. If social change is to take place, perhaps it begins in a mutual interaction, a dialogic exchange in a space between dwelling and the ways in which consciousness becomes formalised in design or planning. Otherwise, in a separation of concept from actuality, of art from life, and of design from the occupation of space, is a hiatus in which fear and distrust are likely to grow. Opposition then takes the form either of vandalism or a desperate resistance which fails against the greater force of the dominant society or culture.

Critical writing on public art in the late 20th century in the UK and USA either legitimized public art as an extension of studio art intended to widen its public, or implied a new relation to public space - as demonstrated in texts by Cork (1995) and Phillips (1988) respectively. This suggests a polarization of art's aesthetic and social dimensions. A deeper understanding of the relation between these dimensions is found in the work of Marcuse, Bloch and Adorno. Marcuse, in his early work, sees art as serving the needs of bourgeois society by displacing ideas of a better world to an independent aesthetic realm; Bloch sees art as giving form to hope, shaping a recurrent aspiration for a better world; Adorno sees the tension between the aesthetic and social dimensions of art as unresolvable, and, like Marcuse in his later work, sees art's autonomy as a space of criticality. But, as Bloch argues, conditions for change are non­ contemporaneous, fostering culture which is both progressive and regressive. In this respect, Gablik's appropriations of other cultures may be seen as regressive, whilst Lippard's concern for locality offers art a basis for progressive intervention. The introduction of the local, as a point of reference alongside the aesthetic and social, leads to consideration of three cases of art practice: Common Ground's Parish Maps (1986-96), the Visions of Utopia Festival coordinated by the Artists Agency (1996-8), and 90% Crude (1996--), a project by PLATFORM in London. The originality of the thesis is in its investigation of these cases; and equally in making connections between them and the elements of art criticism and critical theory noted above.