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Between the 1990s and the financial services crisis of 2008, new public spaces were regularly included in urban redevelopment schemes in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). Following the report of the Urban Task Force, and the invention of the new category of social exclusion, new public spaces were seen as producing social cohesion. Like public art in the 1980s and 1990s, new public spaces represented a cosmetic approach to a range of deeper-rooted urban ills, but were a low-budget, highly visible alternative to dealing with problems of infrastructure and wealth distribution. This article asks what issues emerge from an investigation of new public spaces, what histories are co-opted by their advocacy, and whether public spaces have ever housed a public sphere of social self-determination. It asks whether a proto-public sphere is found in the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and whether or not the idea of a public sphere is reflected in Millennium Place, Coventry, a new public space that is the site of a participatory art project by Jochen Gerz: The Public Bench. All this is put into focus by reference to the worldwide appearance of Occupy in 2011, which might have been an ephemeral public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses several art projects which compared ways in which the values of artists' interventions in urban social settings can be measured. Evaluation processes used for the Window Sills research projects, initiated by staff from the School of Art and Design of the University of Plymouth; Objectives of the Civic Participation Workshops in Barcelona, Spain; Information on the Visions of Utopia Festival coordinated in England.

Examines the creation of a wetland at Quaking Houses, County Durham in England, and an artist's residency at Skinningrove on the Cleveland coast from March 2000. Polarization of the terms local and global; Formation of the Quaking Houses Environment Trust; Role of art in environmentalism.

Presents several photographs of pigeon huts and gardens along the shoreline at Skinningrove.

Introduces a series of articles on the relationship of art with urbanism.

Examines the possibilities for an art of urban engagement in the case of the Nine Mile Run Greenway project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Factors which affect urban development in the 21st century; Factors affecting the function of the state of maintaining an equilibrium between the growth rates of productivity and consumption; Description of the Nine Mile Run Greenway project; Role of art in the post-industrial city.

Introduces the second annual volume of the periodical "Advances in Art & Urban Futures." Theme of the volume; Inclusion of texts from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Introduces a series of articles on the relation of art to the development, regeneration and sustainability of cities.