I was honored to be invited as a U.S. representative to an Urban Thinkers Campus workshop called “The City We Need: Open for Art,” this winter. About 50 arts professionals, artists and planners from around the world debated the relationship between art, city life and urban environment. Our group met at the University of Sassari’s architecture school in Alghero, Italy.
The Urban Thinkers Campus is an initiative of UN-Habitat’s World Urban Campaign, conceived as an open space for critical exchange among urban actors who believe that urbanization is an opportunity which can lead to positive transformations. The 28 Urban Thinkers Campuses taking place around the world between June 2015 and February 2016 aimed to solicit input into the New Urban Agenda – the main outcome document of the Habitat III conference to be held in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016.
At the end of three days of presentations, workshops and debates, the attendees drafted the statement that follows. For me, the most powerful idea that emerged is the creative expression is a fundamental human right.
The City We Need is Open for Art
Cities do not only perform functions or deliver services. Nor are they simply depositories of cultural heritage. The City We Need is the place where the form of cultural expression we call art is constantly produced and re-produced.
“Cities Open For Art” offers all citizens a creative way to design, explore, experiment and experience alternative futures. They must be coproduced by artists, include active citizenship in the artistic process as a city changers, while the urban dimension is where the dialogue among different people can take place, to provide enabling city of “Enjoying togetherness” as a powerful driver and art form for change performed in the city. Art, in its freest form, can express creative voice, ways of seeing, imagining and producing space; empower and encourage awareness, learning, achievement and belonging; generate values and inspire in people a critical view of established norms, procedures and practices; art contributes to psychological wellbeing and health; enables people to claim ownership of urban spaces and generate higher values that can be employed in improving the quality of life and stimulate creative work and a diversified and creative economy; embody the principle of free, equitable and unlimited access to everyday life of a city.”
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