On the intersection of geographical thought and artistic practice
DIY urbanism, flow, and imagining urban futures
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13007105 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rachael Boswell (0000-0002-9356-8652, University of Auckland, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 302-306 |
| Publication date | 2023-05-10 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Dialogues in Human Geography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2043-8206 • E-ISSN: 2043-8214 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/20438206231174637 |
| OpenAlex | W4376140926 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
In this commentary, I explore what an artists’ process offers to city-making: how urban experimentation can open up hopeful, surprising, and imaginative urban encounters and futures. By doing so, I imagine a future for geographical thought and praxis lying partly in the interesting places where they overlap with artistic practice. I ground this thinking on the unstable surface found in the years immediately following the 2010–11 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was into a wasteland of post-earthquake demolition that ‘ordinary citizens’ started to insert creative interventions (known in the literature as do-it-yourself, or DIY, urbanism). I explore how an understanding of creative ‘flow’ helped me untangle what was particular and unique about the uprising of DIY urbanism in post-earthquake Christchurch. From the ‘doing’ of creative practitioners in the city during this time emerged a different and new energy: an imaginative, hopeful, open-ended feeling of the possibilities hidden behind the facade of grey rubble. In particular, I examine how existing work in the geohumanities around hope and temporalities resonates with DIY urbanism and consider what artistic practices may have to offer geographical thought and praxis
Aesthetics · Art · Media studies · Political science · Praxis · Situated · Sociology · Temporalities · Urbanism · Visual arts · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Spatial and Cultural Studies · Urban Planning and Governance · Architecture
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |