From Culture-Led Regeneration to Culture-Led Re-Commoning

Description

From the 1980s onwards, artists and their initiatives have played a role in the regeneration of UK cities. During the same period successive UK governments, have implemented deregulation, promoted privatization, and reduced public spending. This political trajectory has notably eroded civil society and transformed urban landscapes. In this era, characterized by hyper-neoliberalism and the unique conditions it presents, we ask how can art influence the transformation of cities now? How can artists produce works that transcend the conventional notion of cultural-led regeneration? Can artists disentangle art in public spaces from the historical emphasis on economic creation tied to private property, and thereby play a role in the rebuilding of associational life?

Our claim is that aligning art with the theories of the public sphere establishes a connection between artists’ practices and the advancement of democracy and equity. Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, rooted in 18th and 19th-century democratic development denotes a social setting where people gather to debate issues, shaping public opinion and affecting political decisions. It spans beyond official institutions, including places like coffeehouses, newspapers, and social media. Habermas’ theory is justifiably criticised for overlooking marginalized groups such as women and minorities. It centres on rational debates within
spaces that lacked diverse perspectives beyond the bourgeois class. Scholars such as Nancy Fraser, Michael Warner, and Craig Calhoun have sought to rectify these gaps by incorporating feminist and class concepts, exploring the intersection of media, democracy, and public discourse, and the sociology of public life. More recently Zizi Papacharissi explores the concept of affective publics, delving into the ways in which the digital public sphere shapes geopolitics and the way that debate is not limited to rational exchange.

Social Art Practice projects, workshops and exhibitions create spaces for public interaction and dialogue. Although recognized for engaging participants in
discussions and creative processes, social art practice frequently emphasizes consensus-building, reflecting the prevailing norm in liberal democracies.
Contrastingly, our art practice advances agonistic discussion which involves a constructive exchange of conflicting ideas endorsing critical engagement with every day issues. Activities such as slogan-making and publishing to each other aim to confront the contentious aspects of opinion formation – by embracing both agreement and disagreement.

In the concluding part of this paper, we demonstrate our approach to this
challenge by presenting two artworks from a recent exhibition, ‘Talk to the Land,’ Sirius Cobh in Cork. How to practice a culture-led re-commoning of cities, 2022 is realised in the exhibition as a free-standing text. The text calls forth new constituents of the city to take over its making. Identifying actors that have been overlooked and disregarded and infrastructures that have not been widely considered such as platform co-operativism municipal socialism and mutual care networks. Talk to the Land (Carhoogariff), 2022 (3 min film) is motivated by our research on William Thompson, the eighteenth-century Cork-based philosopher, and thinker. Thompson proposed alternative modes of community building arising from cooperative proposals and experiments in Southwest Ireland.

Period	3 Jun 2024 → 5 Jun 2024
Event title	6th INTERNATIONAL ART AND THE CITY CONFERENCE: “The primary purpose of this conference is to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborations among scholars with a specific focus on the intersections of art, urban spaces, the "right to the city," aesthetics, and the politics of the urban environment.”
Event type	Conference
Location	Göttingen, GermanyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International