Urban Avant-Gardes Art, Architecture and Change

Can art or architecture change the world? Is it possible, despite successive failures, to think of a new cultural avant-garde today? What would this mean? "Urban Avant-Gardes and Social Transformation" attempts to contribute to debate on these questions, by looking back to past avant-gardes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by examining the theoretical and critical terrain around avant-garde cultural interventions, and by profiling a range of contemporary cases of radical cultural practices.

"Urban Avant-Gardes and Social" "Transformation" brings together material from a wide range of disciplines to argue for cultural intervention as a means to radical change, while recognizing that most such efforts in the past have not delivered the dreams of their perpetrators.

Urban Avant-Gardes presents original research on a range of recent contemporary practices in and between art and architecture giving perspectives from a wide range of disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences that are seldom juxtaposed, it questions many assumptions and accepted positions. This book looks back to past avant-gardes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries examining the theoretical and critical terrain around avant-garde cultural interventions, and profiles a range of contemporary cases of radical cultural practices. The author brings together material from a wide range of disciplines to argue for cultural intervention as a means to radical change, while recognizing that most such efforts in the past have not delivered the dreams of their perpetrators. Distinctive in that it places works of the imagination in the political and cultural context of environmentalism, this book asks how cultural work might contribute to radical social change. It is equally concerned with theory and practice - part one providing a theoretical framework and part two illustrating such frameworks with examples.

1. 1871: Spitting on Napoleon 2. 1912: Red Flags and Revolutionary Anthems 3. 1938: Graffiti at Cap-Martin 4. 1967: The End of Utopia 5. 1989: After the Wall 6. 1993 (i): In Memories of Dark Times 7. 1993 (ii): Participation and Provocation 8. 2001 (i): Sustainabilities 9. 2001 (ii): Cosmopolis

Malcolm Miles is Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth, author of Art, Space & the City and co-editor of The City Cultures Reader. He is also Editor of the European Journal of Higher Arts Education.