Socially Engaged Art and the Neoliberal City

This book explores alternative understandings of socially-engaged art projects in the age of neoliberal urbanism. It does so by questioning the very nature of these environments and the proposing alternative productions of space, moving beyond the reduction of ‘the urban’ as a set of existing and static structures, institutions, and flows. The book adopts a practice-led approach to range of case studies from across Europe and North America, asking how artists reconcile the creation of critically-informed transformative art practice with the increasingly limited constraints placed on public art by the dominance of commercial funding and neoliberal frameworks. The author points to the transcendence of a neoliberal urban through alternative productions of space, drawing upon a Lefebvrian framework of spatial practice and ‘lived space’, using a structuralist method to challenge neoliberal structures.