[ecrea] Call for Proposals, ‘Territories of Political Participation. Public Art, Urban Design, and Performative Citizenship’

Call for Proposals, ‘Territories of Political Participation. Public Art, 
Urban Design, and Performative Citizenship’ co-edited by Laura Iannelli 
and Pierluigi Musarò and published by Mimesis International.

In the early 1990s, in Chicago, Mary Jacob curated “Culture in action”, 
an experience of participatory public art which left a mark on the 
contemporary artistic research and criticism. Over the last decades, 
this “new genre of public art” has developed. In these “dialogical” and 
“connective” aesthetics, public artists have involved citizens in 
creative performances that aim to modify inhabitants’ perceptions of the 
places where they live, to create new relations within and toward the 
territory, and to transform (often temporarily) the physical spaces. 
From ‘70s, and always more frequently, some processes and tools 
developed by architectural research stress inhabitants’ involvement in 
territorial planning, where the planners become triggers of a spatial 
transformation which compares “projectual-citizens” and institutions. 
Over the last half-century, local, national, and international policies 
have been increasingly characterized by (more or less systematic) 
attempts to involve citizens in the different levels of territorial 
governance, sometimes with an investment on projects of spatial 
transformation through participatory Public Art and Urban Design.
Moving from the outcomes of a two-years interdisciplinary research 
programme on the Italian contemporary Public Art and Urban Design, 
funded by the Sardinia Region (Italy), the book aims to shed light on 
the different creative forms of civic engagement and actions proposed by 
art and architecture around the “political” issues of territories.
Focusing on communicative practices that develop between city-places and 
media-spaces, the book aims to offer a trans-disciplinary analysis of 
Public Art and Urban Design as fields wherein new civic cultures and new 
repertories of political participation can be activated around the 
conflicts of everyday territories to test the vitality of contemporary 
democracies.
In so doing, it will contribute to the scientific debate about 
participatory governance as performative practice by documenting the 
different forms of citizens’ involvement through contemporary forms of 
Public Art and Urban Design. Subsequently, this aims to provide the 
basis for critical reflection on participation and for reconceiving 
participation as not merely representing citizens, but making them. As 
such, the book aims to engage in a constructive debate with scholars 
from the fields of sociology, cultural and media studies, political 
sciences, arts, architecture, and urban planning.
An indication of the agenda of questions the issue proposes to address 
would include:
Assuming that processes of planning and decision making related to urban 
issues are increasingly characterized by attempts to involve the public, 
what are the different participatory methods and tools that are 
available to planners and policy practitioners?
How public artists and urban designers contribute to increase or 
challenge the legitimacy of the planning process and the recognition 
that planning processes should involve those actors that are affected by 
them?
What happens when ambitions regarding citizen involvement in urban 
transformation are put into practice?
What evidence is available about the ways in which participation through 
art and urban design enhance learning processes, improve the quality of 
decisions, contribute to empowerment, or promote social change and 
democratic citizenship?
How do art and architecture can foster participation, inclusion and new 
relations of communication that effectively challenge the power of 
traditional practices of citizenship?
In which ways participatory art and urban design can contribute to 
involve vulnerable, disadvantaged, marginalised or excluded categories - 
such as migrants, homeless, disables, etc.?
How do participatory art and urban design can create new communicative 
spaces and alternative social relations that are capable of 
reconfiguring the relationship between belonging and citizenship?
How does it challenge ‘from below’ accepted social categorisations?

Proposals should be a maximum of 400 words and indicate not only the 
proposed topic but the kinds of approach, methods and forms of 
illustration/documentation/data to be employed. Proposals for shorter 
items (including discussion pieces) as well as for conventional length 
articles (max 45,000 characters, including spaces) are welcomed. The 
deadline for receipt of proposals is September 20th 2015. Proposals 
should be emailed to Laura Iannelli 
((liannelli /at/ uniss.it)<mailto:(liannelli /at/ uniss.it)>) and Pierluigi Musarò 
((pierluigi.musaro /at/ unibo.it)<mailto:(pierluigi.musaro /at/ unibo.it)>). Selection 
for invitations to submit the paper will follow within 3 weeks of the 
proposal deadline, along with details of the planned schedule. The 
deadline for receipt of papers is March 2016. The book is expected to be 
published on September 2016.

********************

Laura Iannelli is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture and 
Communication at the University of Sassari (Department of Political 
Sciences, Communication Sciences and Information Engineering), where she 
presently teaches Political Communication and Participation. She is the 
scientific coordinator of the project “To Govern Artfully. Process and 
Tools for territorial participatory planning” (funded by the Autonomous 
Region of Sardinia, Regional Law 7/07 - Promotion of Scientific Research 
and Technological Innovation in Sardinia). Within the project “To Govern 
Artfully”, the international conference on “Protest Participation in 
Variable Communication Ecologies” has been organized in Alghero on June 
2015. (http://protestcommunicationecologies.com).
39.347.5418597
(liannelli /at/ uniss.it)

Pierluigi Musarò is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University 
of Bologna, Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and 
Political Science, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Public 
Knowledge, New York University. He has recently edited Lo spettatore 
ironico. La solidarietà nell’epoca del post-umanitarianismo, Mimesis, 
Roma-Udine, 2014 – italian edition of Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic 
Spectator. Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism, Polity Press, 
London, 2012, and co-edited, with Paola Parmiggiani, ‘‘Beyond 
Humanitarian Narratives,’’ Sociologia della comunicazione (2013), and 
Media e migrazioni: Etica, estetica e politica del discorso umanitario 
(Franco-Angeli, 2014).
39.348.7438202
(pierluigi.musaro /at/ unibo.it)








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