Public Art, Urban Arts: on Aesthetics, Practices and Languages in the City: Editorial

Urban spaces and their transformations, as well as the very notions of ‘public’ and collective memory, have grown into increasingly critical, complex, and fragmented subjectivities. This change entails a review and rearticulation of collective sensemaking in which art is inevitably involved as a syntax of urban space. As tangible or intangible products of human action imbued with symbolic and aesthetic value, ‘works of art’ proliferate on the streets and squares of cities, partaking in expressing relations, catalysing social life, embodying power, and entailing conflict. By being either an integration to, or an intervention in the urban space, art has assumed over time a variety of context-specific forms and languages, diversely responding to the expressive patterns of local cultures and political formations.