From medieval city views to contemporary urban imaginaries, imagination has always played a major role for outlining human understandings of urban life. Just recently, urban studies, urban planning, and artistic research have re-discovered imaginary approaches to urban lifeworlds as viable stimuli for urban transformation and social critique. In order to find pathways for sustainable development, creative strategies and imaginations of collective utopia have become a vital source of inspiration for urban planning and architecture. Interdisciplinary, inclusive approaches to create urban utopia have become central to thinking and writing about the urban as a shared imaginary matrix for collective sensemaking. This article provides a selective overview of the role of urban imaginaries from the Middle Ages, to the 20th century, and on to contemporary perspectives on urban spaces. In this brief tour d’horizon the potentials of images, imaginations, and utopian perspectives on urban life are sketched out for exploring and ultimately designing places of urban cohabitation. As an introduction to this journal issue on the role of urban imaginaries for creating liminal spaces for social change and critique, this article also aims to describe the use of creative strategies and urban imaginaries for urban studies, urban transformation projects, and artistic interventions in urban spaces. The articles in this issue demonstrate the multifaceted nature of urban imaginaries in contexts as diverse as exhibition design, visual anthropology, urban studies, and virtual/augmented reality. Adopting different imaginary perspectives ultimately paves the way for understanding urbanization as a utopian project, a collective struggle, and a manifestation of collective will, which continuously produces tangible and intangible outcomes. Processes of planetary urbanization, therefore, also inspire us to reflect on social, economic, and cultural co-evolution and participation on a global scale. This way, urban imaginaries become blueprints for social change, critique, and societal innovation.

The discussions of urban commons involve us in breaking up the totalizing notion of those dominated by power as passive consumers and reconsidering how urban life is made as creative production, constantly appropriating and reappropriating the products, messages, and spaces for expression. The common acts of engagement and reorganization are based on re-appropriations and redeployments of the dominant image economy and hierarchical distribution of space experienced in the city.  Hence, they are also a part of the struggle for the reclamation of public space wherein wrongly privatized space is returned to its rightful owners.  The special issue “Art, Urban Commons and Social Change” discusses how art in the urban space creates unmediated spaces and instances of emancipated subjects.

The authors analyze various forms of art within economic, cultural, and social urban contexts to shed light on the complexity of modern urban life and struggles for urban commons. They delve into the issue of urban commons and social change both in the role of urban social struggles and creating urban communities. Some questions that the contributors seek answers are: Under what conditions could art become effective in reclaiming democratic citizenship? What kind of public should artistic creativity in the urban space try to constitute and what kind of public spaces are needed to that effect? What can we learn from urban art about visual resistance in the interplay with political power structures?

The Special Issue ‘Research through Interaction Design (RtD + IxD = RtIxD)’ emerged from our desire, as interaction design teachers, to value design as a creative, practice-led project activity, based on holistic methodology that contemplates various sides of interactive experiences. Also, as researchers, to position design methods as a noteworthy way to achieve more knowledge in an area still defining itself.

This special issue grew out of a two day conference entitled Whose space is it? Interstices and urban commons: the city from an interdisciplinary perspective, which was held at the University of Tours in December 2020. Despite of difficult conditions and impredictibality of situation due to Covid-19 pandemic, the conference was a real success and brought together researchers from various disciplines of social science and more than ten countries. This conference provided an excellent venue within which to begin the discussions on the signification, the use and the ways of appropriation of what is called urban interstices covered in this issue. Urban interstices were one of the two main research themes of this conference whose scientific purpose has been collectively prepared by myself, Bénédicte Florin and Ulrike Krampl, all of us from University of Tours. The interesting point was to see how our different scientific disciplines, respectively sociology, geography and history provided a large scope to understand the interstices and their perception.

The issue opens with Philipp Shadner’s discussion of the 1970s punk movement, which not only questioned and provoked aesthetic values but also has had a major influence on the multitude of styles of urban art until the present. Shadner gives us insights into the history of the punk movement, the symbols and slogans punks used and still use not only for tagging urban spaces, but also put temporarily or permanently on their skins and/or their clothes to create a visual struggle against the conformist mainstream society. Arthur Crucq’s article analyses the social and political role of collaboratory art in an urban community in The Hague, Netherlands. Using examples of textile installations, Crucq’s discussion centers on recognizing community art projects as autonomous platforms for the development of political agency in the urban space.  Jeni Peake looks at street art activism from the perspective of linguistics.  Peake explores English graffiti found in urban spaces in the city of Bordeaux, France. With a large number of the graffiti examples adhering to many themes of social struggle, Peake’s article seeks to establish to what extent the use of English could be understood as a political or at least rebellious and creative act. Angelos Evangelidis examines the political posters on the walls of the streets in Athens that worked as both a visual and political platform for the anti-austerity movement in Greece (2010-2015). Furthermore, Evangelinidis’ literature review shows that the dialectical relationship between urban space and visual practice is the key to map the process of art’s role in social struggles.

On the 2020 conference was in fact proven that the consistency of knowledge and structure of thought in the several disciplinary areas regarding the urban creativity topics, are giving way to multiple approaches to classes integrated in master courses, informing the teaching of art historians, the work of designers, and research of cognitive scientists and educators.  It was evident that this trend will continue in multiple forms including experimental ones bridging theory and practice, sometimes inverting the role of researchers and authors, but always enlarging audiences, practitioners and studious.
On this issue you can observe how the relation evolved between UX (User Experience) and Urban Creativity topics.

 As travelers come and go worldwide, many leave marks in a silent exchange, communicating that I was here, I exist. They embrace and taunt each other over time and distance, sharing in-jokes, and making rude gestures against surveillance and control. Marks about seeking community, personal bests, creating a customized, personalized experience of neighborhoods. This is ours. You are welcome. Some people and some experiences are still free. 

Unsurprisingly, some graffiti and experience design professionals connect, emerge, cross over, and enhance the many disciplines in each. Artists bring graffiti writing and design skills to the digital, sculptural, and architectural worlds. Experience designers document, facilitate, and embrace graffiti culture and experience in their own lives and work, recognizing the importance of people owning, co-creating, and humanizing the artifacts and environments we share.

With this journal, we hope to illuminate some of the compelling work being done at these intersections of people, concerns, design, research, media, environments, liberty, trespass, and aesthetics.

As travelers come and go worldwide, many leave marks in a silent exchange, communicating that I was here, I exist. They embrace and taunt each other over time and distance, sharing in-jokes, and making rude gestures against surveillance and control. Marks about seeking community, personal bests, creating a customized, personalized experience of neighborhoods. This is ours. You are welcome. Some people and some experiences are still free.

Unsurprisingly, some graffiti and experience design professionals connect, emerge, cross over, and enhance the many disciplines in each. Artists bring graffiti writing and design skills to the digital, sculptural, and architectural worlds. Experience designers document, facilitate, and embrace graffiti culture and experience in their own lives and work, recognizing the importance of people owning, co-creating, and humanizing the artifacts and environments we share. With this journal, we hope to illuminate some of the compelling work being done at these intersections of people, concerns, design, research, media, environments, liberty, trespass, and aesthetics.