• Re-Inventing the Urban – The Role of Creativity, Performativity, and Arts-Based Research Approaches to Research the Multifaceted Nature of Urban Spaces
    Vol 6 No 1 (2024)

    In the long and ongoing process of planetary urbanization, urbanity has appeared as a ubiquitous topic in disciplines ranging from sociology, urban studies, and economics, to literature, design, and contemporary art. As the chosen environment for most of today’s cultural, economic, and academic elites, urban space constitutes an ever-present backdrop for unfolding posthumanity. How to live together in todays’ cities, how to confront challenges together, and how to think about urbanization as a global phenomenon, have become pressing and ongoing questions that stir the curiosity of researchers, artists, politicians, and contemporary urbanites alike. In the face of multiple crises, we are confronted with the cascading effects of climate change, intercontinental migration as well as political and economic uncertainty. Meanwhile, urban centers with their cultural capital, innovative potential, and economic power appear as ideal places to look for inspiration, change, or maybe even revolution. As an approach that takes the ubiquity of the urban into account, the concept of planetary urbanization tries to describe urban existence as interwoven in international networks of production, consumption, and sociocultural interaction that span the entire globe. Hence, the urban is understood as an all-encompassing concept, which holds the potential to change the world and how we experience it. 

  • Ubiquity
    Vol 6 No 2 (2024)

    In this issue titled Ubiquity, we explore the omnipresence of concepts, patterns, and phenomena that permeate urban, architectural, and cultural spaces. The term "ubiquity" not only invites us to consider the visible and invisible forces shaping our environment but also challenges us to question how these forces manifest in art, architecture, and society at large. From historical reflections to contemporary debates, the contributions in this issue provide a kaleidoscopic view of the intersections between design, public space, and the socio-political landscapes that frame them.

  • Decoding the DNA of urban spaces with artistic practices and creative research approaches
    Vol 5 No 1 (2023)

    As performative approaches to urban studies and urban transformation have continuously gained influence in recent years, this journal issue aims at charting new ways towards methodological pluralism and multidisciplinary research from a perspective of performativity. In this context, research is understood as a performative act creating outcomes and performing knowledge in multiple research media. The performative as a conceptual term also reunites arts-based, artistic, and traditional research approaches, closing the gaps created by an orthodox understanding of scientific methodology solely based on quantitative and qualitative methods. Performative research or research as performance, therefore, holds the potential to provide a comprehensive, transdisciplinary understanding of knowledge creation which can reunite a plethora of methods and disciplines under the concept of performativity as the expression and creation of knowledge as a collective, transformative endeavour. The performative and its power to change existing urban realities and collective worldviews ultimately offers a conceptual tool for bringing researchers form different disciplines together and co-developing solutions for current problems together with affected populations. In the context of urban studies, performativity may guide the way towards a participatory understanding of contemporary urbanity and societal co-evolution based on a collective ownership of urban spaces. The contributions to this issue present a methodological toolbox, indicating what performativity may imply in the field of urban studies and which benefits it entails for researchers, engaged citizens, and urbanites. 

  • cover Designing Urban Experiences: From Trial/Error Abstraction to Instagram Graffiti Networks
    Vol 5 No 2 (2023)

    This title encapsulates the essence of the articles in Volume 5, 2nd Issue of the UXUC Journal, highlighting the diverse exploration of user experience, urban creativity, and the intricate processes involved in shaping our cities. As we navigate through these diverse perspectives and thought-provoking insights, we invite you to explore the intersections of user experience and urban creativity. Join us in unraveling the complexities that shape our cities and influence the way we interact with the designed world around us.

  • The Role of Urban Imaginaries
    Vol 4 No 2 (2022)

    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.

  • Art, Urban Commons and Social Change
    Vol 4 No 1 (2022)

    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?

  • Urban Interstices
    Vol 3 No 2 (2021)

    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.

  • Research through Interaction Design (RtD + IxD = RtIxD)
    Vol 3 No 1 (2021)

    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.

  • Screens and Beyond
    Vol 2 No 2 (2020)

    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.

  • Art’s Dialectical Role in Urban Struggles
    Vol 2 No 1 (2020)

    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.

  • Urban User Experience
    Vol 1 No 1 (2019)

     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.

  • How can cities become better human habitat?
    Vol 1 No 2 (2019)

    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.