Urban Potentials

What is urbanity? How and where do we experience it, and in what ways does it condition our perceptions of the contemporary city? Does art play a major role? How about architecture, music or popular culture? Through theoretical analyses and practical suggestions gathered at a series of related conferences that took place across Europe in the summer of 2007, this reader explores the issue of urban potential, asking how such a phenomenon can best be discovered, enjoyed and exploited. The venues for the conferences were Rotterdam, Dresden, Wroclaw, Budapest and Salzburg; accordingly, each individual city was used as the prototype for discussion during its corresponding conference, so that concrete and applicable discoveries could arise. The resulting texts, by experts in the fields of art, architecture, sociology and cultural studies, are gathered here, shedding light on themes both international and local in scope. Creative, open-minded and urbane in and of themselves, these essays present artistic strategies to strengthen alternative planning methods and models of action. In particular, they investigate the concepts of "wasteland" and "contradiction" in relation to the development of the urbane.