Creative Disturbances in Urban Space

A role for politics in urban space is to make seen that which is invisible in the relationships and structures of the city; to offer alternative thoughts on the use of space as well as question topographies of power that underpin it. Creative disturbances have long held a place in this form of politics yet recent debate in political and urban geographies has demarcated differences between political and cultural uses of public space, questioning claims of the utility of ‘small’ everyday creative interventions as opposed to Big P political acts.

This paper will argue that the efficacy of cultural politics can be theorised in terms of its contribution to a politics of presence, imagination and transformation. A politics of presence incorporates into creative interventions that which is not seen in the official discourse of the global city including ethnicity, age and gender. A politics of imagination centres on generative processes, that is, the imagining of alternative connections and uses of urban space. This aspect of creative interventions is working within established fields of ‘what is resistance’ and ‘who has the right to the city’. Finally a politics of transformation is embedded in narratives of scale. A criticism of the effectiveness of creative interventions is that they are often unable to rise above the locality in which they are centred. This paper will argue through case studies of creative acts from Sydney (car culture among young men), Delhi (multi-media labs in marginalised communities) and London (graffiti knitting), that creative interventions can in fact generate a process of public pedagogy and reconfigure urban engagement that emphasises ‘community’, temporal alternatives, bodily engagement in production, and the aesthetics of public place-making.