From June 5 to 8, 2025, Villa Arson and Université Côte d’Azur welcome the 7th edition of the international conference Art and the City. The goal? Facilitate dialogues and interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers, with an emphasis on the intersections between art, different types of urban space, the “right to the city”, aesthetics and urban environment policy.
The conference serves as a platform to bring together an international team of researchers, promoting diversity in disciplines and perspectives on the complex relationships between urban space, art and social change. This diversity allows a multifaceted understanding of the ideologies, relationships, meanings and practices that emerge from the interactions between art and the urban environment.
The conference strives to offer perspectives and promote a better understanding of how these interactions take place in different regions of the World, thus contributing to a broader debate on urban life, art and social transformation. The role of art in urban space encompasses a range of spatial and temporal dynamics that lead to dialogic, political and aesthetic interactions.
On the one hand, art contributes to urban development, tourism, public health, race relations and general well-being. On the other hand, it plays a crucial role in urban activism and social change, encompassing movements such as the “right to the city”, anti-gentrification, urban social movements with their spatial, ideological and ecological agendas, as well as the struggles for democracy, civil rights and individual and collective freedoms. These movements have been widely studied from a political-aesthetic point of view, emphasizing the plural resistance against authoritarian governments, struggles for the use of public space, social and structural inequalities and human rights issues.
Besides the discussion of various aspects of art in relation to urban environments, the theme of this edition is “Art, the urbanocene and the city” and we will be interested in the paradigm of the urbanocene and its implications for urban artistic landscapes.
Interdisciplinary areas of reflection
- Artistic strategies that cultivate ecological awareness and mobilize urban communities;
- The potentials and limits of art to galvanize collective action in favor of sustainability and ecological justice;
- Architectural strategies for fair sustainability and ecological awareness in the city;
- How art confronts and reshapes the concept of public space, fostering new interpretations and commitments;
- The ability of art to offer innovative and transformative ways for the participation and involvement of citizens in urban environments;
- The power of art to activate, capture and subvert experiences in urban space, thus challenging conventional perspectives;
- The empowering nature of art that allows voices and marginalized subjects in the city to assert their presence and power of action;
- The production of new narratives around social organization in gentrified urban spaces through artistic expression;
- The ability of art to question and redefine our sensory and perceptive encounters with the city;
- The essential role of art in the aesthetics of urban social movements and their commitment to direct participatory democracy;
- Exploring the potentials and disadvantages related to the interaction between ecological art and urban ecologies;
- Architectural strategies for fair sustainability and ecological awareness in the city.
Scientific committee
Sabina Andron, University of Melbourne
Constantinos Diamantis, University of Thessaly
Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernández, University of Nevada – Reno
Andrew Hewitt, University of Northampton
Mel Jordan, Coventry University
Panos Leventis, Drury University
Leah Modigliani, Tyler School of Art and Architecture
Sacha Kagan, Leuphana University
Vittorio Parisi, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland
Tijen Tunali, Art History, University of Rennes 2
In partnership with
