Artistic City-zenship: How artists perceive and practice political agency in their cities

ABSTRACT

Located in the theoretical triangle of urban, cultural, and political studies, this paper examines artists’ political engagement in cities. Applying a qualitative approach through inter-urban fieldwork in Hamburg and Hanover, Germany, and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel, we study how artists critically engage with their cities and urban spaces, and analyze how the artists’ themselves perceive and practice their own actions. Based on this, we offer a typology of artists’ attitudes and behavior patterns toward urban politics and policies, which we propose as a relevant theoretical tool for analyzing political engagement of artists in the urban environment.

Acknowledgments

We thank the many interviewees for sharing their time and thoughts with us. We also thank the journal’s editors and reviewers for their helpful remarks and suggestions. Special thanks go to Marie Hoop for her help and support. This joint research project was financially supported by the state of Lower-Saxony, Hanover, Germany; the selection process was organized by the Volkswagen Foundation. Part of the research was financed with the help of the Max Kampelman Chair for Democracy and Human Rights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the Lower Saxonian Ministry of Science and Culture, in coordination with the Volkswagen Foundation (Niedersächsisches Vorab: Lower Saxonian - Israeli Research Cooperation, grant code VWZN3166).

Notes on contributors

Merav Kaddar

Merav Kaddar received her PhD in July 2020 from the political science department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a researcher in the Israeli-German research project “Critical Art(ist)s and Urban Development.” She was a fellow in the “Human Rights under Pressure” program, a joint program of the Hebrew University and the Free University of Berlin. She holds a BA in PPE (Philosophy, Political science and Economics) and an MA in Philosophy, both from the Hebrew University. She also holds an MSc in Urban Studies from University College London. Her research covers, among others, urban culture, urban regeneration, mixed cities, contested societies, urban sociology, art sociology, ethics, transitional justice and human rights.

Volker Kirchberg

Volker Kirchberg is Professor of the Sociology of the Arts at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. His areas of expertise are sociology of arts, sociology of culture, and urban sociology. He received his PhD. in sociology from the University of Hamburg (1992) and a post-doctoral habilitation degree in sociology from the Free University Berlin (2003). His postgraduate studies in Hamburg and Baltimore dealt with research on arts and culture in the city. After working as an assistant professor for sociology in New Jersey, he moved to Leuphana University in 2004. His recent research focuses on (1) the significance of the arts for sustainable urban development, (2) museum for social transformations, (3) urban contexts and artists, and (4) organizational theories of culture. He is also vice dean for research at the Faculty of Cultural Studies at Leuphana University, and a board member of several associations in the sociology of the arts.

Nir Barak

Nir Barak is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. His current research focuses on the relationship between national citizenship and urban citizenship (city-zenship) in light of the rising power of cities in national and global politics. Nir received his PhD in political science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2017, he received a Fulbright Scholar Award and was appointed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University. In the summer of 2020, Nir will join the faculty at the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University.

Milena Seidl

Milena Seidl studied the Cultural Studies Bachelor at the Leuphana University Lüneburg and is working as a research assistant on the project “Critical Art(ist)s and Urban Development.” She did her Master at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Further research areas are urban studies and resistance research.

Patricia Wedler

Patricia Wedler is a member of the Department of Humanities and Social Studies at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.

Avner de Shalit

Avner de Shalit (D.Phil, Oxford, 1990) is the Max Kampelman Professor of Democracy and Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His most recent books are Cities and Immigrants (2019), and (together with Daniel Bell) The Spirit of Cities (2011).