ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that socially engaged art has the potential to call into question established classifications that are based on the apparent naturalness of dominant values and definitions. zURBS as a socially engaged artistic practice that would focus on dynamic processes that use strategies for participatory urban enquiry and action that is grounded in the arts. ‘The arts’ and ‘the artistic’ are committed to what Herbert Marcuse defines as ‘an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity’. As such, ‘art’ is understood as ‘a site where “new multi-dimensional knowledge and identities are constantly in the process of being formed”’. Urban imaginaries are always and inevitably social, involving a multitude of perspectives and subject-positions differentiated by class and race, gender and age, and education and religion. These social relations that influence urban imaginaries are materially and spatially constituted, pointing to the reciprocal relation between the material and the social.
