ABSTRACT
The term “Urban Art,” or “Civic Art,” has been defined in various ways and with many semantic deviations across the major European countries, drawing on examples and chronologies sometimes quite different from one another. Already in 1926, and with extreme lucidity, Pierre Lavedan discussed the urgency to initiate a classification system in the introduction to his dissertation.1 He sought to better define the language, areas of interest, and technical instruments of the many disciplines that relate to the urban question, thus emphasizing the differences in the use and meaning of terms apparently equivalent among each other. Likewise the term “Civic Art”, has never been easy to translate or transpose from one country to the other given not only the purely linguistic differences (Civic Art, Stadtbaukunst, Art public, Art Urbain, Art Civique, Arte di costruire la città), but also the disparities between the conceptual and technical apparatus of each country or culture.2
