Performative Urbanism

The city's places and spaces are increasingly used as a scenes for cultural experiences and artistic practices. We as citizens engage in the city not only with our cognitive reason but also through our bodily and sensory engagement: we increasingly move with the city, its pulses and sensory gestures. Accordingly, our dwelling in the city can be regarded as a creative practice constantly shaped by the places and urban environments. Performative urbanism suggests an affirmative approach in which the strategic and planned design discourses are replaced by performative, inclusive architectures. Here art as explorative processes can play an important role in enabling sensory, social and cultural encounters. We see a potential in how arts based research, performative designs and inclusive architectures hold the capacity to comment on, and to intervene in the strategic urban planning. As noted by Lepecki, arts potential lies not only in its capacity to perform, but rather to install singularities that do not perform within the governing mode of neo-liberal, spatial production (Lepecki 2016).
Performative design, art and inclusive architectures propose alternative spatial practices to existing commercial or functional spaces by for instance inviting citizen-users into participatory processes. Also, performative design, art and inclusive architectures share a capacity to negotiate the social and cultural dramas by offering non-linear processes without specific ends.