Therme Art - The Social Culture of Cities

Architects and city planners shape how we live together. Their buildings, as shells, shape human bodily awareness and habitual cultural practices. Streets and transport routes channel flows of humans and set the pace of everyday life. Urban squares continue to shape the consciousness of public life, harking back to the ancient world’s concept of the agora or meeting place. Facades can both dwarf people and provide powerful backdrops and frameworks, as well as providing niches for animals to nest. Streets give rhythm to our gaze and shape our perspectives.

The degree of separation between different forms of construction in urban planning determines the permeability of different social strata. Access to light and green space, essential for health and wellbeing, is increasingly a luxury, especially in northern climes. Parks, vacant lots, verges and other green patches shape the degree of interweaving between the urban organism and animal and plant systems.

Today, the architect has little practical possibility to take these complex networks into account as architecture, planning and design are dominated by specific and powerful interests. Squeezed by building codes, economic efficiency, and the client’s wishes, the architect has very little scope for invention. We are now used to architecture that is broadly insensitive to the human, animal and plant realms––an urban architecture of barriers and standardisation. These structures and spaces affect social behaviour and our consciousness of living together. Meanwhile, museums, theatres and concert halls are constructed to protect them from urban noise and natural influences and to create an energetic free space if they remain mostly closed off from the living organism, the city, and from the possibility of contributing to shape this organism as social sculpture.

The talk The Social Culture of Cities presented on 24 June addressed the consequences of these paradoxes for individual and collective well-being in urban populations. It aimed to synchronise art, architecture, and everyday life anew, and questioned what could be gained by art and artists playing a central role in defining how we live.

1. What unique qualities can artists bring to urban and social planning? What other disciplines need to be engaged as part of the process?

2. How can we create new synergies between art and urban architecture so that they do not cancel, but enhance each other? How can we rethink our cities to meet the challenges of climate change?

3. How can we design art spaces with greater visibility and resonance within a city’s everyday life?

4. Should urban architecture steer the populace? Or does it create free spaces for minimally controlled, spontaneous, and direct communication? What dangers do the two extremes pose in relation to today’s demographic development?

5. What structures foster a feeling of solidarity and collective identity amongst inhabitants or workers?

6. What can we learn from existing art in public space, such as carnival, music festivals, demonstrations or graffiti. What approaches should be taken up and how?

7. Where does artistic thinking inspire architecture today? Apart from beacon projects, what everyday forms are we familiar with? How does architecture inspire and vitalise social interaction?

8. What historical precedents can we look to for inspiration?

9. Experts warn that nature is indispensable for the urban organism’s healthy life and that we urgently need a new way of thinking. Where do we see short-term and long-term solutions that can inspire real interactions between human, animal, and trees in the city?

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