Projects tagged "Cities"

Anti Eviction Mapping Project
Practitioner:
Anti Eviction Mapping Project
Date:
Jan 1 2013
The project consists of a website for data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective formed to document and make visible the dispossession of San Francisco Bay Area residents and to facilitate and organized collective resistance. The project studies the displacement of people and the way in which evictions and gentrification target specific communities in the Bay Area.
NDSM Manifestation
Practitioner:
NDSM
Date:
Sep 21 2021
For this edition of ADE, Stichting NDSM-werf invited art- and activist group Tools for Action + Floor to use their terrain as a public practice space for RÆV REHEARSAL. They invite the public to rehearse new forms of assembly. With a Bluetooth speakers system, floating inflatable sculptures, and a minimalist techno beat, they move through the city like a radiating dancing swarm.
Aqua Line
Practitioner:
Heavy Trash
Date:
Jan 1 2000
Creative Time, Social Practice Archive: In 2000 Heavy Trash, an anonymous arts organization of designers, architects, and urban planners, implemented its Aqua Line project throughout various parts of Los Angeles. The project involved the installation of false "Future Station Location" signs in the downtown area, notifying passersby of the impending construction of a subway that would connect the downtown to the Westside.
Respect The Living Too
Practitioner:
McCann Tirana
Date:
Jun 1 2014
An advertising agency creates a one-time action for traffic safety, then uses documentation to generate awards and free promotion for their company. Did traffic fatalities actually drop after this was done once? Their Press Release doesn't make mention. From McCann's Press Release:
Our City: Designing Your City
Practitioner:
Our City
Date:
Feb 4 2016
Our City is a startup nonprofit based in Oakland and working with cities everywhere. They work with governments, cultural institutions, companies, community organizations, designers, and residents to produce events, installations, and workshops that use public design to improve cities.
Groups Build Parks From Parking Spaces
Practitioner:
Rebar
Date:
Sep 20 2024
Originally a project of San Francisco-based art and design studio Rebar, Park(ing) Day participants from Tucson to Tehran set up temporary installations ranging from simple unrolled sod to art galleries and even free health clinics.
Gota D'Agua
Practitioner:
Ronald Duarte and Emerging Collective
Date:
Mar 21 2015
A site-specific art intervention intended as a call to action in response to Brazil's water crisis. Strategically planned to coincide with UN World Water Day, Gota D'Agua gathered onlookers around an abandoned Olympic size swimming pool at the foot of Edificio Raposo Lopes, a towering luxury condominium building situated on a steep incline overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
Centros Sociales Okupados Autogestionados (CSOAs) in Spain: From abandoned houses to activist enclaves
Practitioner:
Movimiento Okupa
Date:
Jan 1 1980
A Centro Social Okupado Autogestionado (Self-Managed Occupied Social Center) or CSOA is an occupied building dedicated to the development of social and cultural activities. They are part of the “movimiento okupa” (“squatter movement”), a label created and circulated by the mainstream press.
Singing to Disrupt Housing Auction
Practitioner:
Occupy Wall Street
Date:
Apr 17 2012
Demonstrators aligned with the Occupy Wall Street movement sang their way into handcuffs during a Bronx foreclosure auction Monday to protest the housing crisis that continues to plague the borough. They serenaded a courtroom of real estate investors with the lyrics, "Y'all are speculating off people's pain. With all due respect, you should be ashamed."
This area will be photographed
Practitioner:
Laura Napier
Date:
Oct 11 2015
"This area will be photographed" is a public performance of implied photographic consent, inspired by Google's street view and satellite surveillance. Posted signs and handbills alerted the public present in Union Square, New York, NY that a photograph would be taken of the area at a precise time.
Brooklyn deli re-brands as artisanal emporium to protest rent hike
Practitioner:
Jesse's Deli
Date:
Jun 12 2015
Brooklyn deli re-brands as artisanal emporium to protest rent hike The owners of an imperiled Boerum Hill deli have staged an “artisanal takeover” of their 25-year-old corner store, re-branding products with yuppified names and jacking up prices to illustrate the kind of shop that could afford the 250-percent rent hike they say the store’s landlord is demanding.
Rise, Resist & Unite...V-Day & The Vagina Monolouges
Practitioner:
V-Day Sedona/ Organizations Across the Globe
Date:
Feb 17 2018
Back after a five year hiatus, V-Day Sedona joins with hundreds of other productions across the globe in celebrating V-Day’s 20th anniversary with an act of artistic activism. For its 20th anniversary, V-Day is calling on activists around the world to Rise, Resist and Unite.
Street Art Critiques Car Culture
Practitioner:
Peter Gibson/Roadworth
Date:
Nov 30 2000
In 2001, Peter Gibson, a street artist, began by painting bike additional bike lanes onto the streets in Montreal because he was tired of how cars dominated the road. This transferred into more works criticizing car culture in general. Some of his work includes a crosswalk turned into a large footprint and lines on the road transformed into life lines.
At War With São Paulo’s Establishment, Black Paint in Hand
Practitioner:
pichação
Date:
Jan 1 2012
New York Times January 28, 2012 By SIMON ROMERO SÃO PAULO, Brazil — This mega-city’s authorities have waged war for years against what they call “visual pollution,” banning billboard advertising, demolishing abandoned skyscrapers and planning to raze concrete eyesores like the elevated highway known as the Big Worm.
NYU Students' Response to COVID-19 Housing Closure
Practitioner:
NYU Student Body/NYU's Inter-Residential Hall Council
Date:
Mar 16 2020
This was a protest posted on Change.org in response to NYU's forced eviction deadline on students living in on-campus housing. The following was the information posted on the site: We, the undergraduate student body of New York University, strongly urge NYU to rescind the call for students to evacuate NYU residence halls before March 22nd.
London’s “Free Butt Plug Catalogue” Confronts Hostile Architecture
Practitioner:
A Chinese Artist
Date:
May 16 2025
Hostile architecture—urban design features like ground spikes that deter the homeless from lying down or slanted benches that prevent lingering—inscribes exclusion into our streets. In response, a Chinese artist will launch the Free Butt Plug Catalogue, an art-activism project that documents fifteen such spikes and anti–loitering benches across London and pairs each with a commercially available butt plug of the same shape.
Tear It Down, They Said. He Just Kept Building.
Practitioner:
Chen Tianming
Date:
Jan 1 2025
The structure teeters over fields of knee-high grass, looking like a cross between a camping tent and a giant wedding cake. Eleven stories of dark red wooden rooms, diminishing in size as they ascend, balance atop one another, seemingly held together by only the thicket of cords that stretches from the peak to the ground.
Ghana Thinktank. Developing the first world.
Practitioner:
Christopher Robbins, John Ewing, Matey Odonkor, Maria Del Carmen Montoya
Date:
Feb 1 2006
Ghana ThinkTank is an international collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, asking the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world.
People's Tours: A social history of the South End walking tour
Practitioner:
People's Tours
Date:
Jun 16 2012
In early 2012, a group of artists, activists and assorted other odd balls got together to form People's Tours. The idea was to give walking tours in the Boston area. Standard enough. But instead of the usual history, we would talk about social justice, contested spaces, important protests, and shady corporations. So far, the group has consisted of Dave Taber, Heather McCann, Kristin Parker, Neil Horsky, and Tim Devin.
Looping! Finding Your Inner Child in Your Underwear on the Streets
Practitioner:
Matthew Silver, Fritz Donnelley
Date:
Jan 1 2014
What is looping? Somewhere in between art, activism, and wackiness is this liberating experience. Matthew Silver and Fritz Donnelley, two New York City based performance artists got lonely acting silly in their underwear in public. Knowing that there were enough free spirits to join them, they started "Looping" and invited everyone to join them.
Iranian Documentary ‘The Gardener', on Religion and Baha’i Garden
Practitioner:
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Date:
Feb 1 2012
The Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf opens “The Gardener” with the declaration: “I am an agnostic filmmaker.” From anyone else, this might seem like a simple statement, but not from the complex Mr. Makhmalbaf. In 1974, when he was 17, religious and involved in a guerrilla group, he stabbed a policeman, for which he received a bullet to the stomach and a prison sentence.
the bike infrastructure agenda exposed
Practitioner:
Local news
Date:
Apr 1 2021
It has been a long and exhausting battle for the bike activists in Puebla one of the cities in Mexico. Collectives and activist groups have long pushed for including bike infrastructure around the city, in a horizontal, democratic way.
La Fiera en Sevilla
Practitioner:
Isaías Griñolo
Date:
Jan 1 2016
During the economic crisis of 2008, bankers in Spain took advantage of the economically disadvantaged, and the artwork La Fiera en Sevilla, or the Wild Animal in Sevilla in English, brings attention to this money-centric act from the bankers. La Fiera refers to the bankers at the time that used predatory methods in their actions to forcibly evict poor people from their houses.
Shouting 喊
Practitioner:
Xu Zhen 徐震
Date:
Jan 1 1998
Shouting is one of Xu Zhen’s early works questioning the limits of individual expression. First exhibited at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, the video shows Xu hiding in crowds and performing a series of loud screams in Shanghai.
You’d Better Watch Your Step In Madrid
Practitioner:
Luzinterruptus
Date:
Feb 20 2015
Luzinterruptus turns their art activism towards the overabundance of dog doo littering the city’s streets. The studio inflated 500 poop-scoopin' plastic bags and placed a lightbulb inside each one. Installation lasted nine hours.

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