tailieunhanh - URBAN AVANT-GARDES ART, ARCHITECTURE AND CHANGE

I begin with a brief rationale for the book. This needs to go beyond reasons for writing such as the clarification of my own ideas or publication of my own research. Those are both necessary motivations for the writer, but I hope the book will contribute to debates on urban issues during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In particular, I hope it will illuminate what certain kinds of cultural practices contribute, not only reflectively, but in actively shaping the agendas of future urban development and change | Also available as a printed book see title verso for ISBN details URBAN AVANT-GARDES Can art or architecture change the world Is it possible despite successive failures to think of a new cultural avant-garde today What would this mean Urban Avant-Gardes attempts to contribute to the debate on these questions by looking back to past avant-gardes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by examining the theoretical and critical terrain around avant-garde cultural interventions and by profiling a range of contemporary cases of radical cultural practices. The book begins with a reconsideration of the first avant-garde of the nineteenth century followed by commentaries on the avant-gardes of early Modernist art and architecture. It then engages with the theories as well as cultural practices of the 1960s and seeks to identify flaws in the concept of an avant-garde that may still disable cultural interventions. Moving on through the 1990s the book interrogates practices between art architecture and theory. It does not propose a new avant-garde but does find hope in emerging practices that in various ways engage with the agendas of environmentalism and social justice. At this point the terms art and architecture as well as avant-garde cease to be useful what emerges is a need to re-imagine a public sphere. Urban Avant-Gardes brings together material from a wide range of disciplines in the arts and social sciences to argue for cultural intervention as a means to radical change while recognising that most such efforts in the past have not delivered the dreams of their perpetrators. Malcolm Miles is Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth author of Art Space and the City and co-editor of The City Cultures .