Interventions

by Malcolm Miles (Editor), Tim Hall (Editor)

"Interventions is a contribution to current considerations of how cultural initiatives and interventions affect the development of cities. It draws together policies and projects for cultural urban interventions, from the United Kingdom, Lithuania, India, and North America. The authors include artists, arts managers, academics in cultural and geographical fields, and policy-makers. The book has three sections: the first on policies and strategies for cultural intervention; the second on specific projects (a set of case studies); and the third includes two important research reports evaluating public art and cultural interventions in London, Exeter, the north-east of England, and Barcelona.
The book presents a series of positions from different perspectives, to draw attention to these viewpoints, and to encourage debate in an area of rapid change – the cultural life of cities in the twenty-first century. It takes a generally critical position, and is in some ways an antidote to the advocacy of public art or the blandness of official pronouncements on public culture. It does not assume that ‘art is good for us’, but asks exactly what interventions in the form of visual culture might do. The answers are as varied as the places described and strategies employed in them."

180 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Malcolm Miles is a writer and researcher on critical theory, art and urbanism. His writing spans the arts, humanities and social sciences, with a focus on the Frankfurt School as well as modern and contemporary art and architecture. His book on Herbert Marcuse (2011) investigates Marcuse’s aesthetic theory and links Marcuse’s critiques of specific areas of literature to more recent visual art practices. His book on eco-aesthetics (2014) reconsiders aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, setting this beside green political and social perspectives since the 1960s and a diverse range of contemporary art. Cities and Literature (2019) thematically examines key social theories, e.g. from Georg Simmel, and cultural theories, e.g. from Raymond Williams, in context of selected areas of modern and contemporary English literature, with reference additionally to elements of French, German, Russian, Portuguese, and African post-colonial literatures (read in English). It is in the Routledge series Critical Introductions to Urbanism, designed for 2nd and 3rd -year undergraduates in the social sciences and humanities, which he co-edits with John Rennie Short (Geography, University of Maryland). To date he has authored nine books and contributed to refereed journals including the Journal of Cultural Politics, Third Text, Architecture and Culture, The Journal of Architecture, Space and Culture, and Parallax.