UXUC - User Experience and Urban Creativity
UXUC place User Experience (UX) disciplines in relation with built environment disciplines, among others Geography, Urban Planning, Public Space, and Urban Design.
Detroit’s governance consistently aims to overcome the city’s “underdog” status as an urban space of abandonment, violence, and post-industry. It is a simplified vision of Detroit that imagines its past, present and future through a particular 20th century trajectory of progress that ruptures with a white flight-“Black and poor” dynamic resulting in the city’s spiral into decay. However, at the community organizing level, groups and individuals engage in projects designed to assert their presences historically and now, to establish economic self-sustainability, and to imagine futures that reflect the lives of residents more explicitly. The Latine community, in particular, struggles to assert its presence in a city considered through a white-Black racialised lens and beyond its collective economic value and its strategic, infrastructural border with Canada. Drawing from 15 months of ethnographic research with Latine Detroiters, I consider their artistic and ecological interventions in space and time as indicators of a larger ‘bottom-up’ resistance to the city’s constructed identity through challenging the city’s self-perceived space-time. These individuals cultivate a “Latine space-time” in Detroit by agentively navigating Detroit and generating ‘Latine urban ecologies’—unearthed in this paper through the depiction of the transformations of soil, façade, and air fashioned by local muralists, graffiti writers, urban gardeners, and architectural aesthetics. Their interventions compose a Latine space-time, carving themselves in place, that fundamentally contests and reimagines the city of Detroit by nurturing colour, creativity, and life in opposition to narratives of abandonment and decay.
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Territories have traditionally demarcated spheres of political influence and translated power relations into physical spaces. The delimitation of territories separated friends from foes and ensured that policy and polity infused the places of everyday life of citizens – consequently structuring individual lifeworlds and embodied environments. The states’ legal systems have been an indispensable building block of territorialized power systems that culminated in supranational entities such as the European Union. These vast organizations of supranational metagovernance changed the scales of mediated power relations and resulted in abstract political constructs, whose inner workings are often hard to grasp. Responsibilities and competencies at the level of nation states seem to have been diluted, as decision-making power moved away from national governments. At the same time grassroots organizations and political activists of all colors are gaining traction and are searching for answers to pressing issues and problems by re-posing a centuries-old question: Whose territory?
Collaborative Drawing and the Revolution of Urban Territories
Following the ‘Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto’[1], art and artistic practices can not only spell out collective imaginaries that may shape collective futures but can also directly impact our forms of coexistence. In open-ended, enacted environments, artistic perspectives can radically re-imagine human and other-than-human lifeworlds to shape trans-species ecologies towards sustainable and non-extractivist ways of living. Urban spaces have traditionally served as foci of political, economic, and cultural activities, spawning collective visions of human coexistence that influence communities worldwide through continuous processes of ‘planetary urbanization’[2]. Oftentimes, they are places where collective futures are negotiated, imagined, and translated into physical environments. Re-imagining lived urbanity, we use drawing as an artistic strategy to sketch out urban utopias that counteract current crises and re-shape the potentials of urban territories, experimenting with collective visions of urban ecologies that enable trans-species cohabitation, the disintegration of barriers of class, race, gender, and religion, and the collective enactment of sustainable urban environments for all city dwellers. ‘Making kin’[3] with other lifeforms, we radically re-invent the spaces we inhabit and re-construct urban centers as places of encounter, radical imagination, and collective (counter-)action. Dissolving the boundaries between subject and object, we transform the world collaboratively through graphic intra-action.[4] We, therefore, use collaborative drawing as an artistic strategy to re-imagine urban lifeworlds by drawing over photographs of two cities in Austria – Linz and Vienna – which are not only our places of residence, but also incorporate different forms of lived urbanity. Vienna with its rich history and densely built historical center incorporates the charm of old Europe but provides ample ground for radical re-imagination. Linz is a smaller town, marked by industrial production, radical urban transformation, and the integration of the urban center with surrounding suburban and rural spaces. During the project, we take turns transforming photographs of city views in drawing, sending the altered photos back and forth, accompanied by comments and annotations that expand on the ongoing drawing process. This way, the drawings trace conceptual approaches, imaginaries, thoughts, and inspirations expressed in graphic language, which contextualize newfound urban utopias and chart new territories of shared urbanity. Multiple layers of sensing and sensemaking can be added to the drawings that are later used for examining results. Existing territories and territorial markers are re-defined towards an inclusive understanding of true trans-species cohabitation that is running against an exclusionary and extractivist form of lived urbanity. Our collective drawing approach can be understood as a tentacular thinking process, linking multiple perspectives in a sympoietic vision of collective futures. The re-imagination of urban futures becomes a collective act of communication in graphic form that can potentially be opened to other artists/scholars. In this sense, collaborative drawing, understood as a visual dialogue, is used to visualize radical urban ecologies and to de-territorialize and to re-territorialize bounded urban spaces, inspiring political action, social change, and cultural revolution. [1] https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/2023/11/02/art-for-radical-ecologies-manifesto/ [2] Brenner and Schmid, 2013 [3] Haraway, 2016, p. 99 [4] Barad, 2007, p. 56
The exponentially spreading changes recently do not allow the previous objective technical approaches, the renewal of thought is not linear anymore, but brings new creative runs. The intellectual revolution of our time brings emotions and feelings into the transformations of thinking and then reality. The paper introduces the concept of ‘engagingscapes’ designed by artistic practices in the site of Csepel (a part of Budapest, in the capital of Hungary) in the 2010s. ‘Engagingscapes’ especially emphasizes the importance of mental models and the process of bodily understanding. There and then, artistic practices, which actually scape-designs, acted as unique forms of cultural communication, paid attention to civic imagination, cultural and participatory politics, for empowering to ask the question: what else…? The retrospective study is an observational review and reassessment of artifacts, events, documents and interviews with the aim of analyzing previous interest in Csepel.
Evaluating the Social Perception of Public Art
This article examines the evolving social perception of public art in the twenty-first century, arguing for a methodological shift from object-centered to community-centered approaches in its study and evaluation. While contemporary debates on public art often emphasize its participatory and relational dimensions, academic research still tends to privilege aesthetic innovation over social impact. Drawing on theoretical frameworks by Bourriaud, Bishop, Zebracki, and others, the study identifies the need to evaluate how artworks influence emotional well-being, urban experience, and collective identity. It discusses key motivations for such evaluation, including the use of public funds, mental health and urban well-being, democratization of public space, and heritage management. Furthermore, it highlights the challenges of assessing perception—ranging from methodological complexity and institutional resistance to the subjectivity of individual experience—and proposes a transdisciplinary methodology combining quantitative and qualitative tools. These include surveys, interviews, group activities, visual documentation, and digital analytics (such as social media and Google Trends). By integrating these methods, the research aims to capture both the measurable and affective dimensions of public engagement with art. Ultimately, the paper argues that evaluating the social perception of public art not only informs cultural policy and urban design but also reinforces art’s potential to foster critical reflection, inclusion, and well-being in increasingly hybrid (physical and digital) public spaces.
This study explores the structure of urban territory as its central perspective to explore the micro-spatial interactions between urban territorial arrangements and potted plants in contemporary cities. In the contemporary urban context, territory is no longer merely a physical demarcation defined by ownership or planning; rather, it emerges as a spatial process constantly generated and negotiated through residents’ actions, perceptions, and aesthetic practices. As a flexible and small-scale green medium, potted plants have become an important interface connecting urban territorial configurations with individual aesthetic experience. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, this paper re-examines how potted plants—long regarded as decorative or private objects—can be reinterpreted as spatial and artistic interventions embedded in the socio-political structure of the city. These plants typically appear in transitional spaces between residential areas and urban boundaries, actively participating in Lefebvre’s spatial triad: representations of space (institutional and planning logic), representational spaces (the symbolic and perceptual dimensions of everyday life), and spatial practice (embodied actions of residents). Incorporating Edward Soja’s concept of “Thirdspace,” this study further argues that the hybridity, generativity, and sensory intervention embodied in potted plants constitute a form of “micro-politics” at the urban margins, reflecting both the re-appropriation of space and emotional identification with micro-territories. Although such practices are modest in scale, they inject warmth, individuality, and ecological imagination into the abstract and functionalist order of urban space, forming a non-institutional mode of spatial artistic engagement. This paper proposes viewing potted plants as perceptual interfaces and cultural media within the production of contemporary urban territories, offering a new perspective on the entanglement of ecology and subjectivity in urban spatial dynamics.
The management of art in public space has often led to processes of gentrification and rejection by the community in which the piece is inserted. However, other participatory urban practices have served to revitalise different types of territories, especially more rural areas or peripheral neighbourhoods. However, when the management is not done from the neighbourhood itself, it is often the institution that in some way imposes these artistic practices on the territory, and when actions are carried out to integrate the local population, the results are not measured with objective instruments. In this sense, this paper presents a possible guide with participatory dynamics prior to the realisation of murals and/or urban art festivals, in order to achieve good practices in urban art management, from a transdisciplinary point of view by including not only art history, but also psychology and anthropology. These dynamics have already been put into practice and real results will be presented, with comparative analyses leading to conclusions about what has worked and can be extrapolated to other territories and what could still be improved.
Aesthetic Experience and Critical Reflection
The aim of this paper is to develop a critical theoretical framework for the general interrogation of the interrelationship between artistic interventions in public space and democracy. The basic thesis guiding the following argument is that the main challenge for contemporary democracy and democratic citizenship consists in combining the recognition of difference and conflict with the reflection of the common good of society. And the question in focus will be on what terms aesthetic experience is able to contribute to establishing this combination.
Artwalk is a mobile application designed to make urban street art discoverable, accessible, and understandable through the use of a distributed, AI-driven architecture. The app integrates four specialised agents—Camera Crew, Info Crew, Audio Crew, and Route Planner. These collectively analyse user-submitted photos, enrich them with contextual metadata, convert descriptions into audio narratives, and guide users through curated routes. Additionally, users can explore an interactive map of artworks currently limited to Munich, save both scanned and discovered works, and revisit them through a dedicated ‘Saved’ view. Technologically, the system is built with React Native (frontend) and FastAPI (backend), using containerised services managed via Docker Compose. Local language models (LLaVA and LLaMA3), running via Ollama, support image classification and text generation. A custom text-to-speech (TTS) pipeline delivers podcast-style audio guides to improve accessibility, especially for visually impaired or audio-oriented users. Artwalk draws from open data provided by streetartcities.com, and while the current scope is geographically limited, its modular design allows for scalable expansion. This project showcases how AI agents can be combined to enrich cultural exploration in public spaces, turning everyday environments into interactive, inclusive galleries.