STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

ANNEX 2 - SECTION E:
STREET ARTS AND ARTISTS IN THE URBAN SPACE:
URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND REGULATION
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Street Artists in Europe
Contribution by Krisztina Keresztély, assisted by Levente Polyák – January 2007 – in the
framework of the study “Street Artists in Europe”
1. Introduction
Street arts, artists using public spaces for diverting citizens, offering free spectacles for the
inhabitants of any cities or settlements are one of the typical examples on how different forms of
urban culture can resuscitate in different periods and with different objectives and meanings.
Street arts also prove that never any urban, social or cultural phenomenon can be considered as
entirely “new”. We often prone to simplify our understanding on some recent phenomenon by
treating it as if it emerged only since the last few decades. We speak about ‘globalisation’ as a
phenomenon appeared in the early 1980s, although it is evident that the economic or cultural
characteristics that we are labelling as ‘globalisation’ had been existing for a long time before
the end of the 20 th century. The same is available in the case of current discourses treating
culture as an emerging sector of the new economy, and, as a result, as a new factor determining
urban development. Albeit one thing is evident: culture and city are never, were never, and will
never be separable: they suppose each other, they can never function one without the other.
The present study will commit the same fault: it will analyse the role of street arts, and of artists
in the city as the result of a ‘newly’ embedded relationship. Albeit this relationship between city
and street arts can be at least “traced back to the middle age’s pantomimes, buffoons, acrobats
playing around the fairs in squares or in other open spaces” 288 . Nevertheless, this chapter will
examine the role of contemporary street art and artists more as a punctual situation and less as
the result of a long-term historical development. We wonder how in the recent European scene
street art’s role in the urban space is conceived by the persons who are involved in it. How do
they describe their objectives and their aims when performing in public spaces of a city; what
are the main difficulties they have to face; how do they estimate the sustainability and the
effects on the long run of their performance on urban space and on urban society?
The chapter will be set up according to the following structure: first, the theoretical and
historical background of the relationship between street arts and urban development will be
drawn. Second, the role of street art in the city will be analysed through the vision of artists and
organisers themselves. The third part will give the conclusion of this chapter.
2. Background: relationship between urban development and street artists in Europe
In spite of the plea expressed above we feel useful to put the contemporary relationship between
street arts, artists and the city in a more global context, in order to explain some correlations.
This presentation will be guided by five approaches.
288 Chaudoir, P. Arts de la rue et espace public (1999).
PE 375.307