Urban Surfaces

About

What is the Urban Surfaces Research Network?

The USRN brings together researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, to examine the roles and uses of urban surfaces, and their contribution to the formation of urban cultures, politics, and atmospheres. It is a multidisciplinary group with contributions from sociology, geography, architecture, communication, media, and visual and material studies.

What is the framing of the project?

The study of the social life of walls and surfaces has grown into research on graffiti and street art, murals, law and property, visibility, territoriality, atmosphere and public space, but there have been very few developments to focus specifically on the urban surfaces agenda and further demonstrate its impact. This network sets out to become an international resource of urban surface research and practice, cutting across disciplines to focus on the spatial typology and urban condition of the surfacescape.

In everyday urban practice, surfaces matter because they are intimately connected to practices of spatial justice and the right to the city. These concepts refer to citizenship and belonging, and to rights of occupation, affirmation, and self-determination of subjectivities in space. The design, management, and valuing mechanisms of urban surfaces in contemporary cities can therefore offer unique evidence for these social issues.

Researching and interrogating urban surfaces - what it means to be a surface, the development of a surface, the textures, layers and formation of a surface - brings with it countless benefits to the full range of disciplines that will be enrolled in the network. It tells us about the authorship of the city, it allows us to challenge and dissect this authorship, to question the agency of materials and non-materials alike, to consider how surfaces shape the urban imagination, and to explore how the right to the surface is the right to the city (Andron 2018). Questions of citizenship, belonging, vision, identity, economy, law and justice can all be asked through the lens of the urban surface.

What are the initial aims of the project?

Building on existing and developing scholarship on urban and architectural walls and surfaces, the USRN will:

- establish communication and awareness of the multiple research agendas that operate with urban surfaces in an international context;

- foreground surfaces as a central research concept and field of study pertinent to numerous political, legal, social, architectural, and cultural concerns;

- write a series of definitions of urban surfaces and combine them into a manifesto, to form the basis of future publications (special issue, edited volume) and a large grant application;

- consolidate a core group of urban surface research and practice, as an initial phase for an international collaboration with a similar scope.