Restaging Urban Relationships: The Art of Inventing New Social Spaces in the City

Abstract

What do textile fabrics, residential streets and urban dwellers have in common? They are all part of the “living room on your own doorstep” – the public urban and social space that can be shaped by people. This article examines three projects by the Viennese urban and cultural initiative “space and place” that strive to enable the co-creative exploration, reinterpretation, and invention of new urban spaces:  First, “Stoff fu?r’s Gra?tzel” (“Fabric for the neighbourhood”, 2021/2022), honoured with an award by the Chamber of Commerce, uses the medium of fabric to shed light on a Viennese neighbourhood. Textiles like a pair of painter’s trousers, a baby bodysuit or a tea towel from a pub are sewn together to form a “neighbourhood rug”, symbolically intertwining the community’s diverse threads. Second, the project “Residential Street Culture”, initiated by “space and place” in 2018, explores residential streets as urban oases. It challenges car-centric views, redefining these areas as democratic spaces for people. Third, the award-winning project “We speak ...” (“Wir sprechen …”, 2014-2023 – honoured by “SozialMarie”) celebrates the linguistic diversity of a city’s inhabitants by showcasing language skills of local business employees through window displays. In language-sharing events, native speakers are teaching phrases in their first languages to interested neighbours.  These projects employ various methods to activate local neighbourhoods and to support the redefinition of public spaces. This article discusses the role of art and culture in co-creating urban coexistence, questioning established social patterns such as mobility behaviour and throwaway culture. It highlights the potential of city dwellers to contribute to a redesign of urban life.