Planning, Art, and Aesthetics

This Interface presents nine pieces which engage with the broad theme of ‘art and planning’ in a new and diverse way. They have emerged, partially, from a one-day exploratory international workshop which aimed to interrogate and reconfigure the relationships between, and experiences of, planners working with artists and artists working with planners. The workshop aimed to explore the experiences, benefits, discords and difficulties of artists and planners working in each other’s fields from both contemporary practice and historically. It engaged with ideas of public space, collaboration and power; gentrification and tokenism as well as ideas of aesthetic practices which we return to in our Afterword. The power of dialogue between planning/er and art/ists to change ways of working and create more progressive urban spaces, was both something discussed and something we aim to take forward in this collection of pieces.