Urban Art and the City

<p>This book offers original interdisciplinary insights into cities as a diachronic creation of urban art. It engages in a sequence of historical perspectives to examine urban space as an object of apparent quasi-cycles and processes of constitution exaltation imitation contestation and redemption through art.<b> </b></p><p>Urban art transforms the city into a human-made sublime which is explored in the context of the Eastern Mediterranean. The book probes this process primarily through the example of Athens and Byzantine Constantinople but also Jerusalem Cyprus and regional cities revealing how urban space unavoidably encompasses a spatial and temporal palimpsest which is constantly emerging. It presents new ideas for both the theorization and sensuous conception of artistic reality architecture and planning attributes. These extend from archaic classical and Byzantine urban splendour to current urban decline as constitution and attack on the sublime and back. Urban processes of contestation and redemption respond<b> </b>recently<b> </b>to the new ‘imperialism of debt’ and the positivist technocratic understandings and demands of Euro-governments and neoliberal institutions while still evoking older forms of spatial power.<br><br>Offering fresh notions on art architecture space antiquity (post)-modernity and politics of the region this book will appeal to scholars and students of geography urban studies art restoration and film theory architecture landscape design planning anthropology sociology and history.</p>