Urban Avant-Gardes - Art, Architecture and Change (Paperback, New)

Urban Avant-Gardes and Social Transformation explores one of the key issues of the present avant-gardes: how they challenge and change urban conditions. Comprehensive and insightful, this is a timely and much appreciated publication -o Iain Borden, University College London A timely rallying call. Miles shows how critical cultural practices can even now be agents of social transformation -o Paul Usherwood, Northumbria University Can art or architecture change the world? Is it possible, despite successive failures, to think of a new cultural avant-garde today? What would this mean? Urban Avant-Gardes and Social Transformation attempts to contribute to debate on these questions, by looking back to past avant-gardes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by examining the theoretical and critical terrain around avant-garde cultural interventions, and by profiling a range of contemporary cases of radical cultural practices. Urban Avant-Gardes and Social Transformation brings together material from a wide range of disciplines to argue for cultural intervention as a means to radical change, while recognizing that most such efforts in the past have not delivered the dreams of their perpetrators.