Abstract Submission Deadline: May 30, 2022
Manuscript Submission Deadline: Jan 30, 2023
The Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability has put out a call for manuscripts for a Special Issue on Informal Placemaking. Social Activism and Practices of Art and Culture.
In this Special Issue, they want to develop and facilitate a discussion on the practices of ‘informal placemaking’. Informal placemaking practices contribute to an attitude of sustainability of new urban concepts, as well as to sociable and collective practices of sharing. Here we would like to suggest the significance of the term and the practices related to ‘informal placemaking’ through which social, cultural, or ethnic groups shape their environment and landscape, in direct and subtle ways. The practices of informal placemaking include DIY practices and interventions. However, we would also target the relevance and significance of the practices that are defined as neither DIY practices, nor interventions, and emerge from daily life. We want to maintain a comparative perspective by case studies from various cities, emphasizing the significance of informal practices of placemaking for lively urban environments.
Such practices might include but are not limited to:
- Urban narrative production and informal placemaking: Practices that produce place-based narratives, challenging norms, disentangling, and inspiring new cultural narratives
- Practices (social change) through art and design: Practices that contribute to spatial planning, improve community development, interaction, exchange and enhance collective practices channeling work in communities to inspire social change through art and design
- Informal placemaking and collectivity: Practices of informal placemaking through collective actions around food, sports, festivals, community projects, material culture, objects, and spaces of memory
- Informal placemaking and placetaking: Practices of activism and social movements that reveal new claims on urban space, such as heritage and memorial activism.
- Informal placemaking and collective intelligence: Practices on how individuals integrate information provided by others shaping the community; how to integrate conflicting personal and social information; how knowledge transfer between different social communities joins forces with the “wisdom of the crowd”-approach to cultural and artistic practices
- Informal placemaking and digital technologies: Emerging benefits and challenges of digital technologies in terms of a sustainable participation of citizens in spatial planning, place narrating, production of knowledge on urban space, dissemination of citizen’s knowledge on urban space.
Visit the journal’s CFP for more about the topic and submission instructions.