NUART PLUS 2016 - DAY 1 - DAVID PINDER

Cities and life as works of art
Keynote speech by David Pinder (UK)

“Let everyday life become a work of art!” So declared Henri Lefebvre in 1968, the same year that he published his book The Right to the City. This talk returns to his slogan and its rootedness in political struggles over urban space to reflect on more contemporary concerns about art, performance, utopia and the right to the city. David Pinder is a Professor at Roskilde University, Department of People and Technology. Pinder’s interests lie in urban studies, geography, planning and critical theory, and his research explores how urban spaces are socially produced, imagined, performed and contested.

DAVID PINDER (UK)
David Pinder is Professor of Urban Studies at Roskilde University, in Denmark. He has written widely on utopianism and cities, and on efforts to reimagine and reconstitute the possibilities of urban society within and against capitalist urbanisation. That has been with reference to the ideas and practices of modernist and avant-garde movements, including the situationists, as well as to critical urban theory. He also focuses on contemporary artistic explorations, interventions and urban politics, including in relation to psychogeography, walking art and radical cartographies. Among his publications is the book Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (2005).