Dr Matilda Arvidsson

Our book on Urban Creativity is finally out! Editors are Dr Erik Hannerz (sociology, Lund uni) and Dr Peter Bengtesen (art history and visual cultures, Lund uni). Together with Dr Bengtsen my contribution is on spatial justice and street art.

Public place is perhaps the most important of democratic society. Urban Creativity describes subcultures’ use of it.

The book is a collection of texts on interventions in the cityscape – interventions aiming to temporarily or permanently change the city’s meaning, function or accessibility. The essays are the result of an interdisciplinary research collaboration that was initiated in 2018 at the Pufendorf Institute at Lund University on the theme of ‘Urban Creativity’.

The texts are characterized by a diversity both in terms of scholarly fields and approaches and deal with various aspects of interventions in the city o: graffiti and street art, the Occupy movement and the Free-party movement.


From the content: • Openness and porosity: a socio-spatial analysis of Umbrella Square in Hong Kong • Vandals in motion: the ”where” of graffiti in the streets. • Prolonged graffiti articulation in late 1980s and 1990s Lithuania. • Free parties, sexuality, creativity and drugs: dancing within the urban world •From writing the streets to Instagram: a history of subculture graffiti as media