The Right to the City

Overview

The esteemed anthropologist David Harvey believes, "the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is … one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights". He called on all social groups to assert their 'right to the city', and curators Lee Stickells and Zanny Begg are doing just that with the upcoming Tin Sheds exhibition, symposium and publishing project.

But it's not just the 'right' to the city they're interesting in, but how to get out of the concrete jungle, i.e. the escape plan. From the whimsical to the serious, and with social connectivity and sustainability in mind, artists, artist collectives, architects and engineers come together in The Right to the City to present real or invented ways to 'remake' the city.

Australian artists Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro consider public and private space; New Zealand artist-engineer DV Rogers will construct and occupy a relief shelter for the show; UK-based Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley, artist and architect, construct situations and imagined architecture; Milkcrate Urbanism, an artist collective from Sydney, aims to engage with the people that actually inhabit the spaces in which they work; and Temporary Services from the USA will show Public Phenomena, their 10-year research into inventions people make in public.

The Right to the City symposium runs 10 – 6, Saturday 9 April at the University of Sydney Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning.

Image: Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley, Beyond Utopia