Manuel García-Ruiz publishes a research project on the city, urban art and liminal spaces
Lisbon · 06/2013
Manuel García-Ruiz publishes Steps Towards an Urban Speech, his MA thesis in Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Lisbon (ISCTE), supervised by Teresa Malafaia.
The research reviews different academic traditions on the conception of the city and urban art, and proposes a cultural reading of urban space through concepts such as acts of experience, the urban consumer and liminality.
The work offers an alternative way of understanding the city: not as a closed or merely planned form, but as a living construction shaped by uses, movements, appropriations, conflicts, narratives and forms of expression. Within this framework, urban art appears as a practice capable of revealing invisible spaces, activating new readings of the city and questioning the boundaries between the public, the marginal and the common.
The thesis is directly connected to the Universal Declaration of Urban Rights and to the experience of MEDS Reaction LX 2013 in Lisbon, where the Urban Parliament operates as a laboratory for sharing questions about the city. A space where participants, local agents and communities can discuss the present and future of the urban environment as equals.
From Urban Rights, we celebrate this publication as a new layer of shared research: a way to continue building languages, tools and spaces from which to imagine a more habitable, more plural city, open to the voices of those who live it.
You can read Manuel’s thesis on ResearchGate