Are Art Practices in the Social Domain a New Way for the Innovation of Urban Planning Actions? Some Reflections from the Urban Planning Point of View

Why the interest of the urban planning discipline about art and art practices?
Firstly, a creativity - out of schemes of marketing - is emerging, working on social level, departing from the lower part through collective practices of construction of the urban space, realised by groups, collective or network of artists and inhabitants, in which the artist is joined to other urban professionals.
Practices of “art in the public interest” lead the artistic action to become one of the possible tools for the activation and the empowerment of the communities in the processes of urban transformation.
In this context the artistic action definitely goes out of the exclusive language of the art opening itself to the experimentation of multidisciplinary approaches in a relational and social sphere.
Secondly, the research in urban field pays more and more greater attention to the experiences of the daily-life, and, in parallel, in the world of art there is increasing debate around the meaning of public space.
Finally, an increasing attention toward urban regeneration practices based on artistic-cultural resources, is leading to critical and radical approaches against market oriented dominant way of acting/planning and its “unexpected” effects (i.e. competitiveness, gentrification).
This kind of artistic action has assonances with the way of operating of the “insurgent” style of planning (as action of community-building): the role of the art in the processes of planning can be interpreted that of breaking the “norm” of the dominant model.
Through the analysis of case studies (Amsterdam “vrijplaatsen” and Milan) emerges questions about a new role and new competencies required to urban planners as consequences of “contamination” by these “hybrid practices of urban action”; and how the creation of this space of dialogue produce innovative ferment in the construction of unusual boundaries of confrontation and inter-disciplines dialogue.