Art’s presence in the urban space is dynamic and interactive that communicates the complex forms of globalization, cultural hybridity, and plurality in contemporary daily life—where we experience politics. The new forms of agencies and strategies of urban creativity in the form of graffiti, wall paintings, yarn bombing, stickers, urban gardening, street performances, tactical art, creative campaigns and theatrical actions—among others—demand an active spectatorship and have a growing power to renegotiate space for new forms of political participation in the urban space.

Rebel Streets conference engages in the questions that scrutinize the complex relationships between urban space, social resistance, and art, such as: How can art in the public space be used as a weapon of resistance and a means of reconstruction? Are street artists obliged to be a part of the urban resistance against neoliberalism? How does art respond uniquely to gentrification? How do public artistic expressions reveal, delimit or question the complexity of neoliberal urbanization? How can we interpret the poetics of urban art from the perspective of subcultures, freedom of expression, and the limits of criminality? How is street art activism perceived by the authorities, politicians, businesses, and the wider public? What prompts urban artists to communicate with urban dwellers with their marks on the city’s surface? What kind of public should critical urban art try to constitute and what kind of public spaces are needed to that effect? How are symbols, slogans and visual expressions communicated in the urban space of social movements?Participants investigate the hypothesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow for a hegemonic restructuring of the urban environment, but it also facilitates the growth of counter-hegemonic resistance.