Creating spaces for art: Long term impacts of street art in the urban context

Abstract

Street art can be defined as any informal artistic performances or artworks practiced in the public spaces. Street art has the potential to transform the public spaces by contributing to or reducing the quality of these spaces. Through street art, in many cases, public spaces are transformed into places for entertainment, cultural activities, or areas of protests and expression of the feelings and ideas. The impacts of street art practices might be limited to one part of an open space or spread to a district or even to the entire city depending on its temporal dimen-sion. This article aims to examine the relationship of street art and public space. In this context, the article overviews the concept of street art and demonstrates its positive, negative and temporal impacts on public space. This study uses a case study approach and evaluates the long term impacts of street art practices based on the analysis of three cases in the city of İzmir, Turkey. In İzmir cases it is found out that the street art practices transformed the public space in terms of uses, activities and built environment quality and had impacts on economic and social structure of the community. The findings of this study reveal that street art holds the potential of contributing to the city life through creating spaces for artistic activities and moreover of changing the meaning and identity of the public spaces and the settlements.