Public Art for an Inclusive City: Producers and Publics on the Social Potentials and Problems of Flagship Vis-à-Vis Community Art

This article engages with socio-spatial theory on the ‘trialectic’ between the physical, social and spatial to examine the roles and uses of flagship vis-à-vis community art as experienced by producers on the one hand and publics on the other. It presents a comparative case study on the Hieronymus Bosch Statue, a flagship artwork, and The Four Seasons, a community artwork, in the Dutch mid-sized city of Den Bosch. This study critically juxtaposes everyday experiences of producers and publics with regard to the city’s self-declared long-term ambition to move towards a socially inclusive cultural policy. Insights are drawn from a mixed-method approach involving discourse analysis of policy documents, in-situ observations, questionnaires among publics, and in-depth interviews with a key cultural policymaker, a landscape architect, an artist, representatives of a neighborhood committee as well as with residents. The article identifies common grounds and differences between policy discourse and everyday experiences about the potentials and problems of social engagement with flagship vis-à-vis community art. Along these public-art types, the article concludes with a discussion of the field of tension between urban public art’s ‘mere aesthetics’ and its ‘deeper matters’ of engendering social inclusion. This study can be of use for both scholars and practitioners concerned with citizen participation in culture and arts within urban contexts more widely.