Art and Sociotechnical Imaginaries in the Urbanocene: Comparative Interventions Across Four Cities

From the fast-mutating Urbanocene, cities and their public art have become critical interfaces between ecology, technology, and culture. This article explores how civic and monumental artworks coproduce collective imaginaries—visions that connect technological achievement to social life through new infrastructures and shared ideals of progress—via four case studies: New York’s Unisphere, Auckland’s Peace Mural, Japan’s Gift from Land, and Rwanda’s Kigali Convention Centre (KCC). In these various historical and geopolitical contexts, public art provides new ways of imagining the future from the Cold War futurism of “smart” urban progress to antinuclear critical reflection and from postwar reconstruction to stewardship as an ecological principle. Drawing on a qualitative, interpretive methodology that combines visual and discursive analysis, this article locates these imaginaries in larger cultural and political histories. It conceives public art as a dialogic medium between knowledge, power, and civic values—a space of negotiation and co-imagination in and around urban publics. Finally, the article argues that artistic agency plays a central role in constructing sustainable and inclusive urban futures alongside (and sometimes against) technocratic modes of governance. It thus positions public art as a crucial interface where social imagination and urban governance co-shape sustainable futures.