From margins to capital: The integration of spaces of artistic critique within capitalist urbanism

This article seeks to understand how the attitude of urban actors has changed with respect to artistic temporary use of spaces, considered here as spaces for the expression of artistic critique. I will analyze the dynamics of integrating spaces of artistic critique into city production by looking at their history in Paris, their gradual acknowledgment by institutions and, more recently, their instrumentalization. In this article, I show how capitalist urbanization has endogenized artistic critique and spaces of artistic critique and how this contributes to undermine the critique of capitalist urbanization through its integration into urban planning, its harnessing and misdirecting the ethical values of independence, authenticity, and freedom, and its support of spaces for expressing this critique. The new spirit of capitalist urbanization integrates critique to justify engagement in and to inspire actors to pursue capital accumulation, in other words, making a profit off the land. Focusing on the Parisian case and drawing on research carried out over the past 20 years, this article seeks to illuminate these ways of instrumentalizing and integrating artistic critique in view of multiple contemporary changes, in particular the injunction to an entrepreneurial self. To understand this trend, this article draws from two theoretical fields—urban studies and the sociology of art—offering a new perspective on the interface between critical artistic practices and urban spaces.