Endowed with positive values and fatal weaknesses: Public art practices in post-industrial landscape --- A systematic review

Abstract

Public art, due to its convenient participatory function and strong social integration ability, is being widely used in the protection, adaptive reuse and innovation of urban post-industrial landscape. In the process of urban renewal, although different forms of public art practice have brought many positive values and benefits to post-industrial landscape, such as the preference for sustainable development of the city, the continuation of urban context or the concern for local community residents based on “top-down” and “bottom-up” cases. Meanwhile, a series of fatal weaknesses arise are ultimately attributed to fragment and single protection of post-industrial landscape. The goal of this study is to systematically review and classify articles on the involvement of public art in post-industrial landscape (a process for screening articles was designed) in order to more clearly find out the positive values and fatal weaknesses of public art practice in various process of post-industrial landscape protection based on both “top-down” and “bottom-up” models. Most previous studies have focused on case analysis and have not discussed this issue or used this method. Therefore, the study is valuable. The conclusions of the study show eight positive values and seven fatal weaknesses in the application of public art practice in post-industrial landscape. It should be pointed out that “inspiring interaction and involvement” and “strengthening community identity,” are the most important factors in the practice of public art in post-industrial landscape. In the future stage, we should focus on and address the issue of "how to establish long-term artistic practice?” and “how we can better balance interests and rights among multiple stakeholders?" within public art academic ocean.