The city is not only the economic, political, cultural and social hub, but also the symbolic home of modern-day societies that demonstrates their complexity, contradictory nature and fragility most clearly.
This is becoming all the more clear in a phase of the history of the city in which it is undergoing deep-rooted change: from a point of crystallisation of industrial society, in which the category of work is structure-forming, to a node in the network of information and media society, in which communication is the key structural category. Discourses on the mediatised, virtualised city are characterised by information, images and communication, while the discourse of the globalised city is marked by periphery, migration and mobility.
From this perspective of radical change, art's constructive, critical exploration of the subject of 'city' is not only of aesthetic, but above all of current social and political relevance.