Feasibility and Credibility of Research Project

This research project is feasible and credible because it proposes to explore the models of urban development that go beyond linear economic growth and it takes place on the background of macro-processes of critical re-assessment of the extant models of capitalist development. A culture-oriented urban growth is providing cities around the world with rationales to justify the creation of various cultural clusters that without further research into the circumstances of their success, as in Bilbao, or failure, as in Baltimore, is yet to become an accepted point of policy-making, social theoretical and city-transformational reference. Between the claims for uniqueness of every city or state and comparability of urban locations, there lies a process of paradigmatic cities, such as New York or Paris, serving as models for urban development strategies around the world. Signature buildings, representative landscapes and urban design routinely inspire efforts to revitalize cities that seek competitive advantage in inter-urban competition. This research project argues that drawing interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary connections around a precisely defined kind of urban spaces, that of art biennials, can generate theoretical, historical and situated insights that will easily lend themselves for adoption by specialists active in the fields of urban, policy and cultural studies.

An analytically realist approach applied to art biennials will selectively take into account those aspects of these events that are highly relevant to the theoretical framework on which this research seeks to elaborate. In this research project, the focus is on urban spaces of global culture. This approach to art biennials, considered from the perspective of spaces that they activate, makes manageable not only case-studies of each biennial series separately but also their comparisons across cities where they take place. Taking urban spaces as common denominators for this comparative research can credibly lead to its carrying out within the chosen interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary network of research centers and international scholars. A closer consideration of either contexts or contents of art biennials would put into question the soundness of both theoretical and methodological assumptions of such a research since it is important that research data compose a sample, have a variation and correlate amongst each other. There is a strong empirical basis to argue that art biennials, urban spaces, and global culture enter into meaningfully interpretable relations across the cities that deploy promotional strategies that make culture their center-piece.

The positioning of the urban spaces where art biennials take place provides an important source of information on the process of reformulation of urban development strategies in cultural terms. Whether these processes of increasing presence of festivals and biennials on city calendars allow to redescribe them as grounds for stating that a culture-driven development of modern capitalism is taking place is not a question that can be answered inductively. Rather, a multidisciplinary combination of disparate sources of expertise is in order, should a methodologically and theoretically credible answer be tentatively offered. The aims of this research project explicitly pursue this strategy of research design and theory-building.

At this initial stage, the work plan of this research project presupposes progressive clarification of theoretical points that describe the relations between urban spaces and urban culture on the concrete examples of art biennials in Germany, Italy and Israel. To this end, an active set of collaborative relations among the Center for German Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies of Humboldt University of Berlin, and Tor Vergata University of Rome will be sought to be established. Full potential of on-line means of communication will be sought to be utilized for planning, following up, and team working on this research project. The theoretical mandate of this research project seeks to establish a dialogue between classical sociology, especially as it relates to the theorization of culture, and contemporary philosophy, theory and cities. For this reason a series of meetings among the participants in the research project will be sought to be conducted within the framework of a research group coordinated by Dr. Markin. These meetings will set interim goals and assess progress at each stage. Each step of the research project will be vetted by the members of the research team as both its theoretical framework and its sample of art biennials are expected to evolve.

The interdisciplinarity of both the subject-matter and institutional composition of this research project subordinates its work plan to achievement of clearly definable objectives such as establishment of an international research group, publication of its working papers, and participation in public discourse. Tentative work plan for this research project would include establishment of a research group in its first year of operation, engagement of intellectual discourse surrounding art biennials in its second year, participation in discourse over culture as factor of urban development in its third year, and publication in various formats of research results of this project in its fourth year. In no small measure, art biennials serve as prototypes for this work plan as they increasingly cross institutional, cultural, and geographical boundaries in opening up new horizons of cultural dialogue, multidisciplinary cooperation and urban engagement. Frequently networked with scholarly events that take place on their occasion, art biennials store in their materials a fund of knowledge that waits for its second-order organization within a research framework that this project proposes. Therefore, as important part of its work plan is close reading of the primary documents that art biennials generate. Among them are exhibition catalogues, conference proceedings, journal articles, and essay collections. For this research project, these primary sources have to be read for the terms in which urban spaces figure in art biennials as instantiations of global culture. From a methodological point of view, this will represent content analysis of art biennials along the theoretically relevant dimensions of this research design.

This research design is inherently scalable. Addition of art biennials from countries, such as Canada, Brazil or China, into research sample will provide opportunity to qualify the interim conclusions that this research project will have reached.