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> New Urbanism projects tend to end up being a bit too Disney for > many people and is probably mainly an American movement that caters > to a sort of small town nostalgia: > http://www.newurbanism.org/ > > Seaside in Florida is probably the most well known example. That's > where The Truman Show was filmed. Talk about surveillance art... Not too mention the actual Disney run "New Urbanist" venture called Celebration, also in Florida of course. i don't know much about artists' involvements with NU, but the geographer and tourism studies guru Dean MacCannell makes a pretty strong critique of it in an text called "New Urbanism and its Discontents" (in a book titled _Giving Ground_, Verso 1999). It would be interesting to do some kind of study on the role of % for art programs (or some kind of equivalent) in NU ventures, but it sounds like "public art" would end up doing what it does in most places - decorating over history and privileging the values that commissioned it (which is what MacCannell suggests NU is all about). One aspect of NU which might make public art a bit more difficult of a practice is it's zeal for aesthetic consistency, which is supposed to translate into economic and political homogeneity. Public art works would have to "match" the architectural furniture of bungalow, cape cod and/or tudor homes, in one of 8 possible colors. ryan