Practices and Prejudices. Lessons from an Encounter between Artists and Urban Professionals

International audienceThis chapter analyses a unique collaboration between artists and urban professionals and its effect on urban policies. We discuss whether artists help the latter to develop new perspectives on their own practice, and thus bring about new ways of understanding and representing urban issues. Artists appear as professionals whose sensitivity and reflexive practice can open new perspectives on the understanding of urban issues, here the uses and attachments to public space. They take into account subjectivities, whereas, in the urban professional world, information is usually objectivised, and personal feelings and perceptions are hidden. Art-based methods (such as performance) offer to urban professionals ways of moving beyond their preconceived notions of public space and question their vocabulary (the word appropriation) and practices (in public consultations, for instance). But the artists questioned their creativity and the reality of art in such collaboration framework