Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Environmental Analysis

Reader 1

Char Miller

Reader 2

Rosalia Romero

Reader 3

Marc Los Huertos

Rights Information

© 2025 Shelby L Stanton

Abstract

Urban spaces are made not only of buildings and infrastructure but of the social and cultural practices that integrates into social fabric and assigns their meaning. They are a living, transforming entity where humans and the environment influence each other in lifestyle and identity. In New York City, art, both formally commissioned public works and grassroots urban interventions, have become central to the processes of urban transformation. Murals, installations, and curated parks are crucial to the urban environment and are frequently leveraged as tools of placemaking. Place-making is a concept used to describe and understand how meaningful places emerge from interactions between people and their environments. This is a collaborative process where members of the community actively contribute to the shared third spaces to make a shared space more desirable to encounter (Switalski et al., 2023). Artists creating public art for communities are players in the placemaking of communities. Yet, the role of public art in a community is deeply ambivalent. Art can foster social cohesion, civic engagement, and collective identity, while simultaneously enabling processes of displacement, and the commodification of creativity.

In this thesis, I explore the ways public art inhabits urban spaces, tracing how it can transform our perception of the world around us. Public art has the ability to shift our interaction with a street, a wall, or a park, and to invite us to reimagine not only the space we occupy or transit through, but also our relationship to it and to each other. Murals and installations ask us to see, feel, and move differently, revealing hidden textures of the city and sparking new forms of engagement.

I investigate public art’s effects on its surrounding built and cultural environment through a case study comparison of 5 Pointz and the High Line. I draw upon scholars Jane Jacobs, Sharon Zukin, Richard Florida, Miwon Kwon, Patricia Phillips, Susan Phillips, and Vid Simoniti to construct a theoretical framework that will reveal the complex interplay of community, creativity, and capital. By weaving together key concepts like public art, urban art, artwashing, and neighborhood transformation, I demonstrate how artistic practice nurtures urban vitality and, simultaneously, can be entangled in processes of displacement, and economic stratification.

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