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AbstractWhat roles can utopia play in contemporary critical urban studies? The concept has often been treated warily, sidelined or dismissed. Recent years, however, have seen a revival of interest, as writers, activists and artists have sought openings to urban worlds that are different and better. By returning to aspects of the urban thought and practice of Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s and early 1970s, this article challenges common understandings of utopia and clarifies some of its potential uses for critical urban studies today. It explores Lefebvre's emphasis on the possible, and in particular the importance he attached to extending and realizing the possible through struggling for what seems impossible. Rather than being a free‐floating or endlessly open project, however, this engagement with the 'possible‐impossible' emerged in critical dialogue with other currents of utopian urbanism, including prospective thought then influential in France. It was also rooted in long‐ standing concerns with the critique of everyday life and with experimentation through projects with urbanists, architects and others. By attending to these often neglected aspects of Lefebvre's utopianism, a series of provocations emerge for addressing the urban question in ways that take seriously not only what urbanization processes and urban life are but also what they could become and how they might be constituted differently.

Abstract
This paper reflects on a practitioner-grounded metaphor – the mosaic – as a means to think the relationship between health and the environment in two policy initiatives, a walking and a conservation group. These were both part of Thames Chase Community Forest, a UK-based nature program to combat ill-health, poverty and social exclusion for those on the fringe of large urban conurbations. Using multiple research methods, the paper questions the simple, literal, equal-but-separate notions of the two pre-set policy parameters to show how the solidarity that mattered could not be fixed in advance. It was a mosaic-in-the-making, that came to life along the way, within the shifting ground of patterned regularities, people and happenings that often escape the net of rapid approaches to ethnographic policy research. Such reflections might usefully offer fresh soundings for policy-makers to contemplate, not merely a blueprint to be followed.

AbstractChallenging perspectives on the urban question have arisen in recent years from beyond academic realms through the work of artists and cultural practitioners. Often in dialogue with urban theory and political activism, and employing a range of tactical practices, they have engaged critically with cities and with the spatialities of everyday urban life. They are typically concerned less with representing political issues than with intervening in urban spaces so as to question, refunction and contest prevailing norms and ideologies, and to create new meanings, experiences, understandings, relationships and situations. Such interventionist practices may rarely be seen as part of the traditional purview of urban studies. Yet in asserting their significance here, this essay argues that growing dialogues across and between urban and spatial theory, and artistic and cultural practice, have considerable potential for inspiring and developing critical approaches to cities. The essay highlights a number of specific challenges thrown up by such interconnections that are of political and pedagogical significance and in need of further debate.RésuméRécemment, d'intéressantes perspectives sur la question urbaine se sont dégagées au‐delà des sphères de recherches, à travers le travail d'artistes et de professionnels de la culture. Dans un échange fréquent avec la théorie urbaine et le militantisme politique, et à l'aide de toute une panoplie de pratiques tactiques, ils se sont impliqués dans les villes et les spatialités de la vie urbaine au quotidien. En général, ils se soucient moins de représenter des thèmes politiques que d'intervenir dans les espaces urbains pour remettre en question, rediriger ou contester les normes et idéologies en vigueur, et pour créer de nouvelles significations, expériences, compréhensions, relations et situations. Il est rare de pouvoir inscrire ces modes interventionnistes dans le champ traditionnel des études urbaines. Toutefois, cet essai défend leur importance en soulignant le potentiel considérable d'une accentuation du dialogue à travers et entre les théories urbaine et spatiale, et les pratiques artistique et culturelle, pour inspirer et élaborer des approches critiques des villes. Ce travail met en avant plusieurs enjeux spécifiques nés de ces interconnexions, significatifs sur le plan politique et pédagogique, et appelant à un débat approfondi.

International audience ; This paper addresses ways in which artists and cultural practitioners have recently been using forms of urban exploration as a means of engaging with, and intervening in, cities. It takes its cues from recent events on the streets of New York that involved exploring urban spaces through artistic practices. Walks, games, investigations and mappings are discussed as manifestations of a form of 'psychogeography', and are set in the context of recent increasing international interest in practices associated with this term, following its earlier use by the situationists. The paper argues that experimental modes of exploration can play a vital role in the development of critical approaches to the cultural geographies of cities. In particular, discussion centres on the political significance of these spatial practices, drawing out what they have to say about two interconnected themes: 'rights to the city' and 'writing the city'. Through addressing recent cases of psychogeographical experimentation in terms of these themes, the paper raises broad questions about artistic practices and urban exploration to introduce this theme issue on 'Arts of urban exploration' and to lead into the specific discussions in the papers that follow.

This paper addresses ways in which artists and cultural practitioners have recently been using forms of urban exploration as a means of engaging with, and intervening in, cities. It takes its cues from recent events on the streets of New York that involved exploring urban spaces through artistic practices. Walks, games, investigations and mappings are discussed as manifestations of a form of 'psychogeography', and are set in the context of recent increasing international interest in practices associated with this term, following its earlier use by the situationists. The paper argues that experimental modes of exploration can play a vital role in the development of critical approaches to the cultural geographies of cities. In particular, discussion centres on the political significance of these spatial practices, drawing out what they have to say about two interconnected themes: 'rights to the city' and 'writing the city'. Through addressing recent cases of psychogeographical experimentation in terms of these themes, the paper raises broad questions about artistic practices and urban exploration to introduce this theme issue on 'Arts of urban exploration' and to lead into the specific discussions in the papers that follow.