Public art was invented as a funding category by the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA in 1967. The first commission was Alexander Calder's La Grande Vitesse for Grand Rapids, used as the city's logo, displayed on its garbage trucks as well as the mayor's note-paper. Around 100 states and cities in the USA now have Percent for Art policies, though in the UK the policy has been less widely adopted, many schemes being funded by additions to (rather than inclusion in) the capital budget. At the General Infirmary at Leeds (LGI), for example, more than £1.5 million has been raised for art from sponsors and grant-making bodies. Part of the LGI's external spaces were designed by Tess Jaray and Tom Lomax using paving, street furniture, sculpture, beds of lavender, and decorative brickwork [fig. 1]. Here, as in several cases since the 1980s, artists were involved at the design stage, making spaces rather than things to put in them, integrating the beautiful and the useful. Artists argue they bring imagination to the task, and architects that they have done that for decades. Users of multi-storey car parks will draw their own conclusions.

But there is another history: in 1967, also, the first black power mural appeared in the streets of Chicago, and in New York a wall-painting celebrated women's rights. In a haze of smoke from cigarettes people made themselves, art-happenings took place and artists protested against the war in Vietnam.

Firstly because it is, as Janet Wolff, Doreen Massey and Elizabeth Wilson have argued, gendered - there is no flâneuse in urban history; secondly, because it is a zone of power, where monuments state national identities and civic moralities from which some publics are excluded. Leonie Sandercock argues that planning in today's culturally diverse society requires new ways of thinking about representation, and perhaps planners and new genre public artists could have a useful dialogue about this - the history of advocacy planning runs parallel to that of activist art.

The category is also problematic because the demarkation of public and domestic realms assumes that space is produced by design, whilst people's readings of space in the light and shade of their own experiences overlay the planned city with a tracery of individual meanings and associations. So: what (as a chap in a hat once asked) is to be done?

Some new genre public art in the 1990s crossed the boundaries between public and private realms, as a way for women artists to liberate themselves from domesticity. Peggy Diggs worked in 1992 with a dairy in New York to design a domestic violence milk carton, distributed through supermarkets and carrying an image, a text and a hotline number, bringing an issue situated in the home into the public realmand back again [2] . But this has its limitations: public issues are abstract, often determined by the media. Alongside the public and the private, is another terrain of the everyday traces of occupation made by a city's inhabitants. New genre public art begins to get at this, but remains a practice in which, largely, the artist interprets the world for others. Can art enable people to interpret the world for themselves?

One case which suggests it might, in Exeter in the summer of 2000, is Window Sills, a research project coordinated by Sarah Bennett and John Butler, assisted by Gill Melling, from the University of Plymouth, involving collaboration between four artists - Rebecca Eriksson, Edwina Fitzpatrick, Brendan Byrne and Neil Musson - and residents in the St Thomas and Exwick parts of the city. These neighbourhoods are on the 'wrong' side of the river, but include a mix of local authority housing, traditional working-class terraces, middle-class suburbs and fine Edwardian villas. The project includes specially designed man-hole covers relating to the oral histories of those who used to make them in local foundries [fig. 2]; and the siting of scent-dispensers in streets built on the site of a nursery, using, instead of the deodorants these machines spew out in corporate toilets, the smells of the plants which have gone [fig. 3]. Video and sound recordings were made of territories identified by children on their routes to and from school, and residents from 11 to 90 years old made drawings and wrote stories to encapsulate moments of time spent looking through their windows, gazing on the street. The resulting images and stories were displayed in the local press and on local buses.The approach is not unique [ 3] but what is significant is the extent to which the project found its form through conversations between artists and residents. This involved the risk of not defining the form of the work in advance, providing instead a space and facility for interaction; the artists retained their expertise in making the resulting art-works, but the work's content was evolved through the excavation of personal memories of place. Funding bodies often have problems with art without a preconceived outcome, but Window Sills gained £30,000 from the lottery to add to investment in staff time and a Research Assistant post by the University of Plymouth. The title Window Sills reflects the project's investigation of an interface between the public and domestic realms. Sarah Bennett writes: "The space is partly metaphorical, partly actual; through it, individual, social and cultural identities are constructed and become mutually informing" [4]. It is contextualised by the literature of the architectural everyday, and Lefebvre's theories of spatiality. But what are the implications for urban design?

Radical Urban Design

Through the modern period, art has had its avant-gardes, in which new practices have followed from social engagement and, today, a relation to environmentalism. A case is the work of Platform, an artists' group in London whose current project - 90% Crude - includes the distribution of spoof newspapers to commuters, giving the news on pollution and the oil industry the mainstream press leave out. And in the Natural Reality exhibition at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen in 1999 more than 30 artists showed ecologically-engaged work, such as Eve Andrée Laramée's mini-parks on trucks [fig. 4]. But in design, is practice conditioned by a separation of concept and plan from lived experience, so that pre-conceived, and repressive, solutions prevail? The case of Barcelona 2004 suggests so, where, in unacknowledged irony, a UNESCO-funded pavilion for cultural diversity will occupy a site, at present the most culturally diverse neighbourhood in the city, which will be cleared to create a zone of affluence where the River Besòs meets the sea. And in a nightmare foresight of a new totalitarianism in Disney Corporation's pseudo town of Celebration, Florida, the nice folk who live there are allowed only white or beige curtains.