About Actopolis

Actopolis is an online magazine about what happens when art, people and the city share the same ground. We write about murals and monuments, courtyards and bus shelters, workshops in parks, festivals that close a street for a weekend, and the slow arguments over who a square is really for.

What we cover

The magazine is sorted into seven strands, and most pieces sit in two of them.

• Public Art: murals, monuments, memorials and sculpture, and who looks after them once the speeches are over.
• Urban Culture: street art, theatre, markets and night life.
• Participation & Community: workshops, community gardens, play streets and art made with residents instead of for them.
• Architecture & Space: squares, housing estates, stairs, benches and the planning behind them.
• Festivals & Events: what it takes to fill a square or close a street, and how to enjoy the result.
• Culture: museums, libraries, art schools, sound and radio art.
• Travel: routes for people who would choose a market hall over a long queue.

Where we look

Our home ground is Central and Southeast Europe: Vienna, Bucharest, Athens, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Thessaloniki and the old mining and steel towns of the Ruhr. Many of these cities carry layers of empire and upheaval, squares that have held markets, parades and protests in turn, and a great deal of concrete. We look further afield when another place has something to teach, because a pedestrianised block in Barcelona or a metro station in Stockholm can say a lot about a street in Zagreb.

Who writes it

Five writers, each living in the city they write from. There is more about each of them on the writers' page.

• Mara Ionescu, in Bucharest, writes about participation and community art: neighbourhood cultural centres, workshops, markets and libraries.
• Florian Haslinger, in Vienna, covers architecture and public space: housing, squares, streets, cycling and the concrete buildings people love to argue about.
• Daphne Kourou, in Athens, writes about urban culture, theatre, carnival, festivals and artistic activism.
• Luka Marić, in Zagreb, follows public art: murals, monuments and memorials, sculpture conservation and Yugoslav modernist heritage.
• Katrin Dahlmann, in Essen, writes about festivals, travel, sound and radio art, night culture and industrial sites turned over to culture.

How pieces are chosen

We start from things a reader could actually find: a wall, a courtyard, a permit form, a festival site on the morning after. A story earns its place if it explains how something works, why it matters to the people who use it, or how you might do it yourself. That is why essays and city walks sit next to practical guides on mural permits and park workshops. Every piece is read by a second writer before it goes up. Everything published so far is collected in the notes.

Corrections

If you spot a mistake (a wrong date, a misattributed artwork, a building placed in the wrong district), please write to the editors. We check every report. Where a fact was wrong, we correct the text and add a short note at the foot of the article saying what changed. We do not quietly rewrite an article to hide an error.

How the magazine is paid for

Some guides, walks and reading lists link to books and artists' kit on Amazon, and to bus tours through our partner City Sightseeing. If you buy through one of those links we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The links are marked, the picks come from publisher and maker details and published reviews rather than our own testing, and they never decide what we write about or where a walk goes.

What the magazine does not do

We report on art and cities; we do not produce them. The magazine does not run art projects, organise events, commission artworks or sell commissions. It does not take payment for coverage, publish sponsored articles or sell links. Press releases are read with interest, but they buy nothing. When a festival, a council or an artist appears in these pages, it is because one of the writers thought it worth your time.

If you know a square, a wall or a courtyard we ought to see, the contact page is the place to tell us.