ABSTRACT. How might we begin to explore the concept of the "sustainable city" in a world often characterized as dynamic, fluid, and contested? Debates about the sustainable city are too often dominated by a technological discourse conducted among professional experts, but this technocratic framing is open to challenge. For some critics, sustainability is a meaningless notion, yet for others its semantic pliability opens up discursive spaces through which to explore interconnections across time, space, and scale. Thus, while enacting sustainability in policy and practice is an arduous task, we can productively ask how cultural imaginations might be stirred and shaken to make sustainability accessible to a wider public who might join the conversation. What role, we ask, can and should the arts play in wider debates about sustainability in the city today? We explore a coproduced artwork in the northeast of England in order to explain how practice-led research methods were put into dialogue with the social sciences to activate new perspectives on the politics, aesthetics, and practices of sustainability. The case is presented to argue that creative material experimentations can be used as an active research inquiry through which ideas can be tested without knowing predefined means or ends. The case shows how such creativity acts as a catalyst to engage a heterogeneous mix of actors in the redefinition of urban spaces, juxtaposing past and present, with the ephemeral and the (seemingly) durable.Key Words: coproduction; interdisciplinarity; practice-led research; sustainability; urban INTRODUCTIONWe need, in short, to examine the way in which new materialities influence the cultural constructions we place on the environment (Redclift 2005:225).

The office is shifting. Architectural and space planning practices such as DEGW are reformulating work practices and the environments within which they occur. In DEGW's terms, the place of work in the knowledge economy is subject to market pressures demanding change within the surroundings of the contemporary city; office practices are being displaced from traditionally static locations and inhabiting places that were previously associated with the non-work world.Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space 1 and Reinhold Martin's research in The Organizational Complex, 2 as well as Manuel Castells' The Rise of the Network Society, 3 this paper will outline how technology is changing the idea and physicality of the office as discussed in DEGW's publication The Distributed Workplace 4 and how pervasive networks are becoming the norm.

Columbia University's recent interdisciplinary conference on transparency aimed, according to the convenors, to ‘bring an ordinarily extraordinary material back before our eyes’.

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