What are the urban arts, beyond the formal institutions of the culture industry? What types of activities would we include in that concept? We aim, here, to look beyond official, overtly funded artistic initiatives, which are often a tool used for gentrification. Instead we are looking for more spontaneous, organic forms of creative expression. In the former, the culture industry places its mark on the urban space in the construction of arts venues to draw suburbanites into the city, or the repurposing of historical structures into lifestyle and entertainment venues. While such programs foster the arts, they also reconfigure arts consumerism as an engine of economic growth. The commodification of creative expression overlooks the many ways in which city residents create their own aesthetic experiences, as well as the social communities that bind these experiences together. The organic urban arts focus more on local, spontaneous, and social forms of creative expression. Examples include the narrative practices of street-corner culture, sidewalk boom box parties, the rhythms and choreography of people moving down city streets, and embodied social performance in dance clubs, movie theaters, parks, train stations, and other venues of sociability. We aim to explore how the urban arts can be a means to take possession of the urban space, as a tactical form of self-assertion.