Public Space Unbound: Urban Emancipation and the Post-Political Condition

Summary

Through an exploration of emancipation in recent processes of capitalist urbanization, this book argues the political is enacted through the everyday practices of publics producing space. This suggests democracy is a spatial practice rather than an abstract professional field organized by institutions, politicians and movements.

Public Space Unbound brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars to examine spaces, conditions and circumstances in which emancipatory practices impact the everyday life of citizens. We ask: How do emancipatory practices relate with public space under ‘post-political conditions’? In a time when democracy, solidarity and utopias are in crisis, we argue that productive emancipatory claims already exist in the lived space of everyday life rather than in the expectation of urban revolution and future progress.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Space, Emancipation and Post-Political Urbanization

2. Amazon Unbound: Utopian Dialectics of Planetary Urbanization

3. Applying a Relational Approach to Political Difference: Strategies of Particularisation and Universalisation in Contesting Urban Development

4. How to Reclaim Mafia-controlled Territory? An Emancipatory Experience in Naples

5. Improvising an Urban Commons of the Streets. Emancipation-from, Emancipation-to and Co-Emancipation

6. Rupturing, Accreting and Bridging: Everyday Insurgencies and Emancipatory City-making in Asia

7. Post-Political Development and Emancipation: Urban Participatory Projects in Helsinki

8. Urban Events Under the Post-political Condition: (Im)Possibilities for Emancipation in a Small-scale City of Switzerland

9. Emancipatory Research in the Arts: Shift the City - The Temporary Lab of Non | Permanent Space

10. Alternative Participatory Planning Practices in the Global South: Learning from Co-production Processes in Informal Communities.

11. Revitalising Yeldeğirmeni Neighbourhood in Istanbul: Towards an Emancipatory Urban Design in the Landscapes of Neoliberal Urbanism

12. Conflict vs. Consensus: An Emancipatory Understanding of Planning in a Pluralist Society

13. Public Space Activism in Unstable Contexts: Emancipation from Beirut’s Post-memory

14. ‘The City Decides!’ Political Standstill and Social Movements in Post-industrial Naples

15. Emancipatory Practices of Self-organized Workers in the Context of Neoliberal Policies: IMPA, the Case of a ‘Recovered Factory’ in Buenos Aires

16. Questioning Urban Commons: Challenges and Potentials in the Post-Democratic Era

17. Hybridising ‘Ownership’ of Public Space: Framings of Urban Emancipation in Crisis-ridden Thessaloniki

18. Public Space Unbound: Emancipatory Praxis and Lived Space

Tihomir Viderman and Sabine Knierbein

Author(s) Bio

Sabine Knierbein is Associate Professor for Urban Culture and Public Space and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, TU Wien, Austria. Her research foci are theory of urbanization, critique of everyday life, planning theory and civic innovation. She is the editor of Public Space and the Challenges of Urban Transformation in Europe (2014), Public Space and Relational Perspectives (2015) and City Unsilenced (2017).

Tihomir Viderman is an architect and planner, affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space of TU Wien, Austria. For a number of years, he has been engaged in interdisciplinary research and teaching, focusing on culturally inclusive and locally embedded approaches. He is particularly interested in how the expression of cultural difference is modulated by professionals in lived space.