The Journal of Public Space

Mapping Everyday Public Spaces in Urban Neighbourhoods

Glykeria Anaxagorou, Nadia Charalambous — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Central public spaces in cities have always played an important role in urban experience, and continue to have a city-wide signiﬁcance, often described as the meeting spaces of cultures, politics, social and individual trajectories. Peripheral and/or neighbourhood public spaces, where the everyday life of citizens unfolds, rarely enjoy any of this signiﬁcance and may not receive the attention needed from the main stakeholders involved. Many researchers have highlighted the significance of these public spaces in cities, pointing out that the patterns of everyday life in residential neighbourhoods – whether it is the chance encounters in the local market or conversations in the local square– are the essential material of society and may well have integrative social functions, of an individual or collective initiative.

This paper aims at an empirical contribution to a better understanding of the synthesizing mechanisms, which shape public spaces in cities’ neighbourhoods, by addressing the variety of factors involved and their relations and by highlighting the need for manifold perspectives on the localized ‘meaning’ of places, constructed, and shaped by local practices and behaviours. Drawing on the theoretical framework of relational theories, the paper sets out to explore the links between the physical sphere and the social sphere of three different residential public spaces in the city of Limassol, critically exploring the ways in which the boundaries of public space are challenged and negotiated. Both spatial analysis and social sciences methods are employed to map and unveil the essential role residential public spaces play, in bringing together what society divides in contemporary, multicultural cities, where multiplicities of identities, languages, religions and cultures may naturally give rise to tensions and even hostilities. The potential for interaction and meetings between different people backgrounds in the public realm is shown to be a crucial prerequisite for shaping encounters during their everyday life, encouraging tolerance and a feeling of belonging.

Between Alienation and Revolution

Rachel de Castro Almeida, Sabine Knierbein — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Following the tracks of the soiree collectives in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, this article aims at analysing the role of the dimension of everyday life, which according to Lefebvre means the constant movement between the tendency to repeat and the capacity for social transformation, the constant movement between routine and invention. These collectives are formed by young people, most of them residents of peripheral areas who have revealed themselves to be holders of a new subjectivity capable of explaining their place in the world and justifying their existence drawing from the pride of being peripheral, which results in a new way of political action. The daily life lived, perceived, and conceived in the context of their social and symbolic place occupied by the peripheries and their social actors has been reframed in the face of a set of social transformations and, consequently, it produces new public spheres and new ways of expression of emancipatory struggles. The ethnography carried out seeks to apprehend the intertwining of poetry, performance, and the occupation of public space. The critique of everyday life reveals those patterns of behaviour, organization strategies of groups and subgroups, networks of relationships and networks of meanings, as well as systems of material and symbolic exchanges. Indeed, such collectives are expressions of everyday resistance, manifested in poetry, in bodily expressions, in the way activities are organized and performed. In these soirees, critical and political reflections are collectively created, making the creative and liberating capacity emerge.

Participation as a Global Urban Strategy Towards Resilience

Evangelia Athanassiou — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

A recurring theme in urban planning and urban design, citizen participation has been adopted by international organisations (UNECE, 1998; UN, 2016; OECD, 2022) and, has recently, been reinstated in different conceptualizations, planning scales and political meanings, both through formal processes incorporated into legal planning frameworks or led by the local authorities and through citizen-led initiatives with varying degrees of interaction and conflict with formal urban policies (Cornwall, 2009; Miraftab, 2004; Kapsali 2023).
The paper discusses the way participation in public space production is conceptualised in prominent urban strategies towards resilience as triggered, formulated and promoted globally by the Rockefeller Foundation Initiative “100 Resilient Cities”.

First, the emergence of philanthropic foundations as new social actors of urban development in Greece, is understood as part of a new governance regime formulated in the context of austerity politics. A brief examination of prominent projects of public space creation that were funded by foundations during the crisis illuminates specific hegemonic discourses endorsed through the foundations’ granting initiatives for public space. Subsequently, the paper focuses on the initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation and embarks on a critique of the way participation is conceptualized within the initiative and in the “Resilience strategies” of Athens and Thessaloniki. Notwithstanding their inclusive rhetoric, participation is instigated by an international benevolent foundation, facilitated by global consultants acting in parallel and not from within locally instituted planning processes. It is argued that within the framework of this global initiative, participation becomes a matter of techno-managerial “know-how” and its potential to unsettle unjust socio-environmental processes and act towards justice and democracy is questioned.

Discovering and Mapping Aspects of Spatial Publicness

Andreas L Savvides, Spyros Th. Spyrou, Teresa Tourvas — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The value of public spaces and their social function in cities has been the source of numerous writings. The questions posed in our undergraduate architecture studio at the University of Cyprus are: “What core design aspects create successful public places, and how do they constitute conscious design processes?” and “What are core values that create successful public places and how are they consciously integrated in a design process?”. This paper will attempt to address the topic of spatial publicness within a framework of translating observations of the above into design strategies and tools. These aspects have formulated the basis for recent design briefs, tested within an architectural studio context from 2nd year coursework, while at the same time being translated into transferable values, such as diagnostic and synthetic tools, appropriate for an undergraduate architectural studio. They formulate the basis of an ongoing research project tested within the studio context and utilizing case studies from the output of students’ work to draw conclusions that guide the pedagogical approach.

Lived Urban Form

Tihomir Viderman, Ilaria Geddes, Chrystala Psathiti — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The urban form is a political and social arena. It is produced as a composite of sediments of various ways of living, of complex flow of history, of relationships and subjectivities through which people build and exercise their agency to negotiate and change contingent urban realities. Studies of urban form have so far confronted the challenge of grasping this complexity by scrutinizing a city's physical features. However, this paper puts forward a proposition that urban morphological approaches can also be resourceful tools for conceptualizing and scrutinizing dynamic relations between plural urban realities and transformations of the physical urban fabric. By drawing on the experiences from the Erasmus+ project Emerging Perspectives on Urban Morphologies (EPUM), this paper suggests a multidisciplinary, open educational framework combining various urban morphological approaches as a productive means of developing an understanding of multifaceted spatializations of lived space within urban form, as well as materializations of urban form within lived space. Such an endeavour can extend the study of urban form beyond the focus on an object, to embrace the processes, practices and agents of the production of the built environment, including multiple tensions between changing scales and material manifestations of political, economic and social relations.

Mapping Urban Injustices in Public Space: Challenges and Opportunities

Nadia Charalambous, Sabine Knierbein — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Over the past few decades, cities around the world radically and rapidly changed as regards scale, scope and complexity. This is mainly due to the increasing mobility of people, goods and information as a result of technological developments, liberalization of economic systems, economic fluctuations, wars, and climate change. These changes challenge the processes of production of built environment and create conflicts and contestations between different urban groups, who have contradicted claims on the decisions and processes influencing urban transformation.
Such situation brought the discussions on just/unjust urban transformation processes in urban research, policy and public debates. It raised questions on privileging the interests of affluent urban groups, while disadvantaging vulnerable communities. We see public space as central in these debates, as possible facilitator of a more just process of urban transformation. Public space is able to embrace different political, economic and cultural manifestations of urban groups, which allow them to voice their rights on the city. Public space can also submit encounters and interactions between different urban actors and perform as a place of negotiation between them. Public space is potentially able to promote fair allocations of wealth, resources, benefits and opportunities. Also, public space pedagogy helps us to reframe methods of understanding (un)just urban morphologies in urban research, planning and architectural theory as well as praxis. This special issue will thus focus on the question how urban (in)justices can be mapped, and which challenges and opportunities may arise from different approaches to mapping. Intercontextuality as well as intersectional research which combines an analysis of different forms of injustices (such as racial, social, religious, national, ethnic, etc.) will be discussed, alongside more practical and case-study based mapping experiences.
Different views on public space can provide us with ways of thinking to develop planning and design strategies, policy measures, civil initiatives, and social movements to oppose processes of unjust urban transformation. Yet, in the context of a rapid-shifting economic, political and social reality, it is more and more urgent for critical re-thinking of public space as facilitator of urban justice.