EXPLORE THE RESEARCH BY KEY CONCEPTS

In a context of increased urban competition, art and culture are often used by cities world-wide as tools to improve their image and make urban spaces attractive. In that process, art is—as we will argue—becoming a new urban norm, which is normalizing not only urban space and experience, but also art itself. By contributing to the pacification or securization of public spaces, art could encourage some behaviors or, on the contrary, discourage others. Reversely, this normative dimension of urban art could impact art itself, especially by redefining the limit between artistic forms that are either inclusive or exclusive, dominant or subversive. Through examples found during PhD fieldwork in Montreal and Johannesburg, we will demonstrate that this normalization of the city through art and of art through the city takes place in various urban contexts, that it questions the distinction between Northern and Southern cities, and the definition of a (global) city itself.

During the process of modernization, a number of Islamic countries encouraged women to unveil. Among them, only Iran has recently returned to the earlier era of requiring women to veil themselves as the precondition of presence in public spaces. However, this time the difference was that women were already present in almost all public spaces: in universities, administrations, industries, and even in the government. Being marginalized after the revolution, Iranian women have learned how to overcome the obstacle of the veil. To maintain their presence and activity in public, they constantly reinvented new strategies to challenge the existing authority, by claiming, appropriating, and re-inventing new public spaces. Paradoxically, the reveiling of women and the gender segregation of public spaces helped many traditional women enter public spheres as social actors and to gain power, albeit in silence, in different socio-political and cultural fields. Today, more than ever, Iranian women try to conquer new public spaces/ public spheres with their transparent visibility and with a stress on their differences.

While research on business improvement districts (BIDs) has considered the constraints BIDs can place on the negotiation of public space and citizenship, little work has focused on the process of establishing neighborhood BIDs (NBIDs), and few scholars have examined perceptions of public space held by actual neighborhood constituents. This article analyzes a participatory mapping project and messages on a neighborhood e-mail list to compare the visions of place expressed by disempowered community members and by an NBID proposal. Our analysis illuminates how local power relations and inequalities can become inscribed in urban planning projects like NBIDs.

Urban parks are community assets, providing people places to play and rest. Access to parks in urban environments promotes social equity and improves quality of life for surrounding neighborhoods. In this context, social equity is related to accessibility, i.e. the possibility of walking or biking from home to a public park, giving people who do not have access to a variety of entertainment an option that is a public good. This paper examines the spatial distribution of urban parks in the city of Curitiba, Brazil, and how it relates to the socio-economic conditions of surrounding neighborhoods. Curitiba is known for its urban parks; however, no systematic study has been conducted to verify which neighborhoods enjoy park access within walking distance and what the socio-economic differences are between the better and worse served neighborhoods. In addition, we investigate if access to green open space has improved between the last two decennial census, a period marked by unprecedented socio-economic affluence in Brazil. Research questions, to be addressed using spatial analysis, focus on equitable distribution, and spatial evolution of parks and social equity. Variables include measurable walking distances from census tracts to parks, income data from the 2000 and 2010 Brazilian decennial censuses, and qualitative data of urban parks in Curitiba. Findings offer recommendations for future implementation of additional parks in Curitiba so that all areas of the city have adequate green open space and all citizens have equal access to recreation and leisure opportunities.

Mega-projects are usually analyzed as state-led public–private partnerships and iconic architecture aiming at branding the city and attracting tourists and global investors. This article adopts a different approach, analyzing the construction of Helsinki's Kamppi mega-project in terms of the politics of property as a process of creating and distributing rights –– property rights, development rights and use rights. Although the Kamppi project did not follow ordinary planning regulations, this did not mean that there was no regulation; on the contrary, there was more than usual, but through contracts rather than planning. Regulation through contracts denied citizens any voice and negated the celebrated provision for participation in Finland's reformed planning legislation. The Kamppi contracts also show that property rights are negotiated, alienated, compensated, struggled over and constructed. Citizens protested against the demolition of historic buildings, but overlooked the series of Kamppi contracts, which limited their rights and introduced a whole new system in which use rights are connected to ownership. Finally, the long duration of the Kamppi project meant that many people also overlooked the privatization of formerly public space.

This paper is based on a three-year participatory action research (PAR) project conducted with children living and working on the streets of six Turkish metropolitan cities. We first examine how the dominant policy fails to acknowledge street children as actors in public space and review empowering methodology for working with street children. Second, we discuss the PAR methodology and how it facilitates meaningful participation by street children. Third, we consider how the project contributed to the inclusion of street children in public space. Finally, we review the role of PAR in empowering street children.

An actor-centered approach to the gendering of urban spaces demonstrates how individuals respond to competing ideologies in determining the rules that surround women’s presence in urban, Muslim spaces. This article examines how women in the Ville Nouvelle of Fes, Morocco draw on local conceptualizations of hospitality, kinship, and shame as they debate the gendering of four urban areas: the street, the café, a cosmopolitan exercise club, and cyber space. Women’s tactics for occupying social space indicate the resilience of local culture in the face of ideologies that attempt to posit a specific vision of women in the Moroccan nation state.

We explore whether there is evidence of property rights among the homeless, and if so, how these rights are governed. By conducting interviews with 52 homeless people in Cape Town, we show that although the homeless are able to derive some value from assets, and can exclude other members of their community, these rights are precarious and dependent upon state agents not seizing the ‘property’ and overriding the community’s rules of the game. We demonstrate the intersectionality of claims with respect to the same physical property from the varying perspectives of the claimants involved and how this differs depending on the property. Homeless people rely on a community logic to develop rules of the game which results in the appearance of a market logic. In the absence of formal institutions effectively operating in their spaces, they have constituted social norms which provide some semblance of property rights respected intra-group.

This paper examines how the decentralization of state power and, advent of mayoral elections in Bogota ́, Colombia, enabled municipal government, with the help of a cadre of professional planners and designers, to transform the city socially and physically by reinventing civil society and public space. Three contiguous mayoral administrations used public space as a setting and tool to reinvent a culture of citizenship as well as to demonstrate competency on behalf of the mayors. The mayors’ strategy was largely successful as Bogota ́ has experienced a move from individualism to collective spirit, and citizens report improvements in civility, friendliness and quality of life. Much of the city’s success derives from the vision of the mayors and the important role urban planners and designers provide in implementing that vision. By examining Bogota ́’s transformation, it is possible to better understand how local politicians and planning and design administrators are key to that change.

The socio-legal technology of licensing is one of the primary tools governments use to manage spaces and practices deemed risky or threatening to public order. Licensing requirements thus play a crucial role in shaping routine experiences in public space as well as the trajectories of emerging forms of public life. Yet licensing laws have largely been ignored in critical urban scholarship: too often concerned with the interpretation and critique of popular practices and public spaces, the mundane operations of urban governance are often left to practitioners and policy researchers. This article demonstrates how paying closer attention to licensure can provide valuable and unexpected insights into matters of social equality, urban amenity and economic opportunity. It does so through a comparative inquiry into practices of street food vending in New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Drawing on ethnographic study and interviews, the article demonstrates how licensing can be involved in the production of quite peculiar and unjust geographies of practice, but also how shifts in popular culture can force a reconsideration of taken-for- granted laws. In conclusion, it is argued that a focus on licensing offers a productive pathway for new forms of critical urban research and provides a potential point of leverage in efforts to configure better and more democratic forms of urban public life.

Despite an increasing interest in issues surrounding environmental equity, much research evidence to date is based on studies adopting cross-sectional approaches which do not adequately capture the processes and mechanisms generating inequities. Longitudinal studies may better inform policy measures to remedy inequity between populations, but the few that have been undertaken have mostly been focused solely on environmental risks—ignoring access to amenities. As a case study, we adopt a longitudinal approach in this work to investigate the association between sociodemographic indicators and public park provision over an eighteen-year period in the city of Yokohama, Japan. We show that inequities in park provision are present over the whole time period. Hedonic modelling shows that park accessibility is positively associated with house and land prices in the city. Our results suggested some, relatively weak, evidence of two causal processes: new parks are located in more affluent communities; yet new parks also appear to encourage further move-in of affluent populations. We suggest that park provision by administrative authorities in less-affluent neighbourhoods may be required to maintain equity in access to these valuable community resources. Economic incentives, such as subsidy provision, may have a role to play to encourage park provision by developers.

This paper investigates migrant domestic workers as a marginalised group in Singapore's urban landscape by examining the ways in which their social maps are structured and negotiated in relation to public space. It argues that the phenomenon of the 'divided city' evident in capitalist societies which reflects and reinforces the sexual division of labour in general is even more salient in the lived experiences of migrant female domestic workers who must contend not simply with the spatial expressions of patriarchy, but also with racialisation and other means of segregation. However, it is clear that these women are not entirely passive recipients of dominant practices and ideas, but are capable of different styles and strategies in the use, colonisation and even contestation of public domains.

The 21st century city is faced with a myriad of social, political and environmental complexities. The increasing global urbanisation puts pressure on the various spheres of government as well as on citizens to continuously redefine and manage public assets and spaces – often built for social contexts that no longer exist. While top-down approaches have arguably failed to engage and motivate communities in meaningful ways, bottom-up initiatives have also proved difficult in promoting lasting impact on official policies. The democratisation of digital technologies provides new opportunities for citizens to organise themselves around local issues. These complexities galvanise communities around a civic debate about the present and future identity of the places they live in. Yet, it is still fairly challenging to balance community expectations, on one hand, with transparency regarding the complex decision-making processes inherent to public administration, on the other. In this paper, we present common approaches to placemaking. We then discuss new forms of digital placemaking and illustrate their application through four interventions we ran to investigate digital technology adoption for community engagement initiatives. Based on those scenarios, we investigate: (1) the shifting role of digital technologies as tools employed by individual groups to create placemaking initiatives, and (2) media interventions that inform and bring decision makers at the top, and citizens at the bottom together into more collaborative and focused city making efforts.

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A growing literature examines the extent to which the criminal justice system perpetuates poverty and inequality. This research examines how anti-homeless laws produce various forms of police interactions that fall short of arrest, yet have wide-ranging impacts on the urban poor. Our analysis draws on a citywide survey of currently and recently homeless people, along with 43 in-depth interviews, to examine and reveal the mechanisms through which consistent punitive interactions, including move-along orders, citations, and destruction of property, systematically limit homeless people’s access to services, housing, and jobs, while damaging their health, safety, and well-being. Our findings also suggest that anti-homeless laws and enforcement fail to reduce urban disorder, but create instead a spatial churn in which homeless people circulate between neighborhoods and police jurisdictions rather than leaving public space. We argue that these laws and their enforcement, which affected the majority of study participants, constitute a larger process of pervasive penality—consistent punitive interactions with state officials that rarely result in arrest, but that do material and psychological harm. This process not only reproduces homelessness, but also deepens racial, gender, and health inequalities among the urban poor.

A case study of the renovation of New York City’s Bryant Park, this article revisits the end of public space thesis. The renovated park signifies not the end of public space but the new ends to which public space is oriented. In Bryant Park, a new logic of urban publicity was assembled and built into the landscape. The social and technical means by which this transformation was achieved are analyzed. New public spaces of this sort promulgate a conception of the public that is decoupled from discourses of democratization, citizenship, and self-development and connected ever more firmly to consumption, commerce, and social surveillance. If such places do not herald the end of public space, they do represent “publicity without democracy.”

In this article the ambivalence of public policy responses to diversity on the street are documented empirically through a detailed case study of the marginalization of youth from the downtown public spaces of Portland, Maine, USA. Urban planners, architects and property developers have become increasingly concerned with improving the quality of urban life and the public spaces on which it depends. They argue that urban revitalization initiatives must embrace diversity — cultural and economic, as well as functional and spatial. This diversity of different ‘diversities’ is often under‐theorized, as are the benefits of, and relationships among, social and cultural diversity, economic diversification, mixed‐use and multi‐purpose zoning, political pluralism, and democratic public space. It is my contention that this ambivalence is not simply a smokescreen for vested commercial interests, but also provides opportunities for expressing alternative visions of what diversity and the city itself should be. Looking specifically at youth, I explore a relatively underexamined aspect of inner‐city diversity. While there is a relatively well‐developed literature about the contested place of low‐income groups, racial minorities and the homeless in urban redevelopment initiatives, youth have largely been ignored.

Much literature on contemporary U.S. racial relations tends to view black middle-class life as substantially free of traditional discrimination. Drawing primarily on 37 in-depth interviews with black middle-class respondents in several cities, I analyze public accommodations and other public-place discrimination. I focus on three aspects: (1) the sites of discrimination, (2) the character of discriminatory actions; and (3) the range of coping responses by blacks to discrimination. Documenting substantial barriers facing middle-class black Americans today, I suggest the importance of the individual's and the group's accumulated discriminatory experiences for understanding the character and impact of modern racial discrimination.

The nature of public space in contemporary society is changing. This paper uses the turmoil over People's Park in Berkeley, California, as a means for exploring changing ideas about and practices in public space. I argue that as public space is increasingly privatized or otherwise brought under greater control, possibilities for democratic action are minimized. To make this claim, I provide a brief outline of the roots of the August 1991 riots at People's Park. I then examine the role that public space plays in modern democracies, and how ideas about public space have developed dialectically with definitions of who counts as "the public." In American democracy, "the public" is constituted by private individuals. In this paper, I suggest that the presence of homeless people in public spaces raises important contradictions at the heart of this definition of "the public." Many commentators suggest that these contradictions have led to "the end of public space" in contemporary cities, or at the very least, the removal of its political functions to the "space" of electronic communication. I examine what this move means for democratic action in the city and show that material public spaces remain a necessity for (particularly) oppositional political movements. This returns us to People's Park, as these were precisely the issues that structured the riots in 1991. I conclude the paper with a sketch of where People's Park and the issues raised by the riots now stand.

The creation of public internet access facilities is one of the principal policy instruments adopted by governments in addressing ‘digital divide’ issues. The lack of plans for ongoing funding, in North America at least, suggests that this mode is regarded mainly as transitional, with private, home-based access being perceived as superior. The assumption apparently is that as domestic internet penetration rates rise, public access facilities will no longer be needed. Central to this issue are the varied characteristics of publicly provided and privately owned access sites and their implications for non-employment internet activities. What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of these two access modes? More fundamentally, how do people conceptualize public and private spaces and how does this perception influence their online activities? Finally, why do people choose one over the other, and how do they navigate between the two? This article attempts to answer these questions by drawing on data generated within the Everyday Internet Project, a ‘neighborhood ethnography’ of internet usage. It argues that the conventional view of private and public access facilities as immiscible, fixed alternatives is inadequate. Rather than ‘pure’ types, they are better understood as offering hybrid spaces whose identity and character are fluid, perceived differently by individuals in light of the activities being performed, life experiences, infrastructure and architecture. The picture emerging from our study is one where public and private access modes intertwine with each other in a variety of ways, their combination offering significant additional value for many users. From a public policy perspective, these findings suggest that if universal access is to be achieved, there is a continuing need for publicly supported broad-spectrum facilities with integrated technical support and learning opportunities, even if domestic penetration rates approach that of the telephone.

This article searches for public domains in the history of public spaces in Monterrey from the perspective of their colloquial use by different social groups. Through documentary analysis, it reconstructs the transition from publicly owned public spaces to their privatised counterparts. The article expands the traditional somewhat idyllic narrative of public spaces and offers clues to how different social groups have used them. Public spaces have changed during four main periods. A centralised public space appeared during the colonial period (1596–1810), followed by socially segregated spaces between the beginning of the war for independence until after the revolution (1810–1940). The dispersion of public space characterises the period of the metropolitan expansion of Monterrey (1940–1980). Finally, the privatisation of public spaces occurred at the turn of the millennium (1980–2015). Women, children and lower socioeconomic classes have had unequal access to public spaces in Latin America, thus precluding them from being considered public domains.

In the networked information and knowledge-based economy and society, the notions of ‘open’ and ‘openness’ are used in a variety of contexts; open source, open access, open economy, open government, open innovation – just to name a few. This paper aims at discussing openness and developing a taxonomy that may be used to analyse the concept of openness. Are there different qualities of openness? How are these qualities interrelated? What analytical tools may be used to understand openness? In this paper four qualities of openness recurrent in literature and debate are explored: accessibility, transparency, participation and sharing. To further analyse openness new institutional theory as interpreted by Williamson (2000) is used, encompassing four different institutional levels; cultural embeddedness, institutional environment, governance structure and resource allocations. At what institutional levels is openness supported and/or constrained? Accessibility as a quality of openness seems to have a particularly strong relation to the other qualities of openness, whereas the notions of sharing and collaborative economics seem to be the most complex and contested quality of openness in the knowledge-based economy. This research contributes to academia, policy and governance, as handling of challenges with regard to openness vs. closure in different contexts, territorial, institutional and/or organizational, demand not only a better understanding of the concept, but also tools for analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to take part in the debate about power relationships in contemporary cities between the agents of urban renewal and the local communities, as mediated by cultural and artistic interventions and projects. Our study proposes a new conceptual frame, focused on the comparison between two notions of heterotopia as theoretical alternatives for the interpretation of cities as social and participatory spaces. The notions we consider may be traced to two key thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, and lay the foundation for alternative analytical paradigms of the contemporary urban condition, in relation to artistic and cultural practices in the public space. We draw upon these two alternative readings of heterotopia to explore the implications of the interaction of artistic practices with the urban space as a contested terrain from the viewpoint of power relationships. In our analysis, we find that Foucault's notion of heterotopia is potentially conducive to top-down planning processes and to gentrification. Lefebvre's notion is instead possibly more suited to participatory practices as strategies of reactivation of the right to the city.

In this symposium, we explore how urban citizenship is about expressing, if not producing, difference, and how fragmentation of claims affects urban citizenship and right to the city movements with their universal, all-inclusive ideals. Investigating social movements, political participation and conflicting diversities in public space in Tel Aviv and Berlin, we see a trend towards a diversification of interests, a weakening of movements, and even a competition over rights and resources rather than a development of mutual support and solidarities among various groups on the pathway to a livable city. This tension, we argue, deserves attention. Radical urban scholarship and politics need to better understand the historical and place-specific contexts that structure the formation of citizenship claims and the courses that citizenship struggles take. Celebrations of urban citizenship as a more contextualized, community oriented, and bottom-up framework (in comparison to national citizenship) should therefore be complemented by a careful investigation of their fragmented and fragmenting practices.

Urban agriculture (UA) is spreading across vacant and marginal land worldwide, embraced by government and civil society as source of food, ecosystems services and jobs, particularly in times of economic crisis. ‘Metabolic rift' is an effective framework for differentiating UA's multiple origins and functions across the Global North and South. I examine how UA arises from three interrelated dimensions of metabolic rift—ecological, social and individual. By rescaling production, reclaiming vacant land and ‘de-alienating’ urban dwellers from their food, UA also attempts to overcome these forms of rift. Considering all three dimensions is valuable both for theory and practice.

This article focuses on how working-class women encounter and negotiate economic uncertainty, social vulnerability and sexually threatening public spaces in contemporary Karachi, showcasing women's everyday experiences of social and physical violence as a microcosm of the city's life in order to explore the possibilities of a future politics for cities like Karachi that are haunted by the possibility of violent eruptions. By concentrating on people's everyday practices, it proposes a different register by which to understand cities and their politics, a register constituted by an emergent politics that is not always dependent on an analysis of conflict and friction, but which instead focuses on living with disagreements. Hence the article uses the ethnographic depiction of women's lives to understand the mechanisms through which people continue to coexist, share resources and work together, despite the endemic personal, social and political violence in Karachi's working-class neighborhoods.