Contesting Public Spaces

Contesting Public Spaces

Author: Ed Wall

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-01

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1000596354

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This book explores concerns for spatial justice as streets, squares, and neighbourhoods are continuously made and remade through planning processes, political ambitions and everyday activities. By investigating three sites in London that have been the focus of masterplanning, Ed Wall exposes conflicts between planning offices and private developers who direct large urban change and community groups, market traders and residents whose public lives are inseparable from their neighbourhoods being reconfigured. The book uniquely brings sociological approaches to what are often considered architectural concerns, revealing challenges as London's public spaces are designed, regulated and lived. Through in-depth research, Ed Wall identifies how uncertainty caused by large-scale urban strategies, the realisation of visual priorities, and uneven relations between private interests, public organisations and daily lives determine the public realm of global cities. This work is intended for readers interested in how the urban spaces of their cities are continually produced in competing ways—from architecture and urban studies scholars to planners and politicians.


Contested Histories in Public Space

Contested Histories in Public Space

Author: Daniel J. Walkowitz

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2009-01-16

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0822391422

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Contested Histories in Public Space brings multiple perspectives to bear on historical narratives presented to the public in museums, monuments, texts, and festivals around the world, from Paris to Kathmandu, from the Mexican state of Oaxaca to the waterfront of Wellington, New Zealand. Paying particular attention to how race and empire are implicated in the creation and display of national narratives, the contributing historians, anthropologists, and other scholars delve into representations of contested histories at such “sites” as a British Library exhibition on the East India Company, a Rio de Janeiro shantytown known as “the cradle of samba,” the Ellis Island immigration museum, and high-school history textbooks in Ecuador. Several contributors examine how the experiences of indigenous groups and the imperial past are incorporated into public histories in British Commonwealth nations: in Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum; in the First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization; and, more broadly, in late-twentieth-century Australian culture. Still others focus on the role of governments in mediating contested racialized histories: for example, the post-apartheid history of South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument, originally designed as a tribute to the Voortrekkers who colonized the country’s interior. Among several essays describing how national narratives have been challenged are pieces on a dispute over how to represent Nepali history and identity, on representations of Afrocuban religions in contemporary Cuba, and on the installation in the French Pantheon in Paris of a plaque honoring Louis Delgrès, a leader of Guadeloupean resistance to French colonialism. Contributors. Paul Amar, Paul Ashton, O. Hugo Benavides, Laurent Dubois, Richard Flores, Durba Ghosh, Albert Grundlingh, Paula Hamilton, Lisa Maya Knauer, Charlotte Macdonald, Mark Salber Phillips, Ruth B. Phillips, Deborah Poole, Anne M. Rademacher, Daniel J. Walkowitz


The Beach Beneath the Streets

The Beach Beneath the Streets

Author: Benjamin Shepard

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2011-06-03

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1438436211

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Focusing on the liberating promise of public space, The Beach Beneath the Streets examines the activist struggles of communities in New York City—queer youth of color, gardeners, cyclists, and anti-gentrification activists—as they transform streets, piers, and vacant lots into everyday sites for autonomy, imagination, identity formation, creativity, problem solving, and even democratic renewal. Through ethnographic accounts of contests over New York City's public spaces that highlight the tension between resistance and repression, Shepard and Smithsimon identify how changes in the control of public spaces—parks, street corners, and plazas—have reliably foreshadowed elites' shifting designs on the city at large. With an innovative taxonomy of public space, the authors frame the ways spaces as diverse as gated enclaves, luxury shopping malls, collapsing piers and street protests can be understood in relation to one another. Synthesizing the fifty-year history of New York's neoliberal transformation and the social movements which have opposed the process, The Beach Beneath the Streets captures the dynamics at work in the ongoing shaping of urban spaces into places of repression, expression, control, and creativity.


City Unsilenced

City Unsilenced

Author: Jeffrey Hou

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-06-26

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1317297431

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What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics? City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They explore the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), Researchers for Fair Policing (New York), Urban Movement Congress (Poland), urban activism (Berlin), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope and protests against Academic Ball in Vienna (Austria). By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy.


Insurgent Public Space

Insurgent Public Space

Author: Jeffrey Hou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-04-21

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 1136988017

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Winner of the EDRA book prize for 2012. In cities around the world, individuals and groups are reclaiming and creating urban sites, temporary spaces and informal gathering places. These ‘insurgent public spaces’ challenge conventional views of how urban areas are defined and used, and how they can transform the city environment. No longer confined to traditional public areas like neighbourhood parks and public plazas, these guerrilla spaces express the alternative social and spatial relationships in our changing cities. With nearly twenty illustrated case studies, this volume shows how instances of insurgent public space occur across the world. Examples range from community gardening in Seattle and Los Angeles, street dancing in Beijing, to the transformation of parking spaces into temporary parks in San Francisco. Drawing on the experiences and knowledge of individuals extensively engaged in the actual implementation of these spaces, Insurgent Public Space is a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the study of public space use, and how it is utilized in the contemporary, urban world. Appealing to professionals and students in both urban studies and more social courses, Hou has brought together valuable commentaries on an area of urbanism which has, up until now, been largely ignored.


Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore

Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore

Author: Brenda S. A. Yeoh

Publisher: NUS Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 9789971692681

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In the British colonial city of Singapore, municipal authorities and Asian communities faced off over numerous issues. As the city expanded, various disputes concerning issues such as sanitation, housing and street names arose. This volume details these conflicts and how they shaped the city.


Planning and Decentralization

Planning and Decentralization

Author: Victoria A. Beard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-06-04

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1134120656

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The first in-depth study of the impact of economic and political decentralization on planning practice in developing economies, this innovative volume, using original case study research by leading experts drawn from diverse fields of inquiry, from planning to urban studies, geography and economics, explores the dramatic transformation that decentralization implies in responsibilities of the local planning and governance structures. It examines a range of key issues, including: public and private finance local leadership and electoral issues planning in post-conflict societies. Offering unique insights into how planning has changed in specific countries, paying particular attention to South East Asian economies, India and South Africa, this excellent volume is an invaluable resource for researchers, graduate students and planners interested in urban planning in its international political and economic context.


Expression in Contested Public Spaces

Expression in Contested Public Spaces

Author: Spoma Jovanovic

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1793630941

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Expression in Contested Public Spaces: Free Speech and Civic Engagement addresses how people express themselves and their differences, in ways that amplify the many voices central to the mission of democracy. This book investigates in what ways and in what discursive forms people interrupt the status quo or unjust practices to advance positive social change. The chapters feature research activity, engaged scholarship, and creative expression to boldly frame the issues of free speech—amid attempts to chill and silence expressions of dissent—in order to demonstrate how community organizers, activists, and scholars use their voices to advance peace and justice befitting the human condition. Scholars and students of communication and the social sciences will find this book particularly interesting.


Public Space/Contested Space

Public Space/Contested Space

Author: Kevin D Murphy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-02-15

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1000340279

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It is not possible to be alive today in the United States without feeling the influence of the political climate on the spaces where people live, work, and form communities. Public Space/Contested Space illustrates the ways in which creative interventions in public space have constituted a significant dimension of contemporary political action, and how this space can both reflect and spur economic and cultural change. Drawing insight from a range of disciplines and fields, the essays in this volume assess the effectiveness of protest movements that deploy bodies in urban space, and social projects that build communities while also exposing inequalities and presenting new political narratives. With sections exploring the built environment, artists, and activists and public space, the book brings together the diverse voices to reveal the complexities and politicization of public space within the United States. Public Space/Contested Space provides a significant contribution to an understudied dimension of contemporary political action and will be a resource to students of urban studies and planning, architecture, sociology, art history, and human geography.


Places of Contested Power

Places of Contested Power

Author: Ryan Lavelle

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1783273739

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First full examination of why and how certain locations were chosen for opposition to power, and the meaning they conveyed.