Public Space Between Reimagination and Occupation Design and the Built Environment Series

Public Space: Between Reimagination and Occupation examines contemporary public space as a result of intense social production reflecting contradictory trends: the long-lasting effects of the global crisis, manifested in supranational trade-offs between political influence, state power and private ownership; and the appearance of global counter-actors, enabled by the expansion of digital communication and networking technologies and rooted into new participatory cultures, easily growing into mobile cultures of protest.

The highlighted cases from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America reveal the roots of the pre-crisis processes of redistribution of capital and power as an aspect of the transition from the consumerist past into the post-consumerist present, by tracing the slow growth of social discontent that has led only a few years later to the mobilization of a new kind of self-conscious globally-acting class.

This edited volume brings together a broad range of interdisciplinary discussions and approaches, providing sociologists, cultural geographers, and urban planning academics and students with an opportunity to explore the various social, cultural, economic and political factors leading to reappropriation and reimagination of the urban commons in the cities within which we live.

Introduction

Svetlana Hristova and Mariusz Czepczyński

Part I. Concepts and Discourses: The Resilient Public Space

01. Re-Imagining Civil Society: Conflict and Control in the City’s Public Spaces

Sharon Zukin

02. Public Space in a Global World: After the Spectacle

Svetlana Hristova

03. Seeing the Local in Global Cities

Jerome Krase

Part II. Contestations and Rights: Public and Civic

04. Civic Landscapes of Post-Socialist Cities: Urban Movements and the Recover of Public Spaces

Mariusz Czepczyński

05. Public Space, Memory and Protest during Post-Socialist Transformation: The Emergence of University Square (Piaţa Universităţii), Bucharest as a space of protest

Craig Young, Duncan Light and Daniela Dumbrăveanu

06. Social Characteristic of Squares as Urban Spaces, Ulus and Kizilay Squares in Ankara

Nuray Bayraktar

07. Order and Heterotopia in an Urban Space: The Case of a Spanish Square

Francisco Adolfo García Jerez

08. Contested Public Spaces and the Right to the City: The Case of Cairo's Historic Bazaar

Wael Salah Fahmi

Part III. Management and Governance: Transformation and Control

09. The Meaning of Public Space in the Context of Space-Time Behaviour in the ‘Network City’: From Socialist to Sociable Public Space

Anastasia Moiseeva, Remon Rooij and Harry Timmermans

10. The Restructuring of Urban Public Space in the ‘Baltic Pearl’

Megan Dixon

11. Public Green Space in Vienna between Utopia and Political Strategy

Philipp Rode and Eva Schwab

12. The normative construction of a (public) urban space through the use of policy instruments: some reflections from northern Italy

Michela Semprebon

13. Negotiating Public Space in a Shopping Mall

Pavel Pospěch

Conclusions: Rediscovering Public Space Globally

Svetlana Hristova and Mariusz Czepczyński

Note on Contributors

Index

Svetlana Hristova is an urban sociologist, researcher, lecturer and associate professor at the Faculty of Arts of the South-West University in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. In 2009 she initiated the working group Urban Management and Cultural Policies of the City at ENCATC, which evolved into a thematic area with the same name. She is the author and editor of numerous publications on urban cultures, public spaces and sustainable development, such as Culture and Sustainability in European Cities: Imagining Europolis (2015).

Mariusz Czepczyński is a cultural geographer, and a professor at the Department of Spatial Management, University of Gdańsk, Poland. He is also active in applicative consultancy and advisory work, recently for the mayor of Gdańsk, the Polish Metropolitan Union, the City Hall of Lodz, DS Consulting and PwC. His research has focused on cultural landscapes, post-socialist cities, heritage and urban transformations, and the results have been published in several papers and books, including Cultural Landscapes of Post-Socialist Cities: Representation of Powers and Needs (2008).