Appropriation Of Public Space Research Articles

BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE: URBAN VIOLENCE IN THE CITY OF CAMPINA GRANDE-PB

Urban and rural violence in Brazil affects the development and appropriation of public spaces. Rising crime generates fear, reducing interaction in urban environments and favoring their privatization. Campina Grande, a medium-sized city, faces challenges typical of large centers, such as violence that restricts the use of public areas. This study analyzes how violence influences the appropriation of these spaces, highlighting socioeconomic, legal, and ideological factors that shape their perception and use. The study seeks to understand the impact of violence on quality of life and the right to the city, exploring urban reorganization strategies. The research uses data from public agencies, such as IBGE and the Ministry of Justice, as well as academic sources, to map neighborhoods with the highest crime rates. The study reveals that violence in Campina Grande has fluctuated over the last two decades, with an increase until 2016 and a recent recovery. However, vulnerable areas such as Bodocongó and Malvinas remain impacted, with insecurity and a lack of infrastructure limiting the use of public spaces, reinforcing urban segregation. Even with the reduction in violence rates, the perception of insecurity still hinders social interaction in these places.

Sociocultural valuation of public space in a context of rural-urban transition. Case of Morelos Avenue, San Juan Cuautlancingo, Puebla

The municipality of Cuautlancingo used to agricultural production was interfered by the insertion of new urban areas causing land use speculation resulting in the reconfiguration of public spaces such as streets and avenues. The objective is to illustrate how urban expansion, through changes in land use, has interfered with the socio-spatial valuation among the inhabitants of the neighborhood of San Juan and the new housing areas, leading to conflicts in the use, access, and appropriation of public space, exemplified by Morelos Avenue. The methodology used is of a mixed nature, using GIS for the spatial analysis of urban growth. Among the main findings, it is presented how the changes in land use in the last three decades and the appearance of new housing complexes affected the sociocultural valuation of the neighborhood of San Juan Cuautlancingo.

Correlation between spatial characteristics and overflow rate of back alleys in high‐density city of Hong Kong

AbstractIn recent years, scholarly attention has shifted within urban informality research from informal settlements to the appropriation of public spaces in formal urban settings. Overflow, a common research subject within this context, has drawn particular interest. This study investigates overflow dynamics in a representative district of Hong Kong, utilizing the overflow rate as a measure of the extent to which overflow occurs. Three‐dimensional (3D) scanning technology was applied to collect spatial data from back alleys. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted to identify the spatial characteristics of back alleys that influence overflow rates. The results revealed that back alleys with a flatter spatial interface, more overhead shelter, greater numbers of alley‐shops, and shorter overall length corresponded to a higher number of overflow occurrences. Two novel findings emerged: First, a negative correlation between spatial interface unevenness and overflow rates, and second, differential impacts of the shop density and number of alley‐shops on overflow rates. These findings may serve as a valuable reference for governmental policy formulation regarding overflow management and may offer architects workable insights for designing back alleys and street spaces conducive to public use.

Evolution of Informal Trade in Old Hyderabad: Investigating Resistance to Acquired Western Urban Planning Interventions

Street vending has been a dominant occupation among migrants since the inception of urban migration in Hyderabad, India. For a long time, street vending has been considered an intrusion into the city’s urban fabric, causing stringent efforts to exclude it. Historic evidence shows the existence of public markets –called bazaars– that run alongside shops. Nevertheless, the urban transformation of Hyderabad was influenced by Western urbanization paradigms and foreign interference under British rule and sustained by volatile policies after independence, jeopardizing historical identities and pushing marginalized populations away from the city. This study examines the impact of volatile policies on urban informality and argues that peripatetic trade in Hyderabad is native to the city. Today, while street vending is considered an appropriation of public space in the Old City, results indicate it is a form of resistance to acquired Western planning models and modernization induced upon the city.

Gender and appropriation of public space in Harare’s contested central city area

Street trading is a highly gendered form of economic activity practiced by the urban poor in most global south cities. Drawing from focus group discussions and in-depth interviews, this paper examines the everyday struggles facing female street traders with children as they negotiate access to contested urban spaces to make a living in Harare’s Central Business District (CBD). The paper argues that public spaces in Harare’s CBD act as both ‘livelihood spaces’ and places of intense vulnerability for women who have caregiving roles. Female street traders struggle to balance between selling their goods as well as watching for municipal surveillance. These challenges are dire for women with children. The women often engage in precarious strategies to evade municipal enforcement including using their children as ‘shields’ for protection from a highly repressive state machinery that is less sympathetic to the plight of the urban poor. Despite facing these constraints, women enact creative practices to lay claims to urban space. This paper contributes to the ongoing scholarly debates on gender and the informal economy in global south cities. We suggest that urban planning initiatives should be attentive to gendered experiences and needs to create more inclusive and equitable urban environments, where female street traders can engage in their livelihoods without facing harassment or violence.

What is the relationship between philanthropy, materiality and public space?

AbstractThis article explores the dynamic between public space and material representations of philanthropy. It adapts the conception of public space in terms of layers: physical, code and content (Lessig, 2001; Németh, 2012). The article discusses physical forms of philanthropy and the codified norms, processes and relationships in material representations of philanthropy (code). To this end, part one examines how gifts of buildings and the memorialisation of philanthropy embody the philanthropic dominance of public space. Part two explores how the (re)appropriation of public space(s) encapsulates what happens in, and in relation to physical manifestations of philanthropy (content). Specifically; (i) the uses of spaces (ii) deliberation in public spaces; (iii) the decolonisation of philanthropic processes and practices; and (iv) the complementarity of public space and the public sphere. The article offers a novel heuristic for philanthropy and public space that can also inform conversations between development professionals and donors, and public debate.

Urban segregation on a micro scale: the consequences for the low-income residents of a socioeconomically mixed neighborhood in Mexico city

ABSTRACT The patterns of socio-spatial organization of differences have changed in Latin American cities, which has transformed the scale of urban segregation. This has led to an increase in socially mixed areas and poverty enclaves in neighborhoods that have attracted the interest of, both, public and private sectors. Although this phenomenon has been widely studied, the consequences for low-income inhabitants living in spaces that are undergoing urban renewal are not clear. This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of the implications of these changes by exploring three features: access to social programs; changes in the use and appropriation of public space; and daily practices and the limits of urban sociability. The research method consisted of a qualitative analysis of secondary sources, fieldwork, and interviews. We conclude that the decrease of urban segregation scale affects not just the housing structure, but also access to social programs, public spaces, and urban sociability; these factors are a part of the material and symbolic rearrangements that allow groups with great socioeconomic differences to live close to one another.

Democracy on the walls: the portrayal of the common people in post-dictatorship Iberian murals

ABSTRACT After the fall of the right-wing Estado Novo in Portugal in 1974 and the death of the military dictator Francisco Franco in Spain in 1975, many protest murals appeared in both countries on the walls of abandoned buildings and in marginalized urban spaces. These ephemeral grassroots artworks celebrated the collective liberation of the Iberian people from the cultural constraints of Western Europe’s two most enduring dictatorships. Murals constituted a striking visual response to the sociopolitical changes occurring in two countries that were experiencing the transition to democracy in very different ways. In this article, I argue that collectively painted murals, often overlooked in scholarship, are a valuable visual source to analyze contrasting ways of conceiving democracy from below and the appropriation of public spaces following the demise of two long-standing ultra-Catholic dictatorships. By acknowledging the multilayered power of images in murals and drawing on a rich body of research in visual studies, this contribution will address common people’s iconography in Iberian murals and the collective actions of those who sought to secure democratic rights. I will place particular emphasis not only on the visual representational framework of the relationship between the masses and individuals but also on the depiction of gender relations as an intrinsic part of the democratization process in both countries.

URBAN PUBLIC TRANSIT’S TERRITORIES: THE CASE OF ECOBUS IN CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO

The concrete use that traditional social groups make of Latin American urban mobility infrastructures stands as a great unknown in the social sciences and humanities. This use obeys both specific needs and ways of understanding the city similar to subaltern cosmogony. The denial or marginalization of these cultural practices by the public powers affects the processes of precariousness and social exclusion but, in this case, also it generates forms of symbolic resistance. To understand these specificities, I design an ethnography on wheels for a year in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The strategy includes observation-participation and various conversation techniques. The data were contrasted from a subaltern approach, including some concepts from human geography and the sociology of mobility. The most outstanding findings were the demonstration of the symbolic appropriation of public space through two mechanisms that I call in mobility and by mobility.

Appropriation of Public Space: The case of two distinct squares in Cuiabá-MT

Between 2017 and 2020, the city of Cuiabá-MT carried out a revitalization and construction program for approximately 100 (one hundred) squares. Using it as a temporal and thematic cut, the present study aimed to understand to what extent these squares, through their physical attributes, contributed to their appropriation as a public space. With this intention, the research was placed in a practical nature through a single case study in multiple units of analysis, choosing the city of Cuiabá as a case study, and two squares as distinct units of analysis. Issues such as the meaning of public space and its role in appropriation were addressed in the theoretical review. To this end, an inventory survey of the squares in Cuiabá was carried out before and after the aforementioned intervention program, with subsequent selection of a sample for the two squares. Finally, by carrying out visits to these units, it was observed that the physical attributes and the more centralized insertion in the neighborhoods proved to be appropriation inducers. In addition, the design qualification more suited to the needs of local users revealed higher levels of appropriation, with a greater variety of users.

City, Consumption and Interculturalism: How Cities Can Facilitate Consumer Acculturation

With the rise of interculturalism as an alternative paradigm to the dominant multicultural integration policies in immigration countries, the importance of cities, as landscapes of intercultural interactions and consumption has become more and more important. This study aims to investigate how cities and city-related consumption practices play a role in consumer acculturation, an area that is largely overlooked in previous research. A hermeneutic approach is used to analyse and interpret the data collected through semi-structured and unstructured go-along interviews with 18 Iranian immigrants who live in Dortmund, Germany. Beyond the dichotomy of the home and host countries, the findings of this study show how city-related activities and interactions can lead to the construction of a sense of belonging to the hosting society. We show how such a sense of belonging can be constructed through immigrant consumers’ involvement in city-related rituals, private appropriation of public space and reterritorialisation.

Appropriation of public space: combining the Wayfinder methodology and tactical urbanism in a park in the city of Latacunga

The paper exposes an intervention proposal for an urban park in the city of Latacunga, Cotopaxi (Ecuador). The potential intervention seeks to promote the appropriation of public space where people and future users act as protagonists of the change, by contributing ideas and initiatives to create a place that considers their opinions, needs and suggestions. In order to achieve this, the proposal used the Wayfinder methodology, an avant-garde approach that assesses, plans, and acts in social-ecological systems to achieve sustainable, safe and fair transformations. Likewise, it proposes tactical urbanism activities as practical strategies to accomplish the project’s objective. The paper concludes that an intervention of this type is viable and capable of generating outstanding results regarding urban public space appropriation. Being viable, it is established that it can be executed in the short term, in accordance with the guidelines presented in the text.

Between place and territory: Young people's emotional geographies of security and insecurity in Brussels' deprived areas

While much of literature on place attachment describes it as an affective bond between a (young) person and place, with positive psychosocial consequences such as identification, rootedness and belonging, some authors are cautious and stress that an enhanced attachment to place, termed “territoriality”, may have negative consequences such as hostility towards outsiders and a sense of non-belonging elsewhere. In this paper, I ask how we should understand this difference and how the analysis of young people's emotional geographies of (in)security can bring light to this question. The paper finds that emotional geographies of (in)security are instrumental in understanding how a “positive” attachment to place may lead to a “negative” attachment to territory, how some young people emotionally attach to places and some are inclined to claim these places against outsiders (and also at the expense of other members of the community). This explicit appropriation of public spaces in the home neighbourhood is co-constituted by feeling secure inside and insecure outside the area. Territoriality may be a response to or an expression of ontological insecurity and of the inner unease that prompts them to strange avoidance and contorted strategies for manipulating spaces and setting boundaries designed to secure the self.

The Contestation and Appropriation of Public Space

This symposium explores the contestation and appropriation of public space. The ways in which public spaces are used, misused, and even abused have become of growing interest to scholars across the social sciences. However, we know relatively little about the ways how public space is used, changed, and maintained. This has led to the emergence of important questions regarding public space that we begin to address in this symposium, including: How do different groups of individuals define and use public space? What types of public space are needed and for what purposes? How and why has the understanding of public space changed over time? How does the privatization of public spaces impact social stability and equality? To address these questions, we present four studies about public space that embrace a variety of empirical and theoretical contexts. Our intent is that the four papers will set up some lively discussion with members of the audience that will in turn spark new directions of research in an understudied area. The Appropriation of Public Space: Anti-Restriction Protests during the COVID-19 Pandemic Presenter: Giulia Cappellaro; Bocconi U. Presenter: Amelia Compagni; Bocconi U. Reinforcing Systems of Exclusion: The Role of Public Space Presenter: Laura Fey; Doctoral Student Presenter: John Matthew Amis; U. of Edinburgh Where do Places of Social Inclusion come from? Exploring the Institutional Genesis of Public Parks Presenter: Santi Furnari; City, U. of London Presenter: Elena Giovannoni; Royal Holloway School of Business and Management Managing Public Places in Organizational and Institutional Change Presenter: April L. Wright; Warwick Business School Presenter: Gemma Irving; U. of Queensland Presenter: Asma Zafar; Brock U. Presenter: Trish Reay; U. of Alberta

Observing and Performing Male Same-Sex Desire: Appropriation of Public Space in Latvia during the Second World War and Late Stalinism (1940–1953)

The article focuses on male same-sex subculture in public space in Riga during the Second World War and late Stalinism. It analyses the performance of same-sex desire through which the public space was appropriated for male same-sex purposes. The article argues that during the period under discussion, same-sex loving men, who socialised in Riga, perceived themselves as recognisable and positive agents in urban life, thus creating the vibrant male same-sex subculture of the public sex culture. The key source of the article is a diary, whose author both observed his contemporaries performing samesex desire in public space and practiced it himself.

Walking as an intervention

How to analyze urban areas in the contemporary modern city upon the plurality of forms of appropriation of public spaces? This paper seeks to contribute to qualitative studies on urban perception through the method of cartography. Thus, this writing does not deal with the search for information or data collection, but with the immersion in the ongoing process present in the territory of the old railway bed in the city of Bauru-SP. The text highlights a research practice little explored in this spatial cutout, which tends to contribute to the impact on urban perception and future interventions in this area, as the decanted sociospatial layers are revolved and an urban imaginary little explored is accessed through the development as a research modality.

Relation of the Green Structure and the Appropriation of Public Spaces in Large-Scale Residential Areas

More than a half of residents in some capital cities of the former Socialist block live in large-scale residential areas that had been built from the 1950s to the 1980s. The public space satisfaction in the areas is low, the residents rarely appropriate the yards and streets of the housing complexes. The aim of the paper is to provide a framework for the understanding of residents’ assessment of public space and its relation to the appropriation; the framework can be used for the development of building or landscape architecture projects focused at reconstruction of the public space. Public Space Quality Model is generated in the paper. The model includes three spatial categories that are defined by metrical values, configuration components and dominant spatial elements – elements that determine size, category, and the structure of a space. Using the observation method in the residential areas of the former East Berlin, the research concludes that the model demonstrates the highest precision of predictability of the appropriation intensity of the public space when the green structure is used as the dominant spatial element. A method accompanying the model is presented in the paper that permits to use specific types of trees or shrubs in particular distancing and concrete arrangements to create spaces of high, medium, or low appropriation level in large-scale residential areas.

The World turned Upside Down? Cities, Festivalization and Uncertainty

The rapid proliferation of festivals experienced by cities round the world over the last four decades was brought to a sudden halt in early 2020 by the coronavirus pandemic. Planned gatherings ranging from local arts festivals to global megaevents were summarily abandoned, postponed, or converted to digital alternatives. This paper opens with a contextual introduction. The ensuing section considers the reasons for the seemingly unfe ered proliferation and festivalization that had occurred pre-Covid-19, but indicates that problems had already arisen over appropriation of public space, overtourism and security before the current crisis. The next part surveys the pandemic's impact on the urban festival sector to date. With reference to the megaevents planned for 2020 and a series of case studies of arts festivals, it notes responses ranging from whole or partial cancellations to implementation of wholly digital options. The conclusion argues that the continuing importance of physical congregation in designated places must be recognized, contending that this is enhanced rather than challenged by the rise of digital alternatives.

Maps and Mapping Practices in Postreunification Hong Kong

Maps and Mapping Practices in Postreunification Hong Kong Elizabeth Ho (bio) What is the work of mapmaking in Hong Kong, and how can it challenge the spatial and historical implications of the "post" in postreunification? How do various stakeholders across the territory use traditions of cartography to further their own political agenda? This article examines how experimental maps can help us understand the pressures on public space, political discontent, and constrained democracy in a city facing major transitions to new political economies and representations of cultural identity. In a city where all land is owned by the government and merely leased to developers and other tenants, maps become both a record of and a means to contest the contemporary forces of enclosure (Harvey 2013, 70–75) that curtail the meaningful production of public space. As democracy in Hong Kong is limited, to say the least, collective action has had to occur in everyday spaces beyond authorized protest routes and events. Maps mark these spaces of democratic participation and contestation and serve as manifestos of urban struggle. Maps and counter-maps in Hong Kong chart the gains and losses in the appropriation of public space and, as I will show, both "expose the geography of injustice" (Mitchell 2003, 30) as Don Mitchell has claimed and, in their appearance as pseudopublic art, impose new forms of authoritarianism and control. Maps are the product of the collision between "insurgent citizenships" (Holston 2009, 246) and the institutionalized forms of belonging of the "entrenched regime" (246) in Hong Kong, that can, more crucially, produce public space and "the public" by materializing the (utopian) communities they depict. At the same time, maps can consolidate and disrupt nationalist projects by restructuring the narratives in the shaping of national geobodies, an idea I return to at the end of this article. [End Page 103] In what follows I examine a cluster of maps produced specifically around 2014, a watershed year in the history of Hong Kong protests and a defining moment in the period problematically designated as "postreunification." My focus on these particular maps—the commemorative map embedded in the plaza of HSBC headquarters in Central (the central business district), the maps generated by protesters at the three occupation sites, and the installation "Hong Kong Is Land" by the Hong Kong-based art platform, MAP Office—is driven by my attempt to understand the ley lines of power, the topography of inequality, and other "urban invisibles" (Amoroso 2010, xi), now made visible, that shape the urban environment of the city in which I live. Through their form, aesthetics, and tactical registers, these maps offer crucial insight into the narratives that dominated the city at this particular historical moment and exemplify how maps both delineate and become the protest space. Emerging from map worlds perceived to be in opposition, together these maps form a visual corpus of competing interpretations of an event as history is being made and space produced. I focus on the HSBC map and the specific Occupy maps because their adherence to and play on map conventions problematize the concept of counter-maps as reclaiming or "mapping back," and they provide an opportunity to think critically about the deployment of maps to exert narrative control over territory, in this case public space. My shift to MAP Office at the end of the paper offers a reading of how art maps illuminate another mode of contestation beyond public and protest maps/art. The context of the capitalist art world highlights the networks of power and co-optation that encircle new cartographic imaginations in Hong Kong even across the public sphere or protest arenas like those I am exploring. Assessing these interventions does not rest on imputing intention to any mapmakers, who whatever their goals cannot determine the reception of their creations in any case; rather, I analyze the narratives the maps themselves enable and remain sensitive to the fact that in a radically dynamic political landscape, the maps' audience, meanings, and interpretations necessarily change. None of these maps should be considered natural foils to one another, rather, this specific cluster of maps endeavor, however temporarily, to emplot the shifting political landscape of Hong Kong, where claims to...

What forms of socialization lead women to stop cycling during adolescence?

Cycling in public spaces is both a mobility and a physical activity underpinned by considerable issues, but women practice significantly less, particularly during adolescence. A few studies have sought to study this phenomenon but mainly on the basis of social psychology theories. Based on 84 semi-structured biographical interviews conducted in France, this article aims to discuss their findings using gender, mobility and socialization sociology. We first show how a ‘feminine’ socialization to risk taking, body aesthetics, sport, street and mechanics is an obstacle to cycling during adolescence, especially in the working-class environment and all the more so in spatial contexts with strong norms of male appropriation of public space. We then show how the fact of having cyclists in one's social environment and a sporting inclination plays an important role in limiting the risk of abandonment. By highlighting processes of reinforcement of gendered bodily and spatial inclinations, our results shed light on the links between the socio-construction of inequalities in accessing public space and of inequalities in accessing physical activities. Furthermore, they encourage the study of bicycle socialisation in an intersectional way and suggest the interest of studying the links between urban, ecological, health, sport and mobility socialisations.