People's Spaces: Coping, Familiarizing, Creating

Who controls space? Powerful corporations, institutions, and individuals have great power to create physical and political space through income and influence. People’s Spaces attempts to understand the struggle between people and institutions in the spaces they make.

Current literature on cities and planning often looks at popular resistance to institutional authority through open, mass-movement protest. These views overlook the fact that subaltern classes are not often afforded the luxury of open, organized political protest. People’s Spaces investigates individual’s diverse approaches in reconciling the difference between their spatial needs and spatial availability. Through case studies in Southeast Asia, India, Nepal, and Central Asia, the book explores how people accommodate their spatial needs for everyday activities and cultural practices within a larger abstract spatial context produced by the power-holders.

Nihal Perera is Professor of Urban Planning at Ball State University and Director of CapAsia. He has taught in China, Germany, India, Italy, and Sri Lanka. The two-time Fulbright Scholar was also Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore. His publications include Decolonizing Ceylon and Transforming Asian Cities.