Public Space: Between Reimagination and Occupation (Design and the Built Environment)

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.

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).