The Power of the Body in Public Space: The Urban as a Deprivation of the Right to the City

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Ana Fani Alessandri Carlos
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

scholarly journals Public Space for Street-Scape Theatrics. Guerrilla Spatial Tactics and Methods of Urban Hacking in Brisbane, Australia

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Christopher James Cox ◽  
Mirko Guaralda
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Central Business District ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Business District ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

It could be argued that architecture has an inherent social responsibility to enrich the urban and spatial environments for the city’s occupants. However, how we define quality, and how ‘places’ can be designed to be fair and equitable, catering for individuals on a humanistic and psychological level, is often not clearly addressed. Lefebvre discusses the idea of the ‘right to the city’; the belief that public space design should facilitate freedom of expression and incite a sense of spatial ownership for its occupants in public/commercial precincts. Lefebvre also points out the importance of sensory experience in the urban environment. “Street-scape theatrics” are performative activities that summarise these two concepts, advocating the ‘right to the city’ by way of art as well as providing sensual engagement for city users. Literature discusses the importance of Street-scape Theatrics however few sources attempt to discuss this topic in terms of how to design these spaces/places to enhance the city on both a sensory and political level. This research, grounded in political theory, investigates the case of street music, in particular busking, in the city of Brisbane, Australia. Street culture is a notion that already exists in Brisbane, but it is heavily controlled especially in central locations. This study discusses how sensory experience of the urban environment in Brisbane can be enriched through the design for busking; multiple case studies, interviews, observations and thematic mappings provide data to gather an understanding of how street performers see and understand the built form. Results are sometime surprisingly incongruous with general assumptions in regards to street artist as well as the established political and ideological framework, supporting the idea that the best and most effective way of urban hacking is working within the system. Ultimately, it was found that the Central Business District in Brisbane, Australia, could adopt certain political and design tactics which attempt to reconcile systematic quality control with freedom of expression into the public/commercial sphere, realism upheld. This can bridge the gap between the micro scale of the body and the macro of the political economy through freedom of expression, thus celebrating the idiosyncratic nature of the city.

scholarly journals Governing Nonconformity: Gender Presentation, Public Space, and the City in New Order Indonesia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hegarty
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Gender Nonconformity ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Order ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.

scholarly journals RELECTURA DE DOS CIUDADES DESDE LOS CONCEPTOS DE LEFEBVRE

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-229
Author(s):  
Karina Chérrez-Rodas
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Control Right ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

El siguiente escrito es una revisión bibliográfica que se desarrolla en función de tres conceptos claves de Lefebvre: El Derecho a la Ciudad, El Control Social y el Espacio Urbano; concebidos en el marco de sus líneas de investigación y orientación marxista. La investigación pretende emplear apreciaciones del autor en mención, enmarcadas en el acontecer de la ciudad en la actualidad, y trasladar a la relectura de problemáticas puntuales en dos ciudades latinoamericanas: Cuenca-Ecuador y Córdoba-Argentina. A partir del Derecho a la Ciudad definido por Lefebvre; se realiza una crítica, al trazado de la nueva área de planificación urbanística en Cuenca, basado en principios funcionalistas, que ha jerarquizado la circulación vehicular, en detrimento del uso peatonal del espacio público. En la misma línea de la crítica de la modernidad, el control social se manifiesta en un sector de la ciudad de Córdoba, el predio de la Casa de Gobierno. Analizar problemáticas en contextos similares, pero a la vez con diferentes escalas de ciudad, permiten validar las tesis y reflexiones de Lefebvre en su época para la planificación de ciudades contemporáneas, cuyos modelos de desarrollo han tenido como consecuencia deficiencias en la vida urbana. Palabras clave: Ciudades, control social, Derecho a la ciudad, espacio urbano, vida urbana. AbstractThe following piece of writing is a bibliographic review that was developed from three key concepts of Lefebvre: Right to the City, Social Control and Urban Space. It was conceived within the framework of his lines of research and Marxist orientation. The research intends to use the author's appreciations in mention, framed in the events of the city at present, and to transfer to the re-reading of specific problems in two Latin American cities: Cuenca-Ecuador and Córdoba-Argentina. Based on the right to the city defined by Lefebvre, a critique was made of the new urban planning area in Cuenca, based on functionalist principles, which has hierarchized vehicle circulation to the detriment of the pedestrian use of public space. Under the same line of the criticism of modernity, social control was manifested in a sector of the city of Córdoba, the Government House site. Problems in similar contexts were analyzed, but at the same time with different city scales. It allowed us to validate Lefebvre's thesis and reflections in his time for the planning of contemporary cities, whose development models have resulted in deficiencies in urban life. Keywords: Cities, social control, Right to the city, urban space, urban life.

Eating in the City: Fidel Gastro, Street Performance, and the Right to the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Whittall
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
The Political ◽  
Food Trucks ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
Urban Narratives ◽  
Street Performance ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This chapter applies different concepts of radical street theatre and urban performance in order to theorize the ways in which food trucks form temporary communities in urban spaces through embodied, performative intervention. An ethnographic portrait of one of Toronto’s first and best-known food truck entrepreneurs, Fidel Gastro, is employed to demonstrate the precarious position food trucks hold within the political narratives governing public space in the city of Toronto, and the ambivalence food truck entrepreneurs display toward current configurations of urban market economies. David Harvey’s conception of the right to the city is then critically applied to this scenario in order to argue that food trucks harbor the potential to intervene in dominant urban narratives, allowing urban dwellers to assert the common right to change ourselves by changing our cities.

Community gardening for integrated urban renewal in Copenhagen: securing or denying minorities’ right to the city?

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
Parama Roy
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Community Gardening ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This chapter presents a case study from Copenhagen on a community-based, but state-initiated urban gardening effort to examine what such efforts mean for the minorities’ (the homeless and the ethnic minorities’) right to the city (Purcell, 2002; 2013) especially within the context of a traditionally welfare-driven, but increasingly neoliberalized urban context. David Harvey has described the right to the city as “not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire” (Harvey, 2003). As such, in this chapter the concept of “right to the city” is operationalized as a measure or proxy for social and spatial justice to explore how the state-initiated community gardening effort in the Sundholm District shapes/secures/denies the homeless and the ethnic minorities’ ability to, a) use and just be in the physical space of the garden (a public space) and b) to translate this into access to the political space of urban governance (and governance of the garden space) where they can voice their needs/concerns.

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