Space-time mapping of co-working spaces in Cairo: shifting paradigms from openness to technologically controlled spaces

The paper demonstrates how co-working spaces, with their openness ideologies that are not only manifested in sharing space, but also sharing knowledge and generating access to nonhierarchical productive opportunities, are being subsumed into reinforcing neoliberal exclusiveness. The paper questions the openness of co-working spaces that reconciled with the dominant ideologies of 2011 Cairo, setting the stage to the mushrooming of co-working spaces inside Cairo’s apartment buildings as zones of relative freedom. Through space-time mapping of the emergence of co-working spaces in Cairo, in addition to interviews with co-workers, co-founders, and managers of co-working spaces, the spatial appropriation and accessibility of co-working spaces are demonstrated. Using content analysis and space syntax analysis, the study differentiates between two paradigmatic shifts in the spatial appropriation of co-working spaces—from democratizing digital infrastructure in the aftermath of 2011, to being subsumed by technological capitalist ventures by the end of 2015 into a closed paradigm, they originally emerged to defy—and compares between the spatial accessibility, visual accessibility, and social diversity of the two waves of co-working spaces. Using Cairo’s co-working spaces as a case study, this paper shows how ideologies of openness “neutral” as they may seem, can serve to legitimize exclusiveness, emphasizing how ideas—as men—can be socially located, and serve to legitimize a particular social situation.

Soil, territory, land: The spatial politics of settler organic farming in the West Bank, Israel/Palestine

In settler colonial settings, agriculture is a means of reclaiming territorial sovereignty and indigenous identity. Turning attention to the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and their multiple uses and abuses of organic farming, this article explores epistemic and political spatial operations on the colonial frontier. Applying a relational conceptualization of three spatial modalities—soil, territory, and land—we explore the ways in which these modalities serve as political apparatuses: Soil designates the romantic perception of cultivable space, territory is concerned with borders and political sovereignty, and land is seen as a space of economic value and as a means of production. While agriculture is a well-known instrument of expansion and dispossession, organic farming contributes to the colonial operation by binding together affective attachment to the place, and new economic singularity in relation to environmental and ethical claims. We argue that organic farming practices converge claims for local authenticity, spatial appropriation, and high economic values that are embedded in what we term the colonial quality turn. Ultimately, organic farming in the West Bank normalizes the inherent violence of the colonial project and strengthens the settlers’ claim for political privilege.

Reclaiming the city one plot at a time? DIY garden projects, radical democracy, and the politics of spatial appropriation

Unsanctioned guerrilla gardens, long a feature of North American cities, are frequently planted as radical challenge to conventional urban land use. Over the past decade, a number of community-led garden projects – projets citoyens – have appeared on sidewalks and in vacant lots, and alleys of Montreal, Quebec’s inner-core neighborhoods under the banner of “appropriating” or “reclaiming” urban space. In this article, we examine the rise of these DIY (do-it-yourself) garden projects and the extent to which they have been institutionalized via municipal agencies and NGOs. We find the distinction between institutionalized and guerrilla projects to be quite blurry, and ask whether such spaces – and the social relations forged within and between them – are able to effectively challenge hegemonic abstract space (as conceived by Lefebvre) and contribute to a radical democratic urban politics (as conceived by Rancière). We conclude that the power of these projects to transform capitalist urban space and challenge the dominant socio-spatial order is limited. We argue, however, that their transformative potential lies instead in their functioning as spaces of political subject formation, where participants collaboratively articulate counter-hegemonic imaginaries and master the skills of collective autogestion – albeit only for a small and relatively homogenous group of Montrealers. Critical attention to absent and silenced voices and self-reflexive awareness of historical and contemporary processes of exclusion and displacement are crucial in order for these projects to become truly radical democratic spaces.

Placebo urban interventions: Observing Smart City narratives in Santiago de Chile

The implementation of the Smart City (SC) model in Santiago, Chile has not heralded any significant interventions in terms of scale, urban impact, amount invested, technological innovation or architectural design. Instead, material interventions have been small and have had little more than a superficial impact upon the perceptions of citizens. The significance of observing ‘Smart’ interventions in Santiago involves analysing their implementation under a provincialising lens in order to observe the way local experience transforms monist ways of thinking about SCs. Based on ethnographic observation of an SC intervention (in Paseo Bandera, Santiago de Chile), four principles of intervention were identified: democratisation of the city, spatial appropriation by citizens, social and technological innovation and local and territorialised interventions. These principles help to identify the intervention as an urban placebo, which the article argues works through the fictions of effective interventions and urban image improvement that seek to participate in worlding practices whilst, in reality, very little is being improved or effectively addressed in the city. Paseo Bandera SC intervention presents a narrative of modern, sustainable and technologically advanced urban planning in the form of specific material interventions, when in fact it involves very little modernity, sustainability or technology, and is little more than a continuation and evolution of the neoliberal urban model that exists in Chile.

Architectures of asylum: Making home in a state of permanent temporariness

Urban research in Germany has started to address the socio-spatial distribution and architectures of so-called collective accommodation for asylum seekers, refugee camps, and new forms of ethnic segregation triggered by refugee movements in recent years. The spatial practices of refugees themselves within these processes have not yet been a subject of substantive research. Combining research methods from social and architectural sciences, this article investigates the physical, material, social and symbolic appropriation processes and the spatial dimension of homemaking by Syrian refugees currently housed in refugee accommodation in Berlin, Germany. What spatial knowledge is mobilized at the place of asylum in order to turn the accommodation into a home? How do spatial practices and knowledge hybridize practices of the place of origin, experiences made during the flight and the arriving and uncertain period of stay at an unfamiliar place of asylum? How do spatial appropriation processes collide with humanitarian logics and technocratic emergency management approaches at the place of asylum? With these questions, the article focuses on the ways in which refugees perceive, adapt to, appropriate and alter their new urban environment physically and socially, and how they thereby draw on existing and evolving stocks of urban knowledge, urban experiences and social relationships. It argues that to develop a homelike space in temporary accommodation, arriving refugees mobilize knowledge at the place of asylum which can only be understood as a re-figuration process that is equally at work in the case of other migrants, migration and translocal processes. Studying these urban re-figurations thus helps us to reveal how the interplay of refugees’ agency and their knowledge and the technocratic regime – as a state of permanent temporariness – affects the making of a ‘home’.

The unplanned city: Public space and the spatial character of urban informality

The ‘unplannable’ is a welcomed exception to the formal order of urban planning. This opinion article explores some examples of informal urbanism and discusses its ambiguous relationship to public space and unplanned activities in the city. The informal sector offers important lessons about the adaptive use of space and its social role. The article examines the ways specific groups appropriate informal spaces and how this can add to a city’s entrepreneurship and success. The characteristics of informal, interstitial spaces within the contemporary city, and the numerous creative ways in which these temporarily used spaces are appropriated, challenge the prevalent critical discourse about our understanding of authorised public space, formal place-making and social order within the city in relation to these informal spaces. The text discusses various cases from Chile, the US and China that illustrate the dilemma of the relationship between informality and public/private space today. One could say that informality is a deregulated self-help system that redefines relationships with the formal. Temporary or permanent spatial appropriation has behavioural, economic and cultural dimensions, and forms of the informal are not always immediately obvious: they are not mentioned in building codes and can often be subversive or unexpected, emerging in the grey area between legal and illegal activities.

Crossing Boundaries–Tactical Urbanism Practices in Guangzhou City

Tactical Urbanism is a growing movement across the world in which individuals, communities, and municipalities are improving their cities by using short-term, lowcost, and small-scale interventions and policies to catalyze long term change. The aim of this paper is to test the principle sand the approach of tactical urbanism to solve Guangzhou’slocalpublicspacesproblemsbyshowcasingtwotacticalurbanismprojects which have been completed in the Guangzhou urban context. These two cases reveal the opportunities that bottom-up approaches like tactical urbanism can build a bridge to conjunct with long term planning efforts and complete the top-down mechanisms. IntheZhusigangcommunitycase,we examine the spontaneous unplanned practices in the local community,which resemble“Tacticalurbanism” principles,and their spatial appropriation and utilization of marginalized community spaces. We assess how and where daily activities are happening and what other amenities could be provide by temporarily introducing these activities into a local gallery space. In the former textile factory case, we present examples that make the case for temporary, flexible and experimental responses to urban vacant land, then conclude by outlining the potential benefits and drawbacks of this temporary use model. This paper explores the existing practices of appropriation and the potential of temporary occupation in the city and concludes with thoughts on how tactical urbanism, an international movement, might gain a foothold in the context of local Chinese communities

“You can’t be up there” – youth cultural participation and appropriation of space

This article investigates the relationship between youth cultural practices and young people’s spatial appropriation. For this purpose, we analyse case studies into groups of young people involved in two forms of practices that are marked by particular perceptions of the (urban) space: two Parkour groups and a Scouts group. The questions we are dealing with concern the way to which young members of these groups are appropriating ‘free space’ through participating in activities like the Scouts or Parkour. Furthermore, this article also explores important questions concerning processes of how young people’s participation in urban areas should be understood and what consequences this understanding has for youth policy.