‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of Quick links

Cities: Reimagining the urban.

This paper develops a post‐humanist account of urban public space. It breaks with a long tradition that has located the culture and politics of public spaces such as streets and parks or libraries and town halls in the quality of inter‐personal relations in such spaces. Instead, it argues that human dynamics in public space are centrally influenced by the entanglement and circulation of human and non‐human bodies and matter in general, productive of a material culture that forms a kind of pre‐cognitive template for civic and political behaviour. The paper explores the idea of ‘situated surplus’, manifest in varying dimensions of compliance, as the force that produces a distinctive sense of urban collective culture and civic affirmation in urban life.

Collective culture and urban public space

In spite of the amount of urban development that followed the Fall of the Wall, Berlin’s urban landscape has remained filled with a large amount of “voids” and disused sites, which have gradually b...

Pushing the Urban Frontier: Temporary Uses of Space, City Marketing, and the Creative City Discourse in 2000S Berlin

Scholarly interest in ruins and derelict spaces has intensified over the last decade. We assess a broad selection of the resulting literature and identify several key themes. We focus on how ruins may be used to critically examine capitalist and state manifestations of power; we consider the way in which ruins may challenge dominant ways of relating to the past; and we look at how ruins may complicate strategies for practically and ontologically ordering space. We speculate about the motivations for this surge of current academic interest, draw out resonances with current trends in geographical thinking, and suggest directions for future research.

Reckoning with ruins

Summary. This paper discusses the phenomenon of ‘informal actors’ influencing the agenda of urban planning and urban politics by means of temporary reappropriation and animation of ‘indeterminate’ spaces. The latter are spaces left out of ‘time and place’ with regard to their urban surroundings, mainly as a consequence of rampant deindustrialisation processes and the ‘shrinking’ city. The unclear and undetermined status of these urban ‘no-man’s-lands’ may allow for the emergence of a non-planned, spontaneous ‘urbanity’. This intervention may be based on different motives: marginal lifestyles, informal economies, artistic experimentation, a deliberately open transformation of public space allowing for equal access and equal representation or a high degree of social and cultural inclusion. These expressions of the ‘lived’ city at present constitute a pronounced paradox for established city planning and urban politics. Institutionalised stakeholders may occasionally appreciate their presence for their inherent potential to enhance attractiveness of and revitalisation of certain parts of the city. On the other hand, these sites and the actors involved also spatialise and visualise a resistance and temporary alternative to the institutionalised domain and the dominant principles of urban development. Urban restructuring in the post-Fordist city, foremost in the development of inner-city areas, is increasingly focused on a unidimensional logic of commodification, monofunctionality and control. Thus, the complex qualities of animated ‘indeterminate’ spaces are difficult to incorporate into planning procedures. They often become threatened in their existence and pushed to the margins. Nevertheless, the urban conflict around these sites and the appearance of ‘non-planned’ planners on the urban scene, may decisively alter the urban agenda and set the themes for further development, which takes their positive economic and social function and their key role in sustaining and renewing urban cultures into account. The paper discusses this phenomenon, illustrated with an account of three case studies in the cities of Helsinki, Berlin and Brussels. The comparative dimension allows for a subsequent discussion focusing on elaborating the conditions of ‘success’ for informal actors in urban development processes. The predominant question then is how these new forms of urbanism can be given a place in city planning in order to pay more justice to the social and cultural complexity that constitutes contemporary urbanity.

Reclaiming Urbanity: Indeterminate Spaces, Informal Actors and Urban Agenda Setting:

De eeuw van de stad : over stadsrepublieken en rastersteden

Urbanity as a Political Project: Towards Post-national European Cities

The housing of low-income groups in Greater Cairo has always been difficult. However, the general shortage in housing supply is contrasting with the low occupancy rate of newly constructed public housing units. In contrast, despite their bad living conditions, informal settlements have a high occupancy rate. In order to analyse the reasons behind this contradiction, the paper compares four neighbourhoods ranging from formal and semi-informal to informal housing production and including one rehabilitation project. The livelihood conditions in each settlement are unravelled with the concept of modes of economic integration from Polanyi. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed with correspondence analysis. The findings indicate a preference among low-income groups for informal settlements because of three reasons: the advantages of geographical location, the nature of social networks and the strength of private redistribution systems, thus enabling an easier access to means of existence. The results and recommendations are further discussed in the paper.

Eric Corijn

Papers

Reclaiming Urbanity: Indeterminate Spaces, Informal Actors and Urban Agenda Setting:

De eeuw van de stad : over stadsrepublieken en rastersteden

Urbanity as a Political Project: Towards Post-national European Cities

Housing projects for low-income groups and modes of economic integration: a comparative study in Greater Cairo

The Brussels reader : a small world city to become the capital of Europe