Full Description
City, Public Space, and Body offers a timely and interdisciplinary examination of how bodies experience, shape, and are shaped by urban life, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bringing together contributions from scholars, artists, and practitioners across diverse geographies, the book explores the entangled relationships between urban space, embodiment, and publicness through a variety of methodological lenses including ethnography, visual and performative arts, and critical urban theory. The book highlights underexplored themes such as gendered vulnerability, spatial justice, post-pandemic public space, and marginalized urban bodies in both Global North and Global South contexts. By focusing on lived experience and embodied methodologies, the book challenges dominant urban narratives and contributes fresh perspectives on space, care, power, and resistance. It will benefit readers seeking to rethink cities not merely as physical or functional entities, but as affective and contested terrains of social life.
Designed for researchers, students, and professionals in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, gender studies, and cultural geography, this collection foregrounds the bodily and sensory dimensions of urban encounters, spatial politics, and everyday life.
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction
Mahsa Alami Fariman, Chien Lee, Ahmadreza Hakiminejad, Asma Mehan
SECTION I: GOVERNING BODIES
Chapter 1: Infrastructural Spaces: The (Anti)Public Space Manifesto
Asma Mehan, Krzysztof Nawratek, Ahmadreza Hakiminejad
Chapter 2: Public Bodies: Toward a Spatialized Understanding of Canadian Sex Work Legislation
Alexandra Pereira-Edwards
Chapter 3: Dangerous/Endangered Youth: The Governmentality of Nightlife in the Pandemic City
Fabio Bertoni
Chapter 4: (In)Visible Bodies: The Urban Life of Drug Users in Tehran's Harandi Neighbourhood
Mahsa Alami Fariman
Chapter 5: Reimagining Proximity: Art Museums, Embodied Distance, and Aesthetic Experience in the Pandemic Era
Chien Lee
SECTION II: PERFORMING SPACE
Chapter 6: Feminist Performative Architectures: Making Space in and with Public Space
Helen Stratford
Chapter 7: Urban Bodies and Human Spaces: Questioning the Possibilities of Re-Signifying Neighbourhood Places through Performing Arts in Florence
Gloria Calderone
Chapter 8: Dancing Alone(s): Participatory Hierarchies of a Popular Culture Festival in a Global City
Laura Lamas-Abraira, Alba Colombo, Xavier Villanueva Capella
Chapter 9: (Un)Monuments of the Everyday: The Body of/at Work
Elena Cologni
Chapter 10: Essayistic Film Fragments: Instruments to Access the Performativity of Urban Space
Riccarda Cappeller
SECTION III: MAPPING URBAN LIFE
Chapter 11: Using Cartography to Study Mediations of Immigrants: Cases in London and São Paulo
Viviane Riegel
Chapter 12: Mapping the Urban Unconscious: Towards a Hybrid Application of Deep Mapping and Sentiment Analysis
Guilherme Giolo, Yorgos Paschos
Chapter 13: DJing as Worldizing: Sonic, Social, and Discursive Layers in the Urban Soundscape
Jake Williams
Chapter 14: Sensitive Tool with Gender Perspective of Vulnerable Landscapes: The Importance of Experience in Urban Landscape Planning and Modification — A Case Study of Alto Hospicio, Chile
Constanza Andrea Contreras Saffie
Index
