Space and Culture

What are the limits of resistance in public spaces? Academic representations of acts of resistance often exclusively look at the acts themselves, focusing on performers or participants, but neglecting passers-by. How do these passers-by connect (or not) to these acts and their aesthetics? What about after the action is over and the participants have left? What about effects at sites distant from where the practices of resistance took place? This article uses the works of Michel de Certeau, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Rancière to discuss the restrictions and the potential resistance in public spaces. We investigate the limitations of everyday practices of resistance in public spaces and suggest that future research can better understand the limits of practices of resistance by taking into account three distinct aspects: distinction, duration, and extension. We use Rancière’s understanding of aesthetics and the sensible to link accounts of resistance that focus on political subjectivities and those that focus on actual practices of resistance.

Time and experience lie at the heart of urban life. While extensive research on the social implications of the spatial transformation of urban landscapes has been undertaken since the 1980s, the discussion of the impact that manifold temporalities and sensory experiences might have in shaping or constraining the physical and social change of a neighbourhood have been limited, however. Existing research has a tendency to focus on a specific period in time within the remaking of a neighbourhood and draws conclusions from this window in time on the impact of the regeneration. By drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the regeneration of el Raval, Barcelona from 1996 to now, this article interrogates how a focus on temporality and experience produce interruptions of power in contemporary urban regeneration processes leading to what I define as a `resistance of place’. While there have been attempts to regenerate el Raval since the early 20th century, most dramatically during the last 20 years to create Barcelona’s new cultural quarter, the neighbourhood has not been gentrified and developed as expected by Barcelona’s city council. I argue that while elements of control, discipline and gentrification are certainly part of global contemporary regeneration strategies, temporal and experiential dynamics destabilise their full implementation so that these elements are only partial in their imposition.

This essay analyses biographic memories of practices of resistance of workers in the industrial transformation region in the south of Nuremberg. These memories are marked by a nostalgic view of public space in former times, which is put in contrast with public space as it is today. While former practices of resistance are remembered with nostalgia, present-day resistance practices are described as threatening practices performed by others. It turns out that nostalgia for resistance in the public space in the past is also a social positioning in the present.

In this piece, I argue that the city of Cairo has witnessed unprecedented urban transformations for the past 4 years, owing to urban wars and confrontations during the two regimes that followed Mubarak’s ouster. Street politics, although mesmerizing, have been highly exhausting. With the reemergence of the army in civil life, after the ousting of President Morsi, street activism is becoming hazardous and highly costly in terms of human life. Whether Egypt is witnessing the persistence of a counter-revolutionary moment, firmly marching toward the uncompromising neoliberal city, exemplified in Dubai as a model and planned prior to 2011, will be difficult to answer, precisely because Cairo is not Dubai. Experts on Arab revolutions have spoken of the emergence of new “subjectivities” that have opened novel mental, visual, and physical interactions in the city, perhaps encouraging optimism in the long term.

This article departs from analyses that underline the middle-class character of June 2013 (Gezi Park) protests in Turkey by focusing on the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the protest movement. The predominant form of protest in the movement was aesthetic political acts, which did not bring about any distinction based on class or cultural capital. Rather, the artistic practices and cultural symbols employed by protesters bridged gaps by bringing a large and diverse body of people around a common political position. The June protests constituted a moment of “dissensus” in the Rancièrean sense as the shared position was based on an essential claim for equality of the dēmos and the demands of the anonymous to be seen, heard, counted in, and to partake. The article focuses on the role Second New Wave poetry played in the protests, as the protesters appropriated the ironic and ambiguous verses of the Second New Wave poets to create a unified movement.

This article focuses on acts of resistance regarding reproductive politics in contemporary Britain. Drawing on empirical research this article investigates grassroots activism around a complex moral, social, and political problem. This article therefore focuses on a site of resistance in everyday urban environments, investigating the practice and performance involved. Identifying specifically the territory(ies) and territorialities of these specific sites of resistance, this article looks at how opposing groups negotiate conflict in public space in territorial, as well as habitual, ways. Second, the article focuses on questions around the impact, distinction, and novelty both in the immediate and long term of these acts of resistance for those in public space. Here, then, the focus shifts to the reactions to this particular form of protest and questions the “acceptability” of specific resistances in the public imaginary.

Even though it seems that riding a fixed-gear bike is to take the line of least resistance in search for the optimal flow in between cars, or with respect to traffic arrangements in general, in doing so, fixed-gear cyclists simultaneously reject social conventions of interaction with and within the urban space. Hence, the question emerges: how far can resistance, practical critique, or even social change be detected in fixed-gear cycling and related practices? A motto like “you own a car, not the road” indicates that some fixed-gear cyclists insist on a specific “right to the city”; a claim that particularly criticizes the relationship between drivers and cyclists and also touches upon the further issue of personal mobility centered on the term “urban cycling.” Two practical examples will be discussed to show that such claims are inherently “critical” meanings of the idealized—still bodily enacted—fixed-gear rider and to show the ambivalence and limits of such a critique’s potential.