Track 05 PUBLIC SPACE AND URBAN CULTURE

Track chairs: Tihomir Viderman, Matej Nikšič, David Adams, Varvara Toura 

How public spaces are designed, planned and managed encourages a range of everyday practices which cultivate conviviality, care, collective expression and democratic participation. These spaces can also render visible or invisible exchanges that take place across diverse urban cultures; they are negotiated and contested within the shifting boundaries of exclusion, privacy and control. Yet, as cities wrestle with addressing social precarity, climate change, and changing regimes of access and inclusion, public spaces serve as important sites of spatial justice – helping to foster empathetic relations across socio-economic and cultural difference while also becoming central to socio-ecological transitions. In cities shifting from grey to green, the uses and meanings attached to public space are reconfigured, while urban cultures shape ecological imaginaries and orient collective futures. This track brings public spaces and urban cultures into dialogue, exploring how these intersecting pressures can be addressed through innovative design, planning, management and enhancement. It invites explorations of contested social relations, multi-sensory experiences and encounters, through which different individuals engage with public spaces, giving meaning to the present and future. Adopting a broad view of urban culture, contributions are invited that examine how public spaces help shape urban transformation, deliver ecological care and decarbonisation, and foster empathetic exchange for the present and future.

Keywords: public space, culture, urban experience, lifestyles, temporality, risks and threats to cultural landscapes, commodification, identity, sense of belonging, empathy, care