City, Public Space, and Body

The Embodied Experience of Urban Life
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-66238-1
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 206 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Reihe: Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design

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 marginalised urban bodies in both Global North and 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.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hakiminejad, Ahmadreza

Fariman, Mahsa Alami

Mehan, Asma

Lee, Chien

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Garten- und Landschaftsarchitektur
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Städtebau, Stadtplanung (Architektur)

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Mahsa Alami Fariman is an urban researcher and educator with a background in architectural and urban studies. She is Lecturer in Just Urbanism, Societal Diversity, and Citizenship at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. Mahsa holds a PhD in Urban Sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research explores the open city, politics of space, the production of everyday urban life in the Middle East, and feminist urbanism.

Chien Lee is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University, a role they will take on again this September after concluding their adjunct assistant professorship at National Tsing Hua University. They are also a co-founder and researcher at Gallery Unfold, Kyoto. Their work, rooted in the sociology of art, explores art museums, the experience of arts, photographic mediation, and sensory ethnography. Previous experience includes serving as a commissioned researcher for Theory, Culture & Society and a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Ahmadreza Hakiminejad is a researcher and academic with a background in architectural, urban, and planning studies. He is a Lecturer in Architecture based in the Leeds School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University. Ahmadreza’s research intersects critical urban studies, politics of space, architectural history and theory, and urban sociology.

Asma Mehan is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab) at Texas Tech University. She is the author of The Affective Agency of Public Space: Social Inclusion and Community Cohesion (2024) and has contributed to over 50 peer reviewed publications. Her research spans adaptive reuse, cultural heritage, urban resilience, and placemaking, bridging academia and practice to address contemporary urban challenges.