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.
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.
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 Tehrans
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
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 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 Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Previously, they held an assistant professorship at National Tsing Hua University. They are also a co-founder and researcher at Gallery Unfold in Kyoto. Lee's work, rooted in the sociology of art, explores art museums, the experience of arts, photographic mediation, and sensory ethnography. Their professional 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 Lecturer in Architecture based in the Leeds School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University. Ahmadrezas research intersects critical urban studies, politics of space, architectural history and theory, and urban sociology.
Asma Mehan is 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.
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