Since the turn of the century, public spaces have been contested in various ways: they have been physically occupied and artistically re-appropriated, revived and reviled, privatised and socialised, their meanings, contexts, purposes, and significance challenged and changed. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of social scientists from around the world, this volume presents a broad spectrum of approaches and discourses on contemporary public spaces. Throughout the pre-crisis expanding EU, urban public space was seen as a stage of public display, creating opportunities for integration and cohesion, based on more inclusive forms of governance and supported by public arts and design. However, the era in which these public spaces developed was one of untrammelled neo-liberalism and consumerism, where national societies were subsumed into transnational flows and digital networks. Ultimately, the subsequent global financial and economic crises brought about a radically new situation, marked by the birth of an international, consolidated culture of protest and unprecedented radicalisation of public spaces as transnational places of reinvigorated rational-critical discourse. The contributors make connections between this consumerist past and the post-consumerist present, revealing the roots of the pre-crisis processes of redistribution of capitals and power, evident in the restructuring of the public spaces, and tracing the slow growth of social discontents which have lead only few years later to unspeakable mobilization of new kind of self-conscious globally acting class. Focusing on various and changing sets of actors, politics, economies and cultures involved in and around public spaces, the volume examines their transformation in contemporary societies, being re-negotiated through changing politics, design and functions, but also due to a new participatory culture, reflecting public expectations, fears, hopes and dreams.
Lisainfo e-raamatute kohta