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This chapter presents a small number of legal cases from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which the English term and concept ‘public’ was applied to a building or spatial practice in a Punjabi city. These cases illustrate a number of different ways the concept of public space refracted through more long-standing indigenous concepts and spatial practices in Punjab. They also reveal how the institutionalization of ‘public space’ as a prerogative of colonial municipal authority gradually changed the configurations and meanings of those shared spaces that were a traditional feature of every Indian city. These colonial-era cases thus point to the newness of public space — as both a concept and a corporeal substance — and its associated urban phenomena in late-nineteenth century India.

This chapter examines the use of statutory planning powers to effect spatial change by neighbourhoods in England. Neighbourhood planning is unusual in that a tailor-made set of statutory powers was devised and offered to communities to give them distinct rights within the development planning framework. Where much research on neighbourhood planning has focused on its impact on community governance and the management of place, the chapter is concerned with the implementation of a set of spatial practices, and the use by neighbourhoods of a specific, and quite limited, framework of land-use planning to achieve their goals. It addresses the approach taken by neighbourhoods to the key challenge of housing supply, before reviewing the use of planning policy to highlight the goals of social sustainability in regeneration and public infrastructure, and considering the environmental measures and low-carbon alternatives promoted in neighbourhood plans. The chapter concludes with an assessment of what is distinctive about the spatial practices of neighbourhood planning and their impact on land and property markets.

The rapidly changing context of the pandemic offers an important opportunity to revisit what constitutes public space, for whom and how, given the coexisting practices of social distancing and social uprisings. This chapter explores the complexity of negotiations and practices currently involved in the production of space in Toronto, and calls for a further consideration of public space as a socially produced space which is articulated through socio-spatial practices, such as the fast-tracking of bike lanes and the provision of outdoor patio spaces for bars and restaurants.

This chapter focuses on the engagement of Henri Lefebvre with the research of the Institut de sociologieurbaine (ISU) about the practices of dwelling (habitation) between the 1960s and early 1970s. It shows how Lefebvre’s idea develops from his analysis on ISU’s research, which included the formulation of the three “moments” of space that formed the main points of The Production of Space theory.

This chapter examines Mexican street food as a spatial practice that shapes the cultural landscape of Oakland, California. Community activist Emilia Otero fights for street food vendors’ right to occupy public space along city’s streets in East Oakland. She helps legitimize informal commerce in the Fruitvale district and paves the way for street food vendors to develop their businesses--from pushcarts and taco trucks to restaurants. The chapter calls attention to the friction that arises between the rationally planned city and the ways in which marginalized community groups live the city through their daily routines. It argues that remaking city streets to accommodate informal cultural practices is a way claim one’s right to the city.

The urban food scape is changing rapidly. Food trucks, which are part of a wider phenomenon of street food vending, are an increasingly common sight in many cities throughout the United States and Canada. With this rise in the popularity of food trucks, the key issue of regulatory conflicts between the state, street food vending and food truck entrepreneurs, and the wider industry as a whole, has risen to the fore. Cities have responded in various ways to increased interest in mobile food vending – some have adopted encouraging and relaxed regulations, some have attempted to harness the momentum to craft a city brand, and some have rigidly regulated food trucks in response to protest by brick-and-mortar competitors. This Introduction frames the volume through its guiding questions and a variety of lenses - community economic development, social justice, postmodernism. The Introduction also outlines the sections of the volume (Democratic vs. Regulatory Practices and Spatial-Cultural Practices) and summarizes the chapters included in each section.

Chapter 3 focuses on the spatial practices that emerge within and define Muslim civil society. It begins with two excursions/excurses that illustrate the state’s spatial practices of Islam: museification, as represented by the museum and mausoleum of Hacı Bektaş Veli, and institutionalized homogenization, as represented by a Friday sermon in a mosque. The remainder of the chapter elaborates three characteristic spatial practices of Muslim civil society: theological classes, academic-style conferences, and charitable service in a neoliberal environment. The analysis of these ethnographic contexts accentuates the emergence of Muslim civil society as a domain in which activities that were once monopolized by the state—education, mass media, healthcare—are now carried out by nonstate actors.

This chapter demonstrates that qualities once thought to be unique to the Ottoman confederation were of a piece with other imperial strategies to affirm the power of the court amid disparate territorial domains. The chapter builds a basis especially for thinking about the relationship between an expanding bureaucracy, a new set of spatial protocols within an established palatial seat, and the textual habits that extended authority outside the palace confines. It draws on comparisons with the Habsburg court in Spain, addresses the emergence of a hierarchical imperial chancery, and outlines features of the scribal culture that play a key role in the book as a whole. It draws on diverse chroniclers, early kanunname, imperial expenditures, and sultanic edicts in various forms to trace these dynamics between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries.

This introductory chapter summarizes this volume's arguments, as well as the particular case studies which will be the subject of each individual chapter. It also details the scope of the study, which encompasses a large number of case studies in order to demonstrate the reach of counterpreservation beyond a few anecdotal or exceptional examples and leave room for examination in diverse spatial, programmatic, and urban conditions. The chapter also discusses the scholarly approach this book tackles as a whole, in order to give insight into a spatial practice that pops up across the city and even beyond it. In doing so the chapter raises the question which forms the heart of this book—why people in Berlin want to live, work, perform, and play in decrepit buildings when they could either renovate their buildings with their own hands, or, in some cases, afford to live in renovated ones.

This chapter examines the spatial organization of Islamabad as well as the separations and linkages that bureaucratic documentation creates between state and society. It details the “Master Plan” for Islamabad's layout, which has been only partially successful in establishing a sociospatial order liberated from spatial practices prevailing throughout urban Pakistan. Islamabad was designed to make the government legible to itself, partly through isolation from the wider society and partly through its own internal order. Neighborhood and kinship relations pulse within the bureaucratic procedures designed to ensure the correspondence of residential and bureaucratic hierarchies. “Private” work is still done through government offices. However, documents, the very mechanisms for protecting the integrity of government, are often the means through which it is undermined.

This chapter charts the growth of the political left in Los Angeles from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century. It expands upon the preceding chapter’s examination of community development in Los Angeles by analyzing the strands of leftist organizations active in the city within the context of broader community formation patterns. The spatial practices of trade unions, political parties, and radical community groups affected how they engaged racial diversity or practiced exclusionary forms of solidarity. The chapter then considers the community-building function of media in leftist movements, the radical press, and a global print culture that extended solidarities out from Los Angeles to locations around the world. Analysis of radical newspapers focuses on financing, distribution, multilingual content, and consumption.

This introductory chapter discusses the archive of abolitionist spatial practices to show how literary abolitionism promotes geography as a key discourse of abolitionist political intervention. It examines the work of Martin Delany’s Blake to elaborate the category of abolitionist geography. Blake embodies what has come to be understood in contemporary critical discourse as spatial realism. It acknowledges lines of kinship connection among enslaved and free Africans in the Western Hemisphere that traditionally have been elided by a myopic U.S. focus in accounts of African American culture.

The walking stories of the Zohar are its unique literary feature. Charting the motif suggests a consistent concern that connects various segments of the zoharic library, although recent scholarship has emphasized their separateness. This study seeks to understand the walking motif on its own terms, as a spatial practice, without depriving it of its uniqueness by subsuming it into the Zohar's other mystical concerns--concerns that privilege a sacred, vertical, space-denying axis. The abundant yet elusive quality of the motif points to the Zohar's persistent struggle to recognize the mundane space of the road, which is “nowhere” in particular, a “utopian” space. Through this motif, the Zohar engages in conversation and in polemic with surrounding non-Jewish and Jewish groups. In picturing the Companions walking on the road, the Zohar created a fitting image for its own daring independence.

The introduction explains the important relationship between Chang’an and Tang literati writers, arguing that they serve as intermediary between the city and text. It gives a brief contextualized introduction to the Chang’an as both an imperial capital and a site for collective life. It discusses the nature and provenance of the book’s major textual sources, arguing for a need to reconceptualize and reimagine these texts as workings of the cultural imagination, rather than confined to bibliographic categories and regulated within generic boundaries. It also introduces the theoretical models used throughout the book, as related to the concepts of liminality, spatial practice, and the production of space.

The focus of this chapter is the concept of life space, which uses a global and linked approach to mobilities to capture hybrid practices between residential and daily mobility (such as multi-residence and long-distance commuting). In more substantial terms, such a global and linked approach to mobilities makes it possible to focus on the multi-local dimension of the spatial practices of individuals; depending on the approach adopted, we can thus speak in terms of ‘multi-local living’ or ‘life spaces’. The life space of an individual consists of a set of places that have become incorporated over the lifecourse, often with a change of function. This chapter shows how this innovative approach is part of a fifty years research tradition on residential mobility in France. An illustration of this approach is given from a survey led in Lisbon on the individuals who circulate in Europe. We show, through that experience, how it is possible to collect and analyse multi-local living data for an entire lifetime. By focusing on the idea of”life-space trajectories” of people (circulating within Europe), this chapter aims to explore new perspectives offered by lifecourse research.

This chapter analyzes how Bangladeshi American women and teenage girls in Hamtramck renegotiate conceptualizations of the public-private divide through ongoing interpretive and explorative spatial practices while referencing religious and cultural frameworks. It discusses how Bangladeshi women across generations organize the gendering of spaces within paid labor, public and private celebrations, streets, mosques, home-based religious gatherings, and schools. The analysis centers on how Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck are self-consciously and actively engaged in a process of negotiating their relationship to urban space, searching to interface with the city and its institutions in ways that maximize their sense of mobility, mastery, and centrality within public, semi-public, and domestic spaces of the city. In doing so, they advance new agendas of cultural citizenship, thus encouraging municipal environments and institutions to become more democratic spaces that represent and uphold the values of those who participate in them.

Chapter 4 discusses how the Virginia Algonquian landscape first coalesced as a result of population movements and social interactions involving different communities of hunter gatherers during the early centuries A.D. As documented within the Kiskiak site, the archaeology of this period records the appearance of new settlement forms, subsistence practices, and a ceramic tradition shared across a broad swath of the coastal Middle Atlantic. Historical linguistic studies raise the possibility that these developments resulted from the rapid replacement of indigenous foragers by newly arrived Algonquian speakers migrating from the north. The archaeological record on the James-York peninsula, by contrast, documents the coexistence for several centuries of distinct communities of practice linked to different material traditions. The archaeology of interior encampments and of riverine settlements with shell middens points toward seasonal movement between places where forager-fishers gathered for events that involved feasting, exchange, and intermarriage. These spatial practices introduced during the second century A.D. signalled an emphasis on estuarine settings that has oriented Native history in the Chesapeake to the present day.

This prologue provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on the Sia Raga ways of the place—the dynamic shapes and trajectories that give form to their social, spatial, and historical consciousness—and their articulation with the ways of foreigners. It argues that recurrent patterns permeate Sia Raga historical and social consciousness, kinship and spatial practices, and items of material culture. These patterns are not static, but demonstrate emergent and regenerative processes connecting ideas of place and time through biological idioms of movement and growth. The book's six chapters begin with the historical, move through the more abstractly cosmological and sociological, and end by considering the physical embodiments of dwelling. The author's goal is to intimate a sense of his own partial understanding of the connectedness of Sia Raga ways.