(Re)claiming Space by Urban Commons

Reclaiming Pedestrian Space from Car Dominated Neighborhoods

For a long time as a result of accommodating car traffic, planning ideologies in the past put a low priority on public space, pedestrianism and the role of city space as a meeting place for urban dwellers. In addition, according to authors such as Jan Gehl, market forces and changing architectural perceptions began to shift the focus of planning practice from the integration of public space in ...

Collective Action and the Urban Commons

Urban residents share access to a number of local resources in which they have a common stake. These resources range from local streets and parks to public spaces, to a variety of shared neighborhood amenities. Collectively shared urban resources suffer from the same rivalry and free-riding problems that Garrett Hardin described in his Tragedy of the Commons tale. Scholars have not yet worked u...

Urban Informality as a Commons Dilemma

The Locative Commons: Situating Location-Based Media in Urban Public Space

At last month's Transmediale festival in Berlin [1], the Utrecht-based arts collective Social Fiction received the festival's prestigious Software award for their .walk (dot-walk) project, that combines computer code and "psychogeographic" streetwalking. During the walk, participants carry out an algorithmic series of instructions derived from computer code, that "calculates" the city as a gian...

Theorizing Critical Placemaking as a Tool for Reclaiming Public Space.

As economic inequality and segregation continue to grow in the U.S., psychology has an important role to play in exploring and promoting processes that can disrupt social injustice. This paper identifies the privatization of public space as a social problem that contributes to the entrenchment of social, economic, and racial inequality, and advances "critical placemaking" as a tool for reclaimi...