Emergent Spaces

This book explores different emergent spaces where diverse urbanites spontaneously negotiate; make and remake urban spaces; create opportunities; produce social change; challenge urban life, culture, and politics; or simply ask for their right to the city. The focus of this book is on spaces and contexts where change is seeded, regardless of whether it was planned and whether it was or will be successful in the end. Contributors analyze the seeds of change at their very inception in diverse cultural contexts across four continents. How do small groups of ordinary and often also disenfranchised people design, suggest, and implement ideas of change? How do they use and remake small urban spaces to better suit their purposes, voice claims to the city, create opportunities, and design better urban lives and futures? The emphasis of this volume is not on the nature of activities and change, but on the minute processes of initiating change.
Petra Kuppinger is Professor of Anthropology at Monmouth College, USA. She has conducted research on topics of space, globalization, and consumerism in Cairo, Egypt, and issues of space, culture, and Islam in Stuttgart, Germany. More recently she has been working on topics of urban transformations and sustainability. She is the author of Faithfully Urban: Pious Muslims in a German City (Berghahn, 2015) and, together with George Gmelch, she is the co-editor of Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City (6th ed., Waveland, 2018).