ABSTRACT
This chapter explores encounters through the multiplicity and synchronicity of urban space, highlighting how practices of memorialisation, installation and urban architecture may serve to produce, effect and constrain urban atmospheres of sociality. It focuses on Freedom Square in Tallinn, Estonia, in order to consider how this rebuilt square has produced - and continues to produce - micro-climates of political activity and layerings of temporality. In the wider context of Freedom Square, the removal of cars has enabled a situated atmospheric politics of encounters to unfold beyond the 'cocoon' of the vehicle. Drawing on the work of Sloterdijk, the chapter argues that the city square can be seen as a particular form of emergent 'environment' in which the bringing together of people, memorials, materials, objects and discourses, produces contingent atmospheres of sociality. The chapter discusses the case of an art installation that was placed in Freedom Square as part of Tallinn's European Capital of Culture (ECoC) programme in 2011.
