ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the sometimes-ignored politics that sits behind ‘do-it-yourself urbanism’ and other, similar user-led movements that have emerged to influence the management and design of public spaces. Empowering citizens to ‘take city planning into their own hands’ is a meta-narrative that warrants closer examination. By encouraging non-governmental actors to have more influence in decision-making and management, place-based activism shifts the onus of governance to a fuzzy in-between space. The activism can be understood as the desire to build community connections and invest community members in the outcome of their interventions, and so in urban governance more broadly, compared with the same outcome being implemented without community input. Shifting the emphasis of activism to the scale itself, rather than one particular social objective, enables diverse alliances to ‘sign up’ to the movement, even if there is diversity in their social objectives, and just a common belief that those objectives will benefit from a more local decision-making governance structure.
