ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of the historical development of protest in Piaţa Universităţii, in the Romanian capital Bucharest, in order to explore the role that urban public space plays in society and politics in a post-socialist context. As work on post-socialist urban spaces has explored, there are a range of questions to be addressed about the inter-relationship between civil society, protest and democracy as expressed and performed in public space, to which could be added the idea that the nature of such events in public space can also say a lot about the nature of post-socialist governing regimes. Urban public spaces are dynamic and how they operate is shaped by local factors in combination with the national and transnational/international. Analysing Piaţa Universităţii has also allowed us to unravel the inter-connections between public space, the state, civil society and democracy in Romania.
