ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the role of public space and architecture in the articulation and enactment of dissent, critiquing the building of consensus as a central and often unjust process in the resolution of conflicts and interests as a basis of liberal democracy. Examining the insurrection at the UC Capitol on January 6th and other protest movements, and applying critical concepts such as Chantal Mouffe’s “pluralistic agonism” that embrace conflict as a central and ongoing, this chapter presents a new framework that significantly expands extant critiques and foregrounds architecture and space as a central actor in the processes of “exposing, proposing, and politicizing”, and in the machinations of representative democracy and neoliberal capitalism. Based on a new interpretation of the concepts of “spatial strategies” and “spatial tactics”, it interrogates the capacities of space to serve as a medium for enacting discourse, conflict, and dissent – and to mediate society, culture and people in their relationships to each other and the world around them, with a particular view toward empowering excluded and marginalized communities, and enacting a “right to the city” and a right to be seen, heard and included in the deliberative processes that make up civilized society.
