ABSTRACT
In the search for connections between lived space, everyday life, and “the political,” this chapter revisits three key concepts of urban studies: public space, urban resistance, and urban emancipation. In public space, “the political” may eventually become enacted through the everyday spatial practices of publics producing space. Through an exploration of practices of resistance and emancipation in public spaces facing post-political conditions, this chapter argues that publics need to be revisited as ever-changing and contingent foundations. A lack of egalitarian politics and social justice which manifests itself when our conceptual repertoire in public space research becomes fixed and static is thus part of the problem that the concept of urban emancipation describes. Much of the contemporary debate in political theory tends to refrain from spatializing emancipatory praxis while attempts at transferring post-political thought to the fields of urban studies and planning theory tend to conceptually circumvent emancipation. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on a needed dialectical study of emancipatory spatial praxis in public space and changing aspects of everyday life as the spatial dimension of emancipatory action and of egalitarian politics cannot be separated from everyday life.
