MA Architecture & Urbanism research thesis:
This thesis is an insight into how public space is both a field for insurgency and appropriation as well as a precarious place. It emerges from ongoing debates concerning the erosion and control of public space in contemporary urbanism, and draws influence from Henri Lefebvre’s influential writings on the right to the city. Drawing on this work, this thesis highlights how public space is a place of exclusion and domination, both historically and more recently, and explores how the streets and public squares have been the stage upon which such dominating arrangements have exercised control.
This thesis considers the accelerating conditions such as austerity, commodification and privatisation that shapes contemporary public space in many cities worldwide, and explores the ways in which such processes restrict the freedom and possibilities within. In light of this, this thesis analyses the emerging potentialities of resistance and creative alternatives that appropriate and transform the city against such hegemony. In doing so, this thesis seeks to understand the value that these socio-politically driven and aesthetically expressive orientated acts hold in the production of public space and the right to the city. In sum, this thesis focuses on how public space is controlled, contested and transformed.
