This article explores the relationship between space and politics by analyzing the spatial representations and practices of political actors in Turkey. It argues how these actors generate collective dispositions constituting a political habitus, conceptualized as relational and spatially mediated phenomena, drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space, and de Certeau’s notion of tactics. Focusing on the city center of Ankara, the study maps recurring mobilization and the urban positions of trade unions and professional chambers (Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey [DİSK], Confederation of Public Employees’ Trade Unions [KESK], Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects [TMMOB], and Turkish Medical Association [TTB]) that have organized a collective opposition against power since the 2000s, linking them to public spaces where mass actions occurred. Findings reveal that urban spaces not only reflect power relations but also actively structure opportunities for resistance and civic engagement, highlighting the interplay between structure, habitus, and action. The study contributes to understanding how urban areas become politicized and how social opposition acquires spatial form.
This article examines the transformation of spatial meanings and settlement morphology within a Bajau community in Sama Bahari Village, Wakatobi Regency, Indonesia, through a vernacular practice of incremental coral-based reclamation known as tembok . Challenging dominant representations of the Bajau as exclusively sea-oriented dwellers, the study reveals a gradual shift toward hybrid sea–land spatial formations actively produced through the accumulation of dead coral. While research on maritime communities often focuses on state-led reclamation or environmental adaptation, limited attention has been given to community-initiated micro-reclamation and its long-term spatial consequences. Using qualitative ethnographic documentation, spatial mapping, and morphological analysis, this study demonstrates that tembok operates as a culturally embedded spatial strategy rather than a purely technical intervention. Incremental reclamation extends domestic territories, reconfigures circulation networks, and introduces new functional zones, thereby reshaping everyday spatial practices and collective understandings of space. Despite ongoing ambiguities regarding ecological and regulatory frameworks, the persistence of coral-based reclamation highlights its role in sustaining maritime livelihoods while enabling socio-spatial expansion. The findings conceptualize incremental reclamation as a process of territorial morphogenesis, contributing to debates on indigenous coastal urbanization, spatial planning, and culturally grounded approaches to coastal settlement transformation.
The 2004 tsunami devastated Sri Lanka’s coastal regions, displacing thousands and resulting in the loss of over 30,000 lives and 65,000 homes. In response, owner-driven and donor-driven resettlement projects were launched to address the immediate housing needs of affected communities. However, these efforts often prioritized quantitative targets over qualitative aspects, neglecting the emotional and psychological needs of displaced individuals. This study explores the long-term user satisfaction of postdisaster housing in Sri Lanka, focusing on the Turkey Village resettlement in Midigama. Using a sequential two-stage methodology, data were collected in 2014 and 2023 through structured surveys of 30 households. Findings indicate a significant decline in satisfaction with physical attributes such as house plans, living room size, maintenance, and utility costs over the study period. These challenges were compounded by economic hardships, including inflation and rising living costs. However, improvements were noted in satisfaction with internal and external finishes, building materials, and kitchen size, reflecting localized advancements. The study also highlights notable demographic shifts, including aging populations and improved educational attainment, which correlated with an enhanced ability to recognize potential for housing modifications. This research underscores the dynamic nature of user satisfaction in postdisaster contexts, emphasizing the need for adaptive, user-centered, and sustainable planning. The findings contribute to evidence-based recommendations for improving future resettlement efforts and ensuring resilience, cultural relevance, and long-term community well-being.
This study critically examines the transformation of suburban shopping malls into civic spaces, focusing on the open-air mall called Americana At Brand (AAB) in Los Angeles. Employing Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, the research explores how AAB constructs a hyperreal environment that blurs the lines between community and commerce, public and private. In addition, the analysis incorporates French sociologist Monique Pinçon-Charlot and Michel Pinçon’s notion of entre-soi , highlighting how such spaces facilitate social closure among the affluent, thereby reinforcing existing class structures and exclusivity. Through qualitative analysis of AAB’s design, functionality, and user experience, the study reveals that while these transformed spaces offer aesthetically appealing environments, they often perpetuate consumerist ideologies and privatized public realms. The findings raise critical questions about authenticity, inclusivity, and the role of such developments in the future of urban public life.
This article examines the representation of women in Arkitekt , one of the most influential architectural journals of Early Republican Türkiye, between 1931 and 1950. Conceptualizing the journal as a discursive and cultural platform, the study explores how gendered visibility, spatial legitimacy, and professional authority were represented and negotiated within architectural media during the formative decades of Turkish modernity. The selected timeframe begins with the establishment of Arkitekt in 1931 and ends in 1950, when Türkiye transitioned to a multi-party political system, introducing major political and ideological transformations. Grounded in feminist architectural historiography, discourse analysis, and media studies, the research analyzes 136 gender-related references identified within the journal corpus. These references were categorized into seven thematic groups and evaluated through archival interpretation and diagram visualizations. The findings reveal that women were represented predominantly through domesticity, aestheticized femininity, institutional regulation, and gender-segregated technical and spatial practices. Although women became increasingly visible after the granting of women’s political rights in 1934, their professional representation in architecture remained limited and peripheral. The study argues that the Arkitekt archive offers a valuable lens for examining the conditions of visibility, professional legitimacy, and architectural authority in Early Republican Türkiye. The findings reveal a pattern of conditional visibility in which women appeared predominantly within specific spatial, social, and symbolic frameworks. By combining feminist discourse analysis with visual mapping methods, the article contributes to architectural historiography through a gender-focused reading of Turkish architectural media and modernity.
This paper is about barbers and hair salons in London, England, open beyond the traditional retail hours of 9:00 to 18:00. Observation and interviews with managers took place before and after the COVID-19 lockdowns and against a backdrop of regular debates about nightlife, gentrification, the sustainability of local high streets, and austerity. There is extensive research on barbers and salons in terms of community and identity; this paper adds to that literature but centres the night and argues that after dark they also function as important spaces of care and as social infrastructure. The salons examined were mostly what Dutta refers to as ‘diasporic spaces’ and provided the opportunity for sociability, the exchange of knowledge, and care. They were also evidence of how venues after dark vary in meaning according to different practices as well as different discourses of the night.
This poem emerges from fieldwork in Northern Ireland and rambles in the north woods of my home state. A dreamlike transcultural diffusion of embodied symbolism has the persona inhabiting home and field at once. In this instance, nature’s affordances and the martial atmosphere of Michigan hunting season evoke murals, bonfires and the marching season in Belfast. The opportunity for casual violence resonates across settings, and the possibility of the participant observer becoming collateral damage is a real one. The poem ends in a matter-of-fact manner, dramatizing both the mundane nature of risk and the fluidity of our experience of spatiotemporal translation.
Through a comparative reading of selected visual and performance works, ranging from Edvard Munch's Silent Scream and Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism to Samuel Beckett's dramaturgy and Marina Abramovi & cacute;'s performances, the study demonstrates how silence becomes a minimalist device and a philosophical stance as well as a social stance. These examples highlight its role in reshaping artistic language, audience reception, and the ontology of art itself. Silence is thus approached as a horizon of potentiality where concealment and revelation intersect, enabling forms of communication that exceed the limits of speech. In this sense, silence functions as an aesthetic and existential presence that turns the absence of expression into a revolutionary protest across different artistic forms. Methodologically, the research combines analysis, deduction, and comparative critique, situating silence within contemporary debates on aesthetics and semiotics, while also addressing its social and revolutionary dimensions. The findings suggest that silence, in its multiple manifestations, emerges as a powerful tool of artistic expression, often more eloquent than words.
This article argues that contemporary urban, domestic, and digital environments function as interconnected micro-architectures of neoliberal self-optimization, shaping everyday practices of self-monitoring and self-governance. Rather than treating space as a passive backdrop, it conceptualizes as an active interface through which neoliberal rationalities are materialized and experienced. Drawing on theoretical insights from governmentality studies and digital geographies, this article examines how practices such as self-tracking, platform-mediated productivity, and data-driven urban management reconfigure everyday spatial experience as a continuous process of evaluation and comparison. Focusing on urban, domestic, and digital spaces as key domains of everyday life, this article demonstrates how these environments normalize responsibilized forms of subjectivity. By developing a spatial perspective on neoliberalism, this article contributes to ongoing debates on the governance of the self and the role of space in shaping contemporary subjectivities.
This article explores how Latin American cities have been institutionally represented in contexts of foundation, inauguration, or political renewal. Based on the analysis of narratives found in foundational charters, inaugural speeches, and mayoral swearing-in addresses, and covering a historical arc from the colonial period to the administrations that began in 2024 and 2025, it examines how urban power is symbolically legitimized. The methodological approach relies on a critical and comparative reading of official discourse, aiming to identify discursive patterns across distinct historical contexts. The critical reading of these sources reveals several defining characteristics: the centrality of a strong state, albeit one now more inclined toward self-limitation; a shift from explicit Catholic tenets toward a more subtle religious rhetoric; the emergence of new political actors; the valorization of the family; and the transition from a state-centered narrative to one focused on the personal legitimacy of individual leaders. These findings point to a historical permanence in how cities on the continent are exogenously conceived by presiding economic and political powers, to the insubstantial approaches through which these cities have been managed across centuries, and to the fragility with which their specificities are addressed.
This paper employs Lezlie Lowe’s book, No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs , as a crucial site to examine how restroom facilities have historically perpetuated categorical inequalities based on factors such as race, disability, and social class. It analyses how access to restrooms is integral to ensuring full participation and citizenship, as certain spaces are implicitly designated for specific body types, thereby excluding those that do not conform to societal norms. The paper uses textual analysis to study Lowe’s narrative. This analysis deconstructs how signs and language construct and sustain power structures and social inequalities, revealing how ableism contradicts inclusive discourse by shaping public restroom design, denying access to marginalised bodies, and excluding their concerns from mainstream discourse. It examines the distinct health and safety challenges that public restrooms pose for women, men, children, the elderly, those with disabilities and caretakers. No Place to Go challenges the implicit enforcement of the gender binary within public restrooms, and it advocates for gender-inclusive spaces that accommodate the diverse identities and needs of people. By engaging with Lowe’s work, this paper seeks to contribute to ongoing discussions on reimagining restroom design and policy like gender-neutral toilets, gender-neutral language, reinforcing potty parity laws, among others to foster inclusivity and equality. The paper concludes by highlighting how these inclusive designs bring us a step closer to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development like gender equality, clean sanitation and good health in association with WHO initiatives on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH).
This article explores how graffiti removal practices—often seen as mundane concealing tasks—can produce visually compelling outcomes that are reminiscent of what they attempt to erase. These unintended visual outcomes, marked by awkward color patches, rough textures, or transparent traces, challenge the boundary between erasure and expression. Hereby, they raise critical questions about authorship, intention, and the role of the viewer that stem from long-standing debates within visual culture and art theory, particularly throughout the 20th century. Focusing on examples of removals in Istanbul and Paris, the study employs a form-based visual analysis to classify different types of graffiti removal across the city. This classification is not merely descriptive; it also serves as an interpretive framework to understand how these architectural surfaces contribute to the visual narrative of the urban landscape. These surfaces, stuck between the cycle of creation and annihilation, form a self-sustaining urban gallery, where repetition, layering, and erasure create an ever-evolving urban palimpsest. Despite lacking deliberate artistic intention, they give rise to a spontaneous visual language that reshapes the city’s collective memory. Rather than being the opposite of graffiti, removal becomes its partner in a continuous dialogue, both contributing to how the city is read, remembered, and perceived. Thus, by turning our attention to what remains, this study invites a reconsideration of how the accidental textures, traces, and color remnants produced by graffiti removal generate a spontaneous urban visual language.
Neighborhoods remember in more than just buildings-they recall through stories, rituals, and rhythms that outlast physical change. This research utilizes Jewish oral histories to examine the transformation of Bursa's historic neighborhood from Yahudilik to Kuru & ccedil;e & scedil;me. Based on five in-depth interviews conducted between 2023 and 2024 with former and current Jewish residents, the study employs content analysis to uncover the neighborhood's layered identity through the lenses of place identity and collective memory. The transformation is examined across five thematic dimensions: Interwoven Lives, The Street's Lost Soul, From Functional Decline to New Spatial Configuration, Today's New Normal, and Memory Places and Collective Memory. The findings demonstrate that oral histories effectively counteract the physical deterioration of the place, fostering a feeling of community amid demographic transitions and transformations. Incorporating informative signage and cultural pathways that embody our memories can illuminate the overlooked aspects of urban history, a method that not only safeguards the physical environment but also honors its intricate social and historical background.
This article examines how urban imageability operates in cinema through Kevin Lynch's approach, focusing on three Paris-set films. It investigates how cinematic representational strategies and narrative structures reorganize paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks to construct the on-screen urban image. The findings show that cinematic imageability is not a direct reflection of form but a product of how these elements function as representational agents with differing narrative weight. A comparative reading identifies two modes of cinematic imageability: a relational, movement-based mode in which elements are integrated into lived spatial experience, and a spectatorial, postcard-like mode in which isolated and aestheticized elements are visually consumed. Overall, the study argues that cinematic images depend less on which elements are present than on how distance, movement, bodily engagement, and framing are organized within narrative structures, extending Lynch's framework into cinematic mediation and clarifying how cities are experienced or staged on screen.
This article offers a comprehensive investigation of Floating University Berlin (FUB) as a habitable praxis situated within a post-industrial wetland and operating beyond the institutional boundaries of formal higher education. It asks how FUB articulates ecosystemic, spatial, performative, and even micropolitical forms of divergence under neoliberal academic conditions. Methodologically, the study examines FUB as a primary case in juxtaposition with the Institute for Lightweight Structures, enabling a critical assessment of how spatial and organisational configurations mediate learning, interaction, and collective agency. Mobilising F & eacute;lix Guattari's "three ecologies"-environment, social relations, and human subjectivity-as analytical axes, the article rearticulates them as a more-than-living ecosystem, assemblages of tectonics, and a pedagogical network. This framework structures a multi-layered "meta-narrative" that integrates theoretical analysis with visual and spatial interpretation. Through a layered cartography composed of curated quotations, atmospheric collages, mapping-based inferences, and diagrammatic expressions, the study renders entangled relations and de-hierarchised processes sustaining FUB's pedagogical universe. Within this meta-narrative, "flows of identifiers" trace methods, tactics, qualities, and positionalities, while "impalpable frameworks" foreground accumulative architectural interventions, participatory approaches, multispecies associations, and experimental, critical-compassionate modes of learning. By advancing the concept of habitable praxis as an ecosystemic and spatial mode of pedagogical production, the article contributes an original analytical model for understanding learning environments as dynamic, generative, and open to transformation.
This article examines how sacred landscapes are created, contested, and reimagined within the Deori community of Assam, Northeast India, focusing on the rituals and memory surrounding Goddess Kesaikhaiti. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral traditions, and spatial analysis, the study investigates how sites such as the bolisaal (sacrificial space) and the Tamreswari temple ruins serve as focal points for negotiating indigenous, Vedic, and modern influences. Situating the analysis within the frameworks of cultural geography, spatial memory, and political ecology, the article demonstrates how sacredness is actively formed through ritual practice, landscape symbolism, and collective memory. The research highlights how sacred spaces serve as arenas for the ongoing assertion of cultural identity and community resilience amid historical disruption and change. By foregrounding the intersections of spirituality, ecology, and group belonging, the article offers new insights into the territoriality of faith and the politics of sacred space within evolving cultural landscapes.
This study analyzes how street clowns (badut jalanan) are normatively constructed within urban public spaces in Samarinda, Indonesia. Rather than treating public perception as homogeneous, the research conceptualizes stigma as a socially stratified and power-laden process shaped by competing urban norms. Drawing on social construction theory, stigma theory, social norm theory, and Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital, the study examines how six social positions-street clowns, road users, Generation Z, women, government authorities, and academics-produce divergent interpretations of informal cultural labor. Using a qualitative design combining participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document analysis, the findings show that street clowning is conditionally tolerated but rarely legitimized. While performers frame their work as creative labor and economic survival, authorities and road users often associate it with disorder and informality. These conflicting norms reflect broader tensions between regulation, morality, creativity, and urban modernity. The study contributes to urban sociology by advancing a relational understanding of stigma and norm production in secondary cities of the Global South.
The air terminal has long been considered neither capable of awakening the senses nor eliciting wonder as an aesthetic shock to thought. The pathos of wonder as thaumazein thus appears far removed from the air passenger's task mode-driven, functional perception. However, modern international airports appropriate wonder and exploit its psychotropic potential by incorporating and integrating visual media art, which alters their spatial and symbolic experience. I will zero in on Changi Airport in Singapore and the Jewel-a nature-inspired, entertainment and retail complex, integrated into the airspace, with a view to exploring select art installations and their role in the airport's visual transmutation into a wonder space. Mobilizing Deleuze's concept of the Baroque to account for the political-aesthetic implications of wonder, I will reconsider the aesthetic limits of visual contemplation in the airport space, thus accounting for the emergence of a novel spatial ecology.
This study examines the phenomenon of informal urbanization in the municipalities of Soacha (Colombia) and Monterrey (M & eacute;xico) through a comparative methodological approach, building on Dovey's morphogenic logic and field data, which enable the analysis of the spatial and morphological dynamics structuring informal settlements. The study also examines the provision of basic services and housing materiality, underscoring the challenges posed by insufficient infrastructure and precarious materials. Through a comparative approach, the research seeks to characterize the growth patterns and challenges associated with informal urbanization in these areas, highlighting both the similarities and contextual particularities of each case. The findings suggest that while informality is driven by similar socioeconomic factors, the geographic and political contexts of Soacha and Monterrey shape distinct urban forms and challenges. Through a situated approach, our work foregrounds the importance of supplementing morphogenetic approaches with outreach to community and territories, to deepen the understanding of informal urbanization that resists dichotomic approaches and recognizes its different gradients.
In the shared production of cultural memory, border town Laredo has been constructed as an exotic wild space, a heterotopia or even a dystopia, where the Native Americans, Spanish, Mexicans, Tejanos, and the Anglos collided to subjugate the frontier. This paper analyzes the popular perception of Laredo in the cultural landscape. The projections of borders through country songs and TV serials are uncovered as a layered process-the erasure of history and community, the projection of chaos, and the balancing of paradoxes in the imagined no man's land.
