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City, Public Space, and Body offers a timely and interdisciplinary examination of how bodies experience, shape, and are shaped by urban life, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bringing together contributions from scholars, artists, and practitioners across diverse geographies, the book explores the entangled relationships between urban space, embodiment, and publicness through a variety of methodological lenses including ethnography, visual and performative arts, and critical urban theory. The book highlights underexplored themes such as gendered vulnerability, spatial justice, post-pandemic public space, and marginalized urban bodies in both Global North and Global South contexts. By focusing on lived experience and embodied methodologies, the book challenges dominant urban narratives and contributes fresh perspectives on space, care, power, and resistance. It will benefit readers seeking to rethink cities not merely as physical or functional entities, but as affective and contested terrains of social life.
Designed for researchers, students, and professionals in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, gender studies, and cultural geography, this collection foregrounds the bodily and sensory dimensions of urban encounters, spatial politics, and everyday life.
List of contents
List of figuresList of contributorsIntroduction
Mahsa Alami Fariman, Chien Lee, Ahmadreza Hakiminejad, Asma MehanSECTION I: GOVERNING BODIESChapter 1: Infrastructural Spaces: The (Anti)Public Space Manifesto
Asma Mehan, Krzysztof Nawratek, Ahmadreza HakiminejadChapter 2: Public Bodies: Toward a Spatialized Understanding of Canadian Sex Work Legislation
Alexandra Pereira-EdwardsChapter 3: Dangerous/Endangered Youth: The Governmentality of Nightlife in the Pandemic City
Fabio Bertoni Chapter 4: (In)Visible Bodies: The Urban Life of Drug Users in Tehran's Harandi Neighbourhood
Mahsa Alami Fariman Chapter 5: Reimagining Proximity: Art Museums, Embodied Distance, and Aesthetic Experience in the Pandemic Era
Chien LeeSECTION II: PERFORMING SPACEChapter 6: Feminist Performative Architectures: Making Space in and with Public Space
Helen StratfordChapter 7:
Urban Bodies and Human Spaces: Questioning the Possibilities of Re-Signifying Neighbourhood Places through Performing Arts in Florence
Gloria CalderoneChapter 8: Dancing Alone(s): Participatory Hierarchies of a Popular Culture Festival in a Global City
Laura Lamas-Abraira, Alba Colombo, Xavier Villanueva CapellaChapter 9: (Un)Monuments of the Everyday: The Body of/at Work
Elena CologniChapter 10: Essayistic Film Fragments: Instruments to Access the Performativity of Urban Space
Riccarda Cappeller SECTION III: MAPPING URBAN LIFEChapter 11: Using Cartography to Study Mediations of Immigrants: Cases in London and São Paulo
Viviane RiegelChapter 12: Mapping the Urban Unconscious: Towards a Hybrid Application of Deep Mapping and Sentiment Analysis
Guilherme Giolo, Yorgos Paschos Chapter 13: DJing as Worldizing: Sonic, Social, and Discursive Layers in the Urban Soundscape
Jake WilliamsChapter 14: Sensitive Tool with Gender Perspective of Vulnerable Landscapes: The Importance of Experience in Urban Landscape Planning and Modification - A Case Study of Alto Hospicio, Chile
Constanza Andrea Contreras SaffieIndex
About the author
Mahsa Alami Fariman is an urban researcher and educator with a background in architectural and urban studies. She is Lecturer in Just Urbanism, Societal Diversity, and Citizenship at the Bartlett University College London. Mahsa holds a PhD in Urban Sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research explores the open city, politics of space, the production of everyday urban life in the Middle East, and feminist urbanism.
Chien Lee is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Previously, they held an assistant professorship at National Tsing Hua University. They are also a co-founder and researcher at Gallery Unfold in Kyoto. Lee's work, rooted in the sociology of art, explores art museums, the experience of arts, photographic mediation, and sensory ethnography. Their professional experience includes serving as a commissioned researcher for
Theory, Culture & Society and a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Ahmadreza Hakiminejad is a researcher and academic with a background in architectural, urban, and planning studies. He is Lecturer in Architecture based in the Leeds School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University. Ahmadreza's research intersects critical urban studies, politics of space, architectural history and theory, and urban sociology.
Asma Mehan is Assistant Professor and Director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab) at Texas Tech University. She is the author of The Affective Agency of Public Space: Social Inclusion and Community Cohesion (2024) and has contributed to over 50 peer-reviewed publications. Her research spans adaptive reuse, cultural heritage, urban resilience, and placemaking, bridging academia and practice to address contemporary urban challenges.
