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This paper considers how and to what ends commoning practices can take shape in direct response to the spectres and/or realities of eroding resources (we focus especially on public resources) within iterations of what we term "salvage commoning". We show how, in such contexts, commoning practices may potentially alleviate but also potentially (re)produce inequities, exclusions, and resource retractions. To illustrate, we draw upon two examples: parent‐teacher organisations in Washington, DC, and block associations in New York City. In both instances, people have cooperatively built new relations, coordinated voluntary labour, and stewarded resources in connection with specific commons (public schools and urban spaces) threatened by disinvestment and crisis. We show how troubling alignments and exclusions can emerge under these conditions, suggesting critical questions about the starkly mixed potential of salvage commoning—especially in the face of ongoing and emerging crises in which such orientations are likely to become increasingly prevalent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The investigation of linguistic landscapes (LL) among the Arab community in downtown Brooklyn, New York City, is an underserved public space in the literature. This research focused on social and commercial or 'bottom-up signs' in LL to understand their purpose, origin and target audience. Drawing upon discourse analysis, the study was conceptualized according to the principles of border theory and geosemiotics. The latter was used to analyze the data, which consisted of random photographs of shopfronts in Brooklyn taken with a digital camera during the summer of 2016. The three semiotic aggregates used for analysis consisted of interaction order, visual and place semiotics. The data analysis showed the multi-layered nature of LL in this urban community and the subjectiveness of spatial borders through a combination of text and symbolic imagery. The paper highlights the importance of commercial signs in the LL among ethnic minority communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the concept of "green resilience" – the mobilization of gardens and urban green spaces for enhancing the resilience of communities and cities in the face of increasing uncertainty and risk. Drawing inspiration from seminal work in human-plant geographies, it explores the governmental functions and political implications of green resilience, arguing that these spaces serve as key forms of state rule and biopolitical power. The study employs the notion of green resilience as a "composition," emphasizing the assembling of diverse human and nonhuman actors in resilience projects. The developed compositional ontology highlights the importance of aesthetic and visual practices in green resilience projects and reveals how these are continuously decomposed and recomposed by the involved actors. The paper develops its arguments through a "paradigmatic case study" of various green resilience projects in New York City – including survivor trees, memorial groves, and community gardens. The study illuminates the multiplicity of green resilience initiatives and the underlying governmental logic by comparing these projects. Through its analysis, the paper contributes to the literature on resilience as an emerging governance paradigm. It reveals how green resilience projects embody a multiplicity of practices, uncovers the first comprehensive comparative analysis of various forms of green resilience, and offers a critique of resilience from within. The study concludes by identifying three tensions or contradictions of (green) resilience as a form of biopolitical government: visibility and invisibility, knowledge and ignorance, and control and emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privately owned public space (POPS) are a new type of public space that was first introduced in New York City in the 1960s. POPS have been thoroughly studied in the Anglo-American world; however, little examination has been conducted in welfare states. This paper examines to what extent this type of space is relevant and needed for German cities where the private sector involvement is limited. Survey findings, document analysis, and in-depth interviews indicate that private stakeholders are important partners in the provision of public spaces, and co-produced public spaces like POPS are already part of the urban reality in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban waterfronts are experiencing a renaissance, as it is estimated that by 2030 more than 60 percent of the world's population will live in cities, the majority of which are located in coastal or riparian regions. On a global level, changing public demands have spurred a new language of sustainability, revitalisation, and resilience with regard to urban waterfronts. Prior research has explored the potential ecological and social impacts of these trends, both in terms of benefits such as opportunities for recreation, as well as negative consequences such as increasing gentrification. Less explored, however, are how these planning and development processes can alternately support and/or interrupt existing "sense of place" that people hold with waterfront spaces, particularly spaces considered to be degraded and/or that are located in marginalised communities. This paper explores place-making, place-disruption and place protection associated with Coney Island Creek, a heavily polluted waterbody in New York City. We find that the creek provides recreation, sustenance, and social connections for substantial numbers of people, and we discuss these findings in the context of proposed resiliency planning and development projects that are perceived by some local stewards to threaten existing place attachments and meanings. In particular, we emphasise the importance of incorporating local knowledge and values in waterfront planning, especially in neighbourhoods that have been historically marginalised. This study contributes to a growing literature on values associated with urban blue spaces, thus furthering knowledge of how to improve current environmental governance strategies in coastal cities around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1956 Lincoln Center became the centrepiece of a large urban renewal project in New York City. In its original design, this cultural complex resembled a fortress, being disconnected from the surrounding neighbourhood and offering people few reasons to spend time in its spacious outdoor public space. In the 2000s, its site plan was changed, making it a more inviting place. This paper presents the history of Lincoln Center and reveals similarities with the design trajectories of five other cultural or governmental complexes in the U.S. Information is taken from archival sources, interviews with administrators from Lincoln Center, and observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper turns to interdisciplinary museum and ruin studies with the objective to think about space, politics and the political. Situated in a post-foundational understanding of political difference, which roughly distinguishes between 'politics' as the realm of standardized, normalized positions and procedures of power, and 'the political' as the irreducible antagonistic dimension of political life, we explore the mutual interpenetrations as well as political divergences between ruins and museums. For this purpose, we consider 'museumification' as a socio-spatial process that tends to inscribe an order of 'politics', whereas we view 'ruination' as a potentiality to create socio-material voids, which may (re)activate moments of 'the political'. In this framework, the museum signifies an attempt to conserve, exhibit and transmit selected narratives of the past, potentially evoking a topographical notion of space, whereas the ruin dislocates, ambiguates and dismantles orders of the past, possibly leading to a topological understanding of space. After revisiting accounts of the museumification of ruins, we argue that the latter can be understood as a process which disambiguates, commodifies and thus depoliticizes ruins as polyvalent matters. We introduce the 'ruination of museums' as a material, discursive and affective process, bringing attention to the interrelated and conflicting modes of absence and presence in time and space. In 'ruined museums', museums and ruins coalesce into spatio-temporal tropes that attend to complex and complicated narratives of time, space and history. In 'ruined museums', the ossified politics of place(s) become mobilized via 'the political'. To illustrate this conceptual proposition of the 'ruined museum', we engage with the 9/11 memorial museum Reflecting Absence in New York City. Through this empirical case, we hope to advance a postfoundational understanding of space that acknowledges (urban) public places as inhabited and politicized by the agency, materiality and spatiality of ghostly presences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs a narrative timeline of the events that occurred during spring semester 2020 as the disruption and uncertainty unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic made it imperative for an academic library at a public college in Jamaica, Queens transition their in-person service model to remote learning while simultaneously navigate being designated as 'essential' personnel. Fortunately, this college is a member of a municipal university system and as such did not face these challenges alone. During this semester, New York City went from zero confirmed cases to being the epicenter of the country with the largest outbreak on the planet. The virus placed this public university in a dilemma; how to continue providing the services and physical spaces their students relied upon while at the same time ensuring a safe environment for the academic community as a whole. The efforts of these librarians, and the requisite leadership from state, municipal, university, and college administration, have to be placed within the prevailing context of insufficient coordination and communication provided by the Federal government and the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC). The dialogue which took place within the university was necessary, and ultimately, successful in determining a remote-learning model would be consistently applied to classrooms and libraries across CUNY. With this case study we contend membership in a consortium unique to such institutions as the City University of New York (CUNY) was essential for maintaining both relevant services and safety at the level of the individual campus. We present this case study as an opportunity for reflective assessment of what resources were in place, as well as those that were needed, in service of a highly impacted population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics often mourn a loss of publicness in cities due to the increased presence of antiterror security zones and related behavioral and access controls, although recent work suggests that security landscapes have shifted from the hard, intense, militarized architecture of the late 1990s-early 2000s to a softer, less obtrusive approach more commonly seen today. Nonetheless, these studies are mostly anecdotal in nature: few studies attempt to back these claims with empirical evidence and even fewer connect this physical security imposition with the policies and plans governing its implementation and operation. In this paper I describe results of site visits to Civic Centers and Financial Districts in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In each neighborhood I catalog security landscapes using a simple tool to assess the intensity, duration, and location of individual security zones. I find that the security landscape covers between 3.4% and 35.7% of publicly accessible space in the districts studied, and that this landscape is most prevalent and intense in New York City. I also find that security zones governed by multistakeholder networks are more intense and militarized than zones managed by a single entity. By understanding how the policies impact physical security, albeit in a relatively small sample of cities and districts, we can better predict what the future of urban security measures might hold. This paper provides empirical grounding to more common theoretical speculations regarding the future of the urban security landscape in the global West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across a diverse range of urban geographical contexts, the provision and governance of public spaces frequently generates conflicts of varying intensity involving urban inhabitants and urban authorities. A clear moral and philosophically based argument and evaluative framework is necessary for both critiquing and informing the positions that are taken in public space disputes. In this paper, we develop a model of socially just public space that could inform analysis of, and interventions in, these conflicts. In dialogue with the literatures on urban public space and on social and spatial justice, we offer five propositions about what makes for more just public space. The five propositions concern distributive justice, recognition, interactional justice and encounter, care and repair, and procedural justice. The application of these five propositions is exemplified through brief reflections on the politics of the street in New York City, and ‘broken windows’ style policing of graffiti. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair as a conflicted site of public-sphere formation, and the repercussions of these conflicts on organized labor in New York. Conceived within the liberal administration of Mayor La Guardia and dedicated to the principles of social cooperation, this “closed-shop exposition” granted American Federation of Labor (AFL) trade unions an unprecedented degree of workplace benefits and rhetorical support by the Fair administration. This was undermined, however, by the trade unions’ limited public activities within the fair itself and their refusal of city offers to establish outreach and educational programs through events, rallies, and pavilions. As a result, the public space and discourse of a fair nominally devoted to social interdependence was appropriated by a variety of other interests, particularly those of corporate America. This marginalization would ultimately contribute to delegitimization, as allegations of graft and racketeering by visitors, exhibitors, and the national media framed labor as a direct threat to the “World of Tomorrow” and its visitors. Millions of Americans found their visits marred by exorbitantly inflated prices, delayed by strikes, and disappointed by cancelled exhibits. In the face of outside pressure, and with labor groups unable to address hostile critiques within the fair itself, the exposition administration withdrew its public support for unions while dramatically restricting their workplace rights. In this way, the “business-union” principles of the AFL not only undermined their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, despite the efforts of liberal municipal officials to promote them, but ultimately served to undo those very workplace gains such principles were meant to secure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes an urban space that functions, it is argued, as the commons in the neoliberal city. The space of community gardens in New York City is 'unpacked' according to three Lefebvrian moments of space: the material space, representations of space, and the lived space. Engaging alternative conceptualizations of social relations in the urban space, it complicates and explicates the notion of the commons and its actually existing manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically explores the management of privately owned public space. It examines 163 spaces produced through New York City's incentive zoning programme, whereby developers provide and manage a public space in exchange for floor area ratio (FAR) bonuses. Developers of these bonus spaces employ a variety of management approaches, each correlating with common theories of spatial control in publicly owned spaces. However, as developer priorities are often fiscally driven, most approaches severely limit political, social and democratic functions of public space and produce a constricted definition of the public. As such, privately owned public spaces have deleterious effects on concepts of citizenship and representation, even as they become the new models for urban space provision and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how the landscape of a public place in a New York City park embodies larger external structures within which sexual subjects actively organize local sexual culture. Controlling the configuration and utilization of such space is a technique of power used by the state apparatus. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork, we describe how the sexual culture situated within this public space is produced and reproduced in the micro-social practices of sexual subjects in the face of structural constraints. The social reorganization of sexuality occurs when subjects creatively refashion their local sexual culture through subtle alterations in the way they practice it. Such practical alterations occur in dialogue with larger structures. Ultimately, this analysis of sexual space in San José Park provides for an examination of the deployment of power and local sexual culture as the nexus of structure and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]