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The paper is focused on Bastogi, a housing complex which started as temporary housing for university students and travellers but that become a permanent reality for many individuals experiencing severe housing deprivation. It is highlighted the looping effect, in referring to how classifications such as “squatter” and “people in housing emergency” shape individuals’ perceptions of themselves, or how they can also perpetuate the victim-blaming ideology. The temporary housing assistance policies in Rome have chronicled housing precariousness for a significant portion of the urban population, and a place like Bastogi is a product of these urban policies. Like a heterotopia of marginality, Bastogi is a ‘counter-space’, whose existence denounces the segregating logics that created it. The paper also describes the constant struggle of some people in housing crisis to distance themselves from the imposed labels, and how they navigate this social, moral, and political distance from institutions and the rest of the city.

The territory of Lima, Peru, is the result of thousands of years of history of prehispanic cultures. A strategic management of ecological and social resources disrupted by colonization and modernity. Nowadays, the South American metropolis struggles with inefficient public policy enforcement to manage its territory, and close to 256 archaeological sites (called by the quechua word huacas) are located in peri-urban areas of the valleys, most of them neglected by local governments, lacking a proper assessment of their significance, and characterization of their context. The landscape of the southeastern side of San Juan de Lurigancho is a testimony of the past relationship between the agricultural economy of the lower Rimac Valley; and hunting-gathering activities and ranching in the surrounding mountains of the present peri-urban interface of Lima. Here, the participation of grassroots organizations, in the conservation of ancient monuments and their landscape, has been crucial for over a decade. The objective of this paper is to trace a biography of the landscape in the south east of San Juan de Lurigancho, and to highlight the role of community involvement in its present conservation. The results show the need to include this type of community action into urban planning and to empower grassroots organizations, to bridge the gap between current policy making and its implementation in the conservation of prehispanic landscapes in urban interstices.

The paper investigates the relationship between liminal, interstitial spaces with displacement and makeshift inhabitation from people on the move across the outskirts of Paris’ municipality. By providing the example of the camps settled along the interstices of the Boulevard Phériphérique, we aim to shed light on the paradoxically relational nature of voids and liminalities, testified by the multifaceted urban fragments that they generate, as well as the resistive strategies employed by marginalised populations to navigate the exclusive mechanisms of neoliberal power and negligence. The case of Delphine Seyrig serves to highlight the tensions that emerge from a space in which dynamics of exclusion and inclusion converge, where resistance and vulnerability, “us and them”, coexist, yet are made visibly distant. By framing the interstitial opacity that characterizes both the materiality of liminal lands and the condition of the migrant, we have called them “spaces of holding”, where people on the move’s inhabitation remains a perpetual negotiation of suspended existence. Based on participant observation in Greater Paris between September 2021 and August 2022, we draw on interstices’ ambivalent nature of in-between, no-longer-there-but-not-there-yet empty spaces that allow the ongoing reproducibility of a variety of forms, functions, and identities. Despite taking a distance from considering such spaces as “solutions” or countermeasures of reception, we look at these fragments as topographical constructs for scrutinizing spatial tensions and conceptual proposals and building a renewed politics of visibility in architecture and urban planning.

Macro-paintings have become a popular tool used by various actors to uplift marginalized communities in cities of the global South by transforming their physical environments. These actors operate under the assumption that improving the material conditions of these communities will lead to their overall transformation. As a result, communities serve as a focal point in this process, upon which macro-paintings are intended to have a significant impact. In this brief paper, we aim to illuminate the phenomenon of macro-painting by considering them within and beyond the context of a single community. In doing so, we shift our focus away from the traditional interpretations of paintings and instead emphasize their capacity to redefine socio-material boundaries on various scales within the city. Drawing on interviews with artists and actors from different Latin American countries, we analyze the boundaries across different scales of macro-paintings—individual houses, neighborhoods/districts, and the city. Our argument centers on the idea that macro-paintings create a unique ecology, influencing meanings, material aspects, and lives throughout the entire city. This perspective holds broader significance for urban studies, highlighting that seemingly invisible, ostensibly uniform urban surfaces are not passive but exert wider spatial effects. Consequently, scholars must acknowledge and investigate these outcomes.

We bottle it, we flush it, we drink it, we defecate in it, we swim in it. We pay to have it delivered and pay to have it taken away. We can’t live without it but can’t abide it when we’ve used it. We demand our potable water to be pathologically pure, yet routinely douse it in chemicals marked as poisons. Our current relationship with water is complex, irrational, historically specific, ideologically shaped; a complex hydro-social configuration that defies logic. As a result, the potable water resources which continue to underpin political economies relationally bind together public and private domains. Water use is personal and political; material, corporeal, cultural, social and spiritual interconnections which shape ourselves as humans and our relations with others and our environments. Understanding how these tropes of hydro-social relationships remake themselves reveals the power dynamics which shape the control of capital. This paper explores one element of this relationship through exploring the monetisation of the concept of waste prevention within current neoliberal practices of water provision. Within the English water sector water efficiency initiatives are heralded as an essential component of demand lead water security. Those water companies within water stressed regions are required to promote water efficiency technologies and practises; including consumer mindfulness of water use. However, water bills are mostly disaggregated from consumption; instead they are predicated on how much the water companies invest and whether this capital is raised through equity or debt over a five year cycle. Water users are therefore asked to prevent water wastage on environmental justice grounds, but with no tangible monetary savings for them and significant investment in infrastructure networks. The water companies benefit by less resource ‘output’ coupled with an enhanced ‘corporate social responsibility’ profile; especially vital as the domestic UK water market opens to competition. This paper explores how the financialisation of the water sector consequentially distorts human-nature relationships even further, with ‘water efficiency’ as a synecdoche for continued profiteering.

We open this paper by reviewing the care paradigm in urban action and the centrality of the concept of interdependence to this work. We then move on to consider our approach to mapping caring— with practices in urban community-led initiatives. The work presented comes from a British Academy supported project, Caring—With Cities: Enacting more care-full urban approaches with community- led developments and policy-makers.1 We use caring—with, rather than —about or —for, to move beyond understandings of care as a provision from institutions to individuals, or from individual to individual, which positions the cared-for as passive recipients. Here, we illustrate how case studies on urban practices can unravel interdependencies of care by attending to long-term engagements, taking place across sites and scales – rather than being viewed as ‘bounded’ examples. We close with a set of thoughts on our mapping protocol in practice and speculate on future directions that re-situate critical urban action within wider relationalities and power dynamics.

South Africa has a tense relationship with migrants. It is attractive because of its status as an African financial powerhouse and the ‘Rainbow Nation’ image it has projected to the world. It is the land of opportunity where extensive constitutional protections are believed to be able to provide tangible forms of safety. Yet, migrants are regularly accused of a variety of social ills and in recent years have been on the receiving end of several mass scale xenophobic attacks. South Africa is also unique on the African continent in relation to refugee regimes in that it is the only country that recognises and constitutionally protects transgender refugees/asylum seekers. In light of this in recent years it has seen a marked rise in the emergence of transgender migrants within the country. The refugee system though is plagued with issues of corruption and many migrants choose rather to exist in a zone of illegality, outside the system. Drawing on research carried out in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2014 this paper focuses on two such cases that of Trisha and Musa - undocumented transgender migrant sex workers. Being undocumented and practicing a trade that is illegal in South Africa - sex work - leaves Trisha and Musa particularly vulnerable to arrest and deportation. Yet, Trisha and Musa are among several transgender migrants that have been arrested and sent to South Africa’s lone deportation facility - Lindela - only to be released. This paper considers what citizenship, rights and the socio-spatial borders of belonging might mean when transgender migrants come to understand themselves as immune to deportation.

Coffee is an urban liquid. At the American drive thru, coffee is an urbanized liquid that generates a flowing vehicular queue of individual desire, private space, and quasi-public engagement through the otherwise sterile car window. In this coffeescape, the drive thru represents a site of law in which people in cars construct and implement a practice of legality found in rules, order and placement. Obeying the queue is the first rule. Waiting is the second. Communication and payment are the third. All for a hot cup of coffee. But as 78 year-old Stella Liebeck of the infamous 'hot coffee' case reminds us, the coffee can be too hot. With Stella in mind, this paper will examine the coffeescape of the American drive thru as a liquid lawscape in which the queue, wait time, and expected linear traffic pattern-making represents law and order in a vehicular everyday.

Debates on urban sprawl remain strongly focused on the built-up space as main object of study. Nevertheless, undeveloped lands and open tracts are relevant for understanding land fragmentation, suburbanisation and transformation of fringe/belt areas of city-regions (Galster et al. 2001; Northam, 1971). They describe a large geography of interstices that have not been acknowledged in the planning literature. Planning policies regard them as just gaps in the urban fabric – somehow negative or inert – or as abandoned spaces that should eventually be urbanised. In this paper, I introduce a framework for understanding urban sprawl from its non-urban elements – the interstices – starting from a critical revision of current approaches used to describe these spaces in cities. I discuss interstices and their implications based on the case of Santiago de Chile. It reinforces the idea that urban sprawl is equally composed of built-up areas and interstices that play and active role in transformation of city-regions.

Athens has both famous and infamous identities. A city immersed in history surrounded by an"ugly"contemporary urban environment. A city which people love to ‘hate’ exactly due to this dense urban environment and fast pace, but which at the same time is celebrated for its lively everyday (and night) life and creativity. In this paper we focus on the so called "historical and commercial triangle", the city’s downtown in which the historic image of Athens juxtaposes to (coexists with) the most important touristic, leisure and commercial activities.

Have you been there? Have you felt the touch of rusty steel and heard the scrunch of neat gravel paths under your feet? Have you pulled the shiny handles of hyper-insulated glass doors that lead into bright foyers with clean concrete floors and soft leather couches? Do you remember strolling through the wonderful worlds of carefully arranged exhibitions and can you recall the exciting stories an audio-guide whispered into your ears? Have you leafed through the thrilling art books on display in the gift shop? And have you recognized the extraordinary quality of their paper? Exhausted and filled with a mixture of boredom and excitement, have you tasted the cappuccino foam and the exquisite pastries, served on well-designed dishes at the museum café? Have you resonated with the atmosphere of the contemporary art gallery?

The paper discusses the relation between territorial embeddedness and virtual connections among knowledge and creative workers in Milan by challenging the idea that co-presence is crucial for interaction and that face-to-face (F2F) relations are essential for their success. Knowledge and creative workers are thus embedded in a wider "space", that is not necessarily a physical one, but also virtual and ICT mediated.

Explaining the long-term success of collective or community-based natural resource governance is a complex endeavor. There are multiple theories and perspectives from which to draw on, and multiple external and internal forces at work. This paper addresses this question through the lens of common-pool resource (CPR) studies often referred to as the "theory of the commons" combined with insights from political ecology.

In this paper I argue that ‘selective belonging’ (Watt, 2009, 2010) is a useful conceptual lens for understanding how processes of avoiding ‘the other’, especially the poor other, occur in urban and suburban neighbourhoods. Having a sense of belonging to a local residential neighbourhood, a feeling of being at home and part of a community, is a much-debated aspect of city and suburban life that urban sociologists and geographers have investigated and argued over for decades.