"The City is Ours!": A Discussion About How Everyday People Adapt and Appropriate Urban Space

​This discussion will explore the radical uses and misuses of urban space: how everyday people and bottom-up cultures adapt the city to meet their un-accommodated needs and wants. Focusing on London in particular, we will discuss how alternative, marginalized and everyday people carve out lives for themselves in a city designed to primarily meet the needs of the wealthy, their businesses, and the bureaucratic systems that serve their interests. From DIY housing to renegade parties to guerrilla gardening, we will explore how immanent spatial practices are one of the most salient facts about urban life in the twenty-first century.

Immanent Urbanism(s) is a lecture and discussion series about how everyday people, experimental cultures, and other emerging and bottom-up forces can remake cities to make them more habitable and humane in the twenty-first century. The series will seek to explore how and why the formalized planning process often fails to serve the dynamic and diverse social and cultural needs of everyday people, and how bottom-up practices such as “tactical urbanism,” guerrilla gardening, DIY building, street art, street parties, and informal settlement are constantly adapting and reshaping the built environment according to interests that have little or no political representation. We will also explore how these “immanent” practices are increasingly recognized, adapted, and even co-opted by state and market forces seeking new cultural capital to fuel vitality and increase property values. Recognizing that the shifts and crises of the twenty-first century call for new ways of living, using and sharing resources, and co-existing between different cultures, we will also explore the role that immanent spatial practices can play in adapting existing cities to new social, economic, environmental and cultural realities. What forms do these counter-urbanisms take today? How do they evolve, resist, or merge with dominant structures? And what are the real possibilities today for living our own urban lives differently? Join us as we examine this ongoing struggle over the authorship and meaning of the contemporary city.

​This event is followed by an Electronic Music Open Mic (EMOM) from 9pm till 11pm.

​15 min slots available, booked on a first come first served basis.