Spatialized Injustice in the Contemporary City : Protesting as Public Pedagogy

Abstract

This volume documents research illustrating public dissents and interventions to injustice in modern-day cities. Authors present everyday occurrences of city life and place making; still, they show how the ordinary city grows from historical dimensions of injustice, violence and fear. Yet, ordinary citizens continue to make the city their own, to contribute to the creation of city structures and to contest those practices of spatial demarcation, which limit rather than uplift their everyday social livelihood. Chapters show how marginalized populations, from racial, to gendered, to the working poor, are part of the apparatus that makes the city function. However, their contributions to city arrangement and endurance are perpetually at the margins, and city spaces continue to be designed in ways that ignore and negate the existence of those who protest inequity. Novel to the volume are chapters that document and illustrate contestations of city spaces through artistic representation. Public spaces like schools, art galleries and museums are presented as central to projects of inhabiting, remembering and reimagining (in) the just city. Still, ordinary city spaces, like the public washroom, illustrate issues of gender inequity, spatial bias and other art-based protests. City dwellers interested in learning about ‘the making’ of the city; and those interested in the city as a space of possibilities – and the good life, will benefit from this volume. Scholars of geography, space, art and social justice will marvel and simultaneously be appalled by the everyday minute, yet shocking descriptions of the complexity – and unfairly structured city spaces in which they dwell.