Contesting Public Spaces Social Lives of Urban Redevelopment in London

This book explores concerns for spatial justice as streets, squares, and neighbourhoods are continuously made and remade through planning processes, political ambitions and everyday activities. By investigating three sites in London that have been the focus of masterplanning, Ed Wall exposes conflicts between planning offices and private developers who direct large urban change and community groups, market traders and residents whose public lives are inseparable from their neighbourhoods being reconfigured. The book uniquely brings sociological approaches to what are often considered architectural concerns, revealing challenges as London's public spaces are designed, regulated and lived. Through in-depth research, Ed Wall identifies how uncertainty caused by large-scale urban strategies, the realisation of visual priorities, and uneven relations between private interests, public organisations and daily lives determine the public realm of global cities. This work is intended for readers interested in how the urban spaces of their cities are continually produced in competing ways—from architecture and urban studies scholars to planners and politicians.

Introduction: Contesting public spaces, 1. Social and spatial relations, 2. Making and taking, 3. Place as property, 4. Ornaments and images, 5. Approaches to public space, Conclusions, Epilogue: Three propositions

Ed Wall is Academic Lead of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism and co-director of the Advanced Urban (AU) research group at the University of Greenwich, London. He is a visiting professor at Politecnico di Milano, and in 2017, was City of Vienna Visiting Professor: Urban culture, public space and the future–urban equity and the global agenda (SKuOR/TU Wien). His research and design work explores practices of public space and processes of landscapes through concerns for spatial justice.