Emergent Spaces Change and Innovation in Small Urban Spaces

This book explores different emergent spaces where diverse urbanites spontaneously negotiate, make and remake urban spaces, create opportunities, produce social change, challenge urban life, culture, and politics, or simply ask for their right to the city. The focus of this book is on spaces and contexts where change is seeded, regardless of whether it was planned and whether it was or will be successful in the end. Contributors analyze the seeds of change at their very inception in diverse cultural contexts across four continents. How do small groups of ordinary and often also disenfranchised people design, suggest and implement ideas of change? How do they use and remake small urban spaces to better suit their purposes, voice claims to the city, create opportunities, and design better urban lives and futures? The emphasis of this volume is not on the nature of activities and change, but on the minute processes of initiating change.   

Introduction.- I. MIGRANTS, PLACE-MAKING, AND CLAIMS TO THE CITY.- Chapter 1. Peripheral Citizenship: Immigration and City-Making in Santiago, Chile.- Chapter 2. Spaces of Social Reproduction and Emergent Change in Small Town America.- Chapter 3. Practice, Perception, and the Plaza: Situating Migration in Santiago, Chile.- Chapter 4. The Free Trade Zone and the Ethnic Restaurant: South Asian Emergent Space in a Chilean City of Labor Migrants.- II. RELIGION, URBAN INNOVATION, AND URBAN SPIRITUAL GEOGRPAHIES.- Chapter 5. “God Loves Taxi Drivers”: Christian Publics and Emergent Spaces in Shanghai, China.- Chapter 6. The Good Tree Institute (GTI): Muslim Self-Making and Place-Making in Metropolitan Phoenix.- Chapter 7. Building Community Centers in Living Rooms: Piety Movements, Domestic Space, and Women in Islamabad, Pakistan.- III. POPULAR CULTURE, LIFESTYLES, SOCIAL ACTIVISM, AND INFRASTRUCTURES.- Chapter 8. $5 Gets you Soup, Bread and a Vote: Microgranting Dinners for Transforming Detroit.- Chapter 9. Belonging through Bohemia: Maintaining Queer Space and Possibility in Teresina, Brazil.- Chapter 10. Sustainability, Green Businesses and Alternative Economies in Stuttgart, Germany.- Chapter 11. "Punk rock DIY belly feeding”: ephemerality in authentic space-making in Barcelona and Vancouver.- Chapter 12. You Can’t Fight City Hall? Philadelphia’s Advocates for the Homeless and Community Activists Engage in the Battle of Love Park.- Chapter 13. Never-ending Beginnings: Spaces of Infrastructural Labor in Cape Town’s Informal Settlements.- Conclusion.

Petra Kuppinger is Professor of Anthropology at Monmouth College, USA. She has conducted research on topics of space, globalization, and consumerism in Cairo, Egypt, and issues of space, culture, and Islam in Stuttgart, Germany. More recently she has been working on topics of urban transformations and sustainability. She is the author of Faithfully Urban: Pious Muslims in a German City (Berghahn, 2015) and, together with George Gmelch, she is the co-editor of Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City (6^th ed., Waveland, 2018).