A TWO-DAY WORKSHOP
ON
Contested spaces in the city: spatial approaches to culture
    23-24 March 2007

 Space has recently become an analytic concept fundamental for the understanding of social relations. Human action and imagination not only become materialised in space but also are themselves constituted through it.

In this sense, cities are not only conceived as a stage for human action; nor as a result of economic imperatives and the official policies of managing and constructing space. Rather, they are conceived as socially constructed spaces, as spaces where everyday experience and collective memory are inextricably linked with the constitution of individual and collective identities, as spaces of representation and imagination, and as fields of power strategies and resistance. The seminar aims at throwing light on the spatial constitution of individual and collective identities, with special focus on 'contested spaces' in the cities of modernity and postmodernity.

By the term 'contested spaces', we refer to any geographical area within a city (buildings, neighbourhoods, monuments, parks, etc), or even to the city itself as a whole, around which social and cultural conflicts occur aiming at controlling the area, use, manage and appropriate it.

By attributing meaning to space, those involved intent to negotiate their position on the basis of a mutual relation between narrative and action. The social-spatial practices relating to the way space is performed depend on the political, ideological, social and economic context. The meanings attributed to 'contested spaces' create imaginary boundaries which are reproduced through social relations of power and exclusion. 'Contested spaces' acquire a material form and are transformed to places in which the negotiation of dominant cultural issues finds material expression. The relation between space and social identities has a dynamic and unstable character because it is socially and historically determined. This is the reason why geographical areas of the city become fields of conflict where meanings are contested and negotiated. And as the spaces of the city acquire socially determined uses and meanings, social groups co-exist in conditions of delicate balance or in open confrontation, and are often involved in the everyday negotiation of meaning.

Understanding 'contested spaces' presupposes, on the one hand, an emphasis on the socially determined character of hegemonic narratives concerning space, on the mechanisms that support them, the groups favoured by them and the spaces that make them appear natural, and on the other, a closer study of the narratives and the spatial practices of dominated groups which resist regular uses and meanings of space by trying to attribute to it different meanings.

 The organising committee