We are seeking original chapters for an edited volume Protests Beyond Plaza: Strategies, Urban Morphologies and Everyday Spaces (ed. Kateryna Malaia and Nathan Hutson) to be published with Routledge in 2025. This volume investigates the ways in which everyday spaces outside of signature plazas and journalistic gaze facilitate or impede protests.
We are seeking original chapters for an edited volume Protests Beyond Plaza: Strategies, Urban Morphologies and Everyday Spaces (ed. Kateryna Malaia and Nathan Hutson) to be published with Routledge in 2025.
How do we read the history of an urban protest on an architectural scale? How do architectural and urban morphology shape the causes, development, and ultimate outcome of urban protests? In a century defined by increased spread of visual information, how do we understand the role of the built landscape channeling expressions of public political will?
Despite global digitalization, tactile urban protest remains the most effective grassroots instrument to institute change, address societal discontent, and restrict abuses of institutional power in democracies and autocracies alike. Twenty-first century public protests bolster their efficacy and visibility through social media (Gerbaudo 2012, Elshahed 2011, Howard and Parks 2012, Bohdanova 2014, Price 2002), yet while urban protests have been meticulously examined from a standpoint of the signature public spaces, the relationship between protests and quotidian built environment and everyday architecture is understudied.
International media fixate on protests in plazas, near signature buildings or iconic boulevards. They frequently bear the names of these iconic places, such as the cases of Tiananmen, Taksim, and Maidan Nezalezhnosti Square protests. However, such labels and images only show the apex of what shapes the character and potential success of a protest. Beneath the flashy images of crowds at major plazas there are networks of residential streets, courtyards, apartment blocks, temples, markets, transportation and logistics routes, and pathways which are essential to sustain a protest’s momentum. During public protests, escape routes, food supply, medical aid, and the avoidance of police are all mediated by the everyday built environment. Absent spatial knowledge and the horizontal networks created in each particular city fabric with its peculiar architectural morphologies, protests become logistically impossible. This volume contains investigations of interrelationship between urban insurgencies and architecture at the building, street, and neighborhood scale.
The goal of this volume is to feature diverse geographies and movements. To date, we have secured contributions on protests in Hong Kong, Ukraine, South Korea, Lebanon, Iran, Belarus, and Colombia. We are therefore particularly interested in contributions on regions that are not yet featured in this volume’s geographic spread: North America, Africa, and Western Europe.
Please, submit 600 words abstracts explaining the protest and the built context your contribution is investigating. Abstracts should cover research methodology and be followed by a brief bibliography (10-20 entries) and a resume or a link to your website. Please submit your abstracts to co-editors Kateryna Malaia (kate.malaia@utah.edu) and Nathan Hutson (Nathan.Hutson@unt.edu) by July 31st, 2024.
