"The City is Ours!": A Discussion About How Everyday People Adapt and Appropriate Urban Space

This discussion will explore the radical uses and misuses of urban space: how everyday people and bottom-up cultures adapt the city to meet their un-accommodated needs and wants. Focusing on London in particular, we will discuss how alternative, marginalized and everyday people carve out lives for themselves in a city designed to primarily meet the needs of the wealthy, their businesses, and the bureaucratic systems that serve their interests.

From DIY housing to renegade parties to guerrilla gardening, we will explore how immanent spatial practices are one of the most salient facts about urban life in the twenty-first century.Immanent Urbanism(s) is a lecture and discussion series about how everyday people, experimental cultures, and other emerging and bottom-up forces can remake cities to make them more habitable and humane in the twenty-first century.

The series will seek to explore how and why the formalized planning process often fails to serve the…