Space and Culture

This article interrogates the Amsterdam Plaskrul (pee curl) not merely as a functional amenity, but as a material archive of ontological sorting. Departing from the critiques of gendered exclusion, this study reads the pee curl as a philosophically generative case study through an infrastructural thick description that interprets design as a material text to argue that the pee curl’s promise of welfare inclusion is undercut by the very conditions of its provision. The analysis proceeds through three layers. First, a spatial analysis reveals how the pee curl’s design prioritizes urban circulation over inhabitation, offering inclusion only by reducing the subject to a unit of biological throughput. Second, an ontological inquiry shows that the removal of privacy strips the user of political subjecthood, re-enacting the colonial distinction between “Human” and “Animal”. Third, an affective analysis examines how the infrastructure functions as a technology of micro-discipline by offering relief while withholding the conditions necessary for dignity. Ultimately, the article contends that the pee curl operates as an infrastructural script that does not simply fail to provide care but successfully stages a hierarchy of being.

Neighborhoods remember in more than just buildings—they recall through stories, rituals, and rhythms that outlast physical change. This research utilizes Jewish oral histories to examine the transformation of Bursa’s historic neighborhood from Yahudilik to Kuruçeşme. Based on five in-depth interviews conducted between 2023 and 2024 with former and current Jewish residents, the study employs content analysis to uncover the neighborhood’s layered identity through the lenses of place identity and collective memory. The transformation is examined across five thematic dimensions: Interwoven Lives, The Street’s Lost Soul, From Functional Decline to New Spatial Configuration, Today’s New Normal, and Memory Places and Collective Memory. The findings demonstrate that oral histories effectively counteract the physical deterioration of the place, fostering a feeling of community amid demographic transitions and transformations. Incorporating informative signage and cultural pathways that embody our memories can illuminate the overlooked aspects of urban history, a method that not only safeguards the physical environment but also honors its intricate social and historical background.

This article examines how low-income families in Hanoi construct and express their identities through housing, revealing the home as a socio-material and moral field where dignity, belonging, and recognition are continually negotiated. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in three neighborhoods—Phuc Tan, Ngoc Ha, and Ngoc Thuy—the study employs semi-structured interviews to explore how residents use material practices such as decoration, repair, and maintenance to perform respectability and sustain family continuity under conditions of economic constraint. The findings demonstrate that, for these households, housing functions as a form of symbolic labor: a means of moral self-presentation, social participation, and intergenerational memory. Theoretically, the article advances debates on home and identity by integrating socio-material and performative perspectives with insights from post-socialist and culturally embedded urban contexts. It argues that housing among Hanoi’s low-income families cannot be reduced to material adequacy or ownership, but instead reflects complex intersections of moral value, cultural practice, and social aspiration. The study concludes that recognizing the symbolic and relational dimensions of home is crucial for developing more inclusive and context-sensitive housing policies in Vietnam’s rapidly transforming cities.

This study interrogates the emancipatory potential of urban experience by examining the actions of city dwellers in Beyoğlu, an inner-city neighborhood of Istanbul, Türkiye. It identifies a range of “space–time niches” produced through everyday urban practices and investigates various emancipatory acts and existential niches, such as schoolgirls chatting and smoking in a secluded corner of an alleyway. Despite Western neoliberal claims of expanding freedom, this study finds that urban spatial experience is increasingly constrained and perceived as intimidating and unwelcoming by city dwellers. By defining urban space as a continuous oscillation between freedom and control, this study introduces the concept “existential emancipation” as a unique experience best realized in urban space through diverse positions and acts of individuals across both space and time. Viewed through this lens, the study provides a new reading of metropolitan urban life.

Grounded in discard studies and space-attentive discourse studies, this article reports a social semiotic analysis of the Throwaway exhibition at the Museum of European History in Brussels, Belgium (2023–2024). Paying particular attention to the exhibition’s compositional and interactive meanings, my analysis documents how waste and waste-making are narrated through a range of different visual-material-spatial resources; for example, diegetic and extra-diegetic framing, informational value and salience; stylistic and aesthetic choices; and tactile, auditory and interactive formats. As a form of public pedagogy, Throwaway encodes a contradictory way of (un)knowing waste whereby its core instructional objective of engagement is unhelpfully undermined by its disengaging design. Methodologically speaking, the article makes the case for reading exhibitions as multimodal, spatial texts rather than over-attending to their obvious representational content.

This article explores the shifting cinematic representation of Afghans in Iranian fiction films from the 1980s to the mid-2020s, focusing on their social, spatial, and gendered positioning. Drawing on geocritical, feminist, and postcolonial frameworks, it conducts qualitative content analysis of 34 key films to trace how portrayals of Afghans evolved in relation to Iranian state policies and societal attitudes toward Afghans in Iran. Early cinematic depictions largely confined Afghans, in this case, all men, to marginal rural or suburban spaces in Iran, portraying them as undocumented laborers with limited agency, while Afghan women were strikingly absent. As national policies moved from a posture of welcome to repatriation and, more recently, partial integration, filmic narratives shifted. Afghans increasingly appeared in films in urban, domestic, and public settings, with more nuanced representations of gender and generational experiences. Since the 2010s, Afghan women have gained visibility in selected Iranian films as complex figures challenging both Iranian and Afghan patriarchal norms. Post-2015 films also explore aspirations and mobility of second- and third-generation Afghans—toward Europe or back to Afghanistan—revealing imaginaries of identity and belonging. Cinematic developments reflect broader socio-political transformations and contribute to public discourse on immigration, integration, and social change in contemporary Iran.

This study examines the relationship between urban space and collective memory through an in-depth analysis of the Fener neighborhood in Zonguldak, a historically significant urban space in Turkey’s industrialization process. Drawing on archival research and semi-structured interviews, the study explores how urban collective memory is shaped by spatial transformations, everyday practices, and socio-political narratives. It emphasizes the role of urban landscapes in embedding memory and identity, highlighting how place-based experiences and symbolic landmarks contribute to the construction of shared meaning. The findings demonstrate that urban memory is not merely a passive recollection of the past but a dynamic process actively reproduced through lived experiences and emotional attachments to space. The case of Fener reveals how nationalist-modernist planning, industrial work, and cultural institutions coalesce to create a unique memoryscape that continues to influence residents’ sense of belonging and identity.

This research develops a theoretical framework of “collaborative spatial transformation” to examine how Mongolian Buddhist communities actively negotiate the conversion of sacred spaces into heritage sites in post-socialist contexts. Through comparative analysis of Choijin Lama Temple Museum, Dashchoilon Monastery, and Geser Temple, we reveal how communities maintain “custodial sovereignty”—spiritual authority exercised through ritual knowledge, community recognition, and adaptive stewardship—while engaging with heritage regimes. Based on 180 days of fieldwork, 54 interviews (including 22 Mongolian community members), and collaborative ethnographic methods, this study demonstrates how religious spaces undergo transformation not through simple state imposition but through complex negotiations involving community agency, international heritage partnerships, and Mongolia’s strategic “third neighbor policy.” Findings challenge binary sacred-secular distinctions, revealing how communities create hybrid practices that serve both spiritual and heritage functions simultaneously while maintaining cultural sovereignty in globalized heritage frameworks.

This paper examines how Semarang Chinatown functions as a system of surveillance through which Chinese Indonesians negotiate passable identities in a Javanese-dominated society. It challenges static views of Chinatowns by framing the area as a dynamic space of identity negotiation shaped by spatial discipline, cultural adaptation and strategic visibility. Drawing on Foucault’s panopticism, Homi Bhabha’s hybridity, the concept of passable identity and ethnographic research, the study conceptualises Chinatown as a macro-institution supported by houses, temples, markets and informal spaces. Architectural forms, cultural narratives and community initiatives reveal how Chinese Indonesians balance cultural preservation with adaptation to achieve social acceptance. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for fostering urban inclusivity and safeguarding hybrid cultural heritage as part of Indonesia’s multicultural identity.

The air terminal has long been considered neither capable of awakening the senses nor eliciting wonder as an aesthetic shock to thought. The pathos of wonder as thaumazein thus appears far removed from the air passenger’s task mode-driven, functional perception. However, modern international airports appropriate wonder and exploit its psychotropic potential by incorporating and integrating visual media art, which alters their spatial and symbolic experience. I will zero in on Changi Airport in Singapore and the Jewel—a nature-inspired, entertainment and retail complex, integrated into the airspace, with a view to exploring select art installations and their role in the airport’s visual transmutation into a wonder space. Mobilizing Deleuze’s concept of the Baroque to account for the political-aesthetic implications of wonder, I will reconsider the aesthetic limits of visual contemplation in the airport space, thus accounting for the emergence of a novel spatial ecology.

This article explores how graffiti removal practices—often seen as mundane concealing tasks—can produce visually compelling outcomes that are reminiscent of what they attempt to erase. These unintended visual outcomes, marked by awkward color patches, rough textures, or transparent traces, challenge the boundary between erasure and expression. Hereby, they raise critical questions about authorship, intention, and the role of the viewer that stem from long-standing debates within visual culture and art theory, particularly throughout the 20th century. Focusing on examples of removals in Istanbul and Paris, the study employs a form-based visual analysis to classify different types of graffiti removal across the city. This classification is not merely descriptive; it also serves as an interpretive framework to understand how these architectural surfaces contribute to the visual narrative of the urban landscape. These surfaces, stuck between the cycle of creation and annihilation, form a self-sustaining urban gallery, where repetition, layering, and erasure create an ever-evolving urban palimpsest. Despite lacking deliberate artistic intention, they give rise to a spontaneous visual language that reshapes the city’s collective memory. Rather than being the opposite of graffiti, removal becomes its partner in a continuous dialogue, both contributing to how the city is read, remembered, and perceived. Thus, by turning our attention to what remains, this study invites a reconsideration of how the accidental textures, traces, and color remnants produced by graffiti removal generate a spontaneous urban visual language.

This study analyzes how street clowns (badut jalanan) are normatively constructed within urban public spaces in Samarinda, Indonesia. Rather than treating public perception as homogeneous, the research conceptualizes stigma as a socially stratified and power-laden process shaped by competing urban norms. Drawing on social construction theory, stigma theory, social norm theory, and Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital, the study examines how six social positions—street clowns, road users, Generation Z, women, government authorities, and academics—produce divergent interpretations of informal cultural labor. Using a qualitative design combining participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document analysis, the findings show that street clowning is conditionally tolerated but rarely legitimized. While performers frame their work as creative labor and economic survival, authorities and road users often associate it with disorder and informality. These conflicting norms reflect broader tensions between regulation, morality, creativity, and urban modernity. The study contributes to urban sociology by advancing a relational understanding of stigma and norm production in secondary cities of the Global South.

This article examines how urban imageability operates in cinema through Kevin Lynch’s approach, focusing on three Paris-set films. It investigates how cinematic representational strategies and narrative structures reorganize paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks to construct the on-screen urban image. The findings show that cinematic imageability is not a direct reflection of form but a product of how these elements function as representational agents with differing narrative weight. A comparative reading identifies two modes of cinematic imageability: a relational, movement-based mode in which elements are integrated into lived spatial experience, and a spectatorial, postcard-like mode in which isolated and aestheticized elements are visually consumed. Overall, the study argues that cinematic images depend less on which elements are present than on how distance, movement, bodily engagement, and framing are organized within narrative structures, extending Lynch’s framework into cinematic mediation and clarifying how cities are experienced or staged on screen.

This study develops the Context-Sensitive Integrated Conviviality Evaluation Framework (CS-ICEF) to assess conviviality in public parks, addressing the limitations of Eurocentric public space models when applied to cities of the Global South. Conviviality—the capacity of diverse social groups to coexist meaningfully within shared spaces—remains under-theorized in relation to micro-spatial design and informality. Drawing on mixed-methods research conducted in two public parks in Cairo, the International Park and the Child Park, the CS-ICEF integrates spatial audits, behavioral observations, and user perception surveys to evaluate how formal and informal spatial attributes shape inclusive urban experiences.

The resulting 23-criterion framework operationalizes conviviality across six design dimensions: accessibility, spatial design, activities, climate responsiveness, cultural comfort, and informal use accommodation. Findings indicate modest conviviality performance (62% and 56.5%), reflecting limited integration of shade, gender-sensitive zones, and flexible infrastructure. Moreover, recent renovations and partial privatization have introduced exclusionary dynamics that weaken these parks’ social roles.

By incorporating a Rubric Assessment Tool (RAT) that bridges universal design principles with Cairo’s climatic, cultural, and socio-spatial specificities, the CS-ICEF offers an empirically validated, adaptable tool for evaluating and enhancing conviviality in public spaces. The study provides actionable insights for urban planners and designers seeking to foster equitable, inclusive, and resilient public realms across the Global South.

This article examines how sacred landscapes are created, contested, and reimagined within the Deori community of Assam, Northeast India, focusing on the rituals and memory surrounding Goddess Kesaikhaiti. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral traditions, and spatial analysis, the study investigates how sites such as the bolisaal (sacrificial space) and the Tamreswari temple ruins serve as focal points for negotiating indigenous, Vedic, and modern influences. Situating the analysis within the frameworks of cultural geography, spatial memory, and political ecology, the article demonstrates how sacredness is actively formed through ritual practice, landscape symbolism, and collective memory. The research highlights how sacred spaces serve as arenas for the ongoing assertion of cultural identity and community resilience amid historical disruption and change. By foregrounding the intersections of spirituality, ecology, and group belonging, the article offers new insights into the territoriality of faith and the politics of sacred space within evolving cultural landscapes.

Play theory is vital for understanding how interactions in public spaces break cultural and spatial barriers, foster creative self-expression and create inclusive urban environments. This study examines Frankenberger Park in Aachen and the parks of surround Diyarbakır walls to explore how social structures and activities shape playfulness in these spaces. Through play theory and analysis of cultural and gender norms, the research identifies shared and unique traits of the locations. It examines how play theory can reshape gender norms in public space, redefine public–private boundaries and create opportunities for both individual freedom and collective interaction, offering new directions for inclusive urban design.

This paper employs Lezlie Lowe’s book, No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, as a crucial site to examine how restroom facilities have historically perpetuated categorical inequalities based on factors such as race, disability, and social class. It analyses how access to restrooms is integral to ensuring full participation and citizenship, as certain spaces are implicitly designated for specific body types, thereby excluding those that do not conform to societal norms. The paper uses textual analysis to study Lowe’s narrative. This analysis deconstructs how signs and language construct and sustain power structures and social inequalities, revealing how ableism contradicts inclusive discourse by shaping public restroom design, denying access to marginalised bodies, and excluding their concerns from mainstream discourse. It examines the distinct health and safety challenges that public restrooms pose for women, men, children, the elderly, those with disabilities and caretakers. No Place to Go challenges the implicit enforcement of the gender binary within public restrooms, and it advocates for gender-inclusive spaces that accommodate the diverse identities and needs of people. By engaging with Lowe’s work, this paper seeks to contribute to ongoing discussions on reimagining restroom design and policy like gender-neutral toilets, gender-neutral language, reinforcing potty parity laws, among others to foster inclusivity and equality. The paper concludes by highlighting how these inclusive designs bring us a step closer to achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development like gender equality, clean sanitation and good health in association with WHO initiatives on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH).

This article examines the concept of socialist care as depicted in Soviet agricultural brochures, manuals, and guides from the 1920s to the 1930s, with a particular focus on how care practices extended from the human to nonhuman workers. Care and care work are approached through feminist social reproduction theory, particularly through a rereading of Alexandra Kollontai’s ideas from an animal-centered optic. In this perspective, the socialization of all spheres of life was expected to generate new forms of care, including for nonhuman proletarians, with Kollontai emphasizing the production of life itself rather than its mere reproduction for capital. This article traces a trajectory from the revolutionary vision of animal liberation from suffering, imagined as following women’s emancipation and their contribution to class struggle, to the rejection of this ideology during Soviet collectivization and industrialization, when it was dismissed as utopian and misleading. As a result, labor itself became naturalized, and women’s reproductive functions were redistributed during collectivization across all participants in production relations, irrespective of gender or species. This shift gave way to a discussion of conceiving production as labor conjugations (Alexander Bogdanov’s term) that extend beyond the human body to include animals, machines, and plants. The article also problematizes the concept of care, tracing its Heideggerian origins and linking it to contemporary theories of interspecies and feminist care. As a concluding conceptual element, the works of Soviet writer Andrey Platonov are employed as a critical source for reimagining care as care for yet-to-come communism, deferred for future use.

The purpose of this article is to outline and introduce research in the intersection of queerness, space and spatial design – temporarily pinning down the elusive, fluid and transitional character of queerness to make this lens more broadly available to students, practitioners and researchers in the many fields interested in space and its organisation. Hence, a normative project of making a queer perspective more accessible, while simultaneously attempting to negotiate narrow perceptions of queer spatial studies and design practices as mainly concerned with representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and/or other diverse sexual/gender identities (LGBTQIA+) populations in spaces and cities or certain easily identifiable queer aesthetics. Drawing on existing research and design practice, we argue that queerness can support the deconstruction of dominance and privilege both within and beyond ‘overtly’ queer spaces or designer identities. We argue that more scholars and practitioners should take interest not only in what queerness is (because it is so inherently fluid in its oppositionality) but also in what it can do in terms of subverting normality and transgressing boundaries.

This article offers a comprehensive investigation of Floating University Berlin (FUB) as a habitable praxis situated within a post-industrial wetland and operating beyond the institutional boundaries of formal higher education. It asks how FUB articulates ecosystemic, spatial, performative, and even micropolitical forms of divergence under neoliberal academic conditions. Methodologically, the study examines FUB as a primary case in juxtaposition with the Institute for Lightweight Structures, enabling a critical assessment of how spatial and organisational configurations mediate learning, interaction, and collective agency. Mobilising Félix Guattari’s “three ecologies”—environment, social relations, and human subjectivity—as analytical axes, the article rearticulates them as a more-than-living ecosystem, assemblages of tectonics, and a pedagogical network. This framework structures a multi-layered “meta-narrative” that integrates theoretical analysis with visual and spatial interpretation. Through a layered cartography composed of curated quotations, atmospheric collages, mapping-based inferences, and diagrammatic expressions, the study renders entangled relations and de-hierarchised processes sustaining FUB’s pedagogical universe. Within this meta-narrative, “flows of identifiers” trace methods, tactics, qualities, and positionalities, while “impalpable frameworks” foreground accumulative architectural interventions, participatory approaches, multispecies associations, and experimental, critical-compassionate modes of learning. By advancing the concept of habitable praxis as an ecosystemic and spatial mode of pedagogical production, the article contributes an original analytical model for understanding learning environments as dynamic, generative, and open to transformation.