Power relations, conflicts and everyday life in urban public space

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which social space is produced through the development of horizontal power relations in public spaces that function as fields of conflict. Through a six month long ethnographic study, it focuses on the production of exclusionary territories and their contestation by collective and individual non-institutional actors through the production of inclusionary counter-territories in two public spaces in central Athens (Greece), namely, Exarcheia and Agios Panteleimonas Squares. Key findings include (1) the decisive role of everyday unintentional, non-collective productions of space which are in both sites difficult to be overturned, even through collective action, (2) the differentiated characteristics of conflicts developed over and in public space and their influence on collective claims for control, and (3) indications that power relations in urban public space enclose and are built upon contrasting practices and territories that can only be traced and analyzed at the level of everyday life.