Category Archives: publicness

cover-excerpt
publicness, territories, territoriology, urban

A New Index for Public Space

(with Tali Hatuka)

9781032555836

Out on August 18, 2025 – See : https://www.routledge.com/A-New-Index-for-Public-Space-After-Distancing/Hatuka-Brighenti/p/book/9781032555836

With four generous endorsements from:

 

“This erudite and provocative book melds social and political theory with design thinking to produce a new set of terms to understand both the nature and the phenomenology of publicness. Inspired by the challenges of physical distancing that accompanied the global pandemic, the authors show the durability of the public realm while offering new ways to interpret and produce a range of disordered, agonistic, and spatially-situated interactions that will continue to make public spaces the lifeblood of cities.”

Diane E. Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, Harvard Graduate School of Design

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“How can we talk about public space and make sense of its continuous mutations in contemporary cities? As the authors suggest, we need to explore patterns of experience and affect along with efforts to conceptualize sociospatial crises. This book is an inventive and highly successful experiment in analyzing publicness that offers to city dwellers and planners alike an index of terms to be used in thinking about city life as a multifarious set of realities and possibilities.”

Stavros Stavrides, Professor of Architectural Design and Theory, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens

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“Triggered by the contemporary challenges and appreciation of the post-pandemic future of urban space the authors continue the quest to understand and assess public space. Through a new index they introduce us to a series of fresh and inspiring methods and prompts that traverse disciplinary boundaries and help explore the experiential and phenomenological dimensions of public space. The book is a welcome addition that introduces researchers, teachers, and students in the built environment and social science disciplines to innovative ways of examining the future of public space and eventually to show new ways to “read” the city.”

Vikas Mehta, Fruth/Gemini Chair, Ohio Eminent Scholar of Urban/Environmental Design, and Professor of Urban Design, University of Cincinnati

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“This is a playful book on how public space negotiates distance and propinquity amongst human and nonhuman bodies. It is a truly exciting cornucopia of affects, memories and desires that crisscross one another like a boardgame. But like most good boardgames, here too there is wisdom, depth and astute observation of all the things that compose ourselves and our lives. The authors have managed the impossible: to create an intensely visual, lyrical, ludic net of possibilities about our post-Covid world in way that is both celebratory and cautionary, visionary and sobering. In many ways, through its innovative form, its collaborative process of writing, and its ground-breaking content, this book opens up an entirely new way of being in public. This is a fundamentally beautiful and useful book.”

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Professor of Law & Theory, University of Westminster, UK; Artist and Fiction Author

 

intensiology, publicness

Contribution to an intensiology of the public domain

A Keynote Address at the Urban Creativity Conference, Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art, Lund, Sweden.

May 17, 2019, 3pm

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This talk interrogates the nature of the urban public domain by specifically attending the intensities and the phases it generates. A comprehensive view on the phenomenon of publicness, it is suggested, is required to attend its ecological facet – more precisely, as it will be seen, its multi-layered ecology – but also to explain its intrinsic vital qualities. The latter hints to the phenomenon of intensity. After reviewing the main features of publicness (“what is specifically public in public space?”), a broader picture of the public domain can be sketched that includes the processes of mediation. But whereas mediation suggests a ‘continuist’ take, a discontinuities can likewise be detected in the public domain. Coining from physics, the latter could as well be called ‘phase transitions’. How are phase transitions correlated to the intensive moments of publicness? This is the pivotal question for discussion.

+ info | https://urbancreativitylund.tumblr.com

picture courtesy © Mattias Kärrholm
picture courtesy © Mattias Kärrholm
animals, civility, commonality, publicness, territories, urban

Urban Animals – Domestic, Stray and Wild

Urban Animals—Domestic, Stray, and Wild

Notes from a Bear Repopulation Project in the Alps

Daniza in the year 2000 – Photo by Gilberto Volcan – Courtesy of Parco Naturale Adamello Brenta
Daniza in the year 2000 – Photo by Gilberto Volcan – Courtesy of Parco Naturale Adamello Brenta

by Andrea Mubi Brighenti & Andrea Pavoni

Finally OUT in Society & Animals

https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341580

Abstract. This piece explores ‘domesticity’ as a social territory defined by the relationship it entertains with the conceptual and material space of ‘the wild’. The leading research question can be framed as follows: do these two spaces stand in opposition to each other, or are more subtle relations of co-implication at play? As we enquiry into the domestic and the wild, a richer conceptual map of notions is drawn, which also includes the public, the common, the civilised and the barbarian. The case study that illustrates this dense intermingling of categories is offered by the case of Daniza, a wild brown bear introduced in the Brenta Natural Park on the Italian Alps in the 2000s, who repeatedly came into unexpected, accidental contacts with humans. Declared a ‘dangerous animal’, Daniza was controversially killed by public authorities in 2014, officially in an attempt to capture her with anaesthetising bullets, but in a way that still leaves doubts about the degree of voluntariness of the killing. The piece argues that the domestic and the wild constitute two semiotic-material domains constantly stretching into each other without any stable or even clear boundary line, and elaborates a series of corollaries for studying animals in urban contexts.

Keywords: Domesticity; Domestication; Wildness; Bears; Urban Animals; Territorial Governance

 

TOC

Introduction – Domesticity as Urban Prolongation

  1. Animal Governance, Domestication, and Classification
  2. Locating the Wild in the Urban
  3. Domesticity, Domestication and Civilisation
  4. The Unlucky Case of Bear Daniza
  5. Which Sort of Wild?
  6. The Barbarian

Conclusions

pdf version here