In Satire 1.6, Horace depicts himself as a private citizen free to move around as he wishes in opposition to another character who does not enjoy such freedom of movement, owing to the fact that he is a politician. Seneca, in De clementia (perhaps recalling Horace), extols the freedom of movement he enjoys in the urban space thanks to the emperor, who, on the contrary, complains about the limitations imposed on him by his role. In Xenophon, Hiero, who was a private citizen before becoming a tyrant, is questioned by Simonides about the joys and woes of the two conditions: private citizens can go anywhere, while for tyrants everywhere they go is like travelling in enemy territory. In Horace’s sermo, the concrete space of the city refers to a potentially open political space: the figures we see moving around the streets of Rome are free to choose between political abstention and participation on the basis of their own personal inclinations. But the political and social situation was uncertain and unstable. Situations and characters tend in fact to transcend their immediate concreteness, referring to something else as well: something suited to satisfying the search for a principle of authority.

The early modern Japanese city, in the paradigmatic form of the castle town (jōkamachi), gave spatial form to the social distinctions of status group (mibun), and it evolved through complex negotiations between multiple status communities, each with its own social logics and visions of urban life. This chapter sketches these spatial structures and social processes through a study of the shogunal capital of Edo, focusing on the triangular negotiation between three sets of agents: the shogunal administration, the propertied townspeople, and the diffuse occupational collectives of the unpropertied urban margins. This triangular negotiation is illuminated through a historical survey of the Edo firefighting system, revealing the ways in which the early modern city was shaped by competing interests and claims over space. Particular attention is given to the diverse forms of social agency that interacted in the urban process, complicating a binary model of governmental authority and popular subversion.

This chapter shows that due to the old configuration of the Mediterranean city and decades, if not centuries, of political corruption, Mediterranean detectives are confronted with a problematic urban environment, which they blame on political greed and laissez faire capitalism. Alongside this negative perception of urban development, through their work and private life, Mediterranean detectives attempt to resist a dominant culture of exclusion, and experience and build transcultural spaces where history and culture are shared. The Mediterranean detective feels a sense of belonging to the different communities that populate the Mediterranean city. By interacting with different people and ethnicities, and by inhabiting inter-class, transcultural and inter-ethnic places, the Mediterranean detective constructs an urban environment that overcomes stereotypical representations of the city as a dangerous and divisive place. Finally, this chapter shows that a focus on the Mediterranean Sea, as an ‘in-between’ space of both clashes and exchange, adds a new literary map in which traditional postcolonial distinctions between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are overcome.

Chapter 5 troubles the narrative on German culture further by situating the traditions of education and in the context of the migration of refugees into Germany from 2014 onwards. It analyses how this migration has prompted a profound recalibration of the role of artistic institutions, especially theatre. This chapter focuses on public theatres and the ways in which they have forged new civil society alliances addressing refugees and migration in inner-city environments. I argue that public city theatres in Germany are uniquely situated in the interstices of civil society, urban populations, and public authorities, allowing them to reposition concepts, policies, and practices engaging with migration on multiple scales. I show how theatres reframe local public policies while creating prefigurative political spaces and developing inclusive and critical visions of diversity and citizenship. This chapter focuses on the emergence of a refugee theatre collective, documenting the struggles of doing applied theatre with marginalised groups, but retaining an aesthetic approach to theatre, focusing on the rehearsal as a space and practice for ethico-aesthetic negotiation. This concluding chapter is thus also a case study in applied theatre work at the height of this German refugee ‘crisis’.

This chapter argues for the need to view Paris unexceptionally. It acknowledges and moves beyond universalising or celebratory tendencies of Paris-centric theories of world literature. Exploring the literary expression of what I term migrant-flânerie, the chapter analyses forms of epistemic encounter and intimacy found in three novels of migration to Paris by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Mbella Sonne Dipoko and Gauz. These texts reinvent and recycle the nineteenth-centuryflâneurand his leisured navigation of the city. The writing engages themes of alienation,ennui, and freedom in relation to racialised, masculine experiences of the city. In contrasting ways, these African-centred narratives of Paris ‘unworld’ the city space by giving literary form to encounters that disrupt resilient critical claims to aesthetic or epistemic universalism. They present experiences of migrant-flâneriecompressed into specific everyday spaces (the bourgeois apartment; student digs; the department store; the café; a boat on the Seine; security checkpoints) and delineated narrative temporalities (diary form; coming-of-age narrative; ‘a few nights and days’). These formal devices evoke recurrent tensions between abstract, aestheticised promises of freedom and everyday experiences of racism and coloniality.

This chapter examines the application of the principles underlying artistic freedom in the public space, as well as graffiti and street art. To which extent are States obliged to promote, protect or safeguard artistic freedom when clashing with public interests, public order or public morality standards? Does the qualification ‘illicit’ or ‘commissioned’ play a role in preserving artistic freedom? And do these obligations go as far as safeguarding the individual artist’s right to artistic freedom in case of unpopular, controversial or offensive art and performances in the public space – or urban planning considerations, as in the case of the ‘La Demeure du Chaos’ (Abode of Chaos)? Furthermore, the chapter discusses the question of hateful, racist, sexist, misogynous or homophobic art in the public space, epsecially in light of State obligations to raise awareness and eliminate stereotyping. Last, drawing on numerous case studies such as the Great Wall of Los Angeles and murals painted in post-aparheid South Africa, the chapter explores potential obligations to preserve and safeguard street art – and artists’ frededom – especially in the case of large murals reflective of broad community participation and those that reflect human rights ideals.

Roaming around in São Paulo can be quite a stimulating experience: The city’s bustling rhythm, its effervescent cultural life, and its ethnic heterogeneity leave little room for doubt as to why Brazil’s largest city is generally considered South America’s most vibrant and cosmopolitan metropolis. Meanwhile, the city’s “tough concrete poetry”1 also bespeaks a configuration in which human bodies are dwarfed and citizens are constantly reminded of their respective place – a proverbial “city of walls”2 in which the utopia of a universally accessible and politically empowering public space has long since been thwarted by a maze of privatized streets, fortified urban enclaves, and an omnipresent array of surveillance devices. Despite the local elites’ attempts to depict São Paulo as a place which is defined by both its tolerance and its diversity,3 the city’s very material configuration thus indicates an urbanistic model which segments and separates more than it joins and unites. Rather than the clichéd melting pot, São Paulo resembles a kaleidoscope in which social class and ethnic affiliation assign each citizen a precise spatial coordinate in a cityscape defined by a mesh of internal frontiers – some brutally physical, others more subtle and ethereal – and the corresponding characteristic of an almost suffocating impermeability.

While Julio Cortázar is best known as a fiction writer, a full understanding of his oeuvre must take into account his poetry, which has mostly been ignored in the critical literature. Cortázar not only published several volumes of poetry but also included poems in many of his prose works and wrote extensively about poetry. The significance of poetry – that he read as well as wrote – is ever present in Cortázar’s overall literary vision. His poetic work registers his innovative and playful sensibility along with his increasingly politicized engagement. This essay demonstrates through close readings and archival documentation how poetry for Cortázar serves as a transitional mode. Archives of his manuscripts, drafts, unpublished poems, and personal library reveal much about the author’s poetic craft and his shifting stance on the politics of his time. A thorough articulation of Cortázar’s poetic concerns provides a fuller appreciation of the formal and linguistic innovation that undergirds his prose, shapes his ideological and aesthetic evolution, and particularly informs the last phase of his life and work. Poetry serves Cortázar as a bridge between aesthetics and the world around him as his work increasingly puts innovation to the service of sociopolitical engagement.

While Julio Cortázar is best known as a fiction writer, a full understanding of his oeuvre must take into account his poetry, which has mostly been ignored in the critical literature. Cortázar not only published several volumes of poetry but also included poems in many of his prose works and wrote extensively about poetry. The significance of poetry – that he read as well as wrote – is ever present in Cortázar’s overall literary vision. His poetic work registers his innovative and playful sensibility along with his increasingly politicized engagement. This essay demonstrates through close readings and archival documentation how poetry for Cortázar serves as a transitional mode. Archives of his manuscripts, drafts, unpublished poems, and personal library reveal much about the author’s poetic craft and his shifting stance on the politics of his time. A thorough articulation of Cortázar’s poetic concerns provides a fuller appreciation of the formal and linguistic innovation that undergirds his prose, shapes his ideological and aesthetic evolution, and particularly informs the last phase of his life and work. Poetry serves Cortázar as a bridge between aesthetics and the world around him as his work increasingly puts innovation to the service of sociopolitical engagement.

This chapter argues that previous discussions of Harlem Renaissance literature have overlooked the role of religion in shaping ideas of Black modernity. Examining the literature and art of the 1920s, Farebrother posits that religion plays a key role in shaping Black modernity, serving as the means through which Rudolph Fisher can explore anxieties about generational conflict, gender, sexuality, tradition, consumerism, and the Great Migration. Not only are there a large number of Black modernist texts that include religious scenes, but also these texts reveal the relationship between religion and entertainment, church and cabaret. Spatially, scenes of the cabaret and the church are depicted in similar ways, and the role of the spectator is significant in both church and cabaret scenes – someone who can observe the scenes and remark upon unusual elements.

This chapter examines the causes of initial mobilization against the Syrian regime. Contention in the first weeks of the Syrian uprising followed multiple logics. Urban activists organized demonstrations in central public squares, making demands focused overwhelmingly on how power is exercised in the center and on establishing a new citizenship contract. At the same time, challenge broke out in smaller localities, independent of that occurring in other sites, and focused primarily on the grievances of local populations. The emergence of citizenship-focused challenge was the result of activists’ utilization of public spaces, with initial demonstrations encouraging the formation of new networks in the early weeks of contention. Parochial challenge, by contrast, developed on the basis of preexisting dense networks within local communities. Demands were articulated largely in a local idiom and went primarily through preexisting channels of state–society communication; when state agents violated shared understandings of the terms of these interactions by using violence against community members, challengers often responded with violence of their own.

Digital technologies have made it possible for people to work from literally anywhere in the world, as long as they have the right devices and Wi-Fi (Torten et al., 2016). At the same time, the number of self-employed workers is growing rapidly. This group usually does not have an office in a firm they can go to every day, to work. Digital technologies open up an array of possibilities. Working is possible anywhere and anytime. Self-employed workers can choose to work from home, a rented hot desk in a co working space, in coffee-shops, hotel lobbies, and even on the beach in a sunny resort on a beautiful island. In this chapter, the focus lies on self-employed workers who work in hotel lobbies that were not primarily designed as co-working spaces.

A major twenty-first-century fiction, Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84 confirms the continuing force of global magical realism. Our analysis centers on a crucial question for magical realist texts: What does their magic achieve? This epic love story chronicles the separation and ultimate reunion of Tengo and Aomame in twentieth-century Tokyo. In its course, the novel’s 'proximate magic' uses magical events and phenomena to draw isolated people together within the city: Tengo writes a story containing two moons and then he and Aomame see two moons in the sky; Tengo sleeps with Fuka Eri and Aomame becomes pregnant, disturbing habitual ideas of space and identity as many magical realist fictions do. This interpersonal magic, together with magical intersections of separate worlds (including – on a metafictional level – the conflation of separate texts) addresses the problem of the separation between inhabitants of a megalopolis, remedying the alienation they experience. Such cultural work needs magic to overcome these strongly divisive social forces.

Changes in Great Power politics, technical developments, and flows of trade all together transformed Eastern Mediterranean perceptions and usages of space. From their image of Europe and the opportunities it offered to modes of travel, to visions of and policies of urban renewal and its acceptance, many aspects of life in Levantine cities were transformed by the heightened interaction with Europe. Nonetheless, the new Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonica were not carbon copies of the towns on the far side of the sea, but very much also the product of local desires and attitudes.

Quay development had a fundamental impact on late nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean urban space. Large-scale development of the waterfront created not only a new facade for Izmir and Thessaloniki, but also precipitated new usages of urban space and modes of transport, labor, and leisure. They also led to a perceived bifurcation of the urban space into modernized and non-modernized quarters.