(Photo credits: Photo Wilke (https://www.wilke.at/))

The PUBLIC SPACE RESEARCH GROUP welcomes, Prof. Dr. Sabine Knierbein, presenting:

Quo vadis public space? Conceptual explorations of lived space and everyday life in urban studies.

Public space research has been undergoing several conjunctures over the last decades, at times influenced by new approaches to urban design and policy, or responding to and making sense of social change, civic upheaval and the multiple crises moments of democracy. The relevance of conceptions of both public space and lived space has been discussed through conceptual interweaving and bridging, declaring the need to re-theorize lived space in times when everything seems somehow unsettled: First and foremost urban everyday life. With the aim to rediscuss the potentials and pitfalls of public space in relation particularly to everchanging urban cultures, Knierbein revisited Lefebvre’s three volume edition of “The Critique of Everyday Life” with the idea to reintegrate its key findings into wider urban studies debates so as to newly articulate a need for deeper theorization of everyday life, and its (urbanized) geographies of encounter: lived space. While drawing connections between social, cultural and political theory and the more praxis-oriented debates in the spatial arts, Lefebvre’s critique has been updated through more recent positions that have emerged vociferously in the new millennium. This lecture will offer some insights from this four-years-long conceptual research process.

Prof. Dr. Sabine Knierbein is the Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at the TU Wien. Trained originally in landscape architecture, she received the first Dr. phil. degree at the Faculty of Architecture of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar ever in the field of European Urban Studies (s.c.l.). She also holds a journey(wo)man’s certificate as a landscape gardener. Sabine is a founding member of the Thematic Group of Public Spaces and Urban Cultures of the Association of European Schools of Planning. She has worked in Argentina, Austria, Germany and UK, and has taught university courses in Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Thessaloniki, Vienna, Weimar and Zagreb. In 2020, Sabine held a Visiting Professorship for Urban Political Geography at the Dipartimento di Storia, Archeologia, Geografia, Arte e Spettacolo Laboratorio di Geografia Sociale at Università degli Studi di Firenze in Florence, Italy, where she focused on Geographies of Everyday Encounter. Her publications are available in German, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. Books she co-edited books with Routledge are: Public Space and the Challenges of Urban Transformation in Europe (2014), Public Space and Relational Perspectives. New Challenges for Architecture and Planning (2015), City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (2017) and Public Space Unbound. Urban Emancipation and the Post-Political Condition (2018), Care and the City. New Perspectives for Urban Studies and Planning Theory (forthcoming 2021) and Urban Life Unsettled: Routines, Temporalities and Contestations (forthcoming 2022). Sabine submitted her habilitation treatise entitled Critique of Everyday Life in the 21st Century – Lived Space and Capitalist Urbanization at the Technische Universität Wien in Vienna, Austria in 2020. Her research interests relate to the city as a collective political and democratic project, recent theory of urbanization through the lenses of everyday life and lived space, intersectional urban research methodology in planning, architecture and urban design, ethnography of construction sites, concepts of truly open and public innovation, social inequality and disruptive and to intercultural philosophy of science with a spatial and urban focus.

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