Paper short abstract:

The recently proliferation of performative and relational approaches in Human Geography are reanimating urban studies which, lately, have shown signs of exhaustion, predictability and repetitiveness.

Paper long abstract:

The recently proliferation of performative and relational approaches in Human Geography are reanimating urban studies which, lately, have shown signs of exhaustion, predictability and repetitiveness. Different theoretical tools incited from Actor-Network theory (ANT) and Non-Representational theory (NRT) are broadening the objects of study of our discipline, expanding their political ecologies in favor of new possible and alternative articulations. Among other things, these approaches challenged the idea of public space as a self-evident container in which only a set of presupposed social and human dynamics might take place. Moreover, this sort of epistemological turn coincides with a crisis of political representation that has eroded the notion of delegation, questioning both the role and alleged neutrality of experts, and the authority and legitimacy of official representatives in the politics of urban design and decision making. Through the analysis of the controversy of the plaza Lesseps in Barcelona -a contentious case study of urban planning, which recent redesigning unfolded new forms of civic participation-, in my paper I want to rethink the the politics of public space, unlocking the fence which representation -in a very different ways- restricted its study but also its design.