Description
In the lived space and “space of representation” of the urban, how do the social relations through which urban space is produced cultivate perceptions and aesthetic literacies of the ambience and of the everyday artefacts of cities? What is the role of these perceptions – or distribution of the sensible – in reproducing and disrupting the spaces for politics determined by international relations? The trajectory of debates concerning the city in relation to the international – from “global cities” to “planetary urbanism” – has been a fruitful site for conceptual disruptions of the territorial trap (Agnew 1994). Henri Lefebvre’s reconceptualization of contemporary capitalism through his theory of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991) and his notion of the urban revolution (Lefebvre 2003) have informed these debates; however, foregrounding the transformations of social space has not always been accompanied by a focus on the social relations of production of space, or how social space is produced. Emphasising the practices of domination of urban space – through design, planning, finance, or policy – can obscure the labour such practices are divided from. The essay mobilises the notion of “everyday aesthetics” (Saito 2007) in relation to struggles over access to housing to explore forms of internationalism and spaces of political possibility emerging from the social relations of production of urban space.
