UrbanFestival 2006: Politics of Space

publisher: [BLOK] | Lokalna baza za osvježavanje kulture

editor:Vesna Vuković

design: Barbara Blasin

language: Croatian and English

year: 2006

price: 5 €

Space is being produced through specific social progress. But unlike other things it is simultaneously a material object and a medium through which other things and social relations are being produced. So the space actually constantly reproduces and modifies social conditions of its own production. Therefore it is to be seen as a multidimensional “locus of relation” of social struggles. City and Urban area are simultaneously a place and an object of these struggles. → Henri Lefbvre, The Production of Space, 1974.

The space is brutally present, every day it winds around us, it envelops us, it direct us. The streets are pressing us, buildings, and even more shop windows are offering themselves to the view and are limiting our view to the skies. The heaven is far.

A decisive turnover represents rejecting the idea of space as a determined, distant – because the space is reaccepting us always and again and appropriating Lefebvre’s perception of space as a production of either object and place of social relations. We are moving on several tracks at once, the space is giving itself as a never finished, non-reached product of hegemony streaming, the infinite space of policies are being opened. The space is opening possibility for permanent interventions, appropriation and governing (at least temporarily), for involvement of all interested parties with their multiple interests, different, contradictive, and even relentless. Urban space and urban society are not a finished reality, set in time before the present, but a horizon that lightens. That is that what is possible.

Vesna Vuković