“Indeterminate spaces ask questions rather than deliver fixed answers, and allow a space for the subjectivity, appropriation, development, adaptation, and expression of those occupying these indeterminate environments.”
Dougal Sheridan

The indeterminate, informal spaces of city-living have always existed alongside the formal ones. The city can at once be a habitat of individual freedom and socio-cultural segregation, economic growth and destitution, democratic movements and oppressive regimes – and any phenomenon in between. We believe that the assessment of urban appropriation strategies may provide a means to uncover and unpick this ambivalent nature of the urban.

In European cities today, there is a prevalent notion that urban dwellers should have the right to public places, where both the individual can unfold, create, play, dream or simply rest, and where established communities are strengthened and new ones are
allowed to be made.

The growing demand from both individuals and local communities to be able to influence urban planning processes and the joint structuring of individual neighbourhoods reflects this notion. Ultimately, it touches on the pressing debate about how we are to create liveable and open-minded cityscapes for a growing and diverse urban population.

In this conference we would like to discuss a variety of perspectives on urban appropriation strategies, its relation to public space-making and its implications for future city development. What does urban appropriation involve outside its immediate spatiality? How does it link to ideas of appropriation of socio-cultural narratives, of politico-historical occasions as well as of nature and the more-than-human in urban landscapes?

We aim to explore this subject through 3 interdisciplinary categories comprising architecture, European ethnology, human geography, urban ecology, sociology, landscape architecture and design research:

I. Urban appropriation strategies in the context of migration and refugee movements.

II. Appropriation of nature by the urban and appropriation of the urban by nature.

III. Appropriation as tool to create a new, citizen-centered social space in the city