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All produced spaces are curious since they could, by definition, be different. Atriums—double height or greater vertical voids typically to be found in skyscrapers' lobbies—are an interesting illustration of this general contention. An internal feature of super-tall architecture the world over, the atrium flourishes in parts of cities where land value is high and given that atria could be occupied with directly rentable space this is an ostensibly puzzling affinity. Drawing primarily on the ideas of Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin, this paper suggests that the presence of atria in major commercial—and increasingly public—buildings grows from oblique attempts to generate surplus value. Paradoxically, it is the voided space of the atrium that explains this strategy. My argument is that voids of open space can actually increase the value of objects, bodies, and practices that are assembled in and around them; paradoxically 'emptiness' itself can be monetised in a context of rentier capitalism. Defamiliarising the atrium, which is a distinctive and singular architectural feature of this moment, suggests a wider research agenda for those interested in critical analysis of the contradictory spaces that are produced when capital builds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the heart of this Special Feature is a commitment to re-thinking the geographies of occupation, trespass and squatting. The interventions gathered below place particular emphasis on the importance of thinking with squatters, and how they, ultimately, seek to re-make the city on their own terms and with their own needs and desires in mind. At stake here, we argue, is a modest experimental form of 'concept-work' that is consonant with recent calls for a more fragmentary and open-ended approach to how we think about and inhabit cities. With this in mind, we offer three orientations that, in our view, advance and re-centre existing frameworks around urban occupation, trespass, and squatting: a critical historical perspective; an empirical focus on everyday geographies; and a theoretical lens that re-casts our understanding of spatial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the comprehensive and in-depth analysis of distinctive and varied camp formations in various regions such as Middle East, Western Europe and the U.S. It provides brief history of how the project was started in August 2013 and the conceptualization of durable formations that confine undesirable population. It also suggests the importance of bringing camps from the periphery of urban studies to bridge critical analysis, social movements, and policy practice.

Based on my experience as an organizer and militant researcher for the FCDL—Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire [Common Front for Housing Rights]—in Bucharest, I propose a critical analysis of post-socialist property redistribution by emphasizing the role of Westernizing aspirational paradigms. Supported by findings of colleagues and comrades from similar organizations in Romania, I argue that restitutions are a key process for understanding the aspirational, racializing dynamics of property redistribution in post-socialism through their hegemonic narrative of restoring a pre-communist, 'European' class composition. I seek to build a situated scholar-activist perspective anchored in the experience and testimony of evictions produced by restitutions. Placing the resistance of the Vulturilor community in Bucharest, a mixed Romanian-Roma community, as the starting point of my analysis, I argue that the tactics of encampments run by evictees in the Romanian context are in fact a radical form of protest that breaks with standards of protest as formulated in normative Western narratives. By going beyond the conventional categories of 'the concerned citizen' to be found in some right to the city type of movements in the region, the strategies of evictees push the boundaries of radicalism and solidarity. At the same time, they make space for a protest practice outside of the civilizational narratives of Western becoming, breaking the aspirational paradigm of becoming a white middle-class West. Such struggles break with historical property regimes based on continous racialized dispossesions, setting a new threshold for political anti-racist struggles that go beyond the cultural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the examination of two critical analyses of garbage politics, I argue that both can benefit from the insights of a critical urban theory as developed by Marcuse, Brenner and Mayer. At the same time, I argue that bringing garbage into the analysis both underscores the importance of certain key features of critical urban theory—especially its focus on everyday life and the Right to the City as a collective moral rather than legal claim cashed out by individuals while at the same time demonstrating the importance and necessity of including a focus on environmental crises and issues that emerge in the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]