Conference Agenda

The development of cities is shaped by planning processes that coordinate growth and by bottom-up initiatives that drive urban and community development. Local communities play a key role in shaping cities. Unequal opportunities for involvement in decision-making processes can lead to urban conflicts and serious problems in city management. The actions taken by residents to adapt cities to climate change may become more radical if their voices remain unheard and local authorities continue to adhere to a business-as-usual approach.

The aim of the research is to determine the impact of pro-environmental social movements on urban policy in Polish metropolitan areas. Building on the concept of environmental justice, our comparative analysis of grassroots initiatives emphasizes the role of local communities in the improving the quality of the urban environment. The study analysed activities by local communities aimed at improving air and water quality and preserving green areas in major metropolitan areas in Poland—Krakow, Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Tricity. The research addressed the following questions: What actions do urban activists take to improve the urban environment and ensure fair access to environmental resources? How bottom up civic initiatives could influence local governments in the creation of an urban environment?

The actions and effects of bottom-up initiatives were identified based on the content of policy documents, programs, media discourse analysis, participant observation, and in-depth interviews. The research results take into account good practices, e.g. in the field of improving air quality, as well as long-term efforts to protect green areas in cities. The article presents alternative models of city development that implement pro-environmental and social goals, which emerged due to pressure from grassroots initiatives. The research is carried out as part of the project " Social processes of shaping urban space in time of adaptation to climate change” financed by the National Science Center, Sonata-17 program.

Within a variety of existing forms of social movement, protest camps, where people stay and live in the countryside for the limited period of time (e.g. Climate Camp) have become increasingly visible and important. Previous research has regarded protest camps as transnational routinized repertoires and less so as the lifestyle movement that emerge from the interaction between membership and the environment at the time. This research focuses on the improvisation process of repairing the architecture of protest camps to suit their membership and clarifies how autonomy is carried out through the formation of infrastructure in protest camps.

Based on participant observation, this study identifies the emergence of internal autonomy by analyzing the improvised repair process of the infrastructure in the Takayama Architecture Seminar School (TASS) protest camp in Hida-Takayama moutanious area, Japan. The TASS protest camp is held every year and participants stay in one big old house for some days. Participants lived together away from everyday life in urban lifestyles and consumer societies and engaged in creation alongside their daily lives, such as eating and sleeping.

Based on the findings of the TASS protest camp, this research shows that autonomy is not achieved by reproducing repertoires that have emerged from the outside and that it is not a matter of shaping the values of membership to conform to transnational norms of political activism and social movements; rather, they are shaped by the people who make up the community at that time and place through repeated experimentation and failure, with elements of repair and improvisation. The concept of improvisation used in this study is also useful for freeing the rich experiences and backgrounds of individual participants in protest camps from the mold of a regularized repertoire.
From the improvised repair process, activists try to determine how to feel commonality and create openness in their protest camp in a different way from the routinized and regularized repertoires in transnational protest camps. This study presents an alternative methodology to create autonomy based on previous research on protest camps and expands the scope of the concept of improvisation.

This paper investigates the role of social movements and urban commons in creating resilient alternatives to housing commodification in the creative city Groningen, the Northern Netherlands. Located at the fringes of the city, the abandoned COVA factory site has long served as a communal area for a variety of subcultural groups. In the early-2000s, the municipality of Groningen started to acknowledge the creative energy at the site. Consequently, the area became subject to the "Stad aan het Water" (City alongside the Water) redevelopment scheme amid a shift towards creative city policies. Soon after its publication, critical arguments emerged concerning the number of affordable dwellings after promises of the city council to provide a mixed-income neighborhood. Concurrently, the area transformed into an urban commons called "Betonbos" (Concrete Jungle) which is being squatted by urban artists. With the municipal plans in full swing, Betonbos residents shortly realized that their chances to return to living in the area were close to nil. However, Betonbos residents showed that they would not be displaced that easily. In fact, the Betonbos community turned out to be part of a larger and hidden undercurrent of self-authorized artists contesting the commercial housing trajectories of the city council.

This research attempts to answer the following question: "How do social movements and urban commons challenge housing commodification in the creative city Groningen?". Through eleven qualitative walking interviews with urban artists, findings illuminate how social movements in Groningen resist commodification and empower marginalized communities to reclaim their right to housing. In this context, Betonbos turned to squatting to de-commodify housing. Punks, anarchists, environmental activists, squatters, and graffiti artists with strong roots in the urban art scene politically mobilized under the name “De Groningse Onderstroom” (The Groninger Undercurrent). The Betonbos commons and its ally, Groningen Undercurrent, exemplify how collective action can cultivate empowering social infrastructures. Through prioritizing shared governance and use value, the Betonbos experience demonstrates the potential for a reimagined urban landscape beyond commodification. Ultimately, these ongoing housing struggles demonstrate the need for a creative city framework that embraces the transformative power of collective action in creating non-commodified urban spaces.

The legacies of socialist modernism across Central and Eastern Europe have undergone a tumultuous journey in the decades following the collapse of communism. Initially marginalized or demolished in favor of neoliberal urban development, these structures—once emblematic of ideological and functional modernity—are now becoming sites of contention and cultural resurgence. This lecture explores how local communities, activists, and urban movements have re-engaged with these heritage sites, shifting the mechanisms of heritagization from elite-driven processes to grassroots initiatives.

By examining diverse case studies, including the protests against the demolition of Kyiv’s Kvity Ukrainy, Prague’s Hotel Praha, Belgrade’s Hotel Jugoslavija, Krakow's Hotel Cracowia, and Skopje’s GTC mall, this analysis highlights the multifaceted and creative ways communities are reclaiming and reinterpreting socialist modernist heritage. These movements reveal the broader socio-political dynamics of post-socialist societies, where heritage preservation intersects with critiques of unregulated urbanization, corruption, and democratic deficits.

This grassroots activism demonstrates a significant shift in the perception of socialist modernist heritage, from symbols of a contested past to platforms for articulating identity, memory, and civic resistance. Activists, often in collaboration with architects, artists, and historians, have employed diverse repertoires of contention, ranging from protests and petitions to artistic performances and symbolic acts, such as human chains. These efforts have not only challenged the erasure of socialist modernist heritage but have also fostered a reimagining of public spaces as inclusive, dynamic, and meaningful.

How do these initiatives negotiate contested legacies, build legitimacy and express opposition to stagnant ways of remembering, contributing to the bottom-up construction of heritage and transforming often dissonant heritage into vibrant cultural resources or arenas of political contestation?