Abstract
Habitat III and the New Urban Agenda have marked a turn of global urban policies from urban sustainability to urban resilience. From then onwards, citizen participation attains an increased importance in the production of public spaces. In 2016, the Municipality of Thessaloniki announced its participation in the network of “100 Resilient Cities”, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Building on this, the Municipality has produced the “Strategy for Urban Resilience”, which brings at the epicentre of the discussion the concept of the “co-ownership” and participation of public spaces. In light of this, we explore the re-ordering of Thessaloniki’s New Waterfront, through the interplay among urban policies and practices of the Municipality and citizen-led initiatives of everyday praxis. Our aim is to unearth the complex network of consensus and contestation, emerging in and through the public spaces of the New Waterfront, paying particular attention to the importance of practices dissensus. Conceptualizing these practices as the spatialization of democratic urban politics, we provide an empirically grounded analysis of the ways in which and the extent to what, they contribute towards more democratic urban transformation.
| Translated title of the contribution | Urban Resilience and “Co-creation” of Public Spaces: Thessaloniki’s New Waterfront as a contested terrain |
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| Original language | Greek |
| Pages (from-to) | 57-69 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Geographies |
| Volume | 32 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2018 |