Closing, Displacing and Remaking Civic Space across Urban Worlds

Scholars have drawn increasing attention to the shrinking of civic space. Civic space is the arena in which citizens articulate views and mobilize collectively. This panel starts from a simple proposition: the urban is not merely a setting for civic space but helps constitute its conditions of possibility. Civic space is materially grounded in urban environments and shaped by zoning, policing, urban redevelopment, transport systems, religious institutions, property regimes, and the unequal regulation of protest, association, and public presence.

Urban research suggests a broader puzzle: civic space does not simply shrink; it is displaced, fragmented, selectively opened, privatized, securitized, informalized, and sometimes rebuilt in unexpected sites and practices. Research on the privatization and securitization of public space shows who controls these arenas and who is excluded. Scholarship on urban governance highlights how access is filtered, compliant actors rewarded, decisions relocated to insulated arenas, and legitimate claims narrowed. Work on urban citizenship and social movements points to evolving repertoires of action, new forms of representation, and shifting dynamics of repression, co-optation, and collaboration. Research on informality shows that civic space may migrate rather than disappear – into informal settlements, mutual aid infrastructures, religious networks, digital publics and street economies.

This panel invites contributions examining the closure, displacement, transformation, and recomposition of urban civic space, with particular interest in papers that identify underlying mechanisms. We welcome work from diverse urban contexts and across scales, including comparisons between North and South, democratic and authoritarian settings, and large metropolitan as well as smaller cities.