Ungovernable Spaces

Community Formation and the Poetics of Resistance

What does it mean to be governed and what does it mean to resist? Examining how communities form amidst social and political turbulence, this open access book presents four case studies that demonstrate the power of organic social formations over imposed order.

Understanding this formation of community in terms of ‘ungovernability’ and a ‘poetics of resistance’, Ungovernable Spaces charts a movement from oppression, through transformation, into imagining, and finally emergence.

Throughout the book, the authors engage methods of situated practice and related modes of writing and image-making to consider a range of global case studies: the destruction of the Mecca apartment building in Chicago’s South Side in 1952, following a decade of resistance from the building’s predominantly African American occupants; M.K. Gandhi’s practices of social activism including the Salt March protest of 1930, and the daily practice of spinning and intermittent fasts; the Ciudad Abierta (Open City), a radical pedagogical experiment started by a poet and an architect in Valparaíso, Chile in 1970; and, finally, the urban ecologies developing on either side of Belfast's ‘peace walls’ in the wake of the Troubles and 1998's Good Friday Agreement.

Structured via four spatial configurations – the grid, the charkha, the constellation, and the cluster –each case study explores community formation through artistic and aesthetic practices that resist and unsettle forms of hegemonic order. A truly interdisciplinary work at the intersection of poetry, art and spatial practice, Ungovernable Spaces argues for the importance of ethics, aesthetics, imagination and ecology in developing, of necessity, a new poetics of ‘us.’ In doing so, it demonstrates how the formation of community in and through resistance has the potential to introduce new models of social and cultural interaction that make something new, something different, something unknown of the world.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.