AgorAkademi Seminar

organized by Nilüfer Göle 

 Transforming Public Space from the Margins

Thursday May 15,  2025

Columbia Global Paris Center – Reid Hall

4 Rue de Chevreuse 75006 Paris

Salle des conférences

9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.

Transforming Public Space from the Margins

In contemporary urban contexts, migrants, marginalized individuals, and underrepresented groups increasingly contest dominant paradigms of spatial organization and urban governance. Through their everyday practices and spatial claims, they challenge normative assumptions about who has the right to the city, how public space should be used, and under what conditions urban belonging is granted or denied.

This seminar seeks to critically engage with the complex and often conflictual encounters between marginalized populations and the socio-political structures that shape urban life. Through a multidisciplinary lens, participants will examine how alternative forms of spatial organization—enacted through urban planning, cultural interventions, design practices, and performative arts—redefine the uses and meanings of public space. These practices frequently emerge as creative responses to institutional exclusion, regulatory constraints, and systemic neglect. By foregrounding acts of resistance, reappropriation, and experimentation, the seminar brings together the notions of the public good and public space to reflect on new frameworks for collective life.