Abstracts

Heba Alnajada
The Street as a Ruin of Informalization in Palestinian Refugee Camps 

This talk looks at the ruins of informalization in Palestinian refugee camps. It begins by historicizing the shift towards ‘informality,’ locating it in the 1980s, at the intersection of sustained humanitarian non-recognition, the continuum to undo Palestinian refugee camps, and the adoption of World Bank-funded developmentalist imaginaries. The ruins of this process of informalization are many: rubble, tiles, the disappearance of state departments and archives, and language itself as a ruin, to name but a few. The talk focuses on one of these: a street cut through the dwellings of a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. It details how the street is the product not only of “squatter settlement” upgrading projects, but also of a language of informality, along with the habits of mind of architects and planners. The argument here is that a street in a non-recognized camp is not merely a line on a map, a passage for traffic, or a pedestrian space; it embodies a principle of architecture and urban planning predicated on ‘sanctioned ignorance’ and the erasure and disappearance of Palestinian history. The street is a ruin of informalization in space, in the rubble, the tiles that remain visible, and in time and subjectivity. This talk ends by considering how the time of the ‘squatter settlement’ is already over and how camp dwellers contemplate these ruins and work against them.

Liam Bierschenk
Pedestrian Space conceived as a K (knowledge) Space: from negative to positive hallucination and symbol formation

In this paper I will discuss Sandback’s concept of ‘Pedestrian Space’ being a diffuse space combining the triple ontology of space-viewer-artwork, to ask how the capacity to conceive of space and objects arises in the first instance, from a psychoanalytic perspective. I will draw on the work of psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion to describe a developmental process between self and other, which passes through phases of hallucinatory experience to arrive at the capacity to use symbols proper. I shall touch on the significance of these processes for art and science, specifically mathematics, and make the case that psychoanalysis, or rather the psychoanalytic state of mind, is a method for exploring these developmental experiences and the spaces they reveal.

Liisa Bourgeot
Stalin-era logicians: a quest for intellectual freedom in a totalitarian state

The emergence of Soviet dissent caught everyone off guard. Soviet leaders and Western observers alike had assumed that Stalin’s iron regime had crushed free thought and independent action in the USSR. Thus, the first public manifestation of inakomyshlenie (‘thinking-otherwise’) that took place on Moscow’s Pushkin Square in 1965 was utterly unforeseen.

Recently, the evolution of the Soviet human rights movement in the 1960s and 70s has been a topic for rich discussions. Their narratives often build around the eccentric mathematician, poet, and gulag-inmate Alexander Esenin-Volpin, whose founding idea was simple: the Soviet state should be held accountable for its own laws. Stalin’s Constitution purported to guarantee rights – freedom of assembly, speech, and the press – to all Soviet citizens. These rights never existed in reality; yet Esenin-Volpin inspired the early dissidents to pretend they were real.

In my talk, I suggest that the roots of the dissident movement can be traced further back in Soviet intellectual history, specifically to the “rebirth” of logic after WWII. This claim appears at first paradoxical. From 1947 onwards, all Soviet philosophy had to conform to the official ideology; those who failed to comply risked harsh repressions. Yet, even under the strictest control, logic developed in relative freedom. Thinkers such as Valentin Asmus and Sofiya Yanovskaya – both future mentors of Esenin-Volpin – kept their university posts, published new ideas, and thus prepared the ground for future generations.

Intellectual freedom in the USSR was not only a phenomenon of a post-totalitarian era; its seeds were sown during Stalin’s harshest years. My talk examines how expressions of freedom could arise from the midst of extreme ideological control – first in the field of Soviet logic, then through the rationale of Soviet law.

Margaret Crawford
Pedestrians, Spatial Practices, and the Right to the City

The literature of the modern city casts pedestrians as privileged actors, exemplifying modernity as they move through sidewalks, parks, and other public spaces. From Frederick Law Olmsted’s advocacy of civilized strolling, to the Parisian flaneur, “botanizing the pavement,” to Jane Jacob’s description of the “street ballet” to Jan Gehl’s designs for “vibrant” city centers, the pedestrian experience has been depicted as the essence of urban life. This paper explores less celebrated pedestrians and others who share pedestrian spaces, but whose presence is often challenged. Since the 19^th century, definitions of these unwanted pedestrians have continually changed, ranging from immigrant garment workers to black and brown men. Even more challenging are stationary spatial practices in pedestrian areas usually defined by directional mobility. These actions can include repetitive movements such as picketing, temporary but fixed occupation by street vendors or day laborers, or assembled groups of protestors. These practices, both mobile and stationary, highlight other dimensions of urban life. Sites of contention over access to public space, they reveal competing claims to identity and inclusion. I argue that these pedestrian practices are far from pedestrian, but contain significant meanings that embody ongoing struggles over the meaning of democracy.

Marta Gutman
Pedestrian Space, School Children, and Racial Justice in Harlem

For this architectural historian, the tag pedestrian space carries dual connotations—the first being architectural, meaning that when a building or a space is labeled pedestrian, it is viewed as unremarkable, a second rate work; the second being geographical, meaning that when an urban space is designated “pedestrian” it is reserved for people who walk, excluding vehicles and the danger and risk that are associated with them. The tag in the first instance casts pedestrian as a problem, a failure, and in the second as a success, as something to strive for, a benefit to city dwellers of all ages. 

I am not convinced that either assumption helps in understanding pedestrian space in relationship to public architecture for children, historically or in the present day. For instance, in New York City, my hometown, streets were closed to traffic during the pandemic and portable playground equipment was introduced, scattered willy nilly on asphalt and concrete. Kids are adept at turning adult-designed play equipment to their own uses, but this intervention shows how easily a space turned to pedestrian use can easily become an example of pedestrian architecture.

I start from this vantage point, that children are pedestrians, “walkers in the city” who inscribe pedestrian spaces in their neighborhoods. Alfred Kazin coined the phrase to describe his childhood in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and he invoked the city block as the salient spatial structure in the life of a young immigrant child—a place to inhabit, and to imagine leaving, to claim a life in the city beyond the block. In this paper, I turn to another salient material feature in the public life of city children—the public school, which I examine in relationship to pedestrian space and racial justice in Harlem. If school officials acknowledged the child as a walker in locating public schools, children learned who they were when they walked to school. I’m especially interested in discussing white and Black children who walked to different schools in Harlem in the middle of the nineteenth century. If their walk to racially segregated school buildings imparted lessons about racial hierarchy, racial inequality, and privilege to students, walking by common schools also required whites to recognize Black children’s childhood, their standing as students, and their rights to public education. I show that these distinctions were a harbinger of anti-racist struggles to come, struggles which also engaged children, schools, and pedestrian space.

Klaske Havik
Urban Tapestry. Weaving timelines of pedestrian experience in The Hague

In this talk, I will present an urban tapestry, woven from spatial and temporal lines through the city of The Hague, The Netherlands. I will describe pedestrian space in the Dutch city The Hague through different periods, based on two female characters. Part of my narrative describes the city in the 1930s, a city undergoing change as new modern lifestyles emerged. In the early 20th century, The Hague was a vibrant city with a dynamic cultural life, boasting many cinemas and theatres, while the new phenomenon of the department stores emerged. Streets were being widened or newly built as part of urban development projects to accommodate motorised traffic. It is in this Hague that I set the story of Jeanne, who travelled to the city daily to work at a textile atelier in the Passage. Running parallel to her daily route is that of Maria, a young writer living in the city center around the year 2000. Through her eyes, we see how another architect, Rem Koolhaas (OMA) follows in Berlage’s footsteps, aiming to turn The Hague into a contemporary metropolitan city — a goal that only partially succeeds due to the city’s somewhat unruly and conventional character. Both storylines address the experiential aspects of the city streets through the eyes of the pedestrian.

Darien Pollock
Street Justice: The Margins of Legal Authority

In modern societies, it is not uncommon for legal authority (judges, courts, etc.) to become corrupted by social forces (e.g., media, capital, despots) that undermine their ability to uphold certain moral standards valued by the general public. These scenarios tend to produce a unique kind of political actor who partakes in illicit political acts (murder, theft, etc.) on the basis of moral reasons that they believe help maintain the public good, given the disregard of public morality by the legitimate legal institutions in that society.

Call this phenomenon street justice.

In this talk, I want to offer a few thoughts on the nature of street justice.

I start at the level of ordinary language by thinking through the practical application of the abstract concepts “street” and “justice.”

Drawing from my forthcoming book Street Knowledge,: The Hidden Ways Social Change Happens, I talk about a metaphysical concept I call the street disposition and how it provides a motivational theory for understanding any kind of act of resistance—from the American Revolution to the American Civil Rights Movement.

Using recent examples in U.S. politics as a touchstone, I close by describing how understanding the street disposition and street culture could help address vital questions in philosophy of law about the relationship between natural law and legal positivism (“man-made” law). In other words, the street justice framework will help reveal the dynamics between politically motivated actors, morality, and (unjust) legal authority.

Ana María Reyes
Activating Vulnerability: On Artivism in Colombia’s Precarious Peace Process

Reyes analyzes contemporary artivism in Colombia through the activation of public and pedestrian space during the country’s fragile peace process. Focusing on ephemeral, participatory interventions staged in streets, marches, and emblematic civic plazas, most notably Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar, she argues that artivists deliberately mobilize vulnerable materials and embodied presence to transform spaces of circulation into sites of mourning, protest, and political assembly. Through case studies of works and actions by Doris Salcedo, the Wayúu Mantas Negras movement, and Felipe Arturo, Reyes demonstrates how these interventions interrupt everyday urban movement and reconfigure public space as a forum for ethical encounter and collective responsibility. By occupying plazas and streets that function simultaneously as lived civic environments and symbolic centers of national power, these practices render human and ecological fragility visible to national and international audiences while demanding accountability, infrastructural justice, and a sustainable peace. Ultimately, Reyes reconceptualizes public space not as a neutral backdrop for dissent but as a material and political medium through which solidarity, remembrance, and democratic participation are collectively enacted.

Susan Stewart
Far-fetched: On the Poetry of Walking

A talk on the synergy between walking and the imagination, with a focus on poems by William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and others.

Edward Vazquez
A More Complex Situation: Fred Sandback’s Spaces
This talk will provide an overview of Fred Sandback’s art, offering formal and interpretive context for Sandback’s notion of “Pedestrian Space” and its place within broader debates on artistic creation and perception in relation to—and perhaps even as—everyday, quotidian experience. Through an analysis of his spare, site-aware installations, key writings and historical precedents, this talk will consider the “utopian glimmerings of art and life happily cohabiting” that drove Sandback’s coining, marking the on-the-ground presences of its experiential core as well as naming its institutional and critical limits.