Urban culture, Public space and Housing: Negotiating, Claiming and Contesting Public Space.

This lecture series revisited the division between public and private space in the city. This division has been one of the key issues when addressing the qualities of public life and the urban fabric in urban history. Public space has been conceived of as being limited through different shades of private borders, boundaries and property lines, whereas urban planners state that in order to build real cities and not just dwelling units, private space needs to be interwoven with the urban fabric through the connective tissue that is public space. This dialectical relation has also been expressed through the shifting balance between tenants and owners of a city. A manifest change in these patterns has been induced by financial and speculative modes of housing production in which through subprime lending an increasing number of tenant households have been offered loans, in order to tempt them to become property owners and despite them being at high risk not to afford the loan. This, for instance, has been the case in Spain in recent years. It was the aim of this lecture to explore to what extent the relation between public space and housing schemes (and related policies, research and activism) has changed over the last decade, particularly as regards the new urban extension areas. How are these new dwelling areas conceived as built environments, and for whom? Another set of questions that lie behind this investigative lecture-approach was to find out to what extent traditional ‘tenant cities’ have been developing into ‘cities of home owners’, in which the manoeuvre particularly of cities as owners of public housing stocks for renting has been diminished? How have political and medial agendas been shaped in order to stimulate people to consider becoming property owners?