Preface. Re-thinking the quality of public space (I)

The many crises we have witnessed in recent decades, such as the financial and ecological crises, mass migration, and more recently the corona pandemic and the tragedy of war, all indicate that the social changes we are observing do not follow a linear pattern but are the result of inherent tensions which produce contrasting or overlapping spatial effects. Tendencies to transgress national boundaries in trade, tourism or electronic communications are, for instance, contrasted by tendencies towards closure and new localistic pressures, re-bordering practices, and privatisation measures of all kinds (Knoblauch et al., 2021). Within this framework, we wanted to focus on the quality of public space to understand the spatial transformations in contemporary society through the analytical lens of refiguration. The perspective is primarily that of cultural and spatial sociology to problematise the normative twist caused by at least two decades of neoliberal rhetoric. The recent sociological research on the quality of public space presented in this special issue focuses on use/desire/understanding in everyday life, which is gendered, class-structured and bound by racism but also by subjectivation. It does not have a simple, ostensive definition; rather it is still knowable through its correlatives. As we see in the papers, it builds a new glossary more connected to the great umbrella of sustainability: care, hybrid, generative, singularised, liminal and connected. The glossary already intercepted by the various theoretical sociological turns - spatial, performative, affective - in this issue of the journal draws interpretative relevance from the practices of refiguration of public space.