Protests Beyond the Plaza: Everyday Spaces, Urban Morphologies, and Strategies

The chapters in this volume investigate some of the most important urban upheavals in recent history through different political, social and cultural contexts. Through this cross section of case studies from Ukraine, Belarus, Myanmar, Lebanon, Spain, United States, South Korea and Iran, authors envision the future of the successful urban protest as a whole-society movement in which all aspects of a city’s morphology are effectively leveraged. The volume illustrates the ways in which these protests consciously and subconsciously drew lessons from each other’s experiences and integrated physical and virtual tools. Urban environments shape, facilitate, and/or complicate protests and the degree to which protesters recognize and internalize these features is often key to their efficacy. Moreover, emerging protest strategies proliferate and change to fit the context in which they occur. Using interviews, mapping, architectural and planning-scale documentation of urban morphologies, this volume traces the development of important protests and the evolution of protest strategy in balancing the physical and the virtual. It will be of interest to architects, urban sociologists, urban planners, historians, political scientists, journalists, and anyone else interested in how the city shapes resistance.

Kateryna Malaia is an architectural historian and educator. She researches housing under pressure and in times of change. Her first book, Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room was published in 2023. Her book Mass Housing in Ukraine (with Philipp Meuser) was published in September 2024.

Nathan M. Hutson is an urban planner and currently serves as a Visiting Professor of Urban Studies and Postwar Reconstruction at the Kyiv School of Economics. He also serves as an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is a Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and is an active member of the Ro3kvit Coalition for Ukraine and the American Planning Association’s Ukraine Rebuilding Action Group.