Title: Community, empowerment, and everyday politics: public space between Bangkok and Barcelona

Author: Franziska Dienstl

Year: 2025

Keywords: Public Space; Community; Empowerment; The Right to the City; Emotional, Geography; Spatial Appropriation

Themes: Public Sphere and Media, Environmental Politics and Policy

Advisor(s): Jakkrit Sangkhamanee

The full thesis available here.

Abstract: This thesis examines how public spaces with high citizen appropriation contribute to urban residents’ sense of community and empowerment in two contrasting cases, Wat Don Cemetery Park in Bangkok and Plaça de Santa Madrona in Barcelona. It approaches public space not simply as physical space, but as a social and political infrastructure through which quality of life, as well as dimensions of community, civic identity, power, and expression are manifested and (re-)negotiated in everyday urban life (Abrahão, 2016 ; Andersson, 2016). The study brings together the Right to the City (Lefebvre, 1996) and Emotional Geography (Davidson et al., 2016) to analyse how public space works as a field of power dynamics and how users within it affectively experience space, in turn re-shaping relationships with and within public space. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, phenomenological and comparative case study design based on literature review, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. By comparing two politically and culturally distinct urban contexts, the paper asks how perceptions of community and empowerment are shaped by different spatial, cultural and political conditions. This further fills a methodological gap of comparison across different contexts of ‘development’, as described by Anguelovski (2014). This paper contributes to debates on urban justice futures by showing how public space is lived, negotiated, and politically meaningful across different contexts.