The everyday and the evental public space: rethinking the spatiotemporal modalities of radical political events

In this paper, we put forward an examination of the interconnections between public space, the everyday, and the event in order to rethink the spatiotemporal modalities of political action. Recent mass mobilisations and civil unrest events around the globe have brought to the fore the complex relationship between political practices and public space. These indicate a critique of representative democracy, authoritarian governance, and precarious living conditions, as well as entailing new ways of doing and conceptualising politics. Our paper approaches the production and (re)configuration of public space through a spatiotemporal analysis of collective action based on the events that took place in Athens, in December 2008, and in Tottenham, London, in August 2011. By considering the everyday socio-political dynamics of public space as formative of radical political practices, we also pay attention to its evental (re)production. Such a process, we argue, entails the potentiality for rupture, contestation and radical imagination.