Category: Issue-7-2026

If an active citizenship needs places to unfold where a sense of neighbourhood, belonging and identity can be developed, the majority of recent cities do not meet this criterion. If active citizenship is a premise for free citizens and hence for democracy, where is such an active citizenship possible today? If not confined to protests?

How Housing Pressures Erase Cultural Heritage, Identity, and Citizenship – The Chandigarh Story

The proliferation of gated communities and residential compounds has reshaped urban development across diverse contexts, from rapidly growing cities in Asia to more established environments. While these enclaves respond to legitimate demands for safety, order, and quality of life, their cumulative impact on the city remains underexamined. This paper argues that compound-based urbanism produces fragmentation,…

What is being presented in this essay is a view into the relationship between loss of identity and collective consciousness within society/community and the Self. This is paralleled with the adaptions relative to the new internet/social media outer world and the possible journey to individual and societal nihilism, as is discussed from the point of…

Through and with this creative-relational inquiry and commentary I explore how we can stay with the trouble of loneliness and respond to it through encounters with community gardens. Community gardens are a growing third place within Western societies that offer affective environments, which support participants’ wellbeing, belonging and interconnectivity, as well as transformational encounters, which…

This essay reconsiders urban deterioration not simply as failure, loss, or civic abandonment, but as a critical category through which the moral authority of preservation, repair, and revitalization can be questioned.

Reclaiming the multiplicity of what a city means, this article works with the palimpsest archetype through the lens of complex thinking to explore how memory shapes reality, rather than merely recalling it. The methodology, based on a literature review, first lays the foundations for how the palimpsest archetype develops in the city, both literally and…

The historical idea of the city in Western culture has long been closely linked to the concept of citizenship. From the Greek polis to the modern European city, urban space was understood as a place where citizens could meet, interact, and participate in the shaping of collective life. Streets, markets, squares, and neighborhoods formed the…

In my photographic work, I search for the cracks in the polished image of the modern city. We all sense it: city centers are becoming unaffordable, and luxurious spaces are reserved for a small elite. With my series La Grande Bouffe, however, I did not want to produce a theoretical treatise, but rather to tell…

Katerina Belkina’s work ‘For All Mankind’ – an outside view of community