Research in this thematic area is concerned with the way in which social practices contribute to the production of urban environments. It refers to the city as lived space, and seeks to examine the activities of individual and collective users, and analyze urban experiences and routines of everyday life that can be both material (or physical) means of inhabiting and contesting spaces as well as imagined ones. By focusing on a multiplicity of actors and publics, and recognizing the dynamics of social division and interaction, this thematic area positions place-making as a political practice, and the social production of space as a generative and necessary condition of the city.

The themes that have been explored so far under this umbrella cover an array of spatial practices and their intersections, and can be framed as negotiations, claims or rights over space. They include urban security and militarization, street occupation, play and leisure, policing, home-making, mobility, labor, refuge and displacement, territorial organization, neighborhood formation, and the perception of boundaries to name but a few.