Chien Lee

City, Public Space, and Body offers a timely and interdisciplinary examination of how bodies experience, shape, and are shaped by urban life, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bringing together contributions from scholars, artists, and practitioners across diverse geographies, the book explores the entangled relationships between urban space, embodiment, and publicness through a variety of methodological lenses including ethnography, visual and performative arts, and critical urban theory. The book highlights underexplored themes such as gendered vulnerability, spatial justice, post-pandemic public space, and marginalized urban bodies in both Global North and Global South contexts. By focusing on lived experience and embodied methodologies, the book challenges dominant urban narratives and contributes fresh perspectives on space, care, power, and resistance. It will benefit readers seeking to rethink cities not merely as physical or functional entities, but as affective and contested terrains of social life. Designed for researchers, students, and professionals in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, gender studies, and cultural geography, this collection foregrounds the bodily and sensory dimensions of urban encounters, spatial politics, and everyday life.

This chapter sets the theoretical and political groundwork for the book by centring lived, embodied experience as a critical lens for understanding urban life. It critiques dominant technocratic planning systems for failing to engage with the affective, relational, and sensory dimensions of the city. The chapter advocates for experimental urban practices that resist corporate urbanism and reconfigure public space through gestures of care, memory, protest, and improvisation. Drawing on feminist, decolonial, and phenomenological approaches, it reimagines the city as a shifting field of bodily encounters and mediated politics. The chapter outlines a research ethic rooted in sensuous engagement and collective experimentation, calling on scholars and practitioners to expand the discursive and spatial possibilities of urban life. It also introduces the book's three thematic sections, positioning the body as a vital site of knowledge production, resistance, and transformation.