COP26 protests in Glasgow

Encountering crowds and the city

Bibliographic Data

ID21722643
AuthorsMiza Moreau (0000-0002-5551-9710, University of Glasgow, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume139
Issue1-2
Pages56-72
Publication date2023-04-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScottish Geographical Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1470-2541 • E-ISSN: 1751-665X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14702541.2022.2161008
OpenAlexW4313566611
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited15

This paper is concerned with both the affective and material dimensions of encounters among people, and between people and the city, during the COP26 summit in Glasgow, focusing on protest activities that aimed to engage the broader public. The discussion draws from my participation in, and observations of, two protests, the Youth Activist Climate March and the Climate Activist March, and observations of changes in public open spaces in Glasgow for COP26. Fieldwork street photography was instrumental in this study for discovering diverse encounters that were sometimes too transient to register through observations alone. It was deployed as a heuristic method, drawing from personal ‘in the moment’ experiences of the protests, as well as theories of public space and urban morphology, with the aim to discover how changing interactions between bodies and material spaces temporarily reconfigured Glasgow’s public realm. By making material/social relationships more transparent, this paper aims to address shortcomings in protest literature through addressing the material specificity of urban space. I argue that the diversity of Glasgow’s urban spaces enabled varied engagement with protest activities, among protesters, and between protesters and onlookers, and as a result created an overall inclusive, affective experience

Cartography · Crowds · Geography · Media studies · Placemaking · Political science · Public history · Public relations · Public space · Realm · Sociology · Summit · Urban design · Urban planning · Engineering · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Public Spaces through Art · Urban Planning and Governance

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