Crowding as appropriation: voting, violence and bodies in a nineteenth-century urban space

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to address the relation between crowds and public space as a question of appropriation. With the new liberal constitutions in Europe, several phenomena of crowding emerge in major cities, of which Copenhagen is taken as an example. By focusing on the crowd as an agglomeration of bodies, it is assessed how the agency of the crowd works on an immediate level and in its more lasting effects on urban space. The notion of appropriation is related to the crowd’s claim, formal and informal, as resulting from a negotiation of this, mostly public, space, and articulated in empirical cases such as elections, political activism or pickpocketing. Thus, the article suggests terms for a bodily focused and historically situated crowd theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Crowds
• urban history
• spatial politics
• body
• appropriation
• public space
• contentious performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mikkel Thelle is an urban historian and Associate Professor at the Institute of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He is director of the Danish Center for Urban History and as such he is following and supervising a range of research activities on this subject. As a cultural historian, Mikkel is interested in social theory as a way of understanding the transformations of the modern city, with a focus on space, practice and technology. Mikkels research has a point of departure in the period around 1900, but certain tracks covers also contemporary themes such as the neoliberal city.