Ungovernable Spaces: Community Formation and the Poetics of Resistance

What does it mean to be governed and what does it mean to resist?Examining how communities form amidst social and political turbulence, this open access book presents four case studies that demonstrate the power of organic social formations over imposed order.Understanding this formation of community in terms of ‘ungovernability’ and a ‘poetics of resistance’, Ungovernable Spaces charts a movement from oppression, through transformation, into imagining, and finally emergence.Throughout the book, the authors engage methods of situated practice and related modes of writing and image-making to consider a range of global case studies: the destruction of the Mecca apartment building in Chicago’s South Side in 1952, following a decade of resistance from the building’s predominantly African American occupants; M.K.Gandhi’s practices of social activism including the Salt March protest of 1930, and the daily practice of spinning and intermittent fasts; the Ciudad Abierta (Open City), a radical