A connected inquiry into how abstract systems become material in streets, infrastructures and everyday spatial practices.
A Lefebvrian inquiry into street, design, governance and appropriation in Glasgow. The project examines how post-industrial restructuring, municipal fragmentation, infrastructure, austerity and everyday spatial practices become entangled in the contemporary city.
How are the abstract systems of neoliberal urbanism made material, ordinary and contestable in the street?
This semi-structured interview study forms part of Living on the Corpse of Neoliberalism. It examines how Glasgow’s streets are lived, interpreted and appropriated—from long-term everyday experience to the ways art, posters and public messages claim space.
How are Glasgow’s streets experienced over time, and how do people use their surfaces to make cultural, commercial or political claims?
Adults who have lived in Glasgow for more than five years and regularly use its streets and public spaces.
Artists currently making street art or placing work in Glasgow’s streets, and people or groups who appropriate street surfaces through posters, notices, promotion for books or events, campaign material, protest messages, stickers, temporary installations or related practices.
Interested? Email S.Wang22@student.gsa.ac.uk. Please note that the address is case-sensitive.
A connected programme of historical, theoretical and empirical work tracing how street furniture became politically significant under neoliberal urban restructuring, and how public agency persists through appropriation, modification and everyday use.
What can mundane urban objects reveal about changing relations between state, market and citizen?
A theoretical project that uses spatial production to read public design beyond intention, authorship and formal qualities. It focuses on the operational life of designed environments: how they are governed, maintained, financed, inhabited and contested after completion.
How can design critique account for the institutional and everyday life of public objects and spaces?
Writing across urban studies, design research, spatial theory and public culture.
Research article
Wang, S. · CoDesign
Co-design has become a prominent vocabulary in UK urban design and planning. This article examines it as an urban practice embedded in everyday spatial conditions shaped by neoliberal restructuring and austerity. Through a critical narrative review and analysis of 23 policy and municipal documents, it develops three analytical categories: temporal compression, responsibilisation and the datafication of lived conflict.
Research article
Wang, S. · Cities
This paper traces the shift from post-war democratic design governance to an era marked by privatisation, depoliticisation and weakened public oversight. It frames street furniture as an in-between architecture of urban politics and examines how public engagement moved from formal debate into appropriation, subversion and local customisation.
Research article
Wang, S. · The Journal of Architecture
A historical and theoretical account of public art exhibitions as spatial practices through which urban political conflict, public agency and everyday resistance are organised and made visible.
Research article
Wang, S., & Li, Z. · Digital Creativity
Using Henri Lefebvre’s spatial dialectics, field interviews and audiovisual experimentation, this research culminates in the essay film Poetry Grows in the Kitchen. It proposes artmaking as a narrative intervention capable of producing representational image-space and reactivating urban difference, imagination and self-identification.
Research article
Wang, S. · Journal of Urban Design
This article investigates how members of the public appropriate street furniture in Kensington and Chelsea. It reads small acts of use, adaptation and conflict as forms of place-making that reveal the political relations embedded in ordinary urban objects.