Vol. 7 No. 1 (2025): Urban Territories as Malleable Matter for Negotiating Urban Futures - Anchors, Assemblages, Antagonisms

Territories have traditionally demarcated spheres of political influence and translated power relations into physical spaces. The delimitation of territories separated friends from foes and ensured that policy and polity infused the places of everyday life of citizens – consequently structuring individual lifeworlds and embodied environments. The states’ legal systems have been an indispensable building block of territorialized power systems that culminated in supranational entities such as the European Union. These vast organizations of supranational metagovernance changed the scales of mediated power relations and resulted in abstract political constructs, whose inner workings are often hard to grasp. Responsibilities and competencies at the level of nation states seem to have been diluted, as decision-making power moved away from national governments. At the same time grassroots organizations and political activists of all colors are gaining traction and are searching for answers to pressing issues and problems by re-posing a centuries-old question: Whose territory?