Neoliberal urbanism often draws critiques because it privatizes public space and excludes specific social groups whose interests are not in line with the development goals of local states and corporations. This article, through an exploration of the politics and discourses of urban skateboarding, suggests that this clear distinction, between entrepreneurialism and community–based place making, may fail to explain transformative changes occurring in public space today. Comparing two grassroots activist campaigns at the Brooklyn Banks in New York City (NYC) and West LA Courthouse in the city of Los Angeles (LA), this article explains the ways in which skateboarders leverage specific neoliberal ideologies to claim their right to these two settings. In both cases, skateboarders save spaces through entrepreneurial urban means that bolster neoliberal values while retaining the tactical nature of their activities. Although both activist movements pursue the common values of authenticity, entrepreneurship, and private funding, they employ different discourses to reclaim public space. The NYC skaters frame a security discourse, which ultimately limits their continual access to the Brooklyn Banks. The LA skate community, on the contrary, constructs a spontaneity discourse, characterized by creativity, conviviality, and civil society, successfully transforming the West LA Courthouse into a legalized skate plaza. Our findings suggest that skateboarding communities and their spatial activism are resilient enough to articulate different rationales and successfully fight to transform public spaces into urban commons. However, we argue that ‘the discourses’ matter significantly in the processes and outcomes of activist mobilizations occurring within neoliberalizing public space.

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Urban design is concerned with designing and making urban places. It is influenced and constrained by aesthetic, economic, environmental, political, and social demands, with their attendant implications for justice. Ideas about justice in urban space have developed in critical ways in recent years (Soja 2010; Fainstein 2011; Low and Iverson 2016). Just and unjust practices are contested through urban politics, materialized through spatial practices, including urban design, and become visibly and physically inscribed in space. Our late colleague Edward Soja (2010) argued that justice and space are inextricably linked. Socially produced spaces create structures of unevenly distributed geographical advantages and disadvantages. Because of design's role in envisioning and making these spaces, particular forms of injustice are intertwined and perpetuated or conversely mitigated by urban design.But to what extent are urban design theories centrally concerned with justice in the city? In this chapter, we examine the key theoretical developments in urban design scholarship over the last 120 years to understand this. We identify thirty-one classic books that have influenced and continue to influence built environment processes and outcomes and urban design pedagogy worldwide. We ask: Did the foremost urban design thinkers concern their theories and visions with equity and justice issues? If so, how did they incorporate notions of justice into urban

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This article focuses on national and local anti-homeless ordinances and investigates emerging spatial banishment strategies and their impacts on unhoused folks’ basic freedoms. First, we review debates on co-existing geographies of punishment and care through theoretical and legal lenses. Focusing on sixteen cities in the United States, we examine categories of anti-homeless ordinances and their evolution in the past two decades. Next, we focus on Los Angeles and use archival research and interviews with activists to examine the expansion of newly emerging anti-homeless spaces. Our research details ad hoc strategies of spatial banishment targeting homelessness. We find that the city represents a fragmented landscape of “no-go-zones” for the unhoused. We posit that the COVID-19 pandemic enabled various spatial banishment strategies and that Los Angeles is neo-revanchist. We advocate for city policies that abolish spatial banishment strategies and respond to the needs of the unhoused.