Too many of today’s public spaces are designed to control, to exclude, and to commodify. They tell us where to sit, what not to do, and who belongs.
Liberation Urbanism rejects this logic. It insists that the city is not merely a backdrop for commerce or a machine for efficiency — it is the shared stage of human life.
What We Stand For
1. Freedom of Use
Public space must be free to be used, not just looked at. It should accommodate many activities at once: play, performance, protest, rest.
2. Anti-Exclusion
We reject defensive architecture and restrictive bylaws that criminalize presence. No spikes on ledges, no benches you cannot lie on, no signs that say “no ball games.”
3. Radical Inclusivity
The city belongs to everyone: children, elders, migrants, workers, artists, skaters, lovers, and loners. Liberation Urbanism designs for diversity of body, mind, and culture.
4. Democratic Agency
Liberated cities are co-created. Communities shape them, hack them, re-make them. Tactical interventions are the manifestation of engaged citizenship.
5. Openness & Adaptability
A liberated space is never finished. It is flexible, responsive, and alive, ready to evolve as its community does.
6. Joy & Play
Joy is not a luxury. Play is not optional. They are essential to civic health. Liberation Urbanism creates spaces that delight, surprise, and invite participation.
Our Call to Action
To practice Liberation Urbanism is to design with humility and generosity. It means listening to the city before telling it what to do. It means measuring success not by property values, but by the freedom, creativity, and connection that spaces make possible.
We call on planners, designers, policymakers, and citizens to see public space as a commons: a place to be shared, not controlled.
The liberated city is one where we are free to linger, to gather, to create, to play.
A place to simply be.