Book Review of 'Unsettled urban space: routines, temporalities and contestations' edited by Tihomir Viderman, Sabine Knierbein, Elina Kränzle, Sybille Frank, Nikolai Roskamm and Ed Wall

This densely layered book examines ‟unsettled urban space” across Europe, Asia, the Americas and the Gulf states through three distinct analytical prisms: Routines, Temporalities and Contestations. It grew out of a series of conferences at the City of Vienna Visiting Professorship for Urban Culture and Public Space between 2015 and 2017. The publication's interpretative models are reminiscent of a 20th century lineage of trialectic conceptions of urban space. Henri Lefebvre's juxtaposed, divergent spaces (perceived, conceived and lived space), spring to mind; he argued that these coexist in complex interdependencies between spatial practices and representations. The book's interest in ‟unsettlement” recalls Edward Soja's development of Lefebvre's triad that highlights disorderly, unruly, constantly evolving, and unfixed interpretations of space, emphasising how these resist permanent theoretical constructions of space. The book's editors and contributors are interested in how space is settled, unsettled, and contested, while the various interpretative models of space presented in the introductions and chapters are concatenated rather than placed in opposition to each other.