To Occupy, to Inscribe, to Thicken: Spatial Politics and the Right to the Surface

This essay sits in the warm, multiple and frictional space of the urban surface. The surface is a space: not a boundary but an extension, a thickness, an object.
The surface object is cumulative and layered: it results from the gradual addition of individual inscriptions,
materials, coatings, paint, markings and erasures.
Urban spatial production makes surface. It doesn’t just occupy the surface, it produces it: it generates a new space, a new location, a new object. The surface is therefore qualitatively different from private and public spaces. It blurs these urban ownership regimes and embodies collective spatial production and use: a surface commons. Urban ownership regimes and the politics of spatial production are closely related to the question of the right to the city. In thinking about what, and where, the right to the city is, I will suggest in this essay that the right to the city might be (in) the surface.