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In autumn 2015, activists and refugees in Vienna appropriated train stations for shelter. This paper explores their affective practices in order to reflect on their agency to transform predominant ways of understanding and inhabiting public space. At the place of arrival they made their private domain of everyday struggles a part of public space. In so doing they have produced a powerful means for confronting socio-spatial inequalities. Affective practice can therefore be interpreted as the spatialized critique of alienated conditions of everyday life.

This paper conceptualizes affective urbanism as both research framework and praxis, engaging professionals and concerned publics alike in the insurgent making of cities. With its focus on affect and bodily encounters, it taps into the rich knowledge of practices of improvising and inventing in everyday life, which tend to fall outside the realm of discursive and visual representations. An analysis of spatial practices of the collective Plataforma de Afectados Por La Hipoteca in Barcelona illustrates how a mobilization of affects fosters not only individual, but first and foremost a collective capacity to negotiate belonging, appropriate space and contest alienated conditions of everyday life. The argument rests on the hypothesis that affect implicates the ethical engagement with people at places of everyday life, thus producing a medium and means for transgressing socio-spatial divides and challenging practices of exclusion, othering and dispossession. The value of this kind of work does not necessarily lie in the quality of conceived or materialized design, but rather in enacting an inclusive and empathic design praxis which connects to people's multiple lived spaces and cultivates lived space of deep and caring social relations.