Building and Testing a Theory of Territoriality through Tactical Urbanism



By 2050, two-thirds of the world will be urban dwellers (United Nations 2014). Increasingly, policymakers, business practitioners, and citizens are questioning who has rights to live in the city where affordability is a growing problem (Mitchell 2003). Against this backdrop, grassroots resistance is growing, as evidenced by the rise in guerilla urbanism, DIY urbanism, and open-source urbanism (Finn 2014; Wortham-Galvin 2013). We use the term tactical urbanism to describe these temporary small-scale interventions that aim to re-envision, re-design, and reclaim city spaces to be more people-centered. Tactical urbanism uses “short-term, low-cost, and scalable” interventions toward long-term social change (Lydon and Garcia 2015). However, these interventions and how they work (or do not work) are not well theorized from a consumer perspective; specifically, how do these tactics affect the psychological and communal feelings of ownership of these places?

This session brings together five theorists to better understand place making. Joann Peck and Martin Paul Fritze use psychological theories of ownership and experiments to understand how people consume space (Kirk, Peck, and Swain 2018). Brennan Davis employs quantitative theories and methods to understand spatial relationships (Davis and Grier 2015; Grier and Davis 2013). Carol Kaufman-Scarborough has long worked with a spatial sensibility by examining the role of bodega’s in local neighborhoods and retail challenges faced by consumers with disabilities (Kaufman and Hernandez 1992; Kaufman-Scarborough 1999). Julie Ozanne draws on critical geography theories of space and employs ethnographic methods (Saatcioglu and Ozanne 2013a, 2013b).

We seek to understand how these urban tactics affect the psychological and community ownership of the neighborhoods where they are employed. How is psychological ownership by consumers’ of their neighborhood affected by the interventions of tactical urbanists—when does psychological ownership rise and decline? How do tactical urbanists affect larger community feelings of collective ownership?


Track Leaders

Maja Gold Papez
Martin P. Fritze is Assistant Professor of Trade Fair Management and Marketing at the University of Cologne. His research interests are in the areas of psychological ownership, services marketing, and transformative consumer research. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Rostock in 2017 with a dissertation on the Sharing Economy and dematerialization of consumption. He was a visiting researcher at Imperial College London (2015), National University of Singapore (2017), and at the University of Cambridge (2017) and served as a research fellow at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) in corporate management and sustainable consumption.
Maja Gold Papez
Julie L. Ozanne is Professor of Marketing at the University of Melbourne. She is a transformative consumer researcher who specializes in alternative methodologies, such as interpretive, critical, participatory, and community action research methods. She also examines the problems of the poor and the low literate, as well as new forms of sustainable exchange based on sharing. She is an associate editor at the Journal of Consumer Research, she chaired of the TCR advisory committee (2013-15), co-edited the book–Transformative Consumer Research for Personal and Collective Well-Being (2012), and co-chaired the TCR conference in 2009, 2015, and 2017.
Maja Gold Papez
Brennan Davis is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Orfalea College of Business at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Brennan investigates theory about place, social psychology, and unhealthy consumption. He was recognized with the 2016 Emerging Scholar Award. He has publications in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing where his paper won the 2017 and 2014 Kinnear/JPP&M Awards from the American Marketing Association, and in the American Journal of Public Health where he won the best paper award in 2009 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He serves on the TCR advisory committee.

Track Participants

  • Carol Kaufman-Scarborough, Rutgers University, United States
  • Kris Kolluri, President & Chief Executive Office at Cooper’s Ferry Partnership.
  • Joann Peck, University of Wisconsin, United States