Abstract

This article seeks to address the relation between crowds and public space as a question of appropriation. With the new liberal constitutions in Europe, several phenomena of crowding emerge in major cities, of which Copenhagen is taken as an example. By focusing on the crowd as an agglomeration of bodies, it is assessed how the agency of the crowd works on an immediate level and in its more lasting effects on urban space. The notion of appropriation is related to the crowd’s claim, formal and informal, as resulting from a negotiation of this, mostly public, space, and articulated in empirical cases such as elections, political activism or pickpocketing. Thus, the article suggests terms for a bodily focused and historically situated crowd theory.

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