Crowding as appropriation: voting, violence and bodies in a nineteenth-century urban space

This article seeks to address the relation between crowds andpublic space as a question of appropriation. With the newliberal constitutions in Europe, several phenomena of crowdingemerge in major cities, of which Copenhagen is taken as anexample. By focusing on the crowd as an agglomeration ofbodies, it is assessed how the agency of the crowd works on animmediate 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 aselections, political activism or pickpocketing. Thus, the articlesuggests terms for a bodily focused and historically situatedcrowd theory.