Across European cities, the pressures of commercialization, overregulation, and creeping privatization are narrowing the scope for informal, creative, and spontaneous uses. These dynamics produce a contested urban condition, where access and agency are unequally distributed.
Street dance emerges as a globally situated yet locally grounded practice that actively engages with this field of tension. Street dance encompasses a variety of these dance styles that emerged primarily among African American and Latinx youth, particularly in the urban contexts of New York and Los Angeles in the 1970s, as part of Hip Hop culture. Unlike institutional stage dances, these dance forms developed in public spaces such as streets, schoolyards, block parties, and parks—as expressions of self-assertion, resistance, and collective creativity.
For me as both a dancer and urban planner, this double perspective has always been striking: what feels like a spontaneous jam in the city is also a profound urban intervention. These practices were closely linked to social marginalization: Black and other underrepresented communities informally used public spaces to create visibility, belonging, and their own forms of expression. The appropriation of space through dance, music, or graffiti was not only aesthetic but also charged with social and political meaning. It challenged dominant spatial and societal orders and shaped new, identity-forming places.
As an embodied, creative, and often self-organized form of urban expression, street dance still reclaims space—transforming sidewalks, plazas, and overlooked in-between areas into stages of presence, interaction, and community.
Bridging a Research Gap
For years, I have been dancing in a wide range of public spaces and have gathered diverse impressions and experiences along the way. Time and again, I have encountered unequal access for street dancers and processes of spatial exclusion or displacement conflicts. This personal experience inspired my diploma thesis “The Dancing City: Placemaking through Street Dance – Potentials and Challenges for Vienna’s Public Spaces”.
It’s driven by a desire to understand how informal dance practices can transform and enliven public space—if they are allowed to. It also explores the social and cultural meanings these practices generate, and what implications this holds for urban planning.
While more traditional forms of public dance, such as China’s public square dancing (Guang Chang Wu), have received growing academic attention, street dance in public spaces remains largely underexplored. There is little systematic research on its unique characteristics, its social effects, and the spatial practices that emerge around it. Likewise, the concept of placemaking —has rarely been applied to street dance, even though studies hint at overlaps, such as creative appropriation, transformation, and social cohesion.
My research draws on qualitative interviews with Vienna’s city planning officials, organizers such as ImPulsTanz, and local street dance collectives, complemented by a community-wide survey. This multi-perspective approach highlights how something as simple as dancing together can transform urban spaces into places of belonging, visibility, and collective agency.
Street Dance as a Form of Placemaking
Street dance is placemaking in motion: it reclaims, redefines, and revitalizes public space through the power of collective movement
- It reclaims neglected, privatized and commercialized spaces.
- It enables cultural participation beyond institutional walls and language barriers.
- It materializes intangible connections—trust, solidarity, shared identity—in public.
- Strengthens social participation and fosters cultural exchange.
- Reshapes the perception of public places: Spaces are no longer merely functional but are imbued with new meaning and identity also for people passing by.
- Acts as a powerful form of self-expression and empowerment, especially for marginalized groups.
- Questions power relations.
- Activates temporary “in-between-” to “possibility spaces”.
- Enhances well-being by promoting self-confidence, creativity, and fitness.
Yet, these potentials face obstacles
- Lack of supportive infrastructure (smooth floors, shelter, lighting) or places in general (spatial competition; privatization).
- Harassment and Replacement.
- Conflicts with authorities and complaints about noise.
- Limited recognition as legitimate cultural practice.
- Selective cultural funding: Support often focuses on institutionalized formats, leading to a perception among informal groups that they lack direct city support.
Rather than being discouraged, dancers respond creatively: using in-between spaces, adapting the space conditions, building temporary places of appearance and reimagining the cityscape as a stage.
Implications & Actions for using realizing it’s placemaking potential
The thesis offers concrete implications for urban planning to foster street dance and harness its placemaking potential. This means moving beyond symbolic recognition to structural enablement. Key recommendations for city planners and governance include:
1. Build Sustainable Cooperative Relationships:
- Foster ongoing dialogues between dancers, space operators, and city authorities to negotiate shared usage rules, clarify responsibilities, and establish protective mechanisms.
- Recognize street dance as cultural practice, not mere “disturbance.”
2. Strengthen Governance Structures for Informal Practices:
- Develop funding formats not exclusively tied to institutional bodies, allowing smaller, informal groups to access support.
- Adopt conflict-sensitive management strategies that actively secure social participation and cultural diversity, moving beyond simply favoring established uses.
- Introduce proactive, dialogue-oriented administrative approaches and awareness-raising measures.
3. Visible Space Designation and Creation of “Danceable Spaces”:
- Establish clearly marked areas for dance with distinctive signage that publicly designates them as movement and dance spaces. This signals institutional support and helps reduce harassment.
*Draft: Not intended as a universal solution, but rather as an impulse for further urban planning discussions and as a concrete response to the specific needs of the street dance community—such as smooth surfaces, sheltered areas, and accessible spaces.
Model from: Critical Path 2024: Spaces for Street Dance Report Sydney
More than Movement
Street dance takes a dual role: It is both a powerful form of cultural expression and a practical test for the inclusivity, adaptability, and accessibility of public space. When dancers repurpose unsocial spaces into vibrant social arenas, they don’t just enliven the city—they expose planning blind spots and structural deficits in the urban fabric.
This is more than a cultural observation; it’s a planning critique and a call to action. A city that aspires to become a dancing city must fully embrace the principles of placemaking: fostering dialogue, enabling low-threshold permits, designing flexible and multifunctional spaces, and taking dancing bodies seriously as indicators of successful—or lacking—spatial quality.
So let’s ask: What stories of movement and place already exist in your city or neighborhood?
“The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.”
– Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
