COP26 protests in Glasgow: encountering crowds and the city

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with both the affective and material dimensions of encounters among people, and between people and the city, during the COP26 summit in Glasgow, focusing on protest activities that aimed to engage the broader public. The discussion draws from my participation in, and observations of, two protests, the Youth Activist Climate March and the Climate Activist March, and observations of changes in public open spaces in Glasgow for COP26. Fieldwork street photography was instrumental in this study for discovering diverse encounters that were sometimes too transient to register through observations alone. It was deployed as a heuristic method, drawing from personal ‘in the moment’ experiences of the protests, as well as theories of public space and urban morphology, with the aim to discover how changing interactions between bodies and material spaces temporarily reconfigured Glasgow’s public realm. By making material/social relationships more transparent, this paper aims to address shortcomings in protest literature through addressing the material specificity of urban space. I argue that the diversity of Glasgow’s urban spaces enabled varied engagement with protest activities, among protesters, and between protesters and onlookers, and as a result created an overall inclusive, affective experience.