The places we inhabit in everyday life are imbued with normative properties that emerge from ongoing processes of negotiation as well as contestation. The importance of place-making as relational practice of shaping spaces we live in together is being acknowledged from a planning perspective as well as from the point of view of actors’ lived experience of the spatial properties of everyday life. Research in human geography, planning theory and urban development points to the implicit normativities of city infrastructure, architecture, and design as well as its political significance in structuring the potentialities for participation and (public) engagement. In that regard, place-making is intrinsically connected to relations of power, inequality and structures of inclusion/exclusion.

In our presentation we focus on the negative side of place-making by raising the question: What happens when agents reject implicit normativities of places. We argue that such instances imply that places no longer provide scaffolding for routines and habits agents experience as valuable dimension of their everyday life. Against the backdrop of experiences with eco-social transition projects in the city of Vienna, we discuss different modes of experiencing agents’ de-synchronization with places they live in (ranging from crises of attunement and a sense of (not) belonging to open resistance). From there we argue that having to bear places, continuously imposing normative constraints agents experience as unwarranted or outright ‘wrong’ may constitute a felt sense of injustice and may lead to strong feelings of (spatially dispersed) anger, resentment and ressentiment.