Claiming Space and Making It Stick: Stickers and the Making, Maintenance, and Experience of Urban Ideological Territory

Abstract

Political stickers operate as tools of ideological territorialization, enabling grassroots actors to claim space, assert identity, and contest exclusion within urban environments. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with left-wing activists in Utrecht, this study examines how stickers shape experiences of belonging, conflict, and political participation.

Stickers are understood as accessible and versatile instruments for engaging in public discourse beyond institutional channels. Their visibility, density, and placement are interpreted as markers of territorial presence and strength, allowing activists to construct affective maps of the city that distinguish friendly, hostile, and contested zones. Strategic practices such as clustering, layering, and symbolic juxtaposition reinforce territorial claims and invite solidarity.

Acts of removal, covering, or defacement are perceived as direct challenges to legitimacy in public space, yet often encourage renewed engagement rather than retreat. These encounters highlight stickers’ role in the negotiation of urban meaning and the symbolic struggle over whose voices are permitted to shape the city.

By situating these practices within the Right to the City framework, the study conceptualizes stickering as a form of grassroots authorship over urban space. The findings underscore the significance of stickers not as urban clutter, but as interventions in the everyday production of territory, identity, and political expression.