Affordances of absence: collective imaginaries, passive participation, and the politics of care for public space in post-industrial Ostrava

This article examines how urban absences – vacant buildings, derelict lots, and unrealized projects – become sites through which new forms of attention, imagination, care, and public life emerge in the post-industrial Czech city of Ostrava. It contributes to current debates in urban cultural geography on shrinking cities, geographies of absence, and the affective politics of public space. Based on long-term ethnographic research, I develop a relational framework for understanding absence not as lack but as a materially and historically constituted condition encountered through embodied movement. Drawing on James Gibson’s theory of affordances and Michael Warner’s notion of publics, I show how repeated encounters with urban absences redirect attention, making possibilities for action, imagination, and care perceptible. Residents engage not only through direct activism but also through quieter forms of participation, including nostalgic memory work, online discussion, and attentive inhabitation. Rather than treating absence as merely symbolic of decline, the article shows how post-socialist urban voids contribute to the formation of publics and the reworking of collective urban imaginaries. Empty spaces become starting points for civic reinvention.