From No‐Go to Must‐See

The chapter examines the multifaceted nature of designing, staging, performing, and consuming urban atmospheres. It explores the nuanced dichotomy between atmospheres found in autonomous urban spaces, and the dominant, gentrified, and touristic atmospheres shaped by capitalist-oriented urban development. It focuses on Metelkova, a three-decade-old squat neighbouring Ljubljana's city centre in Slovenia, illustrating its transformation of a place once perceived as ‘uncontrollable’ and a ‘no-go’ area to a hub of tourist consumption. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2024, the chapter integrates interviews with squatters and municipal representatives alongside sensory and digital ethnography. This approach allows for an in-depth exploration of the atmospheric transformations, revealing how the atmospheric production is facilitating increased tourist consumption, how it impacts squatting communities, while also highlighting key aspects of fragility inherent to the urban squatters’ movement. In Metelkova, such processes are rendered visible at multiple scales and sites, which we explore by focusing on the relationship between the squat and municipal planning, tourists’ experiences, and public hostel commercial enterprises. Finally, the chapter highlights the interrelation between the experiential dimensions of contemporary urban governance and the atmospheric transformation in the consumption of the city, viewed through the lenses of commodification, negotiation, and subversion. The analysis centres on the dynamic interplay between top-down urbanisation and bottom-up strategies in the co-production of urban atmospheres, showing how Metelkovaboth challenges and augments the atmospheres of touristification in Ljubljana's inner-city.