Developing thoughts on exposure in cultural geography, literary studies, and mobilities research, this article aims to provide a more comprehensive account towards the publicness of public space. What would happen if we assessed publicness not by degrees of openness and inclusion, but through the nexus of vulnerability and complicity that is fundamental to the notion of exposure? To grasp such an intrinsic dualism, our perspective goes towards public transport, where experiences of exposure are intensified by its specific conditions of encapsulation and movement. We illustrate this perspective drawing from the autobiographical chronicles of the Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel, in order to then propose a ‘learning from’ the case of public transport for a rethinking of publicness. Specifically, we argue that exposure provides new insights on agency, power and vulnerability as part of a more processual notion of public space.
This article examines the narratives that enabled and legitimized the gentrification of several neighbourhoods of Washington DC during the 1980s. What links each of the neighbourhoods (Georgetown, Mt. Pleasant, Adams Morgan, sections of the U Street/Shaw neighbourhood and parts of Penn Quarter) is that all experienced gentrification after the arrival of punk communities to their spaces in the early 1980s. I argue that DC punk urbanism is tied to a process through which middle- and upper-class suburban youth valorize neighbourhoods marked by urban decay and disinvestment, occupy those spaces without putting themselves into relation with already existing subaltern urbanisms and subsequently replace the neighbourhood fabrics of the residents who formerly lived there with their own.
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