Appropriating the spectacle: Play and politics in a leisure landscape

Abstract

The urban riverfront of Melbourne, Australia, has been transformed over the past 20 years into a popular leisure precinct known as Southbank. This is a postmodern landscape of contrived spectacle, where playful urban life is simulated, choreographed and consumed. Yet it is also the site of many forms of unplanned and unstructured activity. This paper explores the complex uses and meanings which can develop around such a waterfront, and outlines three dialectics which reveal how many new kinds of public life emerge within it. New tensions between global and local, politics and play, representation and embodied action lead to a rethinking of both formularized waterfronts and urban design theories.

From Fan Parks to Live Sites: Mega events and the territorialisation of urban space

“…It is their work on space that is particularly useful in explaining the dynamic processes of governance that exist in and around mega sport events like the Olympics. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that there are two principal spatial arrangements and like two sides of the same coin spinning with oppositional force, striated and smooth space emerges in contestation (Stevens and Dovey, 2004). The former is perceived to be state-oriented and static and the latter nomadic and fluid.…”

A Tripartite Conceptualisation of Urban Public Space as a Site for Play: Evidence from South Bank, London

“…This 'looseness' of public space (esp. Franck and Stevens, 2007) such as that experienced by interviewees on South Bank is perhaps most apparent when it is contrasted with the regulation of behaviour in, and even physical access to, increasingly privatised, sanitised and disneyfied city spaces (Sorkin, 1992;Goss, 1993;Mitchell, 2003;Stevens and Dovey, 2004;Zukin, 2009;Minton, 2009 Fig. 4], but again this completeness is neither unambiguous in a visual sense -the form of the sculpture is such that it appears to disappear into and reappear from the paved walkway on which it is positioned -nor in terms of how the sculpture is 'practised' from day to day.…”

“…This reported drive to order public space is set within a wider set of narratives that describe the widespread production of leisure landscapes in urban settings as city authorities seek to realise the political-economic potential of place (esp. Logan and Molotch, 1987) and to restructure city images in a bid for improved, ideally 'global,' city status (Zukin, 1995;Fyfe, 1998;Pinder, 2002;Smith, 2002;Degen, 2003;Stevens and Dovey, 2004;Mitchell and Beckett, 2008).…”

Exploring How Urban Waterfronts Can Encourage Visitors’ Active Engagement With Water Through a Temporary Design Installation

“…The design of public spaces in Docklands was explored in terms of the relation between users' desires and spatial affordances (Stevens & Dovey, 2004). The analyses showed that the public spaces along the quays in Docklands are appropriated in different ways, which reveal diverse understandings, readings and desires.…”

“…This space deviates from the general critique of the area as lacking social identity and sense of place (Douglas & Monacella, 2012). Such spaces can also be perceived as having a potential for nurturing urban diversity in the fringes and interstices of formal urban spaces (Stevens & Dovey, 2004). …”