Public Space in non‐Western Contexts: Practices of Publicness and the Socio‐spatial Entanglement

Abstract

In Western traditions, conceptions of public space have been pivotal to ideas and imaginations of civic and political life. Public space is understood as a political forum where ideas and claims are expressed and as a civic arena where identities and differences are rendered visible and thereby acknowledged. Recently, studies on public space have made a timely theoretical move towards theorising the ways in which spatial practices are constitutive of social processes, and contribute to the relational construction of identities and subjectivities. This review focuses on the practices of public space and publicness in non-Western contexts. It engages with the multifarious ways that contingent conceptions of publicness are construed, negotiated and contested in contexts without civic and political conceptualisations of public space conceived in the West. While building on the practice-oriented approach towards public space, this review suggests that f luid and f lexible perspectives and conceptualisations need to be rendered more intelligible and concrete by engaging with the richness of empirical processes taking place in non-Western cities. In cases across the globe, public spaces, in putting together multiple meanings, views, actions and relations, are intrinsically productive of everyday politics and broader socio-cultural transformations.

The refeudalisation of parks: subduing urban parks in Bucharest

“…Recently, the trend has been maintained under the discursive banner of housing stocks marketisation and imaginaries of sustainability. All these elements support the claim made here of a political appropriation of post-communist public places by neoliberal urbanisation forces (Qian 2014;Kalyukin, Borén, and Byerley 2015).…”

“…This has been supported by rhetorical statements of power and manoeuvres addressing public memory and identity legitimation (Light and Young 2010), reflecting parts of the internal forces that have contributed in shaping public space in the region (Stanilov 2007). Such statements have also reactivated projects and discourses able to set power symbols and increase regulations (Qian 2014). Recently, the trend has been maintained under the discursive banner of housing stocks marketisation and imaginaries of sustainability.…”

“…Shifting the metaphor from a Western context to Bucharest, our approach extends the refeudalisation of the public sphere (Habermas 1991) to urban parks as they progressively become elements in the local framework of power. We use the notion of refeudalisation as a "reservoir of sense which can always reemerge and produce new normative effects" (Supiot 2013, 138) through everyday politics and socio-cultural transformations (Qian 2014). Here, refeudalisation implicates a local administration oscillating between closed door decisions and promises of good planning that secure further interventions.…”

The ‘magic of the mall’ revisited: Malls and the embodied politics of life

“…The remainder of this section, though, reviews outstanding work that connects the built environment of the mall to questions of social difference and broader (geo)political struggles in ways that gestures toward the importance of embodiment in understanding this relationship. Here, we highlight recent contributions that position the architectures of capitalist consumption amid broader relationships and geographies of difference, as these have been elaborated and deepened beyond familiar Global North locations (Qian, 2014). Interestingly, these malls are entangled in geopolitical contexts that include violence, conflict or war, thereby introducing additional nuances into their everyday functioning and political potential.…”

Dis-locating public space: Occupy Rondebosch Common, Cape Town

“…Furthermore, Western influence has directly (through colonization) or indirectly exported the concrete forms of European public space to many other parts of the world (Sakai, 2011). Contemporary postcolonial societies have developed ''creolized'' (Gordon, 2014) and original forms of such spaces (for a recent overview, see Qian, 2014). Nevertheless, actually existing spaces of public expression should be distinguished from ''public space'' as a normative ideal.…”