Adolescent Latina Bodyspaces: Making Homegirls, Homebodies and Homeplaces

This essay examines the local, everyday practices of heteropatriarchal power—dominating and resisting power, through which young Latina women negotiate teenage, sexual and gender subjectivity and spatial ordering of young heterosexual bodies. Their negotiations are shaped by and give shape to the material, discursive and representational social spaces of Los Angeles, worsening "landscapes of neglect" attributable to the changing geographies of private and public investment. Their narratives convey and construct a visceral experience of being tied, materially and discursively, to homely spaces as young carers, and their struggle to untie their competencies to the private, domestic sphere, or "inside," and their vulnerabilities to the public sphere, or "outside." In their struggle, the young Latinas variously reproduce, rework and resist the dominant norms and materiality of local places and their dispositionality in bodily terms.     

Gestures of judgement and welcome in public spaces: hypervisible migrant newcomers in Darwin,Australia

This paper draws on ethnographic research to show how pigmentation intensities of skin and facial characteristics make bodies of colour recognisable in public spaces of Darwin, a small multiethnic and multiracial north Australian city. This paper shows that the visibility of newcomers, in particular, humanitarian migrants from countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, circulates negative sentiments of fear, anxiety and discomfort in public spaces when instantaneous judgements are made. These judgements of misrecognition made by residents of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds lead to simmering tensions that unfold as visceral events of vulnerability in public spaces such as bus interchanges, neighbourhood streets, shopping centres and car parks. These events that have the potential to wound and numb bodies contribute to the “urban unconscious” of Darwin as a city where public spaces are safe with heightened surveillance. This paper argues, however, that events of hypervisibility, judgement and interracial tensions can unfold quite differently in public spaces if humanitarian migrants sense gestures of welcome, particularly from Aboriginals. Such fleeting moments of welcome in Darwin have the potential to bring together bodies with different histories and geographies of racialisation, so that multiple publics emerge through everyday habits of living with difference.     

Post-secular geographies and the problem of pluralism: Religion and everyday life in Istanbul,Turkey

The concept of post-secularism has come to signify a renewed attention to the role of religion within secular, democratic public spheres. Central to the project of post-secularism is the integration of religious ways of being within a public arena shared by others who may practice different faiths, practice the same faith differently, or be non-religious in outlook. As a secular state within which Sunni Islam has played an increasingly public role, Turkey is a prime site for studying new configurations of religion, politics, and public life. Our 2013 research with devout Sunni Muslim women in Istanbul demonstrates how the big questions of post-secularism and the problem of pluralism are posed and navigated within the quotidian geographies of homes, neighborhoods, and city spaces. Women grapple with the demands of a pluralistic public sphere on their own terms and in ways that traverse and call into question the distinction between public and private spaces. While mutual respect mediates relations with diverse others, women often find themselves up against the limits of respect, both in their intimate relations with Alevi friends and neighbors, and in the anonymous spaces of the city where they sometimes find themselves subject to secular hostility. The gendered moral order of public space that positions devout headscarf-wearing women in a particular way within diverse city spaces where others may be consuming alcohol or wearing revealing clothing further complicates the problem of pluralism in the city. We conclude that one does not perhaps arrive at post-secularism so much as struggle with its demands.     

“Friendly authoritarianism” and the bedtaun: public space in a Japanese suburb

In the West, public space ideally serves as the open, transformative core of urban democratic society. But what role does it play in a non-Western democracy with anti-individualist, authoritarian cultural mores, such as in Japan? The author used archival research, direct observations and informal interviews, as well as reference to key insights of actor-network theory (ANT) to investigate whether or not the public spaces of a Japanese suburb are conducive to individual freedom and expression. The paper concludes that these spaces help maintain what Sugimoto (1997) calls the “friendly authoritarianism” of Japanese society.     

Girls,consumption space and the contradictions ofhanging out in the city

Geographers have effectively examined girls' reactions and resistances to adult control in public space, but the ways that girls learn about and reinscribe social differences like race and class through ‘hanging-out’ practices in public, urban space have yet to be sufficiently explored and theorized. Therefore, in this paper I consider the normative productivity of girls' spatial practices, as well as girls' resistances to adultist space. I examine the case of consumption space and focus on how girls utilize, create and reproduce myriad social identifiers as they hang out in public, urban space. Consumption space and consumerism dominate the urban spaces and hanging-out practices of teenagers, and while girls complain about the ubiquity of consumption space, girls' public social-spatial activities inevitably involve consumption space. Therefore, consumption's symbols and spaces are central to the normative production of girls' identities like class and race, and of social difference more generally in urban space.     

资本、权力与空间:“空间的生产”解析

全球化时期的生产方式从根本上决定了资本和权力是城市空间产生和演化的主要动力。它们分别展现了不同的作用范围、形式及效果:资本主要作用于物质的、社会—经济空间的生产,而权力主要作用于抽象的、政治—制度空间的生产。这两个过程相互影响、相互交织。本文将"空间的生产"理论与城市空间实践结合起来进行转型中国语境下的解析,尝试提供一个研究我国城市与区域空间重构问题的马克思主义政治经济学视角。     

Experts,publics and the environment in the UK: twentieth-century translations

Prompted by contemporary concerns in the West over a global vision of nature and society at risk, this paper builds on recent studies of expertise within a broader public culture. By focusing on earlier episodes of social and political uncertainty, the paper argues that there is scope to extend such analysis in terms of historical geographies of specialist knowledge. The paper examines the formative years of British ecology, a discipline which from its beginnings in the wake of urban industrialism more than a century ago, was centrally concerned with the relations of human well-being and the environment. In exploring when, where and how an ecological expertise became defined, it shifts the focus from familiar milestones in the discipline's public recognition. By tracing the discursive and material practices of those who sought to identify and define ecology as a specialism, the paper illustrates the importance of groupings within and beyond accredited expertise in giving it meaning and purpose. In doing so it highlights the fragility and fluidity of the boundaries around ‘expertise’, and the significance of geographical context and connections in shaping its conduct and content. In terms of broader historical geographies, the paper suggests that while ‘expert’ cultures may be projected as giving greater public reassurance, the sense of certainty that this implies disguises complex processes in which the boundaries are imprecise between specialist and lay knowledge and between scientific and public spaces.     

Remembering the past against the grain: an analysis of the reconstructions of the past in The Sunday News's ‘Lest We Forget’ column

Memories of the nationalist struggle are fervently contested in Zimbabwean public spaces such as the media. This paper examines the emergence of the counter‐hegemonic historical narratives in the state‐controlled media that seek to subvert the dominant nationalist discourses propagated by the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF). Focusing on the Sunday News's Lest We Forget newspaper column, the paper analyses the representations of the role played by the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) in the liberation struggle, a nationalist movement whose contributions are marginalised and obscured in the official nationalist historiography. Given that in Zimbabwe the state‐owned media are generally viewed as mouthpieces of the ruling party, this paper identifies the tensions in the Sunday News as alternative historical memories are being reproduced and sustained. Drawing upon the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method, this article argues that alternative historical imaginations are rekindled in the state media.     

Intersectionality and planning at the margins: LGBTQ youth of color in New York

Through an intersectional lens, this article reflects on the dialog between planning and gender, feminist, and queer studies to analyze the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth of color (YOC) community in New York City (NYC). The community is subject to multiple disenfranchisements, given their ethno-racial status, class, age, gender, and sexual orientation. This community's limited access to safe public spaces and amenities, housing, health services, job training, and other opportunities is an urban planning challenge insufficiently understood or addressed. Our methodology includes participant observation and analysis of an LGBTQ YOC tour of West Village in NYC, interviews with LGBTQ individuals and NGO staff, life stories, observations in LGBTQ-friendly meetings and facilities, and content analysis of LGBTQ reports and media coverage. The research shows the agency of an LGBTQ youth group as a resilient community organization effectively participating in planning processes and exerting rights to public space and services. Finally, it offers recommendations to planners and policy-makers to facilitate the recognition and expansion of rights to the city for LGBTQ, particularly YOC, by committing to understanding their unique conditions and needs and expanding their access to safe housing and public spaces, poverty reduction programs and job opportunities, and health and social support services.     

Public parks in Ghent's City life: From expression to emancipation?

With three empirically based and theoretically framed case studies, this paper contributes to the understanding of how public spaces, more specifically urban parks, can mediate between different subgroups of society, such as women, seniors, gays and skaters, and how gender related connotations play an important role in these respects. This study draws upon a comparative analysis of three parks in Ghent, Belgium. The elements of analysis are the physical morphology, history, signification and the use by different kinds of park visitors. The article shows a new approach to design of public spaces.     

Race, Protest, and Public Space: Contextualizing Lefebvre in the U.S. City

Since the early 1990s, Henri Lefebvre's theory of the social production of space has become widely used by Anglophone academics to understand contemporary urban processes in the Western world. This article argues that care must be taken in transporting Lefbevre's theoretical framework from one context to another. When applied in places like U.S. cities, it must be contextualized in relation to significant sociospatial processes, especially race. It is also argued that when the racialized geographies of U.S. cities are taken into account, Lefebvre's work—with its focus on the role representation plays in the production of space—aids our understanding of contemporary urban processes. The article develops this argument through an engagement with the racialized public spaces in and around downtown Lexington, Kentucky. The killing of an African-American teenager by a White police officer and the ensuing violence and commentary, especially two editorial cartoons, provide the opportunity to contextualize Lefebvre's theory. Furthermore, the case allows us to understand the role racialized representations of space play into the construction of urban geographies. The paper concludes by emphasizing the role of the body in Lefebvre's understanding of space and suggests that his twin notions of "the right to the city" and "the right to difference" hold out hope for the grassroots development of antiracist urban public spaces.     

Micro Aggressions and Connections in the Context of National Multiculturalism: Everyday Geographies of Racialisation and Resistance in Contemporary Scotland

This paper is organised around geographies of encounter, power and living together. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews and focus groups in the West and North of Glasgow, I explore the micro connections and aggressions shaping everyday encounters for some (ethnic and cultural) minorities, contributing to debates on the potentials and challenges of multicultural living. The research contributes to this work by offering a detailed embodied/felt account of belonging and racism in contemporary Glasgow, challenging dominant narratives that construct Scottishness as having “no problem with racism”. As worrying shifts around immigration and multiculturalism continue on a broader political level, including in Scotland, I use the conceptual frame of micro connection, to detail how people actively resist being racialised and othered, and attempt to transform public spaces in Glasgow by “quietly” carving out and inhabiting alternative spaces of belonging.     

How is a political public space made? – The birth of Tiananmen Square and the May Fourth Movement

With the specific case of the birth of Tiananmen Square in Beijing during the May Fourth Movement in 1919, this paper tries to give an answer to the more general question of how a political public space is made. It argues, (1) the transformation of the spatial order of Beijing made possible the formation of new modes of collective political action in republican Beijing. (2) The different kinds of action of the people led to the production of a number of political public spaces. (3) The demonstration staged on May 4, 1919 was vital in converting the empty space in front of Tianan Gate into a public space of political significance, which was then named Tiananmen Square. Borrowing from Arendt's conception of the public space and people's political action, this paper contends that the political action of people was most important in breaking through the control of the government and opening up political public spaces. With the historical geographical case of the Square, this paper assesses the “end of public space” position that has become widely accepted in academic debate.     

‘It's a public,I reckon’: Publicness and a Suburban Shopping Mall in Sydney's Southwest

Traditionally, public space has been perceived as an integral part of fully functioning liberal democracy. Yet much research argues that public space is in decline due to regimes of neoliberal governance paralleled with a growth in quasi-public spaces such as shopping malls, casinos and gated communities. It is argued that these new spatial forms posit a commercialised, sanitised and ultimately exclusionary urban form in place of more egalitarian, engaging and ultimately democratic public spaces. Increasingly, however, urban research has questioned the veracity of the claims made about the nature of traditional public space as well as investigating the marginal and contingent nature of publicness as constituted by and enacted in a variety of places. Drawing on Foucault's concept of heterotopic space, this paper reports on a qualitative study based on focus group interviews conducted with users of a suburban shopping mall in Sydney's southwest. The research uncovers both a more complex and less overtly deterministic publicness than has previously been identified in such spaces. From these findings the paper argues for a conception of publicity which moves beyond the zero-sum game approach endemic in much work in this area to one which analyses the qualitative effect quasi-public spaces are having on the nature of publicness in the Australian context. The paper concludes by arguing that a rethinking of publicness allows room for the emergence of a more progressive public ethic.     

Gatekeepers of the Urban Commons? Vigilant Citizenship and Neoliberal Space in Multiethnic Paris

This article draws from ethnographic research on a recently built park in one of Paris' predominately West African and Maghrebi districts. It demonstrates how urban design is used to “build‐in” neoliberal subjectivities to the city. This design approach appropriates a tradition of street democracy held by neighborhood associations and redirects their disproportionately middle class, French membership into managerial roles traditionally held by municipal agencies. This neoliberal political subjectivity, which I term vigilant citizenship, makes monitoring and controlling the social composition of the urban commons a form of civic engagement for middle class urbanites. In Paris, this vigilance is fueled by anxieties over the presence of West African and Maghrebi youth in public spaces. Activists do not passively adopt this neoliberal role; they strike a delicate balance as gatekeepers, weighing inclusion against an expectation to maintain a “successful” public space conforming to a republican model of citizenship.     

Terrace Dissent in Urban Western Sahara: Between Plazas and Homes

Since 2018, domestic Saharawi houses in occupied Western Sahara have become tactical sites for organising dissent. The move to interior spaces came as a collective retreat from the city's public plazas. This retreat from extravagant plazas illustrates that the turn toward interior spaces was a tactic in front of destructive occupation power rather than a withdrawal. This article explores Saharawi spatial production of dissent under two different political moments. I ask, what spaces of dissent do people under occupation animate when the city is mobilised against them? This paper is based on ethnographic engagement with encounters between Saharawis and Moroccan security forces that led Saharawis to construct the house as its own public. I demonstrate interiorising the exterior by analysing homes’ terraces as the new space of urban dissent in the Western Sahara. As such, the terrace appears as a new space and a new tool of and in urban insurgency.     

Building heteronormativity: the social and material reconstruction of men's public toilets as spaces of heterosexuality

This paper concerns changes in the spatial structure of British public toilets for men over the last ten years from secluded, indistinctly public/private spaces towards open, largely public structures. It examines a number of past and present toilet spaces in the British city of Manchester using spatial syntax analysis to consider how spaces have been adapted and policed differently in order to reduce opportunities for sex between men. It considers how these changes relate to shifts in the legislative context and in planning and policing initiatives away from explicit homophobia towards policies of inclusion of certain sexual minorities. The paper concludes that the way in which inclusion and a post-homophobic context have been expressed through legislative changes and planning and policing initiatives in relation to public toilets has led to a more explicit heteronormalisation of public spaces. The discussion relates to current debates in cultural geography about the consequences of greater participation of sexual minorities in public and issues of surveillance, control and privacy in public spaces.     

Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality,race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy

This article explores the ways that the popular diasporic novel Funny Boy, set in Sri Lanka but written from Canada by an exiled Sri Lankan born Tamil, intervenes in the country's contemporary geographies of difference. The novel itself explores a Tamil boy's struggle to negotiate life in Sinhala-dominated Colombo while also coming to terms with his emergent same-sex desire. By focusing specifically on the writing of two familiar middle-class Sri Lankan spaces central to the novel's narrative—the family home and the school—the article shows how these everyday geographies regulate and normalise carnal desire in a society which still operates anti-homosexual legislation. It also suggests how the erosion of the meanings of these familiar spaces is a tactic central to the main protagonist's sexual liberation. By reading these sexualised geographies through the polemic racialised Sinhala/Tamil divisions in contemporary Sri Lankan society, the paper shows how the novel makes an important political intervention in contemporary Sri Lankan politics where devolution and federal solutions to recent civil unrest have produced territorialised geographies of difference that prescribe ‘places for races’. By evoking the Funny Boy's fictive and sexualised geographies of exclusion and resistance, this article unsettles the logic that binds intra-racial solidarity, its cognate geographical modelling, and instead highlights the exclusions that exist at all levels in Sri Lankan society.

Amma held up her hand to silence us. ‘That's an order,’ she said.     

Becoming public: public pedagogy,citizenship and the public sphere

This paper explores the question what kind of educational work can be done in attempts to reclaim or reinvigorate the public sphere. Through a discussion of the intersection of public sphere and public space, it engages with the work of Hannah Arendt in order to outline a conception of the public sphere as a space for civic action based on distance and the conservation of a degree strangeness rather than on commonality and common identity. The discussion of the educational work that can be done to support the public quality of common spaces and places focuses on three interpretations of the idea of public pedagogy: that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy for the public, that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy of the public and that of public pedagogy as the enactment of a concern for the public quality of human togetherness. The latter form of public pedagogy neither teaches nor erases the political by bringing it under a regime of learning, but rather opens up the possibility for forms of human togetherness through which freedom can appear, that is forms of human togetherness which contribute to the ‘becoming public’ of spaces and places.