The fantasy of access: Neoliberal ordering of a public beach

Neoliberal governance has led to the progressive privatization and ordering of urban public spaces, restricting their use as domains of political expression and visible identity formation. While the processes of privatization have taken a variety of forms, the end result either produces new privately-owned spaces or restricts access and behavior in extant public space. A programmatic, bourgeois-public space emerges where a fantasy of open-access occludes the experience of exclusion. This fantasy of inclusive public space is upheld by dualistically countering its faux-democratic state management against private ownership. Though scholars have theorized the neoliberal production of public spaces elsewhere, this paradigm has rarely been applied to the large and proximate public beaches and coastlines that bound US lands. This paper seeks to complicate our understanding of the process of privatization by countering legal and experiential exclusions that govern access to beaches in Connecticut. A study of the Eastern Point beaches in Groton, Connecticut is used to analyze the impacts of a Connecticut Supreme Court case that struck down residents-only restricted beaches. Supported by empirical data from beachgoers at the small public and private beaches, the mechanics of exclusion are shown to hinge upon race class and locality. Though Connecticut beaches are now more legally inclusive, results from this research indicate that the ruling has had negligible effects upon the practice of social exclusion from the beach. Using anarchist theories of spatial practice, I suggest that a democratic public space can only be achieved through occupation and embodied resistance to neoliberal ordering.