ABSTRACT
In open city spaces, people have many fleeting encounters. Such ephemeral meetings are often taken to be a hallmark of urban social life. But how does such social life in public work? This chapter discusses the concept of public space (see Box 4.1), an important theme in urban anthropology, and explores how people relate to one another within this type of space. Anthropologists have studied the material characteristics that make public spaces ‘work’, the cultural politics that shape their production and use, and theemplaced and embodied encounters that urban residents have in the public spaces of the city. Public space
What is public space? As an ideal-type, the term refers to shared, common spaces that are accessible to anyone, where everyone can participate in social life. Urban scholars have tended to see these open common spaces – places where strangers mix and meet – as part of the essence of the city (Young 1990; Sennett 2010). In addition, with discussions going back to Ancient Greece, public space has been associated with an ideal of urban political life. Many urbanists see the existence of public space as a precondition for the existence of democratic politics and of ‘the commons’ (Mitchell 2003; Casas-Cortés et al. 2014).
Actually existing urban public spaces are often contrasted with this ideal and found lacking. However, ‘publicness’ is only one aspect of the urban landscape. Open city spaces have many functions other than the ideal-typical ones of the meeting ground or the democratic forum. For most people, most of the time, these are the spaces in and through which their everyday life unfolds, spaces they traverse quickly or inhabit more leisurely, with more or less attention paid to the urban scenes of which they find themselves both spectators and participants.
Public space is a relational term, defined in opposition to the private. While the boundary between the two types of space is not always clear, ‘public space’ refers to more open, accessible, collective urban spaces, while ‘private space’ refers to more bounded and restricted home spaces. Understanding public–private as a spectrum rather than a sharp dichotomy helps us understand how public space can also include common spaces that are less than fully accessible. Cafés or shopping malls, for example, relatively open spaces – nominally accessible to anyone who can afford to consume – facilitate encounters between strangers and participation in urban social life. They are, however, privately owned and have numerous explicit and implicit entrance requirements. In this sense, they differ considerably from open public spaces like streets or parks. We can, then, think of publicness as a quality that is differentiated and graded. It is a potential inherent in urban spaces that is not always fulfilled.
