ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on school choice for urban or city dwellers only as an empirical tool, but also as a sociological lens for evoking the city imaginary. As the public school is increasingly entangled within the market across many Anglophone countries, there comes a struggle to define meaning and identity. The commercialisation, rebranding and differentiation of the traditional public school presents a litany of problematics in rendering a conclusive and essentialist identity of the ‘public’. In the face of increasing economic pressures in urban cities, in countries such as Australia, the US and England, it is evident that some sections of the white middle class are repopulating the urban public school. The members of the lobby group are located in Lawson, an inner-city suburb in Melbourne – clearly this is the urban and globalised imaginary of ‘village’ – and the majority have moved to the suburb less than five years prior with small children, are professionally employed and well educated.
