ABSTRACT
Public spaces are produced by the people who connect, disconnect, flow through and transect them, and by the people who play, laugh, cry and interact in them – in other words they are spaces of desire and affect. Encounters constitute the very spaces within which they are enacted; encounters bring a place into being. In this sense we can think of urban encounters as choreography (Pile and Thrift 2000). Public spaces are performed as well as being spaces of performance. The very specificity of the city, its shape and form, the way it is designed and managed, makes a difference to the bodies that are therein produced. Grosz (1992: 301) puts it this way: ‘the form, structure, and norms of the city seep into and effect all the other elements that go into the constitution of corporeality and/as subjectivity. It effects the way subjects see others.’
