Publics and the City

Contests over urban lsquo;public spacersquo; are positioned at the intersection of a variety of concerns in the social sciences, and increasingly they engage the interest of a wide range of scholars. Contests over public space have come to assume increasing centrality in deliberations over urban policy in post-industrial nations such as the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Surprisingly, however, there are few single-authored books which take the question of public space as their main conceptual problem. Combining original empirical research across a range of Australian and British cities with innovative reflections on a range of secondary empirical and theoretical sources, the book will advance a new framework for considering the diverse spatialities of publicness and their relationship to the city. The framework developed in Publics and the City is built on the contention that the cityrsquo;s contribution to the formation of democratic public spheres should not be reduced to the provision of so-called lsquo;public spacesrsquo; where citizens encounter one another in an unmediated fashion. In fact, the urban dimension of publicness inevitably escapes any attempt to categorize spaces with the binary classification of public and private. Rather than uncritically reinforcing this problematic categorization of space by focusing on the question of who or what is included in lsquo;public spacersquo;, Publics and the City instead explores the ways in which the urban is used and produced in struggles to establish novel modes of public discourse and sociability.