A mall, a mosque and Martin Place: publics, publicness and urban space

This work explores the relationship between publics, publicness and urban space. Its central argument rests on three assumptions about the nature of urban publicness: first, that publics are plural, being the collective expression of individuals’ many fleeting fidelities; second, that the boundary between public and private is porous and contextually determined and, crucially, there is a politics to how this boundary is defined, transgressed and traversed; and third, that publicness has no normative social or spatial idiom but it is shaped by publics’ encounters with others. Taking publicness as a contextually constructed process the thesis argues for a processual approach that attends closely to how publics come into being, in what spatial and political contexts, with the aid of what resources, and for what ends. Using a case study approach I examine how three spaces in Sydney, Australia unsettle common understandings of the nature and processes of publicness and its association with space. In analysing the Westfield-Liverpool mall I deploy Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to argue that the shopping mall is a site of simultaneity: a privatized place where consumer culture coexists with various kinds of publicness. In exploring the Auburn Mosque I enlist post-secular theory to illustrate the intermingling of religion and a mode of publicness that is shaped by the ethical dimensions of religious life and the cultural expectations of place. In analysing Martin Place—a public square in Sydney’s CBD—I work with and against Barnett’s ghostly public to show how propinquity in public space can be both important and irrelevant to publicness. Drawing from these cases I suggest the need to expand our concept of the spatial and social terrain of publicness to account for simultaneity of space and the plurality of publicness and the production of publicness as a process. Such an understanding maintains that space is neither public nor private but rather always potentially open to the processes of public making. However I insist that place still plays an important role in these processes. The texture of place shapes publicness by resonating with some publics and forms of publicness and not others, by affording opportunities for some types of address but also placing contextually -realised parameters on its nature and reach.