Mobilizing Urban Publics, Imagining Democratic Possibilities

Abstract

Publics are not what they were once imagined to be. A growing body of interdisciplinary work is shifting attention to processes in which publics are summoned, constituted and mobilized within political struggles. Nowhere is the formation of publics, as multiple, contingent and contested, more evident than in the varied responses to the transformation of urban spaces. Publics are emerging around issues of belonging, heritage, rights and participation within increasingly divided and unequal cities. Through a close reading of discourses of revitalization and gentrification in the case study of the controversial redevelopment of the Woodward's building in Vancouver, Canada, I examine how the formation of issues imagines and mobilizes publics and further how these discourses work to define possibilities of democratic participation. I show that discourses of revitalization, relying on economic and cultural logics of urban redevelopment, imagine an exclusive, individualized and passive public. In contrast, anti-gentrification discourses, advancing social and political logics of redevelopment, mobilize a collective, active and more inclusive public. In exploring publics within the relationship between issue formation and political participation, I suggest that urban struggles, such as that at Woodward's, are sites in which to understand how meanings of democracy are being contested and rewritten in the contemporary moment.

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