Editorial - Exclusion and Belonging in Urban Public and Quasi-Public Space

Abstract

Public space -which comprises streets and sidewalks, parks and plazas -is one of the justly celebrated aspects of cities.If cities are rich arenas of social diversity and crucibles of civic participation, it is their public spaces which facilitate the coming together of diverse populations since there is 'a presumption that within these spaces we will, necessarily, encounter "others" in all their many differences' [1].The meanings and functions of public space have increasingly become a matter of debate for urbanists, not least in relation to what, if anything, public space might mean under conditions of 21 st century 'splintering urbanism' [2].While urbanists such as Amin and Thrift [3] are sceptical regarding the democratic potential of public space seeing it merely as offering places of sociability and tolerance, Staeheli and Mitchell [4] put forward the view that 'being present in public space -making claims to and becoming visible in the streets, sidewalks, squares and parks of the city -is a vital, necessary step in making claims on the public and as part of the public' (p.xiv).Running alongside such debates over the political potential of urban public space is growing anxiety over matters of exclusion and belonging.From Mike Davis' City of Quartz [5] to Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege [6], the diminution of urban public space -via the proliferation of privatized zones of hyper-consumption alongside heightened mechanisms of paranoid surveillance -has become a staple of the urban studies' literature.Is public space genuinely open to the public as a whole, who thereby have a right to belong in it, or is public space demarcated and controlled so that some groups have greater access rights than others who are deemed not to belong?Sanitizing a city's public spaces to make them appeal to tourists and high-spending residents has become an allimportant aspect of urban neoliberalization strategies.One prominent example can be seen in the staging of urban

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