Inhabiting Cities, Domesticating Public Space: Observing Change in the Public Life of Contemporary London

Abstract

To attend more carefully to how public life in cities is put together, people think that urban scholarship needs to be more expansive in how it thinks about publicness. With this in mind, this chapter would like to offer some alternatives to the usual framings of exclusion, encroachment, and claim-making. Spaces become public not only because laws or discourses recognise them as such, but through all sorts of corporeal, largely routinized practices. In public space, people are walking, working, driving, sitting, cycling, resting, and riding transport. Some people are at work, others at leisure. Materialities are constitutive of the types of public action and address, as well as the collective actors that come to form relationships within a space, and often in ways that are unanticipated. Some of London’s newest streets are missing many taken-for-granted forms of demarcation—street markings, traffic signs, stop lights, guardrails, and even kerbs.

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