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Collective culture and urban public space Ash Amin

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CITY , V OL . 12, NO. 1, A PRIL 2008

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/08/010005-20 © 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13604810801933495

Collective culture and urban public space

Ash AminTaylorandFrancisLtd

This paper develops a post-humanist account of urban public space. It breaks with a longtradition that has located the culture and politics of public spaces such as streets and parks or libraries and town halls in the quality of inter-personal relations in such spaces. Instead, itargues that human dynamics in public space are centrally influenced by the entanglementand circulation of human and non-human bodies and matter in general, productive of amaterial culture that forms a kind of pre-cognitive template for civic and political behav-iour. The paper explores the idea of ‘situated surplus’, manifest in varying dimensions of

compliance, as the force that produces a distinctive sense of urban collective culture and civic affirmation in urban life.

‘When public spaces are successful … theywill increase, opportunities to participate incommunal activity. This fellowship in theopen nurtures the growth of public life,which is stunted by the social isolation ofghettos and suburbs. In the parks, plazas,

markets, waterfronts, and natural areas of ourcities, people from different cultural groupscan come together in a supportive context ofmutual enjoyment. As these experiences arerepeated, public spaces become vessels tocarry positive communal meanings.’ (Carret al ., 1993, p. 344)

Introduction

rbanists have long held the viewthat the physical and social dynam-ics of public space play a central role

in the formation of publics and publicculture. A city’s streets, parks, squares andother shared spaces have been seen assymbols of collective well-being and possi-bility, expressions of achievement and aspi-ration by urban leaders and visionaries, sitesof public encounter and formation of civic

culture, and significant spaces of politicaldeliberation and agonistic struggle. Whileurban commentators and practitioners

have varied in their views on the precisedetail of collective achievement across timeand space, they have generally not ques-tioned the assumption that a strong rela-tionship exists between urban public space,civic culture and political formation, as thequote that opens this paper clearly shows.

In this paper, I ask if this reading is stillvalid. In an age of urban sprawl, multipleusage of public space and proliferation of the sites of political and cultural expression,it seems odd to expect public spaces to fulfiltheir traditional role as spaces of civicinculcation and political participation. Weare far removed from the times when acity’s central public spaces were a prime

cultural and political site. In classical Rome,Renaissance Florence or mercantile Venice,the public spaces of a city (for the minori-ties that counted as citizens and politicalactors) were key sites of cultural formationand popular political practice. What wenton in them—and how they were struc-tured—shaped civic conduct and politicsin general. There were few other sites of public gathering and expression, justifying

their connection with civitas and demos,through inculcations of community, civicresponsibility and political judgment or

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participation sparked by meeting andmingling in public space.

Today, however, the sites of civic andpolitical formation are plural and distrib-uted. Civic practices—and public culture ingeneral—are shaped in circuits of flow andassociation that are not reducible to theurban (e.g. books, magazines, television,music, national curricula, transnationalassociations), let alone to particular placesof encounter within the city. Similarly, thesites of political formation have prolifer-ated, to include the micro-politics of work,school, community and neighbourhood,and the workings of states, constitutions,

assemblies, political parties and social move-ments. Urban public space has become onecomponent, arguably of secondary impor-tance, in a variegated field of civic and polit-ical formation. This would almost certainlybe the view held in cultural and politicalstudies, with the emphasis falling on thesalience, respectively, of media, consumerand lifestyle cultures, and of representative,constitutional and corporate politics. The

dynamics of gathering in, and passingthrough, streets, squares, parks, libraries,cultural and leisure centres, are more likelyto be interpreted in terms of their impact oncultures of consumption, practices of nego-tiating the urban environment, and socialresponse to anonymous others, than interms of their centrality in shaping civic andpolitical culture.

Within the urban canon, however, to

assert that only a weak link might existbetween public space and civic culture ordemocratic politics, is a lot less acceptable.The history of urban planning is one of attempts to manage public space in waysthat build sociality and civic engagementout of the encounter between strangers.It draws on a long lineage of thoughtincluding the classical Greek philosophers,theorists of urban modernity such asBenjamin, Simmel, Mumford, Lefebvre and

Jacobs, and contemporary urban visionar-ies such as Sennett, Sandercock and Zukin,all suggesting a strong link between urban

public space and urban civic virtue andcitizenship. This is a lineage claiming thatthe free and unfettered mingling of humansin open and well-managed public spaceencourages forbearance towards others,pleasure in the urban experience, respect forthe shared commons, and an interest in civicand political life. As Carr et al. (1993, p. 344)claim:

‘in a well-designed and well-managedpublic space, the armor of daily life can bepartially removed, allowing us to see othersas whole people. Seeing people differentfrom oneself responding to the same settingin similar ways creates a temporary bond.’

Public space, if organized properly, offersthe potential for social communion byallowing us to lift our gaze from the dailygrind, and as a result, increase our disposi-tion towards the other.

Among urban practitioners, such thinkinghas inspired the ‘city beautiful’ and ‘gardencities’ movement, and most recently, theproject of ‘urban renaissance’ and ‘new

urbanism’, commending a return to compacthousing, front porches, pedestrian areas,shared urban assets, mixed communities andthe city of many public spaces. While theaspirations of urban practitioners haveveered towards civic and communaloutcomes rather than political ones, urbanactivists continue to believe that inclusiveurban public spaces remain an importantpolitical space in an age of organized, repre-

sentative, and increasingly centralized butalso veiled politics. Such spaces—bothiconic and known spaces of public gatheringas well as more peripheral spaces tentativelyoccupied by subaltern groups and minori-ties—are seen as the ground of participatorypolitics, popular claim and counter-claim,public commentary and deliberation, oppor-tunity for under-represented or emergentcommunities, and the politics of spontaneityand agonistic interaction among an empow-ered citizenry. Here, the social dynamics of public space are judged as the measure of participatory politics.


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space remains one of sociability and socialrecognition and general acceptance of thecodes of civic conduct and the benefits of access to collective public resources. Itcontinues to be an experience that supportsawareness of the commons, perhaps fallingshort of fostering active involvement in thelife of a city, but still underpinning sociabil-ity and civic sensibility.

My aim in this paper is to trace a line inbetween these two interpretations of thecultural politics of urban public space—onestill expectant and the other complaining of privatized consumption. Working with thegrain of everyday usage, I wish to suggest

that the workings of urban public space arepolitically modest (as sparks of civic andpolitical citizenship), but still full of collec-tive promise. I locate this promise, however,in the entanglement between people and thematerial and visual culture of public space,rather than solely in the quality of socialinteraction between strangers. This move,following an earlier publication in this jour-nal (Amin, 2007a), stems from an insistence

that technology, things, infrastructure,matter in general, should be seen as intrinsicelements of human being, part and parcel of the urban ‘social’, rather than as a domainapart with negligible or extrinsic influence onthe modes of being human. Accordingly, theformative sites of urban public culture—collective forms of being human throughshared practices—need not be restricted tothose with a purely human/inter-human

character, but should also include otherinputs such as space, technological intermedi-aries, objects, nature and so on. One of theinsights of a post-human reading of the socialis that the collective promise of public spaceis not reducible to dynamics of inter-personalinteraction that prompt a sense of ‘us’ or easewith the stranger, as the urban canon onpublic culture would have it (see Wood andLandry, 2007, as a recent example). Instead,there may be more at work, and in the formof influences that have more to do with thenature of the setting itself than the patterns of human association and sociality within public

space. This is not to reject social interactiontheory outright, but to weaken its grip byarguing that interaction is not a sufficientcondition of public culture, has a tacit dimen-sion that has to be acknowledged, and isalways mediated.

My argument is that the link betweenpublic space and public culture should betraced to the total dynamic—human andnon-human—of a public setting, and mythesis is that the collective impulses of publicspace are the result of pre-cognitive and tacithuman response to a condition of ‘situatedmultiplicity’, the thrown togetherness of bodies, mass and matter, and of many

uses and needs in a shared physical space.I propose seeing any resulting recognition of others and of the common weald as theoutcome of a habit of unconscious reflex, atbest ‘pragmatic reason’ (Bridge, 2005),towards the orderings of plural space, ratherthan as the outcome of inter-human recogni-tion and accommodation. Inculcations of thecollective, the shared, the civic, arise out of the human experience of surplus; mass and

energy that exceeds the self, that cannot beappropriated, that constantly returns, thathas emergent properties and that defines thesituation. There is, however, an importantqualification to my thesis. This reflex of ‘trust in a situation’ is not a characteristic of all forms of placed surplus, but only whenpublic space is structured in a certain way.It is linked to particular forms of publicspace. Following Jane Jacobs (1961) and in

more recent years Richard Sennett (2006),I trace the ‘virtues’ of urban surplus to publicspaces that are open, crowded, diverse,incomplete, improvised, and disorderly orlightly regulated.

Starting with an explanation of civicformation when urban public space is struc-tured along these lines, the paper goes on toidentify interventions in public space thatbuild on various reflexes of studied trust inthe urban commons as a way of strengthen-ing civic appreciation of shared urban spaceand, more generally, civic hope in thecomplex and super-diverse city (Vertovec,


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A MIN: COLLECTIVE CULTURE AND URBAN PUBLIC SPACE 9

2006). The reflections centre upon the mobi-lizations of four keywords of civic formationin public space; ‘multiplicity’, ‘symbolicsolidarity’, ‘conviviality’ and ‘technologicalmaintenance’.

Situated multiplicity and social practice

How should we encapsulate the rhythm of daily life in urban public spaces, the reso-nances of collective repetition and endur-ance? This is not an easy question to answer,for public spaces come in many forms: openspaces of different kinds such as parks,

markets, streets and squares; closed spacessuch as malls, libraries, town halls, swimmingpools, clubs and bars; and intermediate spacessuch as clubs and associations confined tospecific publics such as housing residents,chess enthusiasts, fitness fanatics, anglers,skateboarders and the like. In turn, everypublic space has its own rhythms of use andregulation, frequently changing on a daily orseasonal basis: the square that is empty at

night but full of people at lunch-time; thestreet that is largely confined to ambling andtransit, but becomes the centre of publicprotest; the public library of usually hushedsounds that rings with the noise of schoolvisits; the bar that regularly changes frombeing a place for huddled conversation to oneof deafening noise and crushed bodies. Thereis no archetypal public space, only variegatedspace-times of aggregation.

But is it possible to identify commonrhythms of social response in similar types of public space? Clearly, how people behave in anoisy square in which pedestrians areconstantly avoiding other bodies and objectswill be very different from that in a smallersquare laid out for café life and convivialmingling. On the other hand, it could beargued that spaces with similar patterns of organization, usage, vitality and inclusion doshare common social traits. For example, rela-tively safe spaces that are busy, open to all, freeof frenzy and lightly regulated—whether theyare parks, squares, retail centres, museums or

libraries—appear to be marked by an ethos of studied trust towards the situation. The nego-tiation of space and of bodies in this kind of environment seems to be guided by mecha-nisms that somehow render the strange famil-iar (such that people feel largely unthreatenedin the company of strangers and unfamiliarthings and occurrences) and the familiarstrange (such that menacing or embarrassingintimacies are avoided). Consequently, trans-actions are conducted in a relatively efficientand safe manner, the threat of unanticipatedviolence, fear and anxiety that always hangsover a gathering of strangers is avoided, andthe positive gains of presence in public space

are noted tacitly or consciously by partici-pants (Paulos and Goodman, 2004). Urbancomplexity and diversity are somehowdomesticated and valued through the socialexperience of this kind of urban public space.

It is easy to forget how considerable acultural and social achievement this is, giventhe myriad prospects of anomie, indifference,self-interest, opportunism and hostilityamong strangers in the contemporary city

of amassed diversity, continual and rapidflux, and increasing unfamiliarity. And thatsuch a form of collective response might ariseout of situated spatial practice rather than therational or ethical choices of social actorsmakes this achievement even more signifi-cant. How is it that a particular kind of rhythm of urban public space is capable of strengthening a civic culture of toleratedmultiplicity and shared commons? What is

responsible for the civic outcome? Myclaim is that this rhythm cannot be reducedto the nature of inter-personal interactionamong strangers. For a start, even the mostcreatively managed civic spaces—the historicsquare cleared of motorized traffic, the streetor bazaar that hums with the noise of marketstalls and pedestrians, the busy and well-keptpark that offers a pleasant and safe haven toall—are places of highly qualified interaction.These are spaces where people who alreadyknow each other meet in known corners,where there is a clear tactic of acknowledge-ment or avoidance between strangers even


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when in close proximity, where familiaritytakes time to build and comes from inventionand repetition (Figure 1), and where theglimpse of recognition with a light touch isalways tinged with the anxiety and fear thatcirculate at the edges of the public space(Robinson, 2006; Watson, 2006). In makingthis claim, I do not wish to diminish thesignificance of free mingling in inclusivepublic spaces. Instead, my intention is to

underline the circumspect nature of socialinteraction which, I would add, rarelyinvolves transgressing long-accumulated atti-tudes and practices towards the stranger.Figure1Figure2 Publicspaceandstudiedtrust:chessinaNew Yorkpark(photographer:H.Kaggan

If, as I believe, a social ethnography thatinvolves familiarization of the strangecannot be explained in terms of a culture of inter-personal negotiation within urbanpublic space, drawing on practices of civiceducation, deliberative encounter or strangerrecognition, as would have the classics of urban sociology, how else might it beexplained? I wish to argue that such a civicoutcome, when not threatened by darker

forms of urban division and exclusion basedon the erosion, excessive surveillance ormanipulation of public space, can be read asa form of positive social reflex to the condi-tion of ‘throwntogetherness’, a term coinedby Doreen Massey (2005) to signal the whirland juxtaposition of global diversity anddifference in contemporary urban life. InMassey’s work, the term is not intended tosignal a particular normative direction to

urban life or to public life in general, but myproposal is that the ontology of ‘thrownto-getherness’, when visibly manifest as therelatively unconstrained circulation of multi-ple bodies in a shared physical space, isgenerative of a social ethos with potentiallystrong civic connotations. I wish to arguethat this form of situated multiplicity orsurplus, excess contained in a confinedphysical space, produces social effects. Bysituated surplus I mean spaces with manythings circulating with them, many activitiesthat do not form part of an overall plan ortotality, many impulses that constantly

Figure 1 Public space and studied trust: chess in a New York park (photographer: M. Kaggan)


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change the character of the space, manyactants who have to constantly jostle forposition and influence, many impositions of order (from buildings and designs toconventions and rules). The swirl of surplusmatter in a given space—its localization in abusy and diversely used market, square,park, housing estate—and its experience as aforce of that place, has a more than inciden-tal impact on urban public culture. My argu-ment, thus, is not drawn from a reading of plurality in general, but from a particularspatial embodiment of surplus; the minglingof bodies, human and non-human in closephysical proximity, regulated by the

rhythms of invention, order and controlgenerated by multiplicity.

There are two claims I wish to make,echoing the writing of pragmatists such asWilliam James (2003) and other theoristsof pluralism interested in the relationaldynamics and self-regulating properties of complex systems (e.g. DeLanda, 2000, 2006;Connolly, 2005). The first is that ethicalpractices in public space are formed pre-

cognitively and reflexively rather than ratio-nally or consciously, guided by routines of neurological response and material practice,rather than by acts of human will. Thevitality of the space, its functional andsymbolic interpretation, its material arrange-ments, the swirl of the crowd, the manyhappenings form a compulsive field of actionand orientation. Many a commentator sinceBaudelaire and Benjamin interested in the

social, affective and psychological effects of the modern urban crowd has sought tocapture this aspect of public space. Thesecompulsions of the situation also include anethical orientation guided by the complexpractice of negotiating the space and by thestrength of embodied and sensory responsewithin a plural setting; an orientation thatmay come to the conscious forefront fromtime to time and which is undoubtedlyinflected by ethical influences formed else-where in a person’s life, but one that exertsconsiderable force in that time-space as anethical pulse generated by the situation.

The ethics of the situation, if we can put itin these terms, are neither uniform nor posi-tive in every setting of throwntogetherness.The swirl of the crowd can all too frequentlygenerate social pathologies of avoidance, self-preservation, intolerance and harm, especiallywhen the space is under-girded by unevenpower dynamics and exclusionary practices.My second claim, thus, is that the compulsionof civic virtue in urban public space stemsfrom a particular kind of spatial arrangement,when streets, markets, parks, buses, town hallsare marked by non-hierarchical relations,openness to new influence and change, and asurfeit of diversity, so that the dynamic of

multiplicity or the promise of plenitude isallowed free reign. There are resonances of situated multiplicity/plenitude that have asignificant bearing on the nature of social andcivic practice. At least five that merit concep-tual and practical attention can be mentioned.

The first resonance is that of surplus itself,experienced by humans as a sense of bewilder-ment, awe and totality in situations that placeindividuals and groups in minor relation

to the space and other bodies within them.What Simmel tried to explain in terms of behavioural response among strangers whenplaced together in close proximity in urbanspace—from bewilderment and avoidance toindifference and inquisitiveness—might bereinterpreted as the shock of situated surplus,experienced as space that presents more thanthe familiar or the manageable, is in continualflux and always plural, weaves together flesh,

stone and other material, and demands socialtactics of adjustment and accommodation tothe situation (including imaginative ways of negotiating space without disrupting otherestablished modes, as shown in Figure 2). Theresonance of situated surplus, formed out of the entanglements of bodies in motion and theenvironmental conditions and physical archi-tecture of a given space, is collectively experi-enced as a form of tacit, neurological andsensory knowing (Pile, 2005; Thrift, 2005a),quietly contributing to a civic culture of easein the face of urban diversity and the surprisesof multiplicity.


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Figure2 Surplus:parkour,orfree-running,inLondon(photographcourtesyofwww.urbanfreeflow.com)

These surprises are rarely disorienting,for a second resonance of situated multiplic-ity is territorialization; repetitions of spatialdemarcation based on daily patterns of usageand orientation. The movement of humansand non-humans in public spaces is not

random but guided by habit, purposefulorientation, and the instructions of objectsand signs. The repetition of these rhythmsresults in the conversion of public space intoa patterned ground that proves essential foractors to make sense of the space, their placewithin it and their way through it. Suchpatterning is the way in which a public spaceis domesticated, not only as a social map of the possible and the permissible, but also as

an experience of freedom through theneutralization of antipathies of demarcationand division—from gating to surveillance—by naturalizations of repetition. The lines of power and separation somehow disappear ina heavily patterned ground, as the groundsprings back as a space of multiple uses,multiple trajectories and multiple publics,simultaneously freeing and circumscribingsocial experience of the urban commons.

A third and related resonance of situatedmultiplicity is emplacement. This is not justeverything appearing in its right place as aconsequence of the routines and demarca-

tions of territorialization. The rhythms of useand passage are also a mode of domesticatingtime. Public spaces are marked by multipletemporalities, ranging from the slow walk of some and the frenzied passage of others, tovariations in opening and closing times, andthe different temporalities of modernity,tradition, memory and transformation. Yet,on the whole, and this is what needs explain-ing, the pressures of temporal variety andchange within public spaces do not stack upto overwhelm social action. They are not asource of anxiety, confusion and inaction,and this is largely because of the domestica-tion of time by the routines and structures of

public space. The placement of time throughmaterialization (in concrete, clocks, sched-ules, traffic signals), repetition and rhythmicregularity (so that even the fast and the fleet-ing come round again), and juxtaposition (sothat multiple temporalities are witnessed asnormal) is its taming. Accordingly, whatmight otherwise (and elsewhere) generatesocial bewilderment becomes an urbancapacity to negotiate complexity.

The repetitions and regularities of situatedmultiplicity, however, are never settled. Thisis because a fourth resonance of thrownto-getherness is emergence. Following complex-ity theory, it can be argued that the interactionof bodies in public space is simultaneously aprocess of ordering and disruption. Settledrhythms are constantly broken or radicallyaltered by combinations that generatenovelty. While some of this novelty is the

result of purposeful action, such as new usesand new rules of public space, emergenceproperly understood is largely unpredictablein timing, shape and duration, since it is theresult of elements combining together inunanticipated ways to yield unexpectednovelties (DeLanda, 2006). Public spacesmarked by the unfettered circulation of bodies constitute such a field of emergence,constantly producing new rhythms from themany relational possibilities. This is whatgives such spaces an edgy and innovative feel,liked by some and feared by others, but stillan urban resonance that people come to live

Figure 2 Surplus: parkour, or free-running, in London(photograph courtesy of www.urbanfreeflow.com)


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with and frequently learn to negotiate. This iswhat Jacobs (1961) celebrated when champi-oning the dissonance of open space, receptiveto the surprises of density and diversity,manifest in the unexpected encounter, thechance discovery, the innovation largelytaken into the stride of public life.

A final resonance can be mentioned. Wecould call it symbolic projection. It is inpublic space that the currents and moods of public culture are frequently formed andgiven symbolic expression. The iconographyof public space, from the quality of spatialdesign and architectural expression to thedisplays of consumption and advertising,

along with the routines of usage and publicgathering, can be read as a powerful symbolicand sensory code of public culture. It is anactive code, both summarizing cultural trendsas well as shaping public opinion and expec-tation, but essentially in the background as akind of atmospheric influence. This is why sofrequently, symbolic projections in public

space—lifted out of the many and variedmaterial practices on the ground—have beeninterpreted as proxies of the urban, some-times human, condition. There is a long andillustrious history of work, from that of Benjamin and Freud to that of Baudrillardand Jacobs that has sought to summarizemodernity from the symbols of urban publicspace, telling of progress, emancipation, deca-dence, hedonism, alienation and wonderment(Amin, 2007b). Similarly, politicians, plan-ners and practitioners have long sought toinfluence public opinion and public behav-iour through the displays of pubic space.

These resonances of situated multiplicity

condition social action in quite powerfulways. One social reflex is that of toleratedmultiplicity, structured around the tacitand unconscious negotiation of anonymousothers, plural objects, assembled variety,emergent developments and multiple time-spaces (see Figure 3). I believe this is howdifference and similarity, the known and

Figure 3 Tolerated multiplicity: pedestrians cross the road to Osaka Central Station, Japan (photograph by AdrianO’Rourke).


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unknown, continuity and change are tackledin public space, and not, as frequentlyassumed in writing on the politics of differ-ence, through cognized tactics of negotiationor affective response towards others. This isnot to deny inter-personal attitudes andpractices in public space their significance(this would be folly, if we remember the actsof those bent on malice and harm towardsothers). Instead, it is to argue that the socialexperience of multiplicity itself can beregarded as a form of inculcation, alongside,perhaps even under-girding, habits of inter-personal association in public space.Figure3 Toleratedmultipolicy:pedestrianscrosstheroadto Osakacentralstation,Japan(photographbyAdrianO’Rourke).

Secondly, however, such a social reflex is far

from given. Tactics of territorialization andthe general ordering of public space (withexcesses of surveillance and control never farremoved) are central technologies of publicorientation. The ordering of space is a tool of social regulation, assurance and delegation.Similarly, the emplacement of time in public

spaces is a means by which the bewildermentof being in the world—fast changing,stretched, multi-speed—is addressed, perhapseven given a ring of enchantment and wonder.None of this comes with automatic guaran-tees, tied as it is to the poetics of experience ina given place. The point, though, is that spatialordering, like other sources of cultural orien-tation such as education, media influence andpublic debate is essential in the making of apublic (see Figure 4 for an imaginative exam-ple). Strange, therefore, that much of thehistory of thought on the civic and politicalinculcations of public space has chosen tofocus on the dynamics of deliberation and

social interaction, rather than on the rules androutines of ordering, which are usually treatedas the nemesis of public culture.Figure4 Neworderings:sixbicyclesagainstonecarpark(photographbyAdrianRovero).

A third social reflex is symbolic compliance.If one role of public space is to frame and testthe pulse of public culture, then what isprojected about, and from, them is of crucial

Figure 4 New orderings: six bicycles against one carpark (photograph by Adrien Rovero).


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relevance. The atmosphere of a public space,its aesthetics and physical architecture, itshistorical status and reputation, its visualcultures, subtly define performances of sociallife in public and meanings and intentions of urban public culture. The symbolic projec-tions of public space have to be taken seriously,not trivialized as distractions or inauthenticfetishes, as has become common in contempo-rary lament on the ‘theming’ of urban publicspace through excessive consumptive hedo-nism (Amin, 2007b). Such denials woefullyunderestimate the power of symbolic projec-tion, working at the interface between publicculture and public space. The projections—

cast out from billboards, public art, the designof space, public gatherings, the shape of build-ings, the cleanliness of streets, the sounds andsmells that circulate, the flows of bodies—come with strong sensory, affective and neuro-logical effects. They shape public expectation,less so by forcing automatic compliance, thanby tracing the boundaries of normality andaspiration in public life. In our times, theprojections in public space of the cultural

cutting edge, social desire, matters of publicconcern, the uses of public space, norms of freedom and safety, and so on, are importantsummations of contemporary collective life,the measure of individual and social standingand possibility.

Public space and civic culture

In this section, I look at whether urban civicculture—a sense of the commons, sharedassets, civic involvement—can be strength-ened through mobilizations that work withthe social reflexes and resonances of situatedmultiplicity. I have suggested at the outsetthat the connection between urban publicspace and demos has become fragile owing toshifts in the uses of public space and thegrowth of other political spaces and institu-tions. The thrust of the preceding discussion,however, has been to show that the connec-tion with civitas remains strong, undercertain conditions of plural and inclusive

organization of public space; conditions thatI believe must be traced to the situation itself and not reduced to the character of humaninteraction within it.

Given this emphasis on the situation andits impact as a force-field of influence—notinstruction—working in the background as akind of collective unconscious, any course of normative intervention suggested by thereading of situated multiplicity has to begrasped as a hint of possibility rather thanone with tool-kit certitude. The suggestionsoffered below to strengthen civic culture,therefore, should be read as keywords tounlock new principles of urban public space,

without any hint of slavish replication of theideas or examples cited. There are fourkeywords that spring out of the precedingreading of public space, discussed in turnbelow: multiplicity; symbolic solidarity;conviviality; and technological maintenance.

Multiplicity itself is the most obviouskeyword of urban civic culture suggested bythe reading that I have offered, understood asan urban good in its own right as well as a

source of urban sociality and emergence.Unqualified multiplicity, however, is no guar-antor of any of the latter outcomes. Simplythrowing open public spaces to mixed use andto all who wish to participate is to give swayto practices that may serve the interests of thepowerful, the menacing and the intolerant.We know this from the daily abuses sufferedby vulnerable people such as migrants, minor-ities, asylum seekers, women and children,

those who look different; all victims of thecruelties that unregulated co-presence canbring. It is just this kind of consequence thathas forced progressive urban planners onmany an occasion to seal off particular publicspaces or parts of public space for sections of society at risk, as the history of women’spublic baths or parks reserved for childrenconfirms (Watson, 2006; Iveson, 2007).Therefore, and depending on circumstances,policy effort to promote multiplicity as aprinciple of urban inclusion and civic accep-tance of the right of the many to public spacemight indeed necessitate making special,


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perhaps even separate, provision in publicspace for certain groups in order to ensurethat multiplicity does not result in harm.

Yet, there are other examples of diversity juxtaposed, where multiplicity resounds withvitality and promise, with fear and anxietykept at bay through rhythms of movement,talk and watchfulness that act as informalsources of regulation. This is preciselywhat is at work in markets, bazaars andcommunal gardens, where the intensity of presence, negotiation and regard for the situ-ation, crowd out panoptical surveillance andmalfeasance. At the scale of the urbancommunal garden that is shared by many

ethnic and social groups, the promise of multiplicity is the result of occasional shar-ing, curiosity in the neighbouring plot and asense of common purpose often mobilized bythreats to change things (Schmelzkopf, 1995;Armstrong, 2000; Shinew, 2004). At thelarger scale, such inclusive ordering of multi-plicity can be the product of overlappinginterests and informal reciprocal arrange-ments among the occupants of public space,

as Lyons and Snoxell (2005) have shown intheir work on market traders in Nairobi, orthe compromises resulting from continuous

jostle for space among many participants, asMoyer (2004) has shown in her work on pooryouths looking for work in the up-marketstreets of Dar es Salaam. In all these exam-ples, the accommodations and achievementsof multiplicity have to do with the wisdom of the crowd or the ‘eyes of the street’ as Jacobs

(1961) put it, the active juxtaposition of diversity, the play of ground-up and distrib-uted watchfulness, and an entanglement of uses—economic, social and cultural—thatpromises individual and collective benefits.

A second keyword of civic promisesuggested by the preceding analysis relates tothe symbolic uses of public space. Arguably,the history of modernist planning has been anexperiment of precisely this sort, with inten-tions for iconic buildings, monumental art,and massive squares and boulevards, neverfar from the desire to foster a sense of awe,gratitude, fear or modesty among the people

in the face of big urban provisioning. This isa stark example of the use of public spacefor emblematic compliance. Similarly, masspolitical, religious and cultural gatherings—fed by the spectacle of numbers, movingspeeches, music, imposing architecture—actively rely on the symbolism of the event togenerate intense feelings of social solidarityand union. Many a regime has been toppledor propped up by the clamorous solidaritiesof mass congregation in public space,frequently in ways least expected by thearchitects of public assembly (Batuman,2003). The significance of mass demonstra-tions in iconic public spaces—from Tianan-

men to those in Kiev during the OrangeRevolution—should not be lost.

It is not this kind of mobilization of soli-darity that I have in mind, central though it isfor any account of the ways in which publicspace can project social togetherness. Instead,I am interested in symbolic visualizations inpublic space of solidarity in a ‘minor key’, asa kind of public commitment to the margin.This is a form of solidarity towards the emer-

gent and always temporary settlements of public culture, serving to reinforce civic inter-est in the plural city, the rights of the many,the margin brought to the centre, the legiti-macy of the idiosyncratic and ill-conforming.Its symbolic projections are oriented towardsaesthetic disruption rather than hegemonicconfirmation, but always in the spirit of reinventing the ties that bind.

Many examples of innovative urban effort

around the world can be cited. One examplederives from the long legacy of radical urban-ism advanced through forms as diverse asliberation theology, legislative theatre,community art and mass popular events.Today, this tradition is emblematically repre-sented by the World Social Forum in its urbangatherings around the world, which mixprotest, education, pleasure and enchantmentthrough many bold and imaginative culturalinventions in the name of multiple solidaritiesand common interests stretching across andbeyond a city. Feared by interests keen onconformist and non-clamorous uses of public


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space, these cultural experiments come withextraordinary capacity to unlock new socialimagination and energy, by showing thaturban public culture can be organized in waysthat are more plural, temporary and inclusivethan the debilitating conformities of elitisturban planning (Groth and Corijn, 2005).

Another good example of solidarity in aminor key is the use of public art to joltsettled cultural assumptions. The most well-known experiments relate to the injuries of race and ethnicity. Some of these commemo-rate painful legacies, in the way that thePower of Place project in Los Angeles hasattempted by remembering the slave and

midwife Biddy Mason (Hayden, 1995), or inthe way that new-genre arts projects such asthe District Six Museum, BLAC, Returningthe Gaze, and In Touch Poetry Bus Tour inCape Town (Minty, 2006) have sought topublicize past and present social inequalities(e.g. against women, as Figure 5 shows).Others celebrate the multicultural city. In

Birmingham, for example, this includesimaginative ventures such as placing comicstrips in the back seats of taxis telling thestories of the city’s Asian cab drivers, blind-folded walks around the city centre toencourage experience of the city without thedistortions of visible difference, or photo-graphic projections on prominent publicbuildings of the varied ethnicity of faces onthe street (see Figure 6, and Kennedy, 2004).How successful these public expressions of cultural solidarity are in combating ethnicand racial prejudice is a matter of conjecture,but at the very least they are a powerfulsignal of the kind of urban public culture that

is officially desired in a city.Figure5 Symbolicprojection—memory.‘LeisureTime’byDonovanWard,formingpartofthepublicartproject‘ReturningtheGaze’,Langa,CapeTown(photographbyNiceAldridge).Figure6 Symbolicprojection–multiculture.BeatStreuli,BirminghamPortraits,2001(PhotographbyBeatStreuli,publishedwithpermission)

Another closely related genre of ‘minorsymbolic projection’ that has emerged inrecent years, but is hardly conceptualized inthese terms, is the use of urban public art toforce public reflection. This is an importantaspect of the contemporary urban shift fromcivic monumentalism towards art forms

Figure 5 Symbolic projection—memory. ‘Leisure Time’ by Donovan Ward, forming part of the public art project‘Returning the Gaze’, Langa, Cape Town (photograph by Nick Aldridge).


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them (Sennett, 2000; Sheldrake, 2001; Amin,2002; Sandercock, 2003; Gilroy, 2004; Keith,2005; Watson, 2006). The turn towards ethi-cal practices based on daily negotiations of difference has begun to appear in urbanpolicy practice, through attempts to buildsocial solidarity and cultural understandingthrough interventions working the grain of inter-personal interaction. These involve

measures to bring together people fromdifferent backgrounds in common spaces(e.g. mixed housing estates or youth clubs) orcommon ventures (e.g. school twinning ormulticultural festivals).

The kind of urban conviviality that I wishto stress here is of a different sort, namely, abrush with multiplicity that is experienced,even momentarily, as a promise of pleni-tude—one way of interpreting convivium. Isthe shared experience of the well-stocked andsafe, park or street and community centre orlibrary not such a brush, based on interest inthe possibilities of serendipity and chance, the

gains to be had from access to collectiveresources, the knowledge that more does notbecome less through usage, the assurance of belonging to a larger fabric of urban life,perhaps even the knowledge that the space canrecover from minor violations (e.g. seeKarsten and Pel, 2000, on public response toskateboarders in Amsterdam)? This is conviv-iality towards the situation, mediated by thecollective experience of bodies, matter andtechnology (Latham and McCormack, 2004;Massey, 2005; Thrift, 2005a; Hinchliffe andWhatmore, 2006), with empathy towards thestranger emerging, if it does, as a by-productof the convivial experience of situated multi-

plicity. Recognizing this implies a shift inthinking behind socially inclusive urban poli-cies towards public space, which have becomefar too focused on logics of human recogni-tion and interaction. It requires, for example,starting out with a much more comprehensiveaudit of the sources of civic ease in publicspace, an exercise that might reveal how thedesign and lay-out of mundane intermediariessuch as sewage systems, traffic rules, public

toilets, street furniture, spaces for dogs, chil-dren, cars and pushchairs, affect not only thesocial experience of space but also the civicremains of such experience.

To acknowledge the agency of mundaneintermediaries is to gesture towards a fourthkeyword of civic inculcation through theuses of public space, namely, technologicalmaintenance. The city is a machine of objects-in-relation with a silent rhythm that

instantiates and regulates all aspects of urbanlife (Amin and Thrift, 2002). The objectsalready mentioned, along with postcodes,pipes and cables, satellites, commutingpatterns, computers, telephones, software,databases, regulate urban provisioning bysetting the delivery systems, Internet proto-cols, rituals of civic and public conduct,family routines and cultures of workplaceand residence. The urban techno-structure isthe life-support of cities (Gandy, 2005), asmade amply evident when infrastructuresuch as sanitation, clean water, electricity,telecommunications and transport, shelter

Figure 7 Symbolic projection—wonderment. ‘Angelof the North’ by Anthony Gormley (photograph by AndyHiggs).


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20 CITY V OL . 12, NO. 1

and health care lack or fail. But, this techno-structure also bristles with intentionality.Nigel Thrift (2005b) has described it as atechnological unconscious with interactionalintelligence, acting as the hidden hand of both urban organization and social practice

(see Figure 9). It is the filter through whichurban society reads and accepts demarca-tions, measures achievement and worth, andassesses what it is to be modern. Identities,supply, functionality and social power areall tangled up in this machinery of provisionand regulation.Figure9 Urbanmaintenance.TheinvisiblegeographiesofwirelessinternetprovisionindowntownSaltLakeCity,Utah(imagebyPaulTorrens,www.geosimulation.org)

No politics of urban civic culture canignore the power of this hidden republic.This is partly a matter of revealing andarresting the use of technology as a weaponof social control, affecting civic trust andexpectation. Contemporary urbanism isimpregnated with ‘new software-sorted

geographies’, as Steve Graham (2005, p. 5)argues, daily and silently measuring theworth of particular zones and sections of urban society. Graham writes of the prolifer-ation of bio-metric technologies to sort social‘desirables’ from ‘undesirables’ and the devel-

opment of new facial recognition software sothat the ‘guilty’ can be named before theevent through new street surveillance tech-nologies. How these qualifications of thepromise of urban plenitude based on securiti-zation of public space can be addressed is notself-evident, not least because of the nowpervasive entanglement between urban tech-nological systems and the social life of cities.A start, however, would be to reveal the‘values, opinions and rhetoric … frozen intocode’ (Bowker and Leigh-Star, 1999, p. 35,cited in Graham, 2005, p. 1), so that hiddenassaults on civic conviviality can be publicly

Figure 8 Symbolic projection—surprise. Banksy’s figure of a Guantanamo Bay detainee placed inside the Big Thun-der Mountain Railroad ride at Disneyland (photo placed on 8 September 2006, www.woostercollective.com).


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22 CITY V OL . 12, NO. 1

an ideological blind spot to the idea of auniversal public. The quality of urban main-tenance, it is my argument, also affects theurban civic culture. When the basics of shel-ter, sanitation, sustenance, water, communi-cation and the like are missing, theexperience of the city, of the commons andof others, is severely compromised, produc-ing solidarities of largely an exclusionary andwretched nature (Davis, 2004; Swyngedouwet al ., 2006; MacFarlane, 2008). Such a struc-ture of maintenance does nothing for thepromise of plenitude or for the experience of multiplicity as an enhancement. A politics of urban maintenance has to make explicit the

link between the techno-structure and theformation of a public. When this happens, aswas the case in the city of Bologna in 1978when bus fares were scrapped, and thenagain in 1998 when the public authoritiespromised free Internet access, the habit of solidarity comes to be woven into the urbanunconscious and, most significantly, pridedas such by the urban population.

Conclusion

These reflections from a post-humanistperspective on the link between the commonsand public space are projections from animagined place, and not a summary of partic-ular public spaces in particular urbancontexts. If this imagined place has materialmoorings, it is as an amalgam of the most

promising examples of surplus made to workas such. These would include bazaars andshopping malls in which difference is treatedas a virtue, streets and squares of free and safemingling, parks and other recreation spacesresonating with vitality and mixed use, librar-ies and schools that sustain public interestand reach out to the reluctant, bus sheltersand car parks that are not the dumpingground for the dregs of society, buses andtrains that work and offer a pleasant experi-ence to the travelling public. Here, the quali-ties of multiplicity, conviviality, solidarityand maintenance can be expected to crowd

out malfeasance, reinforcing a sense of sharedspace.

Outcomes on the ground, however, are amatter of context, shaped by the materialdynamics and historical legacies of individualpublic spaces. They are not the mirror of some ideal. This would be to imply thatpolicy outcomes can be achieved regardlessof the fine-grain of time and place. Thisraises an important question the expectationsof efforts to populate public spaces, makethem safe, increase their openness to differ-ence, experiment with inclusive projections,and ensure proper maintenance. At best theinterventions come with emergent force,

facilitating new spatial combinations andnew rhythms of usage and regulation thatwill jostle against old combinations andrhythms. New civic achievements willinvolve some not others, will soon becomehybridized, and will take time to stabilize.Linking public space to civic ideas requires agood measure of hope without certitudefrom urban actors.

Another final qualification must be made.

Although I have dissented from the viewthat urban public space is a site of politicalformation and human recognition, I haveagreed that it remains an important site of civic becoming. This is no trivial achieve-ment, but it too needs to be placed incontext when thinking about possibilities forurban well-being and collective recognition.The achievements of public space presup-pose other dynamics of inclusion, notably

provision of the means to ensure thathumans can participate as fully fledged socialsubjects in urban life. This is centrally, amatter of ensuring equity of provision of themeans of subsistence and sustenance. Urbanwell-being is inextricably tied to the natureof the work/livelihood/survival opportuni-ties offered within a city. In an age of increasing state withdrawal, capital mobility,distant ties and transnational positioning,urban elites and markets are progressivelywithdrawing from local collective obliga-tions. It is no longer clear, for example, whoassumes the responsibility of providing the


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means of survival for those unable toflourish under the market or through socialadvantage. Increasingly, the urban massesare being abandoned to fortune, pushed tothe remote and liminal zones of cities,and denied the basic rights of urbanparticipation.

In these circumstances, cities are becomingecologies of surplus that can only yield a poli-tics of the fittest, with the collision of bodiesin public space reduced to a game of appro-priation of the commons, based on patholo-gies of envy, suspicion and resentment.Public space becomes a synonym for collec-tive privatism and social antagonism rather

than social agonism and civic formation. Thiscondition of ‘situated multiplicity’ is farremoved from the condition I have described.It cannot yield a sense of the commons with-out sustained effort to improve social well-being and justice. People have to enter intopublic space as rightful citizens, sure of accessto the means of life, communication andprogression. Without this guarantee, now soseverely tested by market society and related

forms of corporatism, interventions in publicspace will amount to no more than tinkeringon the edges. The social capacity that growsfrom an active public sphere—nourished bystate-protected welfare, high quality publicservices, a vibrant public culture, and publicspaces for the many and not the few—cannotbe left to fortune, now so intoxicated by theexcesses of the market (Jacobs, 2005).

Acknowledgements

This paper originated as a book chapterprepared under the auspices of the Compara-tive Urban Studies Project of the WoodrowWilson International Center for Scholars.I am grateful to the editors, Caroline Kihato,Mejgan Massoumi, Blair A. Ruble and PepSubiros for allowing publication of anextended version of the chapter in this jour-nal before the book is out. The book will bepublished as Inclusive Cities. The Challengesof Urban Diversity: Problems and Assets

(Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD:Woodrow Wilson Center Press and the

Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcom-ing). I am also grateful to Bob Catterall,Robert Hariman, Colin MacFarlane andDoreen Massey for their comments on anearlier version. Finally, I am indebted to

Jonathan Darling for finding the wonderfulillustrations that might help to clarify thesometimes esoteric language of the paper.

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Ash Amin is Professor of Geography and Exec-utive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, South Road,

Durham DH1 3LE, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

collective culture and urban public space_ash amin

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