Public space in non-western contexts: Practices of publicness and the socio-spatial entanglement

Abstract

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.In Western traditions, conceptions of public space have been pivotal to ideas and imaginations of civic and political life. Public space is understood as a political forum where ideas and claims are expressed and as a civic arena where identities and differences are rendered visible and thereby acknowledged. Recently, studies on public space have made a timely theoretical move towards theorising the ways in which spatial practices are constitutive of social processes, and contribute to the relational construction of identities and subjectivities. This review focuses on the practices of public space and publicness in non-Western contexts. It engages with the multifarious ways that contingent conceptions of publicness are construed, negotiated and contested in contexts without civic and political conceptualisations of public space conceived in the West. While building on the practice-oriented approach towards public space, this review suggests that fluid and flexible perspectives and conceptualisations need to be rendered more intelligible and concrete by engaging with the richness of empirical processes taking place in non-Western cities. In cases across the globe, public spaces, in putting together multiple meanings, views, actions and relations, are intrinsically productive of everyday politics and broader socio-cultural transformations.