Publics and the City

Contests over ‘public space’ have come to assume increasing centrality in deliberations over urban policy in post-industrial nations such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This project addresses the relationship between publicness and the city, considering how the production, management and regulation of ‘public spaces’ has emerged as a problem for urban politics and urban theory.

The main output from this project is the book Publics and the City (Kurt Iveson, published by Blackwell in 2007). This book presents a new framework for considering the relationship between publicness and the city. This framework is applied to detailed case studies of struggles over different forms of publicness, from political protesters seeking to use the grounds around Parliament House in Canberra, to young people hanging out on the streets of inner city Perth and writing graffiti in Sydney. Publics and the City is a timely and critical examination of the relationship between urbanism, publicness, and democracy.

'A fascinating and well argued book which convincingly explores the relationship between the public sphere - or publicness - and the city. It is an engaging and fruitful conversation between urban studies and critical social theories of the public sphere, which draws on a series of illuminating case studies.' Allan Cochrane, Professor of Urban Studies, Open University

'Urban public spaces are arenas of political action but also of both public and private efforts to manage popular behaviour. This series of engaging Australian case studies and insightful analyses helps clarify both sets of issues. It should be of interest to everyone who cares about urban life, popular politics, and the intersection of place and identity.' Craig Calhoun, President of the Social Science Research Council and University Professor of Social Sciences, NYU