Geography Compass 8/11 (2014): 834847, 10.1111/gec3.

12183

Public Space in non-Western Contexts: Practices of

Publicness and the Socio-spatial Entanglement
Junxi Qian*
Centre for Cultural Industry and Cultural Geography and School of Geography, South China
Normal University

Abstract
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 con-
ceived in the West. While building on the practice-oriented approach towards public space, this review
suggests that f luid and f lexible 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.

Introduction
In Western traditions, public space has long been celebrated 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 (Orum and Neal, 2010). Recent theoretical advancement in human
geography and cognate disciplines, however, has cautioned against conceptualising public space
merely in terms of normativised civic and political ideals. Practices of public space, as Madden
(2010) argues, invoke diverse and context-specific conceptions of publicness that are assembled
and built into the landscape (p. 187). While certain (in fact most) practices centred on public
space do not fully live up to the democratic visions of unfettered participation and expression,
they nonetheless act as fundamentally constitutive forces in the formation of relations, meanings
and identities.
In a sense, this re-conceptualisation of publicness enables us to geographically extend the
applicability of the notion of urban public realm (Lof land, 1998; Sennett, 2000) to include
non-Western public spaces that may not bear the normative values conceived in the West,
but are nonetheless extensively used and appropriated, as well as profoundly politicised and
contested. Indeed, the recent one or two decades have witnessed a rapid growth of works on
public spaces in non-Western contexts, with contributions from a wide variety of disciplines.
This article is an attempt to examine practices of public space in urban settings outside the West,
and it also makes efforts to unpack social processes that these practices not only respond to but
also constitute. This article asks whether public space also attains significant social and cultural
weights in non-Western contexts, and my answer to this question is unequivocally positive. I

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 Public Space in non-Western Contexts 835

suggest that 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.
This article captures the West as an imagined category that refers to, albeit nebulously and
contestably, advanced industrial societies, which embody and propagate the specific version of
modernity embedded in European Enlightenment, liberal democracy and capitalist economy.
As to the study of public space, the West also implies attachment to Greco-Roman conceptions
of public space and the Habermasian ideal of public sphere. This cohort of societies overlaps
considerably with Global North, which dominates not only the global economic and political
order but also the production of knowledge on the city. Meanwhile, the non-West is far from
a homogenous monolith, as no meanings or routines of practices apply universally to non-
Western public spaces. My invocation of the notions of West and non-West is to assemble
case studies from contexts whose urban experiences are less explored and theorised, rather than
reinforce a rigid binary division between homogenised constructs of the West and non-West.
Since the latter half of the 20th century, numerous scholars in the West have lamented the
decline, and sometimes even the end, of urban public realm due to urbanites increased obses-
sion with the domestic sphere, rampant privatisation of public space and stringent regulation un-
der neoliberal agendas of urban development (Sennett, 1977; Sorkin, 1992; Atkinson, 2003). In
the meantime, rich accounts have begun to emerge, which have depicted vibrant and convivial
public socialities in Latin America (Richardson, 1982; Low, 1996; 1997; 2000; Herzog, 2006),
India (Edensor, 1998), Vietnam (Drummond, 2000), postsocialist China (Orum et al. 2009),
among others. Yet, it is not the aim of this article to convey a somehow reductionist view that
the authentic urban life lost in the West can be rediscovered in non-Western cities. As
Freemans (2002; 2008) study of Rio de Janeiros beach has evidenced, assumedly democratic
spaces of unconstrained access and interaction may in fact be crosscut by subtle boundaries
pivoting on issues of race, class, and so on. Hence, instead of making assertive and normative
judgement on the f lourishing or declining of urban public realm in a given society, as Watson
(2006) has incisively commented, a more productive approach traces and scrutinises the
immediate socio-spatial contexts of spatial practices, the diverse and often contradictory views
of being public and the ongoing construction of social relations and cultural meanings that
spatial practices effect.
Some clarifications on the foundational concepts that structure this review warrant highlight-
ing before I proceed to the main sections. In this article, publicness is understood not merely as a
venue of democratic claim-making, but a state of throwntogetherness (Massey, 2005; Amin,
2008), which consists of multiple actors, groups and identities. Publicness describes the ways
in which meanings, emotions and ideologies are addressed to others (Iveson, 2007), thus
catalysing processes of acknowledgement and collaboration, as well as conf lict and domination.
Public space is therefore defined as the physical terrain inscribed and produced by actions of
addressing. Specific spaces are viewed in light of publicness for their potentials of assembling
diverse identities and groups.
In addition, the notion of practices of public space encompasses two dimensions, which are
ref lected, respectively, in the following two sections. On the one hand, this article investigates
ways in which public space is actually used and appropriated to meet particular demands and
interests, and analyses how values, meanings and emotions are inscribed into public landscapes.
On the other hand, it also pays close attention to the regulatory regimes emerging from
competing claims to spaces. In contrast to the view that regulation leads to the end or even
death of public space (Sorkin, 1992; Kohn, 2004), it shows that it is precisely through conf licts
and contestation that public space is enacted as an irreducible element placed at the very centre
of civic life and political processes.

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836 Public Space in non-Western Contexts

Accordingly, I deploy the notion of the urban not simply in terms of population density,
concentration of heterogeneous groups and distinct lifestyles (Hubbard, 2006). Instead, the
urban is viewed as densely charged with values, representations and ideologies. The city is a
civilising force whose disciplinary and subject-producing effects are not only fostered by city
builders but also experienced at everyday level (Paddison, 2001). Precisely as Peake and
Rieker (2013) contend, it is the city that has become the space in which humanness is
delineated and engaged (p. 11).

Spaces of Appropriation

TOPDOWN INITIATIVES OF PUBLIC SPACE PRODUCTION

The use, appropriation and shaping of public space involve various cultural agents. Space as
social oeuvre (Lefebvre, 1991) is constituted by both topdown and bottomup efforts and
investments. From a topdown perspective, it has been widely observed that powerful
groups in non-Western societies, much alike to their Western counterparts, work painstak-
ingly to inscribe dominant values and political views into public space. Studies on
communist/socialist regimes, for example, suggest that the planning, building and architec-
tural design of grandiose public spaces were/are essential to the showcase of state power
(Stanilov, 2007; Engel, 2007; Ioan, 2007; Kurfrst, 2011). From the erection of colonial
and later nationalist symbols in a Taipei park (Allen, 2007), to the use of public space
for assembling the mass and staging political propaganda in Maoist China (Hung, 2013),
and to the initiatives of nationalist urbanism, which created landscapes of power to repre-
sent Jakarta as a unifying force of Indonesian nation (Kusno, 2004), public space has played
an indispensable part in shoring up the political legitimacy of state regimes (also Lavrence,
2005; Gaubatz, 2008a; Light and Young, 2010). A particularly compelling account is pro-
vided by Lynne Attwood (2010), who analysed how the housing planning in Soviet Russia
enforced relocation of domestic activities, such as cooking and childcare, to communal pub-
lic spaces. As Attwood (2010) underscores, this reconfiguration of private and public lives
upheld the Bolshevik ideals of liberating women from burdens of household labour and
in the meantime promoting a collectivist society.
Among all the topdown initiatives, one key project in which states in non-Western
countries are avidly engaged is the engineering of social norms, values and identities
through the production of public spaces. Berneys (2010, 2011) discussion of pedagogical
urbanism in Bogot illustrates vividly how the provision of public space is interwoven
with rhetorics of equal access to the city and the exercise of full citizenship. Public space
is also expected to educate citizens and promote appropriate ways of social interactions.
The initiative of expanding the right to the city through public space resulted in not
only the reversal of privatisation of urban space but also monitoring and banishment
of behaviours seen as antisocial and unattractive. Similar processes took place in Singapore,
where the planning of public spaces in public housing compounds embodied the states
ambition to create shared experiences of social cohesiveness and racial harmony (Hee and
Ooi, 2003).
Of particular relevance to this theme is the fact that public space has served especially
noteworthy roles in dovetailing everyday spatial experiences with state-endorsed visions of
modernisation (Needell, 1995). The planning and construction of Western-style public parks
in Beijing during the early 20th century, the period in which China witnessed its nascent urban
modernity, expressed the states expectation that parks would motivate healthy, civilised leisure
activities that acculturated citizens in an assumedly backward civilisation to Western ways of

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 Public Space in non-Western Contexts 837

social life [Shi, 2008; refer to Waley (2005) for a similar case of Tokyo]. In a similar vein, Levy
(2013) has traced the cultural and ideological rationales underpinning So Paulos two theatres
built, respectively, in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. As part and parcel of urban re-
formers attempt to secure a place for So Paulo within the ranks of modernised, civilised world,
the local state and elites took a series of measures to ensure the theatres wide public access and
hygienic elegant interior space, enforce codes of conducts and standards of performance curricu-
la, improve architectural aesthetics of theatre buildings, and redefine the funding of municipal
theatres as a state responsibility.

RE-INVENTING PUBLICNESS THROUGH BOTTOMUP AGENCY

From a bottomup perspective, it is no less notable that grassroots agents and actors are
remarkably active in determining uses and meanings of public spaces. Public places, including
those that are viewed as the forgotten or even residual spaces of the city (Elsheshtawy,
2008; Chen, 2010), cater to a diversity of demands for public socialities and activities, such as
improvised social interactions (Elsheshtawy, 2013; Imai, 2013), leisure activities (Drummond,
2000; Chen, 2010; Kurfrst, 2011) and information exchange (Elsheshtawy, 2013). In some
circumstances, interactions in public bring together and celebrate differences, thus facilitating
mutual acknowledgement and helping people articulate an embodied sense of cosmopolitan
conviviality (Duruz et al. 2011; Bishop, 2011).
More remarkably, despite the fact that non-Western public space is not traditionally associ-
ated with democratic expressive actions, it is nonetheless commonly used for voicing claims
and lending visibility to particular groups and identities. This testifies the existence of a
politically engaging urban public realm in varying social, political and cultural contexts. The
celebration of indigenous histories and cultures in the Plaza de la Constitucin (or Zcalo) of
Mexico City (Low, 1995; Alonso, 2004) presents a classic example of how the displays and
performances of identities defy invisibility, subordination and/or marginalisation (Young,
2003; Roth, 2006; Gruszczynska, 2009). One comparable case can be found in Hong Kong,
where the Central district the citys most powerful icon of capitalist modernity and commer-
cial development is used by Filipino domestic workers for communal gathering, public eating
and political rallies (Law, 2001; 2002). Appropriation of space in this way empowers migrant
communities not only by maintaining communal solidarity via shared experiences of leisure
and food-related sensations but also by liberating a culturally othered group from spatial con-
finement and restricted rights to urban spaces [refer to Wu (2010) for Filipino migrant workers
use of public spaces in Taipei].
The mobilisation of the expressive function of public space also involves the use of public art
for the communication of views, attitudes and discourses (Ding and Schuermans, 2012). Public
art, by engaging with grassroots realities and concerns, exposes stark social inequalities inherent
in the uneven distribution of power and provides alternative narratives to state-endorsed
rhetoric of progress (Guazon, 2013). Mintys (2006) writing on post-Apartheid Cape Town,
for example, contends that the state-led projects of nation-building, which reify racial harmony
and reconciliation but downplay the actually existing inequalities, are culturally and discursively
destabilised as public art works speak powerfully about how institutionalised racism made strong
imprints on power relations of the city.
Apart from aforementioned actions of expression, which appear to be somehow indirect and
implicit in their confrontation with bastions of dominant power, public space in non-Western
societies does frequently assume the role as the stage of spectacular protests. As Springer (2009,
2010) comments, with reference to Cambodia, public space can be conceived of as a vision for
democracy and development from below in the Global South (p. 15). It is Cambodian

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838 Public Space in non-Western Contexts

peoples active participation in the street-level political actions that has convinced Springer
(2010) that democracy is not naturally a privilege enjoyed by Westerners but enthusiastically
pursued by people outside the West. Indeed, it has been widely recognised among students
of non-Western public space that public protest has the potential of counteracting spatial orders
prescribed by hegemonic powers, hence acting as a crucial agent of democratisation
(Salmenkari, 2009; Padawangi, 2013). Especially in those contexts where public spaces are
already heavily coded with meanings and ideologies propagated by dominant groups [such as
those of national and economic progress in Turkey (Batuman, 2003; Baykan and Hatuka,
2010) and those of neoliberal development in Latin America (Irazbal, 2008)], public protests
wield remarkably destabilising and disrupting impacts.
More recently, the global proliferation of protests against neoliberal development agendas
which is arguably a proactive response to the global financial crisis that, since 2008, has swept
over the entire world economy has renewed scholars interest in the relationships between
political movements and space. This wave of protests, erupted in 2011, exhibits features notably
distinct from earlier street politics. On the one hand, it is intrinsically transnational, binding
together Tahrir Square in Cairo, the J14 movement in Israel, the 15M in Spain and the
occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City (Rabbat, 2012; Benski et al. 2013; Grinberg,
2013; Ramadan, 2013; Marom, 2013). On the other, the political possibilities of both physical
and virtual spaces are combined and reinforce each other, with activists relying heavily upon
social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to extend communication and networking (Fahmi,
2009; Benski et al. 2013).
The last strand of research to be reviewed in this section concerns ordinary urban inhabitants
embodied engagement with, and experience of, public space. It is implied that seemingly
mundane encounters with specific urban spaces actually register extraordinary cultural signifi-
cances, engendering rich meanings and attending the reconstruction and performance of diverse
identities. Perhaps, nowhere is this argument more obvious than in the studies on the newly
emergent spaces of consumption in non-Western cities. Spaces of this kind not only mark the
global triumph of Western consumerist culture but, more importantly, also express complex
local adaption, which gives rise to connotations of lifestyle, cultural taste and cultural citizen-
ship. Numerous studies have commendably emphasised the affective and emotive dimensions
that constitute the lived experiences of consumption-oriented public spaces in non-Western
contexts (Miller, 2013, 2014). A modern and consumerist identity is not simply the topdown
manipulation of hegemonic capitalism. Rather, it is intimately encountered and lived, providing
city dwellers with chances to break out of conventional frameworks of cultural affiliations
(Chua, 2003; de Koning, 2009b).
Without doubt, consumption-based publicness, with the shopping mall as its principal
incarnation, does mirror a trend towards privatisation and isolation, as Connells (1999) study
on Manila clearly indicates. Yet, uses of consumption spaces ref lect diverse cultural meanings
and rationales that urbanites, as mindful and ref lective social agents, inhabit (Stillerman and
Salcedo, 2012). In both Egypt and Turkey, shopping malls become important social spaces
where imaginaries of global citizenship and Westernised lifestyle are experienced and appreci-
ated (Abaza, 2001; Erkip, 2003). People of different income groups and cultural backgrounds
all participate in ongoing re-definition of shopping malls, catalysing multiple popular cultural
practices to meet varied quests for identities and meanings (Abaza, 2001). For women in
Turkey, shopping malls are among the limited number of social spaces in which they can freely
participate in public life and interactions (Erkip, 2003). De Konings (2009a) research on upper
class, socially exclusive coffeehouses occupied by wealthy professional women in Cairo suggests
that the withdrawal of middle-class women into secured social spaces is related to their
dilemmatic position between the pursuit of a modern f lnerie identity and the cultural

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 Public Space in non-Western Contexts 839

constraints on gendered roles and behaviours prescribed by religious doctrines. Feminised and
privatised middle-class spaces manifest both class privileges and the entrenched structure of
unequal gender relations.
Spaces of Regulation
As I suggested earlier, public spaces in non-Western contexts are not tranquil heavens of
unconstrained access and participation. Rather, it is inherently contested, and its regulation
operates alongside a plethora of norms, rationalities and ideologies. As global capitalism gains
new impetus through the spread of neoliberal schemes of urban development, public spaces
in non-Western cities are increasingly besieged by regulatory practices, which privilege profits
and economic interests (Swanson, 2007, 2013). But in other circumstances, logics legitimising
regulation are deeply embedded in local histories, discourses and power relations, such as those
rendering intelligible the spatial confinement of migrant domestic workers and young people in
Singapore (Yeoh and Huang, 1998; Skelton and Hamed, 2011).

CAPITALISM, NEOLIBERALISM AND PUBLIC SPACE

Global capitalism, as a powerful constraining and regulatory framework, is exerting increasingly

decisive impact on the production of non-Western public spaces. As early as in 1995, Cuthbert
(1995) lamented that the close-to-ubiquitous surveillance of public space in Hong Kong
worked in the interest of corporate powers and resulted in the extermination of rich cultural
use of urban space (also Cuthbert and McKinnell, 1997). Indeed, the privatisation and
regulation of public space, which have been forcefully criticised with regard to cities of the West
(Sorkin, 1992; Mitchell, 2003; Kohn, 2004), are increasingly commonplace in non-Western
contexts. Much of this transition, arguably, is attributable to the policy transfer between the
Global South and North, a process in which urban policies conceived in other cities, inter alia
Western ones, are adopted and adjusted to address local issues (Peck and Theodore, 2010;
McCann, 2011; Swanson, 2013).1 Resultantly, many non-Western cities have witnessed the
establishment of consumption-oriented and tightly regulated business improvement districts
(BIDs) (Ward, 2007; Didier et al. 2012), the privatisation and/or Disneyfication of public space
to satiate economic interests (Stanilov, 2007; Kurfrst, 2011; Gaubatz, 2008a; 2008b) and the
implementation of CCTV surveillance technology to curb unruly or unsafe elements in
public space (Walton, 2001; Norris et al. 2004; Lemanski, 2004; Firmino et al. 2013).
Economic restructuring and transformation have caused intensifying social polarisation and
spatial segregation in many non-Western countries, and privatisation and regulation are thus
expected by cohorts of urban policy makers and elites to contribute to an ordered, secured
and sanitised environment with a painstakingly maintained veneer of safety and civility
(Caldeira, 1996; Connell, 1999). Many of these efforts are also rooted in local elites aspiration
to win the city a respected place in world economy and global urban hierarchy. Eventually, as
Didier et al.s (2012) and Michels (2013) studies of BIDs in Johannesburg and Cape Town
indicate, it is usually the groups that are already marginalised in an unjust political economy,
such as the poor, street children and homeless people, that are excluded and victimised by those
newly emerging spaces of privilege.
The making of socially exclusive and tightly surveilled public space corroborates scholars
observation of the ascendancy of entrepreneurial urban governance in non-Western cities and
the heading-South of neoliberal ideologies (Swanson, 2007). One strand of research that
illustrates this transition in governance philosophies focuses on the growing anxiety of urban
governments in the Global South over street vendors, people who use public streets as spaces
of economic activities and survival (Brown, 2006). Motivated by aspirations to beautify the city

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840 Public Space in non-Western Contexts

to attract inward investments, politicians and elites rationalise and regulate urban spaces in tan-
dem with dominant visions of order, civility and security. Once celebrated for their innovative
and creative uses of urban spaces, street vendors are now treated as an eyesore and portrayed as
one of the primary sources of disorder, environmental deterioration and even crime (Donovan,
2008). Consequently, street vendors are forced to move out of iconic urban spaces and, in var-
ious cases, relocate to state-managed, often geographically peripheral, markets (Staudt, 1996;
Donovan, 2008; Crossa, 2009; Hunt, 2009; Huang et al. 2014).
These apocalyptic accounts, however, should not imply that public space in non-Western
cities is simply hijacked by policy rhetorics and governance practices copied from the West.
Globally circulated ideas are always in dialogues with local conditions to yield new forms and
processes of control and regulation. Indeed, some studies have already pointed out that even
techniques of regulation imported from Western contexts can serve to shore up social and
cultural norms specific to local contexts and often not applicable to the West. The use of CCTV
monitoring to maintain the public morality in a Riyadh shopping mall is but one of many
examples (Alhadar and McCahill, 2011). Insights drawn from South Africa and Ecuador also
attested that rationales of regulation were, at least in part, constituted by local racial tensions
(Popke and Ballard, 2004; Swanson, 2007; Samara, 2010). BIDs in South Africa provide an
enlightening example of the mutually interactive relationships between policies in motion
and local social, economic and political milieus. As the works of Tomlinson (1999), Bond
(2000) and Bremner (2000) have elucidated, the rise of neoliberal urban governance, embodied
largely by the sprouting of BIDs, in South Africa shortly after the Apartheid was abolished is
anything but coincidence. On the one hand, the nation-building project of post-Apartheid
South African state exhibited a highly biassed emphasis on economic development. On the
other hand, the racial desegregation in post-Apartheid cities led to the explosion of informal
economies conducted by black South Africans. The difficult integration between the White
and Black, which was in the minds of many also read as the integration between order and
disorder, gave rise to fears of crime that had driven capital and firms out of central cities. As a
result, images of orderly, well-managed South African cities collapsed in the eyes of politicians
and elites. The establishment of BIDs, as we may surmise, has constituted part and parcel of state
initiatives to reinvent, re-image and re-market (Bremner, 2000, p. 187) inner cities.

SOCIO-CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION AND THE DYNAMICS OF PUBLICNESS

Precisely because the regulation of public space is closely related to different social groups
articulation of local problems and concerns, as evidenced by South African BIDs, it is not
surprising then that competing visions of publicness offer important lenses to snapshoot changes
in mainstream ideologies, social orders and cultural norms (de Koning, 2009b). To take the
emergence of citizens groups in Mumbai as an example, Anjaria (2009) points out that
middle-class Indians activism against street vending and the urban poor needs to be understood
in contexts of the rise of Indian bourgeois civil society and the wake of middle-class citizenry.
Battles waged against street hawkers and poor populations enabled middle-class activists to
envision themselves as active members of the civil society who spoke on behalf of the citys
collective interests.
Sometimes, contestation of public space refers to the very ways in which the public/private
distinction is constructed, within broader contexts of astronomical socio-cultural changes. In
India, there never existed any notion of urban public realm that was reserved for orderly,
concerted social activities and interactions. A wide, even chaotic range of uses, including
washing, sleeping and even urinating, were practised in the common spaces, which were vaguely
conceived of as spaces outside the domestic sphere (Chakrabarty, 1992). As Kaviraj (1997) puts

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 Public Space in non-Western Contexts 841

it, the outside the streets, squares, bathing ghats, and other facilities used by large numbers
were crowded, but they did not constitute a different kind of valued space, a civic space with
norms and rules of use of its own, different from the domestic values of bourgeois privacy
(p. 98). The absence of any recognisable order in Indian public space aroused considerable
anxiety as well as overt disdain among colonial administrators and indigenous elites engaged
in the building of postcolonial national culture. They made substantial attempts to introduce
the governing conventions of ordered public space in the West to civilise and modernise the
nation and its citizens (Kaviraj, 1997). This tension between the Western and indigenous
conceptions of publicness has persisted even to this day. Arabindoos (2011) study of the states
re-imagination of Marina Beach in Chennai shows that rhetorics privileging the Western
conception of orderly public space empower the local states search of a world-class status of
the city in the age of globalisation. While the state advances plans to impose cleanness and
orderliness on the beach via capital-led development projects, the grassroots society resists by
continuing to use the beach in tandem with the traditional sense of common spaces and holding
popular rallies, which explicitly celebrate disorderliness and unruliness.
A similar case can be found in urban Vietnam, where the private/public distinction is
transgressed and blurred as ordinary people make use of supposedly public spaces for private
activities, such as cooking, eating and small commercial businesses (Drummond, 2000). In
a manner genuinely comparable to what is observed in India, the state reacts by criticising
these activities for sabotaging the efforts to make cities in Vietnam civilised and modernised
(Kurfrst, 2011).
Seen from a different angle, these examples also enable us to gauge just how much a non-
Western citys encounter with the almost consecrated notion of modernity hinges on the
production of public space. The trinity of public space, order and modernity exerts tremendous
power in disciplining everyday livelihoods. Whether anxieties over unregulated spatial practices
are directed towards the periodic bazaars in Istanbul (z and Eder, 2012) or the carnivalesque
and festive culture of saints-day celebrations in Egypt (Schielke, 2008), it seems safe to argue,
albeit tentatively, that it is now an increasingly global phenomenon that modernity is associated
with public spaces that convey images of decency, civility and order, often at the expense of
displacing and excluding culturally othered and denigrated groups.
Apart from the association with orderliness, the disciplinary power of hegemonic
conceptualisations of modernity also shapes public space by legitimising and mobilising
other rationales of regulation. One body of literature that deserves highlighting here has
examined the unsettled tension between Islamism and secularism in Turkish public space.
As secularism is placed at the centre of nationalist culture by the post-Ottoman, Kemalist
state, the public space in Turkey is not only fraught with symbols reifying the secularist
modernisation agenda but also intrinsically hostile to expressions with explicit references
to Islam (nar, 2005). Yet, political sects and social groups challenge hegemonic secularism
by carving out a counter-public sphere that celebrates Islamic cultures, identities and practices.
The self-chosen veiling of women, which is now increasingly the norm rather than excep-
tion, is perhaps one of the most conspicuous tactics of resistance (Gle, 2002; ONeil, 2008;
Gkarksel, 2012). Also, Houston (2001) and nar (2005) have both documented restau-
rants in Istanbul that perform Islam identities by re-inventing cuisines, cultural ambiences
and codes of conducts. However, it is probably overly simplistic to view the resurrection
of public Islam as reactionary retreat to religious fundamentalism. The performance of Islam
in public, in fact, exhibits a radical hybridity that orchestrates Islamic cultural authenticity
and norms and meanings embodying the European modernity. It serves peoples desire to
articulate a sense of cultural difference, rather than absolute and rigid opposition between
West and East (Gle, 2002; nar, 2005).

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842 Public Space in non-Western Contexts

Conclusion
So far, this article has clearly demonstrated that although the ways in which the private/public
distinction is constituted geohistorically vary a great deal, there is nevertheless a sense, either
vaguely or clearly defined, of an urban public realm in many different societies and cultures.
It is my argument that although conceptions of publicness always emerge from distinctive, even
unique, social, economic and cultural contexts, public space in non-Western cities is not
ontologically different from that in the West. If public space in the West is traditionally scripted
by the political and civic ideals attached to it, the use of public space for voicing collective claims
and promoting acknowledgement of cultural difference has in effect been observed across the
globe. More notably, the recent re-conceptualisation of public space as something lived,
negotiated and practised in the formation of social relations, cultural meanings and power also
seems to apply to both non-Western and Western contexts. In sum, this article analyses public
space as something centrally implicated in actions of addressing (Iveson, 2007) and thereby the
assertion or contestation of differences, orders and ideologies (Watson, 2006).
Therefore, rather than use historically specific configurations of publicness to exoticise non-
Western public space, a more rewarding approach interrogates how public space, because of its
being outside the domestic sphere and its role as the embodiment of shared meanings, values and
views, becomes a focus of appropriation, contestation and struggle. Indeed, there is an urgent
need for scholars to interrogate much more extensively how the very idea(l) of being public
is conceived and practised in specific contexts, and what notion of publicness achieves a
more dominant status, and eventually becomes tensioned with other visions of publicness
(e.g. Kaviraj, 1997). In other words, the public/private divide, though perhaps widely
identifiable, is constituted as an active response to context-specific social, economic, political
and cultural dynamics (Huang, 1993).
Another less explored but theoretically rewarding inquiry is to trace the invisibilities, as well
as visibilities, of women in the urban public realm. As the volume edited by Peake and Rieker
(2013) has argued, women reside within hegemonic notions of their appropriate places in the
city. It is evident that in various non-Western contexts, public spaces are scripted by distinctive
forms of patriarchal domination. Womens presence in public is often seen as either morally
disturbing or socio-culturally insignificant (Wright, 2013). On the other hand, however, in
many cases, changes in dominant ideologies and cultural norms also tend to work through images
of women in public. This line of argument is attested by the ways that public spaces that enable
womens use are depicted either by the state (as in Attwood, 2010), or directly lived (as in Shi,
1998; de Koning, 2009a; 2009b) as progressive and emancipatory, situated within broader
discourses of modernity and socio-cultural changes.
To conclude this article, I propose that the immensely capacious range of actors, relations and
ideologies involved in the appropriation and contestation of non-Western public spaces enables
us to capture them as intricate dynamics between inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion and
exclusion are not mutually antithetical in the social construction of public spaces. Groups in
non-Western societies, political elites and grassroots communities alike, understand well that
the cultural energy of public space as a unifying force lies in its ability to include, and in certain
cases indoctrinate and educate, the mass. Yet, the making-visible of shared meanings and values
depends on the invisibility of other feelings and relations. Remarkable conf licts and power
asymmetries exist underneath seemingly democratic uses of public spaces. Even in a South
African shopping mall that ostensibly endorses racial inclusion and harmony, as Houssay-
Holzschuch and Teppo (2009) suggest, the hegemony of whiteness still operates in invisible
and taken-for-granted ways, creating subtle dynamics of exclusion and disengagement (also
Lee, 2011; Marom, 2013).

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 Public Space in non-Western Contexts 843

Hence, it is an essential task to excavate the diverse rationales undergirding the exercise of regu-
latory power, some of which are framed with vocabularies of inclusion and democracy, rather
than exclusion. In Bogot, public space is imagined as a civic centre that breeds democratic citi-
zenship. Ironically, street vendors are stigmatised as invaders of a natural and dignified public realm
and therefore victimised by agendas that ostensibly promote democracy (Hunt, 2009). Indeed, as
we look into how the creation of ordered and regulated public space is justified by invoking the
omnipotent signifier of modernity, we are able to glimpse that public space in non-Western con-
texts is now increasingly imbricated in the control and discipline of difference and diversity, a pro-
cess in which new subjectivities that conform to dominant discourses and orders are invented.
Finally, the agency of grassroots people in negotiating and resisting imposed rules and norms
warrants nuanced consideration. People are not automatons who passively act out rationalities
of regulation. Rather, they creatively navigate through meanings and norms with which public
spaces are coded so as to envision empowerment and meet specific demands. In Iran, the Islamic
decree that women must be veiled in public space ironically provide them with chances to
present themselves in public, as the veiling of body helps to overcome gendered tension
between Islamic women and men (Amir-Ebrahimi, 2006). Tactics of coping and negotiation
like this, as observed also in the cases of street vendors in Latin America and young people in
shopping malls (Staudt, 1996; Crossa, 2009; Stillerman and Salcedo, 2012), expose the
incoherency of regulatory regimes and create some spaces of manoeuvre which may contribute
to more subverting actions of resistance.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my three PhD supervisors in the University of Edinburgh Jane M.
Jacobs, Tom Slater and Eric Laurier for inspiring and encouraging me during my research
on public space. I would also like to thank Prof. Jon May and the two anonymous referees
for their advice and guidance throughout the review process.

Short Biography

Junxi Qian is a social and cultural geographer who works at the intersection of geography, urban
studies and cultural studies. He holds a BSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Sun Yat-sen
University, China, and a PhD in Human Geography from University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
His PhD thesis examines the social and cultural geographies of public space in post-reform urban
China. His recent research focuses on changing place identities and place politics in transitional
China, as well as the restructuring of urban China. His works have appeared in academic
journals such as Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Environment and Planning A,
Geoforum, Social & Cultural Geography, Geografiska Annaler Series B, Urban Studies and Journal of
Rural Studies.

Notes
* Correspondence to: Junxi Qian, Centre for Cultural Industry and Cultural Geography and School of Geography, South
China Normal University, Shipai Campus, Tianhe District, Guangzhou, 510631, China. E-mail: [email protected]

1
It warrants some retrospection that although planning and regulation of public space in the West have exerted major
impacts on non-Western cities, in the extant literature, it seems impossible to trace the ways in which non-Western
public spaces have impacted Western urbanisms in recent times. When non-Western urban landscapes are transplanted to
Western cities, they more often than not act as highly exoticised, postmodern simulacra that dovetail with market
interests. It testies the persisting dominance of Western cities in the global mobilities of urban policies and ideologies.

2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Geography Compass 8/11 (2014): 834847, 10.1111/gec3.12183
844 Public Space in non-Western Contexts

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