On the hard work of domesticating a public space

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On the Hard Work of Domesticating a Public Space

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On the Hard Work of Domesticatinga Public Space

Regan Koch and Alan Latham

[Paper first received, December 2011; in final form, March 2012]

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of domestication as a way of attending to urbanpublic spaces and the ways in which they come to be inhabited. It argues against thetendency in urban scholarship to use the term pejoratively and interchangeably withwords like pacification or taming to express concerns relating to the corrosion ofpublic life. Rather, the aim here is to develop domestication as a concept attentive tothe processes by which people go about making a home in the city. Given the tre-mendous investment, enthusiasm and amount of policy directed towards urbandevelopment and regeneration over the past decade, it is argued that it is vital thaturban scholarship continues to develop tools and concepts for offering fine-grainedattention to the spaces that get produced by these interventions and to the socialdynamics within them. These arguments are developed through a case study of thePrince of Wales Junction in London.

Introduction

The piano had been sitting in front of thecafe for not quite a week. An old upright,the sort you might find in a parlour ordrawing room, it had been painted brightblue to match the newly decorated store-front. Beside it, four local residents loungedat the Parisian-style tables spread across apatch of artificial grass. As they sipped theircoffee, the group seemed transfixed by thebustle of the traders setting up their stallsat the new market on the plaza. ‘‘Is it okay

if we have a go on this?’’, the young coupleasked, gesturing towards the piano. ‘‘Seethe sign?’’, one of the group membersreplied with a smile, ‘‘It says ‘Play Me. I’mYours!’’’. The young man sat down on thebench to play. ‘‘What you wanna sing?’’ heasked his friend. After a brief discussion,the duo launched into a rendition of StevieWonder’s Isn’t She Lovely. As the songunfolded, they gained in swagger andvolume. Passers-by stopped to listen, a few

Regan Koch and Alan Latham (corresponding author) are in the Department of Geography, UCL,Pearson Building, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK. E-mail: [email protected] [email protected].

Urban Studies at 5050(1) 6–21, January 2013

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people came out of the cafe and several tra-ders left their stalls to get a better view ofthe performance. As they finished, the smallcrowd applauded and whooped. Despitepleas for an encore, the couple bowed gra-ciously and left to browse the market.

Moments such as these are indicative ofthe pleasurable encounters that public spacesoften afford and of convivial forms of social-ity they can offer (Peattie, 1998; Laurier andPhilo, 2006; Watson, 2006). What is remark-able about this event, however, is where ittook place. The five-way intersection, knownas the Prince of Wales Junction, situatedalong a stretch of Harrow Road in central-west London was known for generating verydifferent sorts of atmospheres. Over the pre-vious decade it had become a regular site ofstreet drinking, aggressive begging, prostitu-tion and drug dealing. Lacking amenitiesbeyond a set of public toilets, for most resi-dents the space was somewhere to avoid orpass through quickly even though it waslocated at a central point in the neighbour-hood. The transformations that led to theestablishment of a market and other com-munity activities on the site were not acci-dental. Rather, they were part of a deliberatestrategy to re-imagine and reconfigure theJunction as a public space. The aim was toprovide a set of interventions that mightmake it more habitable and attractive forlocal residents, and which might ultimatelyhelp to reinvigorate commercial activityalong this troubled retail stretch. In no smallsense, these actions were about trying todomesticate a space troubled by social prob-lems and economic failures.1

The term domestication—along with arange of related words such as taming andpacification—is often used by critical urbanscholars as a shorthand to evoke concernsrelated to public space, particularly those ofprivatisation and commercialisation (seeZukin, 1995, 1998, 2010; Jackson, 1998;Atkinson, 2003; Munoz, 2003; Krase, 2005;

Allen, 2006; Kaltmeier, 2011). In what fol-lows, we make an argument against thischaracterisation. Rather than understandingthe domestic as existing in opposition topublic life, and viewing domestication as acorrosive of it, we want to use the conceptto think more carefully about the qualitiesthat enable spaces to become collectivelyinhabited. Drawing on three alternative dis-ciplinary perspectives, we suggest thatdomestication provides a productive way toattend to the processes by which peoplecome to inhabit public spaces and make asort of home in the city. To focus on suchmatters is to connect with a diverse tradi-tion of scholarship and activism concernedwith the practical possibilities of publicspace. It is to speak of the progressive tradi-tion of Jane Addams, John Dewey and thenotion of ‘civic housekeeping’ (Jackson,2001); the activist scholarship of Jane Jacobs(1961) and William H. Whyte (1988) andtheir concern with the micro orderings ofpublic life; urban designers such as Jan Gehl(2010) who attend to the role that objects ofall different kinds play in the fostering ofeveryday urban life; and more recent scho-larship by urbanists such as Richard Sennett(1994, 2010), Gary Bridge (2005, 2008) andAsh Amin (2006, 2008) who, in variousways, theorise public life as a collectivegrammar of social interaction. Through acase study of the Prince of Wales Junction,our aim is to explore how a set of materialinterventions and the altering of routinepractices helped to reorient a troubled siteinto a space marked not only by a ‘studiedsense of trust’ (Amin, 2008) but by convivialforms of inclusion, mutual interaction andpleasurable surprise.

Domestication and Public Space

The writer most closely associated with cri-tiques related to the domestication of publicspace is the urban sociologist Sharon Zukin

DOMESTICATING A PUBLIC SPACE 7

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(1995, 1998, 2010). In her analysis of NewYork’s Bryant Park during the late 1980sand 1990s, she details how a city park notor-ious for crime, drug dealing and the gather-ing of homeless persons was transformedwhen private actors were given responsibil-ity for its redesign and management. Upontaking it over, the Bryant Park BusinessImprovement District set up a subsidiarytasked with reconfiguring the space to makeit more attractive to surrounding officeworkers. This included extensive relands-caping and the lowering of perimeter wallsto make the park more inviting. New secu-rity measures included the prominent post-ing of rules banning alcohol and drug use,fixed hours of operation and the introduc-tion of private security guards. The interiorof the park was redeveloped following prin-ciples developed by William H. Whyte andpopularised by the Project for Public Spaceswhich included the provisioning of movabletables and chairs, kiosks selling coffee andsandwiches, and entertainment programmesincluding live music, films and specialevents. These changes dramatically alteredthe use of the park. Having been a no-goarea for most women, even in the daytime,the four-hectare open space became regu-larly populated by thousands of men andwomen each day. By this and many othermeasures, the new Bryant Park could beconsidered a success. Zukin, however, ismore circumspect. Although the park isfilled with many more people, she takesissue with the ‘‘vision of civility’’ (1995, p.31) being promoted, whereby the presenceand practices of ‘‘normal’’ users gives ‘‘lessspace for vagrants and criminals to maneu-ver’’ (p. 28). For Zukin, this process, oneshe first terms ‘‘pacification by cappuccino’’(1995, p. 28) and later ‘‘domestication bycappuccino’’ (1998, p. 2; 2010, p. 4) presentsboth an indicative trend and a worryingmodel for the provisioning of urban publicspace more generally.

This argument related to the domestica-tion of public space has been picked up by avariety of urban scholars in other contexts.Jackson (1998) describes how the designand management strategies of shoppingmalls present a domesticated version of theBritish high street, offering an aestheticisedand fully self-contained environment wherethe anxieties of public encounter are largelyabsent. Bondi similarly evokes a sense ofpacification in her description of gentrifica-tion as a process that ‘‘turns history into heri-tage, and untamed urban wilderness intodomesticated urban landscapes’’ (Bondi,1998, p. 195). Domestication, for Bondi, isan outcome of heterosexual femininity subtlyresisting the wild uncertainty of urban spacewhile at the same time being part of its con-quest. Atkinson uses ‘domestication by cap-puccino’ as an analytical frame to questionmechanisms of control being deployed inBritish cities, whereby

residential desires for safety and relative social

homogeneity [influence] the choices made

about public spaces in order to enjoy the

experience of the street without its dangers

(Atkinson, 2003, p. 1841).

Munoz (2003) is concerned not with cappuc-cino, but rather with ‘domestication by bar-beque’ as a force that threatens traditionalforms of public space in Mediterranean citiesby turning city life inwards towards thehome. Domestication also plays a key role inAllen’s (2006) consideration of Berlin’sPotsdamer Platz as an insidious form ofpower that underpins the logic behind manynew urban public spaces. However, in con-trast to highlighting the exclusive qualities ofsome domesticating amenities, Allen detailsthe emergence of an inclusive model of publicspace dependent upon a ‘‘staged version ofpublicness’’ (p. 453).

Zukin’s most recent work NakedCity (2010) further develops her idea of

8 REGAN KOCH AND ALAN LATHAM



domestication to describe a generalisedcondition of authentic public space beingdiminished. In this account, what is hap-pening in neighbourhoods all over NewYork is that

wilder places [are] getting an aesthetic

upgrading by the opening of a Starbucks or

another new coffee bar. The tastes behind

these new spaces of consumption are power-

ful because they move longtime residents

outside their comfort zone, gradually shifting

places that support their way of life to life

supports for a different cultural community

(Zukin, 2010, p. 4).

In summary, for Zukin—and to some extentJackson, Atkinson and Allen (although per-haps not for Bondi)—domestication supportsa macro narrative about cities being graduallystripped of the more authentic forms ofpublic life that have historically defined them.The term therefore sits together with a wholerange of words like securitisation, pacifica-tion, ordering, disciplining, homogenising,commercialising and controlling to describethe perilous state of contemporary publicspace (see Kohn, 2004; Low and Smith, 2006).On the whole, we do not disagree that there issomething pernicious about many of thesetrends. However, we want to emphasise thatdomestication can also be—and, we willargue, should be—made sense of in a ratherdifferent way. For precisely what troublesmany public spaces is that they are lacking incertain domestic qualities. That is, they fail toprovide a sense of trust, comfort or amenitythat might invite multiple publics to inhabitthem. This was certainly the case at the Princeof Wales Junction.

Struggling with Disorder on theJunction

Prior to 1995, the Junction was not muchof a recognisable public space but rather a

busy five-way traffic intersection with a setof public toilets at the centre. When aLondon Transport study identified the siteas a major pedestrian hazard, Westminstercouncil chose not to close the toilets but toreconfigure the space around them. Trafficwas diverted along one side of the Junctionto allow for a small stretch of pavement toconnect with the toilets, in effect creating asmall piazza along the intersection. Newguardrails installed along the surroundingfootpaths meant that drivers no longer hadto worry about pedestrians entering theroad, but this allowed cars to travel fasterthrough the Junction. Speed bumps werethen added to calm traffic and the roadrunning directly alongside the new pave-ment was converted to one-way. Thesechanges met the goal of improving pedes-trian safety. They also transformed how thespace was used. Busy with traffic during thedaytime, pavement use was typically lim-ited to those passing through. At night,however, when things calmed, it offered anattractive spot for some people to gatherand drink. Before long, the new stretch ofpavement also proved to be well-suited fordrug dealing and for prostitutes to solicitclients, as cars were now forced to driveslowly past the pavement with the optionof then heading off in any of five directionsin west London.

That persons involved in illicit activitymade a home on the Junction was notcompletely surprising. The surroundingward had since the 1950s been one of themost deprived in London. In the 1980s, ithad been at the centre of the ‘homes forvotes scandal’ in which council membersintentionally neglected ward services andstrategically relocated persons in shelteredaccommodation—including those withmental health and addiction problems—into the ward.2 Around the same time asthe physical changes already described,stringent policing in the neighbouring




borough of Kensington and Chelsea pusheddrug dealing and street solicitation there tothe north of Harrow Road. In the late1990s, retail in the area also began to shiftgradually down-market to a repetition ofmostly low-end discount shops, takeawayfood outlets and betting agents. Over 20per cent of storefronts sat vacant. As theseaspects came together, the Junction becamea place where the atmosphere and modes ofinhabitation recognisably expressed theprevalence of illicit practices, while materi-ally offering few affordances for much else.

Troubles at the Junction came to a flashpoint in the spring of 2004. When a well-known elderly woman was badly injured onthe site as her handbag was snatched, localresidents expressed outrage in phone callsand letter campaigns. The council’s responsewas to establish a governance group bringingtogether local officials, housing providers,business owners and the police. The measuresfirst enacted were very much in line thosethat Zukin, Jackson and Atkinson identifywith the general securitisation of publicspace. Priority was given to dispersing illicitbehaviour from the Junction through heigh-tened surveillance and policing. AdditionalCCTV cameras and civic watch forums wereput in place. A series of ‘target hardening’interventions saw blind spots, alleyways andoverhangs in the surrounding area fitted withsecurity gates and additional lighting, whilephone boxes were removed. Anti-social beha-viour orders (ASBOs) were given to at least10 persons convicted of drug dealing on theJunction, barring them from being within aset radius of the space for a period of fouryears. Their names, pictures and violationswere posted on a display nearby.

These measures substantially loweredvisible instances of illicit activity on theJunction. Police surveys and communityconsultations, however, indicated that neg-ative perceptions of the area remainedunchanged. The security measures also

seemed to have little impact on bringingabout new uses to the space or attractingnew businesses. Thus, while the Junctioncould be described as having its unruly ele-ments pacified or tamed, it failed to pro-vide much sense of trust. It was not a placewhere many people felt at home. In manyways, we can see parallels with the condi-tions that characterised Bryant Park priorto its transformation as described by Zukin.Having failed to solve the problem of theJunction through interventions aimed atexclusion, the council and a range of otheractors alighted on the idea of transformingthe space by making it more inviting.

Sometimes More is More:Experimenting with Public Space

The understanding that policing would notnecessarily create a more inhabitable spacewas not lost on the governance group. Yetwhat exactly might be done was an openquestion. How do you shift perceptions andpractices associated with fear and avoidanceto ones of everyday use, trust and a sense ofwell-being? The governance group decidedto apply a national funding stream that waschannelling money into wards with highlevels of deprivation through Local AreaRenewal Partnerships. In December 2004,the group was awarded a three-year grant toenact a ‘comprehensive programme of localarea renewal’ and the Harrow RoadNeighbourhood Partnerhsip (HRNP) wasformed. After extensive local consultation, itwas clear that many residents felt stronglyabout the need for changes at the Junction,describing it variously as ‘an eyesore’ and a‘black eye for the community’. The actionplan the Partnership eventually producedcalled for the development of a ‘‘quality civicspace’’ that would ‘‘create a destination’’ fora wide cross-section of the local public. Thiswas to be done in part through physicalimprovements and in part by encouraging




‘‘temporary uses’’ and greater ‘‘communityactivity’’ on the site (HRNP, 2007, pp. 25–29). As plans went through various stagesof proposal and consultation, the idea ofestablishing a regular market on the sitefound favour as a viable option for meetingthese goals. The idea fitted with a prevailingethos of experimentation and adding-to thatthe Partnership developed. As project man-ager for the council Martin Whittles explains

We tried to come at this from lots of different

angles. So, in addition to the improvements in

social services, we’re really just trying to make

this space look better, feel safer and support a

whole bunch of new activity. Which ideas might

really take off, whether the market will work,

whether we’ll eventually get a major developer

interested in this area, we don’t really know

(Martin Whittles, interview, 13 May 2009).

The newly designed Junction that emergedfrom this process roughly quadrupled thepaved area available for pedestrians. It fea-tured new granite paving stones, permanentbenches, electricity and water points, bicycleracks, ground lighting and two rows of newlyplanted trees (see Figure 1). The centre-pieceof the project was a market licensed to oper-ate three days a week and during specialevents. Funds were also earmarked to hire amember of staff for three months to organiseevent licensing and promote activities. Someof these funds are what covered the initialcosts of opening the small cafe and decorat-ing the piano to match.

The cafe and the piano were not part ofthe official plan for the Junction. Rather,their almost accidental arrival was madepossible by the re-imagining and reconfi-guring of this formerly dysfunctional site.On the market’s opening weekend, a resi-dent named Alice passed through andnoticed an unmet demand for coffee.Having just been made redundant, shespoke with the market manager about

opening a drinks stall, which then led to aconversation with the partnership’s direc-tor. The partnership had been trying toconvince the council to do somethingabout the vacant and unsightly council-owned properties along the Junction. Thedirector’s idea had been to open an art gal-lery to showcase local talent, but Alice sug-gested setting up a cafe. If they would lether have the space rent-free on a trial basis,she would be happy to display art as well.Given the go-ahead from the partnership,Alice spent the next week clearing years ofaccumulated debris from the doorway andwindows, and having it repainted insideand out. Furnishing the space with tables,chairs and an artificial grass patio, she alsoadded a range of small touches to make theplace comfortable: reading materials, fliersfor local events, a guestbook, a chalkboardfor comments and drawings, and a waterbowl for dogs. Alice also worked with thepartnership’s event organiser to promoteactivities on the Junction including livemusic on Fridays, an Irish Festival, aCarnival drum display, salsa dance lessonsand an Old Folk’s Tea. The first artistselected to exhibit in the cafe knew aboutthe city-wide ‘Play Me I’m Yours’ pianoproject and, when Alice agreed to takeresponsibility for securing it at the end ofeach day, the artist was able to get theJunction a piano of its own. Alice’s effortscan be understood as both entrepreneurialand community-minded, but what interestsus in particular is the way her actions paral-lelled the general aims of the partnershipand the council. By taking ownership of aformerly vacant storefront, routinely popu-lating the space with mundane forms ofsociality—greeting, eating, drinking, watch-ing, gossiping, reading—and spilling thisactivity out onto the pavement, Alicehelped to extend the broader set of changestaking place at the Junction, bringing a newkind of public life to the space. In a whole




range of ways, this process was about apublic space becoming domesticated.

Rethinking Domestication andPublic Space

The critical use of the term domesticationin urban scholarship has arguably been

useful in drawing attention to ways inwhich public life can be dampened ordulled in certain ways. However, we wantto argue that this usage comes at theexpense of registering other processes thatmay be taking place. We want to movebeyond the use of the term in the sense ofpacification or taming. There are at least

Figure 1. New configurations of materials and practices on the transformed Junction: a spon-taneous performance on the piano; granite paving stones provide a plaza surface; tables andchairs offer an invitation to stay, bikes stands and benches provide practical furnishings; land-scaping softens the space; morning coffee at the cafe; setting up stalls becomes a daily routine;eye-catching displays invite people to browse; occasional events draw large crowds; routinepractices of caring for the Junction.




three reasons for doing so. First, such userelies upon an organicist metaphor ofurban space that needs closer examination.The notion that real public space was once‘wild’ but is now being ‘tamed’ (Zukin,1995, 1998; Bondi, 1998; Atkinson, 2003),or that an entire city could lose its ‘soul’(Zukin 2010, p. 1) provides a seductivenarrative but not much analytical purchase.In part, this is because such overarchingstories depend upon a necessarily narrowreading of the multiple spatio-temporalitiesthat define a given space, much less anentire city. Such thinking also draws uponan idea of a ‘natural order’ (the ‘wild’ being‘tamed’) artificially suppressed when in facturban space is always defined by the collec-tive negotiation of multiple claims onspace. We would prefer to work with amore hybridised conceptualisation of citiesas always and already comprised of socio-material assemblages which can be var-iously configured to enhance or constrainhuman capabilities (Amin and Thrift,2002). Even were we to accept the meta-phor, the assumption that ‘wild’ cities areinherently better than ‘tamed’ ones seemsrather dubious. Secondly, to automaticallyposition domestication as a form of domi-nation ignores the continuous becoming ofurban space. New developments that oftenseem sterile or tightly scripted at theironset often take some time to settle in, tobecome inhabited, and for new norms ofuse to be negotiated. Indeed, our own visitsto Bryant Park over the past several yearsfound a much looser and more inclusive setof users and uses than Zukin’s initialdescription. Implicit within much urbancriticism is a sense that cities are more real,or at least more authentic, when they areedgy or dirty; and that cities used to bemuch more interesting but are now beingmade boring. These positions seem steepedin a sort of nostalgia which can not only‘‘suck the life out of the present’’ (Berman,

2006, p. 217) but also leave urban scholar-ship ill-equipped at registering instanceswhere urban spaces might be becomingmore inclusive and generally better for thepeople who inhabit them. Thirdly, mobili-sations of domestication as pacification areunderpinned by an implicit narrative of adecline in public life. Such a narrative isrestrictive at best and at its worst simplywrong (see Crawford, 1999; Sheller andUrry, 2003; Latham et al., 2009).

To develop a more open-ended andnuanced conception of domestication, wewant to turn to three alternative perspec-tives outside urban studies. The first,coming from cultural anthropology, con-ceives of domestication not as a formof imposition, but as the cultivation ofa whole range of intimate relationshipsbetween humans and other forms of life,artifacts and environments. Ingold (2000),for example, writes of the way hunter-gather peoples frame the process of culti-vating their environment not as an act ofseparation from the natural world but askind of working-with. Similarly, Vitebsky’sstudy of Eveny reindeer herders poses thequestion of whether the Eveny have domes-ticated their reindeer or the reindeer theEveny. For Vitebsky

Domestication [is] an arrangement of mutual

benefit to both sides . even . a social con-

tract between reindeer and humans (Vitebsky,

2006, p. 27).

A second perspective on domestication,based in the sociology of technology andmedia studies comes from research detail-ing the processes by which new technologiesbecome accepted and used. Here, the con-cept has provided a theoretical frameworkand a practical approach for consideringtechnology within the dynamic routines,rituals and patterns of everyday life(Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992; Sørenson,




2006). A key idea is that when technologieshave been ‘successful’ they are

not regarded as cold, lifeless, problematic

and challenging consumer goods . but as

comfortable, useful tools—functional and/or

symbolic—that are reliable and trustworthy

(Berker et al., 2006, p. 3).

A third perspective, coming from post-socialist studies, has understood domestica-tion as a process through which ‘big’ politi-cal and social projects—largely the ideas ofpoliticians, experts and social institutions—become enmeshed within everyday practicesand processes of social reproduction. In thecontext of both state socialism (Creed,1998) and neo-liberalism (Stenning et al.,2010), this positioning of domestication hashelped to highlight the processes throughwhich these projects were understood,negotiated, contested and made tolerablethrough various forms of economic practiceand consumption.

Each of these perspectives shares acommon sense that domestication is notsimply a relationship of domination. Rather,it is a process in the formation of certainkinds of (variably) beneficial relationshipsbetween humans and other things—be theyobjects, sets of ideas or other forms of life.These relationships, which maybe first bealien, novel or incomprehensible, evolve overtime and in various non-determinate ways tobecome familiar, ordinary, routine and mostof all useful. This framing provides a way ofthinking about the domestication of publicspace in terms beyond that of a straightfor-ward imposition of alien norms and conven-tions upon a site or its culture. That is,domestication does not constrain public life,but rather is an essential part of the processthrough which people come to inhabit urbanspaces and, indeed, is part of the way inwhich publics of all different sorts come tofind a home in the city.

In moving to the notion of domesticationin the sense of making a home, we are notsuggesting that public space is, or should be,the same as the domestic space of the houseor apartment. We are, however, attemptingto move beyond conceptualisations of‘public’ and ‘private’ that pose them as dis-tinct opposites. Our intention is to take seri-ously the ‘‘complex and fluid hybridizing ofpublic-and-private life’’ (Sheller and Urry,2003, p. 108) that characterises the urbaneveryday. Rather than thinking about urbanspaces as being either public or private, wewant to understand the public-ness of aspace as defined by how the relationshipbetween the two is configured. Much ofwhat goes on within public space is in factprivately directed—it is about people get-ting from A to B, shopping, eating, relaxing,meeting friends and so on. The public qual-ity of these activities arises out of the degreeto which they involve some sort of orienta-tion towards, involvement with, perhapseven responsibility for, the others withwhom one collectively inhabits space. Whenpublic spaces work well, these relationshipsare inclusive, convivial and democratic. Inshort, they are shared. For the key actorsbehind the Junction’s transformation, thegeneral intention was to re-orient the spacealong these lines and transform a site thatwas failing to support public life in manyways.

Bringing the Domestic to PublicSpace

To make sense of the processes by which adifferent set of public qualities were broughtto the Junction and to think about broaderlessons for attending to the difficult work ofcreating and managing public spaces, wewould like to engage with the metaphor ofhome-making. Although just one way ofthinking about domestication, an extensive




literature on the concept of ‘home’ recog-nises it as an expansive (although not unpro-blematic) spatial imaginary (Blunt andDowling, 2006; Blunt and Varley, 2004).Our aim is not to recast domestication ashome-making in order to continue to framegrand narratives about public space. Rather,we think that the concept evokes a numberof modest metaphors for attending to thefine-grained details of everyday forms ofinhabiation. Hence, and in what follows, wewould like to offer four heuristics for think-ing through a notion of home-making inrelation to the domestication of publicspaces: foundations, furnishings, invitationsand accommodations.

Foundations

To start, we can think of how the changesenacted at the Junction in 1995 literallypaved the way for illicit activities to find ahome there. Adding a stretch of pavementsomewhat extended its capacity for peopleto congretate. Yet its smallness, proximityto unpleasant traffic and the absence ofamenities limited its usage. At night, how-ever, traffic died down and the pavementwas consistently populated by groups ofthree to five people, typically drinking pur-chases from the nearby off-licence. Thepartnership’s redesign attempted to expandthe range of affordances for public activityby imagining it as a plaza. This new concep-tualisation provided a checklist of necessaryfeatures: plazas need to have open space,enough to allow a crowd of people to con-gregate and mingle; they need an appropri-ate surface and ideally landscaping andseating; they need to be relatively free oftraffic; they need to provide facilities likepower and water for events and festivals;and they need lighting to be useable afternightfall. At a most basic level, thesechanges—and the re-imagining of theJunction as a plaza—provided what can be

understood as a sort of foundation beinglaid down. A foundation is not the same asa script or a tight programme, but rather anenabling set of features that underpin thebuilding of a home. The laying of a founda-tion can be done with varying degrees offlexibility, adaptability and openness(Sennett, 2010) and, importantly, it involvesmore than just physical infrastructure. Newsocial and legal frameworks (permits, licen-sing, management contracts, leasing agree-ments, service provisions) are foundationalfor things like a market and other tempo-rary events to take place. Important here isthe idea that foundations are not only aboutthe material. They are also about a kind ofethos—a way of thinking about the kind ofpublic space that might be put together.Rebuilding the Junction as a kind of plazainvolved the recognition that making agood public space is not quite the same assimply making a safe one. Important here isthe notion that filling the space with activi-ties and people is preferable to focusing onthe exclusion of that which is less desirable.To do this one has to learn to live with (tosome extent at least) the ‘wild’ or ‘untamed’elements that are outside the official pro-gramme of the site. Thus, part of theJunction’s domestication involved the rec-ognition that in some senses it will never befully ‘tamed’. Crucially, and contra toZukin (2010), this is not some kind ofMachiavellian trick through which themajority comes to discipline the minority.Rather, it is a pragmatic realisation that‘good’ public spaces need to find ways ofaccommodating and living with the widediversity of demands placed upon them.

Furnishings

If infrastructural changes provided newfoundations for expanding public inhabita-tion, what actually came to populate theJunction was practical activity. The end of




the nine-month construction project meanta return to regular pedestrian traffic, therhythms of which where enhanced by theadditional set of footpaths now connectedup with the newly created plaza. The redeve-lopment also encouraged daytime users todo more than just pass through—but howexactly? Engagement with a range of mate-rial objects, or what we might think of as fur-nishings, played a key role. Recall that theredesign introduced a number of additions tothe stripped-down space: granite pavingstones, benches, landscaping, recessed groundlighting and bike racks (see Figure 1). Thesepermanent features were complemented bymore temporally variable amenities such asthe market, live music events and the range ofcommunity gatherings that were organised.Of all these furnishings, the movable furnitureoffered a consistent and easily observable setof engagements. Each day during summer, sixplastic tables and thirty matching chairs wereset out by the market’s manager. There wasno branding or labelling to indicate proprietyor expectation of purchase. Rather, they weremade available for people to use, rearrangeand cluster as they pleased. These inexpensiveitems were recognised as practical and theywere used in a variety of perhaps unforeseenways. People who purchased food at themarket used them, but so too did elderly resi-dents who needed a rest, men who scannedthe day’s horse races before heading into thebooking agent, people from the nearby carehome who brought packed lunches outwhen the weather was sunny and occasion-ally people taking quick naps used themtoo. Borrowing from studies of technologyand media discussed earlier, we can outlinea process of domestication here consistingof several general features. First, there isthe construction of regular, predictableroutines associated with the use of thesefurnishings. Secondly, there is the estab-lishment of roles for taking responsibilityfor the space and its furnishings. Thirdly,

there is the on-going mix of events takingplace whereby the Junction becomes routi-nely perceived as a site of ‘situated multi-plicity’ (Amin, 2008, p. 8) rather than asmerely a space for passing through or asthe exclusive territory of those involved inillicit activity. Amin’s reflection on howsuch practical activity can generate collec-tive affects captures precisely what seemedto be taking place

The movement of humans and non-humans

in public spaces is not random but guided by

habit, purposeful orientation, and the instruc-

tions of objects and signs. The repetition of

these rhythms results in the conversion of

public space into a patterned ground that

proves essential for actors to make sense of

the space, their place within it and their way

through it. Such patterning is the way in

which a public space is domesticated, not only

as a social map of the possible and the permis-

sible, but also as an experience of freedom

through the neutralization of antipathies of

demarcation and division—from gating to

surveillance—by naturalizations of repetition.

The lines of power and separation somehow

disappear in a heavily patterned ground, as

the ground springs back as a space of multiple

uses, multiple trajectories and multiple pub-

lics, simultaneously freeing and circumscrib-

ing social experience of the urban commons

(Amin, 2008, p. 12).

Invitations

Amin’s description gives a sense of the back-ground hum of activity in spaces that havecome to be widely inhabited. Yet the ways inwhich these collective achievements are pro-duced is left largely unexamined. The hardwork of domesticating a public space—creating a new ‘‘patterned ground’’ as Aminterms it—is a particular achievement of agiven site. The domestication of theJunction began by laying out a new




foundation and furnishing it with variousamenities, but the routines alreadydescribed did not magically happen on theirown. People needed to be invited to makethemselves at home. These invitations wereattempted through a strategic set of experi-ments and interventions. They includedplanned events, activities and performances,but they also emerged through the moremundane aspects of the market’s operation.Drawing on pragmatist philosophy, Bridge(2005, 2008) has described how the inhabi-tation of public spaces involves urban dwell-ers in an on-going conversation aboutnorms, conventions, expectations, appro-priate forms of behaviour and so forth.Through these communicative transactions,certain spaces come to possess a kind of col-lective legibility. This happens throughmore than just face-to-face dialogue andincludes a broad spectrum of communica-tive registers which emerge from the assem-blage of bodies, objects and atmospheresthat constitute a given public space. Thepartnership’s idea of establishing a marketto transform perceptions and practicesmade sense precisely because of the constel-lation of invitations a market provides. Thatis, markets are about the provision and saleof objects which can offer, simultaneously: acertain functionality, amenity, comfort,sociability, pleasure and employment(Watson, 2009). The market is an obviousexample of how people were being invitedin to the Junction, but we also need tounderstand such invitations as workingacross a range of spatio-temporal registers.It is not just that the market provided anattractive spectacle; it is that the individualstalls offer invitations to browse, buy, eat,drink and linger in the space. That theseinvitations gradually shifted the collectivelegibility of the Junction was observable inhow some people began making a regularhabit of attending the live music playedthere on Friday evenings and by the way

food and drink were consumed during theperformances. At first, consumption waslimited to food bought from the stalls sellingready-to-eat items such as roast pork, paellaor sandwich wraps. Soon, however, someresidents began the habit of purchasingcheaper options from the high street to eatat the outdoor tables. Within a few weeks,some regular attendees began bringingpicnic baskets with food prepared at home.Although this caused some consternationamong the traders, these practices evidencea collective re-orientation of the site as aplace where consuming food was a recogni-sably valid practice. Alcohol started makinga presence at the Junction in new ways too.Long a site for street drinking, events likemusical performances and art shows meantthat less marginalised people occasionallydrank there too. Importantly, these practicesdid not preclude the existing public culture,but expanded it to a wider public. Awarethat alcohol consumption on the site wasillegal given that the market lacked properlicensing, the market manager handled thisby asking anyone drinking—those drinkingthere as part of the event and those whomight normally be considered ‘streetdrinkers’—to keep their beverages inunmarked cups or wrapped in paper. Thissmall normative intervention represents acertain democratisation of the space.Persons openly drinking on the Junctionwere asked to make a slight compromise intheir behaviour, yet in doing so becamelegitimised as valid users of the space andpart of the normal goings-on of a typicalFriday at the Junction.

Accommodation

Closely following this example, a fourth ele-ment in the domestication of public spaceis accommodation: the process of adaptingor adjusting to others in order to get onwith living. Good spaces can, of course,




accommodate a diverse variety of peopleand their needs. Yet we can also considerthis metaphor in the sense of top–downvisions for spaces having to accommodatethe publics that inhabit them. Consider theupscale vision of the Junction envisionedby the council and the partnership in theearly days of the redevelopment. Bothgroups wanted to see higher-end retailbeing offered in comparison with the shopsalong Harrow Road. This vision was givenfurther support by consultants who sug-gested that the market should be tailored tosatisfy the needs of the middle- and higher-income residents in the area. It many ways,the policy adopted could be read as a neo-liberal strategy of gentrification: neo-liberalin the assumption that social problemsshould be addressed by fostering economicactivity; gentrification in that there was adeliberate attempt to recast the area as suit-able and safe for higher-income residents.The market traders first selected by themanagement company were purveyors ofupmarket goods such as organic produce,gourmet cheeses, cured meats, homemadetoys and fresh fruit smoothies.

From opening day forward, the marketwas well attended, the special events weresuccessful and the new design was wellreceived. The traders, however, were notmaking much money and over the next fewmonths there was a great deal of turnoveramong them. In the months following, allthe original traders except for the womanrunning the flower stall eventually left.Gradually, the market got both smaller andmore down-market; the contract with themanagement company was terminated andit became clear that if the market was to sur-vive it would have to work better for theactual people using the site. A local residentwas hired to set up and take down themarket. Stalls selling items such as pennysweets, plastic toys, soaps and incense, andstir-fried noodles gradually found a home

on the Junction and stayed on through thewinter. The traders pressed for an extra dayof trading on Wednesdays, arguing thattheir profits were limited by only workingthree days a week. In spring, the manage-ment began operating a weekly ‘jumble sale’allowing local residents to set up a table andsell unwanted items from their homes.These adjustments, although perhaps not inline with the original ideal of the market,evoke the fact that a period of settling-in canbe expected to follow any major interventioninto public space. This settling-in resonateswith processes of domestication in at leasttwo different registers. First, the partnership,the manager and the stallholders needed toto work with how the market was taken upin practice. Their original plan had to beboth scaled down and expanded in certainways. Secondly, we can sense something likea refusal of local publics to accept the origi-nal vision of the market, bending it into amore prosaic, less up-market entity than wasimaged by the partnership. This is a kind ofdomestication that feels rather like thatdescribed by Creed (1998) and Stenninget al. (2010) whereby abstract top–downpolicies become to a greater or less degreenegotiated, contested and adapted—or inour words, accommodated—to circum-stances on the ground.

Conclusion

Two years have passed since the redevelop-ment of the Prince of Wales Junction. Theproblems associated with drug dealing andprostitution have not been completely era-dicated, but they no longer serve as thedefining element of the Junction. Five daysa week, from late morning to early evening,a handful of traders—all of them localresidents—earn money selling takeawayfoods, flowers and a range of relativelyinexpensive items. The offer is smaller and




less up-market than the original vision, butthe way the space operates seems to fit withthe surrounding neighbourhood. The newtrees and landscaping have grown into theirplaces; an abandoned storefront is nowhome to a new bakery; and a national chaingrocery store has moved in diagonallyopposite the Junction. The partnership dis-solved when its three-year funding ended,but an offshoot continues to oversee themarket, sponsors occasional activities onsite and is working with the council todevelop a community centre and kitchen ina vacant storefront next to the cafe. Aliceno longer runs the cafe, but the new man-ager operates it much as she did. He hasexpanded the number of seats outside andstill wheels the piano out on sunny days.Most days at the Junction, however, aredefined simply by everyday routines ofpeople eating and drinking, shopping,meeting friends, resting on the benches, set-ting up and taking down stalls, and passingthrough on the way to wherever is next.

This brings us back to the concept ofdomestication. We are sympathetic tomany of the individual issues that Zukinand others address when they use the termdomestication in a critical sense. We sharea concern for encroachments upon thedemocratic nature of public space and, inparticular, that exaggerated concerns fororder and public safety threaten the open-endedness of public life. However, we alsothink there is a tendency in urban scholar-ship to exaggerate the ubiquity and coher-ence of these forces. In much writing onurban public space, the impulse to connectwith larger narratives about public life anda concern for what might be lost meansthat there is a tendency to overlook muchof what actually goes on in public spaces(Koch and Latham, 2012). There is a needto stop viewing domestication as implyinga loss of public life. Domestication is moreproductively understood as a fundamental

part of how people come to be at home incities. Thinking in this way opens up arange of analytical horizons. It allows us toquestion how spaces are being domesticatedand the kinds of ethos that underpin agiven space or set of interventions. It offersup new ways of thinking about how wemight help to produce urban public spacesembedded with a greater sense of inclusive-ness, conviviality and democracy.

As we have seen with the Junction, creat-ing public places that work well, whichallow a broad range of people to inhabitthem, is uncertain and often underappre-ciated work. Those responsible for publicspaces regularly have to make difficult deci-sions and deal with seemingly irreconcilabledifferences when it comes to provisioning/managing various spaces. Urban scholarshave become proficient in critiquing howthese decisions can be manipulated by thepowerful. We are less skilled in offeringcontributions that reflect carefully on thesedecision-making processes, directly enga-ging with practices of intervention or beingactively involved in the production ofpublic spaces. By tracing the process ofdomestication of public spaces—how cer-tain networks of practice become routine;how relationships among those sharingspace are constituted; and how abstractpolicies unfold when they hit the ground ofeveryday practices—we might better reflectupon and contribute to the ways in whichmultiple publics come to make a home inthe city.

Notes

1. The material on which this case study isbased is derived from ethnographic researchconducted over a period of three monthsin the summer of 2009. This includedinterviews with local residents, police,planners, business owners and communityactors involved in the redesign of the site,




along with attending neighbourhoodpartnership meetings. This work wascombined with participant observation onthe Junction, including one of the authorsassisting a market trader at his stall for aperiod of six weekends to allow for afine-grained analysis of the new Junction’sopening days. For an account that providesmore historical detail on the Junction andgives greater detail to the policy driving thetransformation see Koch and Latham (2012).

2. For the full story of the crimes committed, seeHoskens (2006) and Dimoldenberg (2006).

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On the hard work of domesticating a public space

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