Tuesday 4 April 2017, 09:00 - 10:30 PAPER SESSION 1 Cities, Mobilities, Place and Space A ROOM 1.218 CITIES BUILT TO INCLUDE? THE THEORIES AND PRACTICE OF INCLUSION IN URBAN PUBLIC SPACE In the last few decades urban regeneration strategies (e.g. Towards an Urban Renaissance [Urban Task Force 1999] in the space) have put particular emphasis on the rejuvenation of the urban public space. In this context, urban public realm has routinely been portrayed in more abstract social scientific accounts as under threat from various social forces. These include the perceived ‘disneyfication’ of public space (Sorkin [ed.] 1992), its increasing securitisation (Ruppert 2006) and declining levels of participation in public life (Sennett 1974). Against this backdrop, this themed session will explore both practical and theoretical approaches to dealing with issues of social inclusion and public space. Fostering social inclusion in public space is important, it has been suggested, because it can enable casual, everyday social contact between different ethnic and age groups (Young 1990) and the generation of ‘weak ties’ that provide for the accommodation of social differences (Watson 2006). In this vein, and in the spirit of the conference theme, public space can become a site for rendering personal causes, identities and subjectivities public; or at the very least a site for experiencing, even if just visually, inter-personal difference. Amidst a raft of influential accounts of public space that forecast its demise, this session aims to examine the ways in which policymakers, planners and urban denizens themselves have the potential to create and nurture inclusive public spaces. The analyses of these processes will also shed light on the tensions, challenges and contradictions involved with creating socially inclusive cities and public life. ‘The Great Meeting Place’: Regeneration and Social Inclusion in ‘Bradford Beach’ Sirriyeh, A., Manning, N. (Keele University) Recent accounts of urban space note pervasive trends which undermine public spaces: privatisation, commercialisation, securitisation and homogenisation. While we accept the broad sweep of these analyses, this paper will introduce a case study of Bradford’s City Park which, to some extent, seems to run counter to prevailing tendencies. City Park is a new urban space with a central interactive water feature in the centre of Bradford (West Yorkshire, UK). The park was being planned as the financial crash hit and was then built and developed in the post-crash period. It opened in March 2012 and despite some on-going criticism, the site has drawn thousands of people to the heart of Bradford. In 2013 we undertook a research study to explore how the park is used, experienced and perceived by different groups. We argue that commonly accepted principles of urban regeneration structure who has the right to the city and what activities are pertained to be acceptable. In particular, post-industrial city regeneration is often centred around appeals to commercial interests and investment and to attracting creative classes into the city. City Park displays some elements of these models of recovery. However, we found the development also presents a unique regeneration pathway which deviates from renewal projects in other northern UK cities through its offer of a more socially inclusive route to regeneration. We consider the opportunities and challenges in this development and ask to what extent such an approach is being, and can be, replicated or shared in across other settings. Re-materialising Public Space Watson, S. (Open University) A dominant tradition in sociology and urban studies sees public space and the public realm as a site of debate, contestation, encounter and social interaction among human actors. In much discussion of the public realm and public space, the city is dematerialized, it has no physical substance or solidity; rather it appears as a container, where matter, objects and infrastructural elements are ‘blackboxed’ into invisible infrastructure. More recently scholars have explored the technological and ‘natural’ governance of the city, while others have developed a socio-material view of publics which foregrounds the constitutive role of different objects and materials in making up, 53 BSA Annual Conference 2017 University of Manchester Tuesday 4 April 2017, 09:00 - 10:30 PAPER SESSION 1 separating, allowing and limiting different publics. This paper builds on these arguments to look at how changing technologies, practices and spaces in relation to mundane objects and materials of everyday urban life co-produce shifting borders, boundaries, margins, inclusions and exclusions in the city. Erasing, Mobilizing and Inviting: Producing the ‘Inclusive’ City Wallace, A. (University of Leeds) This paper attempts to sketch some of the key dynamics of ‘inclusivity’ and the contemporary city. It starts from the premise that post-crash and mid-austerity, urban welfare systems have been further hollowed out and a range of social conflicts have come to the fore across European cities reinforcing structural and corporeal vulnerabilities. In light of this, various citizen relationships and networks are being pressed into the service of improving and securing urban life. Government projects seek to build ‘cohesion’ within and between communities, ‘nudge’ programmes encourage individuals to make ‘pro-social’ choices, whilst planners and architects design ‘out’ threatening behaviour from public space and design ‘in’ a range of opportunities for ‘authentic’ and nourishing sociality. The paper traces some of the roots of these contemporary expressions back to a range of ‘therapeutic’ urbanist agendas which fixate on citizen relations (e.g. North American functionalism and communitarianism, ‘New Urbanism’, behavioural economics) and discusses the ramifications of an ‘inclusive’ city built around ‘our’ relational capacities. Right to the City (If You Want It): Marshall Berman and the Pleasures and Pains of Inclusive Public Space Millington, G. (University of York) This paper examines how the work of Marshall Berman illuminates our understanding of the pleasures and pains of public space. Berman’s distinctive Marxist Humanist position—developed in major works such as All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982) and On the Town (2007) as well as a number of lesser known short articles—expands upon Marx’s maxim that the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Berman insists that inclusive urban space is a fundamental human right, albeit a right that can only be established through struggle. Three discussions from Berman’s work are foregrounded here: first, his emphasis on the importance of urban imaginaries in understanding the inclusive potentials of a public space such as Times Square; second, his reading of creativity as struggle in the Bronx during the crisis-ridden 1970s; and third, his affirmation of the perils of confronting ‘unknown human spaces with no limits at all’ (Berman 1982: 114). The key contradictions or tensions emerging from these discussions will then be worked through Orhan Pamuk’s (2015) novel about one man’s life in Istanbul, A Strangeness in my Mind. Pamuk was one of Berman’s favourite authors but he was not alive to read this remarkable book. The purpose of this final exercise is to identify or point to how the contradictions of public space identified by Berman may be resolved or deferred through practice and/or happenstance, focusing in particular on the interface between subjectivity (or internal life), the public life of the city and time. In this sense the public spaces of the city can only be animated through the revelation of secrets, or the appearance of elements that usually remain hidden Inclusive Place, Inclusive Space? Exploring the Contextual Dimensions of Public Realm Use on London’s South Bank Jones, A. (London School of Economics) There is growing interest in the development and study of design processes, practices and policies for the creation of inclusive public outdoor urban environments, in particular when it comes to fostering the inclusion of young people. In this developing area of practice and research the emphasis is on how approaches to the design of public realm can impinge upon how inclusive that realm is perceived and experienced as being. Drawing on a 4-year ethnographic study of the use and production of public realm in and around an assemblage of arts institutions in London known as the ‘Southbank Centre,’ in this paper I explore the role of place in fostering inclusive space. Specifically, I consider the relationship between the civic purpose of the Southbank Centre and its related ‘accessibility’ – not only physical accessibility, but also socio-economic, policy and cultural dimensions of accessibility – and the social in-/ex-clusivity of the local public realm. Underpinning this paper is the argument that urban public space cannot be treated as a vessel existing in isolation from its social and institutional context; rather, such space serves ‘city publics’ (Watson 2006; Iveson 2007) whose relation to the material form of the city is structured by their use of, access to and experience of its constituent social and institutional forms. BSA Annual Conference 2017 54 University of Manchester Tuesday 4 April 2017, 09:00 - 10:30 PAPER SESSION 1 Cities, Mobilities, Place and Space B ROOM 1.219 NEW URBAN PUNITIVENESS Everyday Evictions: A Political Economy Paton, K., Cooper, V. (University of Liverpool) In austerity