Collective culture and urban public space

Abstract

This paper develops a post‐humanist account of urban public space. It breaks with a long tradition that has located the culture and politics of public spaces such as streets and parks or libraries and town halls in the quality of inter‐personal relations in such spaces. Instead, it argues that human dynamics in public space are centrally influenced by the entanglement and circulation of human and non‐human bodies and matter in general, productive of a material culture that forms a kind of pre‐cognitive template for civic and political behaviour. The paper explores the idea of ‘situated surplus’, manifest in varying dimensions of compliance, as the force that produces a distinctive sense of urban collective culture and civic affirmation in urban life.