Privatised Public Space

Definition

Privatised public space names the urban type Borden analyses at Broadgate: "those new urban spaces – the shopping mall, plaza and transport concourse – those spaces at once public and private?" The type's defining condition is ownership without occupancy: "As privatised urban space under corporate control, Broadgate in effect has no resident-owners, and everyone who enters is either a worker, visitor or trespasser." This inverts the usual property relation and installs a permanent status-check on every entrant — in Foucault's formulation, which Borden applies directly, "[a]nyone can enter one of these heterotopian locations, but, in reality, they are nothing more than an illusion: one thinks one has entered and, by the sole fact of entering, one is excluded."

The type's apparatus, in Borden's account, has three layers. (1) Programmatic: the enclave "strives to define its social ethos" — "Americanised 'fashion effect' architecture" (Arup Associates, SOM), middle-manager shops and bars with "signs barring entry to those not in 'smart' dress," service workers "hidden in a subterranean undercroft," a "similarly Disneyfied scopic regime" in which undesirables are escorted off and hawks scare away pigeons. (2) Securitised: after the IRA bombs, the City's 'Ring of Steel' road-checks and 'Camerawatch' CCTV let Broadgate's managers "rely on their own extensive system of private security guards and surveillance cameras," so the enclave's boundaries could be "configured toward more social ends, installing a further social ring of defence within the City's militaristic frontier." (3) Boundary-marking: "brass rails let into the pavement signify the edge of the property line, public art like Serra's 45-tonne 'Fulcrum' signals entrances, armorial devices record the borough thresholds, and various gates denote the transition from public to private realms." The result is control without visible walls: the unsealed 'Go-Between Screens' leave "a 2 metre gap" — "The boundary here is never sealed" — because the regime works on the visitor's self-perception rather than the body (see thick-edge, hostile-architecture). Within the wiki, the concept is the boundary-level face of the neoliberal-metropolis and the concrete stake of the commons debate.

Key Thinkers

• Iain Borden — the concept's urban anatomist: Broadgate's programmatic, securitised and boundary layers, and the "worker, visitor or trespasser" status-check.
• Michel Foucault — the theoretical frame: the heterotopia of "illusive entry" that Borden applies to the corporate enclave.
• Marc Augé — the experiential frame: the enclave as non-place whose users retrieve identity "only at Customs, at the tollbooth, at the check-out counter."
• Jonathan D. Solomon — the POPS and occupation register: Zuccotti Park as "a privately owned public space (POPS) controlled by Brookfield Properties"; the HSBC plaza "Owned by the bank but legally designated a public passageway, a judge had ruled the occupation fell outside its intended use" — privatised public space as the very terrain where politics must now be practiced.
• Michael Sorkin — the normalisation verdict (via Borden): "as with Disneyland's staff, everyone becomes a 'cast member'" ("See You in Disneyland," 1992; not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• neoliberal-metropolis — the macro condition: Broadgate as the post-'Big Bang' City's built logic, before finance-theory named it.
• thick-edge — the boundary regime: gates, brass rails and armorial devices as the material cordon of the enclave.
• hostile-architecture — the hard-pole sibling: the blue screen's frontal exclusion vs Broadgate's self-policing gate.
• non-places — the anthropological category: the concourse and plaza as transit space "at once public and private."
• commons — the counter-concept: what privatised public space forecloses, and the aspirational alternative.
• heterotopia — the Foucauldian mechanism: entry as exclusion; the counter-site turned corporate.
• panopticon — the security layer: private guards, CCTV, and the visitor who surveys and disciplines themselves.
• enclosure — the political technique extended from land to urban spectacle.
• right-to-the-city — the normative question the enclave raises with every brass rail: "Do I have the right of passage?"

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the founding source: the "spaces at once public and private" question (p. 51), the programmatic ethos and the class/gender/race frame (p. 52), the Ring of Steel division of labour (p. 52), the boundary devices (p. 52), the unsealed gate and the "worker, visitor or trespasser" condition (p. 53), and the Foucault/Sorkin/Augé apparatus (pp. 53–54).
• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the avant-garde's hybrid: the ICA's Dover Street gallery as "a semi-private and semi-public space. It was a members' space, but visitors could buy a one-day membership. There was a members' bar, but a program of public events" — the 1950s counter-case to the corporate lounge: semi-publicity engineered not to exclude (the Ring of Steel) but to make the avant-garde's public possible, admission priced at one day (see power-and-space, populable-art-work).
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the concept's American megastructure scale: the Portman city-within-a-city as "increasingly isolated, transactional, and privatized forms of urbanism" — "hermetic commercial zones," "autonomous internal plazas, encapsulated landscapes," a networked world of "skywalks, tunnels, arcades, and atria… designed to be weatherproof, convenient, and safer than downtown itself." The concept's corporate-rebranding variant: GM's "three-dimensional GM advertisement" replacing the interior urban spaces "that they were designed to be" — privatization extended from access-control to total branding (see interior-urbanism, atrium-hotel).
• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the concept's POPS-occupation register: Zuccotti Park ("a privately owned public space (POPS) controlled by Brookfield Properties") paired with Hong Kong's HSBC plaza — "Owned by the bank but legally designated a public passageway, a judge had ruled the occupation fell outside its intended use" — the encampment "forcibly cleared by court bailiffs on August 27, 2012." The concept's sharpest claim comes from the contrast: "Unlike these other protests, which occurred in sites adjacent to the space of global capital, Occupy Hong Kong overlapped the space of global capital and shared space with the informal occupation by foreign domestic workers that preceded it" — privatised public space not only occupied but overlaid with an informal, sensory counter-public ("Little Manila") preceding the political one. The concept's terminal question is posed here: whether the public of a privatised public space is a gift of the owner (revocable by judge or bailiff) or a right of passage the occupation can claim (see interior-urbanism, public-sphere, atmospheric-politics).
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the carceral register and the corrective: Davis's destruction thesis ("genuinely democratic space is all but extinct… public amenities are radically shrinking, parks are becoming derelict and beaches more segregated, libraries and playgrounds are closing, youth congregations of ordinary kinds are banned," quoted p. 303) against Soja's restructuring reading — "the very distinction between public and private space has never been clear-cut and that what is happening today is more accurately described as a restructuring of both private and public spaces" (p. 320); MacKenzie's "the words public and private… are used in popular and political discourse as if they were – but they are not" (quoted p. 320); public space romanticized "from the ancient agora and forum of the Athenian polis to the present-day postmetropolis… it is difficult to see that it is a fully lived space, subject to being shaped – and reshaped – not only by class conflicts but also by gender, race, ethnicity, and other relations of differential social and spatial power" (p. 320); Judd's medieval-marketplace analogy (Eco's enclosed markets: "In contemporary cities they have become one's fellow citizens," p. 315); and the counter-register — Skid Row's $300 million "gilding" (SRO hotels, missions, police and fire stations) as "a lavishly financed, minimum security prison… without physical walls" (p. 306), the privatized space not destroyed but re-purposed as containment. See carceral-archipelago, commons, hostile-architecture.
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the concept's 1961 prehistory, thirty years before Broadgate: turf as the rebuilt city's enclosure system — the literal fences (the Johns Hopkins cyclone fence with "Keep Out. No Trespassing" signs; Amalgamated Houses' padlocked, barbed-wired gate), the buffer anatomy between price-tagged populations (Corlears Hook–Vladeck's "wide parking lot… a spindly hedge and a six-foot-high cyclone fence… a completely fenced-in no man's land some thirty feet wide consisting mainly of dirty blowing papers"), and the hired-neighborhood variant (residential Park Avenue's doormen and nursemaids as "a form of hired neighborhood… keeps residential Park Avenue supplied with eyes") — the enclave that polices by guard rather than by gate, and the type's habituation finding: "people seem to get used very quickly to living in a Turf with either a figurative or a literal fence, and to wonder how they got on without it formerly" (pp. 47–49). Jacobs's diagnosis is the design-locked cause: "Wherever the rebuilt city rises the barbaric concept of Turf must follow, because the rebuilt city has junked a basic function of the city street and with it, necessarily, the freedom of the city" (p. 50). See turf, eyes-on-the-street, public-sphere.
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — Goldberger's diagnosis of 'the privatization of the public realm' (p. 170): streets displaced by malls, festival marketplaces, and atrium hotel lobbies, and entire neighbourhoods made 'one vast piece of private property' in gated communities (pp. 170–71).

Open Questions

• Does the type survive its own securitisation? The Ring of Steel redirected terrorism "to other parts of London" — is privatised public space's security a service it provides the city, or a cost displaced onto the unpoliced street?
• Borden's enclave normalises ("everyone becomes a 'cast member'"). Does the type's self-policing gate differ in kind from the non-place's contractual injunction (Fuller's "insert card now"), or are these two grammars of one regime?
• Can a privatised public space be re-commoned without dissolution — what would it mean for the brass rails, the dress-code signs, and the "worker, visitor or trespasser" triad to be redesigned?
• Broadgate predates the post-1980 financialisation literature by a decade: does the enclave's 1986 'Big Bang' founding make it the archetype of the neoliberal-metropolis's architectural object — or a more special case of City-of-London corporate territoriality?
• Solomon's HSBC plaza is "legally designated a public passageway" and occupiable "outside its intended use" — the judge ruled occupation beyond intent. Is the POPS's publicness therefore a legal fiction (the designation) that politics tests by excess (the encampment)? Can a "public passageway" owned by a bank ever be commons, or only a commons on a revocable leash (commons)?
• The domestic-workers' Sunday occupation of the same plaza precedes the political one — is privatised public space's first counter-public always sensory and informal (Howes's "sensuous (re)construction of space") before it is political and formal? Does the concept need a register for occupation that makes no claim (the day off) as the precondition of occupation that does (the encampment)?