As Neil Smith, a revolutionary geographer, along with Setha Low has written in the introduction of their edited work The Politics of Public Space, “public space is almost by definition urban space, and in many current treatments of public space the urban remains the privileged scale of analysis and cities the privileged sites.” Even the existing public spaces in cities are increasingly becoming exclusive through the ways that these spaces are managed. It is rare for the focus of analysis to be on suburbs or small towns or rural spaces as public.
This is particularly true in India, where the small towns and rural spaces lack certain recognisable geographies of public spaces like their urban counterpart, such as public parks, shopping malls, reading halls, grandiose boulevards, etc. It is interesting to see how the people in small towns and rural areas are using, conceptualising and through their interactions thereby (co)producing public spaces. In this essay, by eliciting two commonly recognised yet creatively utilised public spaces in my hometown, I intend to delineate how these public spaces are produced through interactions and embedded social relations, not just by designation as such, and the significance of recognising the (co)produced nature of such spaces in the day-to-day small town social life.
From public school grounds to railway platforms: Creating ‘the public’
I grew up in a small town in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu, where I spent all my childhood and a considerable part of my adult life, ‘coming’ and ‘going’. I have witnessed and was struck by the spatial changes the town has undergone in the last two decades, starting with the highway development in the early 2000s which spurred the growth of the local real estate market to the recent advent of branded retail showrooms and popular food chain restaurants. Yet so many spaces remain intact in their form and uses over these decades: the common well where people fetch water from for drinking and domestic uses; the ‘yeri’- a common lake that shelters migratory birds during monsoon times; the busy bazaar street and the vegetable market.
One such lively space that fosters a range of recreational activities and the likes of young and old coexist is the playground of the public all-boys high school in the town. Apart from the school hours, the playground is open to the public in the morning from 6 am to 8.30 am and in the evening from 5 pm to 7 pm. During these hours, a diverse set of people and activities happens, ranging from morning karate classes, evening cricket and football coaching, summer sports camps, not to mention the walking enthusiasts and avid cricket players.
As these activities have been happening for decades, there has been some sense of fraternity among the people, in particular among the cricket and football players in terms of senior-junior relationships and as friends and brothers. Their relationships with this public space have also extended to help manage it by collectively building infrastructures such as creating seating arrangements around the ground, planting tree saplings, and helping manage a public gym. One senior cricket player, who funded the installation of a concrete cricket pitch along with practice nets on the ground, proudly says that the nets will help the future cricket aspirants in the town and his name will be remembered for generations.
Another happening public space in my hometown is the railway station. The station has three platforms connected by an overhead bridge. As opposed to the always crowded railway platforms of metropolitan cities like Chennai or Mumbai, it is crowded only when the train arrives and the crowd dissipates as the train leaves. Aside from commuting purposes, it serves as a favourite meeting spot for local youths and walking enthusiasts, as a reading space for service exam aspirants, and for some, it gives solitude and space for contemplation.
These platforms provide a platform, literally and figuratively, for a varied set of activities to foster and a diverse set of people to coexist. Particularly, a group of exam aspirants, around 25 to 30 members, sit on these platforms and stairways ideally from early morning till late evening to prepare for a varied set of public service exams. Most of them come from the marginalised sections of the town, both in terms of class and caste. They told me that they don’t get the proper space and time to prepare for these exams in their home which often consists of a single living room.
Apart from the utilisation of the space for reading, it also serves as a space for networking and creating a fraternity among them to train the future aspirants from their locality. To them, getting a public sector job is deemed and revered on one hand for its job security and on the other, seen as an opportunity for social mobility through occupying the places of power. These platforms serve as nurturing ground for these aspirants and the future ones to aspire for social mobility through securing a government job.
These spaces are not just consumed passively, that is, for the commuting purpose or recreational activities, but are actively created by the populace through their activities, social relations and attributed meanings. Thus, the publicness of these spaces is created through these interactions and material/non-material exchanges.
Pluralities of public spaces:
Despite such a romanticised picture of these public spaces inherited with some sense of democratised control, there are still factors like the differences in gender inclusivity, state policing and surveillance that restrict the access and popular uses of these spaces. Most of the public spaces in my town are tainted with differences in gender inclusivity. It is hard to see women being part of these public spaces and the public sphere as if these spaces belong to the world of men. The difference in gender inclusivity, the relation between public space and the public sphere and women’s role in it, require special attention and that can be expanded into a separate article in itself.
Apart from this, the popular uses of these spaces are restricted and shaped by the official authorities through policing and surveillance. For instance, ‘This is not a park for you to linger around’ is a kind of response one often gets when the railway officials/staffs confront these aspirants and walking enthusiasts and others who use the space for other than commuting purposes. Interestingly we don’t have a park in or anywhere near my town. These kinds of responses arise out of the notion that public spaces are designed for a very specific purpose. The use of public space is then legitimised based on these designated functional purposes. The activities that don’t fall within these narrowly defined functional purposes are deemed illegitimate, and undesired, and thus are not allowed; even though those non-purposive activities are socially productive and are in no way disturbing the normal functioning of these public spaces.
Perhaps, the lack of infrastructure is one thing that might have led people to visualise these public spaces beyond the set designated purpose. But how these people utilise and impart meaning to spaces like railway stations and public-school grounds encapsulates the dynamic nature and plurality of public spaces and defies the notion of public space as something to be designated for a single/specific purpose and compartmentalised into a controlled space. It is not a homogenous arena. It is a space where a diverse set of people, their ambiguities of ideas, meanings, and the political economy of everyday life collide.
It is in this plurality and informal ways of placemaking are how public spaces are constructed and kept alive in a small town like ours. These are the sites of celebration of ‘the public’ and animate the everyday social life in many small towns across India. By acknowledging the existence of such pluralities and (co)produced nature of public spaces, it is possible to resist the homogenous fixation, either by the state or by the market or by both, of what and how public spaces should be.
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Vadivel Chinnadurai is an independent researcher working at the interface of Environment, Society and Development. He can be reached at vadi.chinnadurai@gmail.com.