Public realm ethnography: (Non-)Participation, co-presence and the challenge of situated multiplicity

Alasdair Jones

doi:10.1177/0042098020904261

Abstract

Against the backdrop of abstract accounts of a variety of processes associated with the ‘end of public space’ (disneyfication, commodification, privatisation, gentrification, securitisation and so on), the last few decades have witnessed a marked growth in ethnographic accounts of the production, meaning and experience of urban public spaces. Methodologically, studying these dimensions of public space ethnographically poses clear challenges for how researchers design and conduct their fieldwork: practically, how can fieldworkers participate in a socio-spatial context typically characterised by ‘situated multiplicity’ (Amin A (2008) Collective culture and urban public space. City 12(1): 5–24) and co-presence with strangers? Moreover, what do researchers do when there are no core group activities, institutional roles or (sub-)cultural practices to participate in? With these questions in mind, I first seek to review the practical fieldwork techniques used by ethnographers interested in studying the urban public realm. I then use this review to synthesise and distil a set of four interlinked fieldwork heuristics for public realm ethnography.

Highlights

As Bodnar (2015: 2090) notes, ‘[s]omewhat paradoxically, the widely pronounced death of public space in the early 1990s . marked the beginning of an extended debate on the topic of public space itself’
The aim of this paper is to address this gap and, to review, distil and synthesise the shared characteristic features of the data collection methods employed by ethnographers to generate situated and embodied understandings of the urban public realm and of the socio-spatial processes that constitute that realm
The paper argues that in social scientific research conducted in urban public space settings we can broadly distinguish between studies concerned with communities inhabiting such spaces and studies concerned with the public realm in and of itself

Summary

Introduction

As Bodnar (2015: 2090) notes, ‘[s]omewhat paradoxically, the widely pronounced death of public space in the early 1990s . marked the beginning of an extended debate on the topic of public space itself’. Borrowing the language of Lofland (1989: 453–454), we have ‘bits and pieces’ of methodological insight into public realm ethnography scattered across empirical studies, but no coherent review and synthesis of the defining methodological features of ethnographic fieldwork in public realm settings. To this end, the aim of this paper is to address this gap and, to review, distil and synthesise the shared characteristic features of the data collection methods employed by ethnographers to generate situated and embodied understandings of the urban public realm and of the socio-spatial processes that constitute that realm

Objectives

Conclusion