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A critique of the socio-spatial debate and the

publicness of urban space

Yiming Wang

To cite this article: Yiming Wang (2018) A critique of the socio-spatial debate and the publicness
of urban space, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 72:3, 161-175, DOI:
10.1080/00291951.2018.1470564

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Published online: 09 May 2018.

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Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography
2018, VOL. 72, NO. 3, 161–175
https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2018.1470564

A critique of the socio-spatial debate and the publicness of urban space

Yiming Wang

Yiming Wang, School of Built Environment, University of Technology Sydney, 15 Broadway, Ultimo, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia

ABSTRACT
Research on urban processes under capitalism and the resulting transformations of urban space is
caught in a socio-spatial dualistic debate, which neglects the continuum and relativities of space.
The author aims to extend this debate through an in-depth review and critique of the main
perspectives on socio-spatial relations. He argues that in capitalist urban processes urban space
plays a dual role as both the public sphere and arena of capital accumulation. However, ARTICLE HISTORY
importantly, this dual role has led to the multidimensional nature of the publicness of space Received 10 April 2017
which, in turn, collaboratively results in increasingly blurred boundaries between ‘public’ and Accepted 25 April 2018
‘private’ in cities. To grapple with the new features of urban space for theory and empirical
research, the article offers an alternative property rights approach. Rather than treating space as EDITORS
monolithic, the proposed property rights approach puts the case for analysing space as a Per Gunnar Røe, Catriona
Turner
continuum. On this basis, the author discusses how that approach can be used for empirical
research. KEYWORDS
capitalism, publicness,
multidimensional nature,
urban processes, urban space

Yiming Wang. 2018. A critique of the socio-spatial debate and the publicness of urban space. Norsk Geografisk
Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography. Vol. 72, 161–175. ISSN 0029-1951.

Introduction large body of work insist that social processes shape

The ongoing debate
Much research has been done to explain how capital
shapes space and how space influences the form of capi-
tal (e.g. Marx 1967a; 1968; Harvey 1973; 1990; Lefebvre
1991; Bentley 1999; Dovey 1999; Polanyi 2001) but as
shown by Stavros Stavrides, in his book titled The City
as Commons (Stavrides 2016), the precise direction of
causality is hotly debated. Contributions to the debate
have come from various fields, including political philos-
ophy (e.g. Arendt 1958; Habermas 1974; 1989; Young
1990); political economy (e.g. Harvey 2006; 2008;
2011); legal research and legal geography (e.g. Bottomley
& Moore 2007; Layard 2010; Blomley 2013); urban
design and planning (e.g. Webster 2007); and sociology
(e.g. Zukin 1991; 2010; Low 2006).
An influential group of scholars, most notably Henri
Lefebvre (1991; 2003), Edward W. Soja (1989), Hannah
Arendt (1958), and Jürgen Habermas (1989), argue
that space itself possesses inherent social-economic and
political characteristics. However, the authors of another
urban space and are conferred on its features (e.g.
Marx 1967b; 1973; Harvey 1973; 1990; 2013). This
body of work is most commonly associated with the
work of America-based urban thinker David Harvey.
In Harvey’s theories of space, capital circulation and
accumulation are the most powerful forces shaping
urban space. In these processes, urban space tends to
be designed, managed, and used to facilitate and support
capital accumulation, rather than to cater for the
demands of civil society (Harvey 1973; 2006; 2008).
Additionally, there is a small group of urban political
economists, such as Frank Stilwell (1992; 2000) and
Franklin Obeng-Odoom (2013; 2014), who posit a
socio-spatial dialectic, an interaction between the two
above-mentioned perspectives, as a way of collapsing
the binary.
A common feature of all three perspectives is that they
consider space as a social construction: space is an intrin-
sic part of the superstructure that interacts with the
means of production (such as rules, customs, and
norms), but is also part of the means of production

CONTACT Yiming Wang wangym.chn@foxmail.com

© 2018 Norwegian Geographical Society
162 Yiming Wang
(including factory sites and land for agriculture). The
issue in contention is the direction of causality. Does
space shape social change or does social process drive
urban change? This dualistic debate has shaped our
understanding of public space, which tends to be
regarded as monolithic (Sennett 1992; Sorkin 1992). In
practice, as a recent paper by Hinojosa & Moreno
(2016) shows, public space can mean many things,
including public sphere (such as squares in front of the
city hall where political speeches and protests can take
place) and public domain (such as public libraries).
Analyses of the post-2011 social movements and pro-
tests, such as Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and
the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, have stimulated
fierce debates on the public use of urban parks and
streets (Gitlin 2012; Kohn 2013; Ortmann 2015) and
highlighted the dyadic nature of the debates on space.
According to Kohn (2013), some researchers argue that
although the occupations were collective actions they
amounted to a privatisation of urban parks and streets
because the occupiers excluded the rest of the public
and other daily uses from those urban spaces. However,
others claim that the occupations made those spaces real
public spaces because, by presenting the conflicts
between opposing interests and making them visible
and subject to dispute, ‘the occupation of physical
space was one part of a broader attempt to reclaim the
ideal of the public’ (Kohn 2013, 106). Thus, even in
parks and streets that are commonly regarded as public
spaces, the boundary between public and private is not
clear cut. An alternative approach that is able to provide
a more comprehensive understanding of space is needed
to transcend the current debates.
Attempts to overcome the historic debate and
remaining questions
In the literature, a number of authors have tried to
understand the nature of newly emerging urban spaces.
Many of them have recognised the continuum and rela-
tivities of space (e.g. Madanipour 1995; Akkar 2005; Van
Melik et al. 2007; Németh and Schmidt 2007; 2011; Car-
mona 2010; Varna 2014). However, the body of work
mainly focuses on the ‘outcomes’ of urban process driven
by capitalism, and none of the authors offers a helpful
framework to classify and explain systematically what
drives the analogous patterns of urban development,
namely how new forms of public spaces emerge and
why transformations of urban space occur in the urban
process under capitalism. In short, their studies have suf-
fered what Charles Gore (1984) calls ‘spatial separatism’.
The rise of capitalism has substantially transformed
urban space and at the same time brought significant
changes to the publicness of space. The changing public-
ness of urban space has been widely recognised as one of
the key characteristics and consequences of the urban
process under capitalism (Bentley 1999; Akkar 2005;
Smith & Low 2006; Harvey 2013), although some
argue that it is not necessarily a universal truth happen-
ing everywhere in the capitalist world (e.g. Langstraat &
Van Melik 2013). According to Stilwell (2006, viii), capit-
alism is ‘the particular type of economy based on private
ownership of the means of production and the pursuit of
profit’. The private ownership-based nature of capitalism
enables property owners to prioritise their ‘sense of place’
legally over any other consideration within the property
boundaries (Layard 2010). As Voyce (2003) has noted in
his empirical research conducted in Australia, in the
urban process under capitalism, property owners do
not simply take advantage of property rights in the
legal sphere but also refer to the ‘social side of property’.
This means that any urban space under their control will
become the separation between ‘consumers’ inside and
‘citizens’ outside. Moreover, according to Cuthbert &
McKinnell’s (1997) observations in Hong Kong, the pur-
suit of profit in capitalist cities has produced a shrinking
public realm because civic spaces are increasingly
replaced by commodity spaces, such as shopping centres.
To date, no clear answers have been given to the fol-
lowing questions: How can we make sense of the trans-
formation of urban space under capitalism and its
impacts on the publicness of space? How can we concep-
tualise this process?
Aims of the article
In an attempt to answer the above-mentioned questions,
in this article I try to extend the socio-spatial debates and
provide an analytical framework to overcome the long-
established dyadic line of thinking that remains the con-
ceptual avatar for research on space. Inspired by a prop-
erty rights approach used by institutional economists
(e.g. Ely 1914; Commons 1924), I argue that in the
urban process under capitalism, urban space, as a mix-
ture of ‘life space’ and ‘economic space’, plays a dual
role as both the public sphere and an arena of capital
accumulation. This dual role has led to the multidimen-
sional nature of publicness of urban space, which in turn
has resulted in increasingly blurred boundaries between
‘public’ and ‘private’ in cities. Although a focus on prop-
erty rights can show differences, the nature of such
differences is better ascertained through empirical
research. Accordingly, based on a critique of the socio-
spatial debate, I put the case for a continuum approach
and show how the approach can be used for empirical
research.

The remaining part of this article is structured as fol-
low. I start by discussing the spatial social relation and
the idea of urban space as possessing inherent socio-
economic and political characteristics. Then, I turn to
the socio-spatial relation by considering David Harvey’s
approach to capital circulation and accumulation, and
how these processes are conferred on urban space and
its features. Thereafter, I analyse the increasingly blurry
boundaries between public and private. On this basis, I
discuss the multidimensional nature of publicness.
Finally, I propose an analytical framework that can be
used in empirical research to asses the publicness of
urban space.
The spatial social relation
Henri Lefebvre is regarded as one of the most influential
Marxist thinkers of his time and the present because he
‘laid the foundations for an explicitly Marxist urban soci-
ology’ (Elden 2004, 9). Lefebvre’s work has highlighted
the importance of urban space in the process of what
he called ‘the reproduction of social relations of pro-
duction’ (Lefebvre 1991; 2003). Lefebvre separated him-
self from others who write about cities by revolving his
work around space: ‘Some chose other ways to thread
through the complexities of the modern world, for
example, through literature or the unconscious or
language. I chose space … I dug deeply into the concept
and tried to see all its implications’ (Lefebvre 1975, 218).
It is worth noting that Lefebvre did not merely write
about cities from a spatial perspective, but put space
first in order to ‘see all the complexities of human exist-
ence, especially cities, through assertively spatial lenses’
(Soja 2003, 272). For him, the rationality of space was
‘itself the origin and source – not distantly but immedi-
ately, or rather inherently – of the rationality of activity’
(Lefebvre 1991, 72).
Following Lefebvre, Soja (1989; 2003) has also chosen
to put space first as an encompassing viewpoint through
which to make practical and theoretical sense of the
complexities of the postmodern world. Soja (2003, 275,
emphasis in original) argues:
To be sure, it is widely (and almost unavoidably)
acknowledged that things take place IN cities, but with
a few prominent exceptions (the old Chicago School
and the writings of Henri Lefebvre come immediately
to mind), rarely have social theorists recognized that
cities in themselves have a causal impact on social life,
that the historical development of human societies
does not just take place in cities but is also, in significant
ways, generated FROM cities.
In both Lefebvre’s and Soja’s work, social relation
was and is central to their understanding of space.
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography 163
As emphasised repeatedly in the book titled The Pro-
duction of Space (Lefebvre 1991), space is not a thing
but rather a set of social relations between things, and
it is clear from the same book that social relations remain
abstract and unrealised until they are concretely
expressed and materially and symbolically inscribed in
lived space. How, then, can we understand this process?
The real and imagined, material, and symbolic geogra-
phies or spatialities of urban life in ancient Greece may
serve as a point of departure.
Urban space as the public sphere
Space and social relations
According to Edward S. Casey (1997, 50), ‘space’ or
‘place’ was ‘a continuing cynosure of ancient Greek
thought’. For ancient Greek philosophers, space was pri-
mary and fundamental. For example, Plato argued that
creation must occur in and with space (Johansen
2008), meaning that space must pre-exist before any
act of creation occurs (Cornford 1997). Similarly, in
Aristotle’s view, space took precedence over all other
things (Casey 1997). Yet as Casey (1997) reminds us, see-
ing space primary resulted in ancient Greek thinkers’
tendency in their philosophical debates to consider
space as ‘the void’, namely a precondition for creation.
However, in Hannah Arendt’s book titled The Human
Condition, we learn that in city settings space is never a
‘void’ with emptiness (Arendt 1958). Instead, urban
space, even in its original condition, was largely bound
by social relations, and the social relations in urban
space were not equal. In ancient Greece, public and pri-
vate lives were separated by the ‘household’ and ‘politi-
cal’ realms, and only people who were set free from
productive labour were ‘not to be subject to the necessity
of life or to the command of another and not to be in
command oneself’ (Arendt 1958, 32). Thus, they were
recognised as free citizens and deemed as ‘the public’.
Only they were allowed to participate in political life in
the political realm, since political rights were highly
restricted to this privileged social class.
In ancient societies, particularly ancient Greece, the
form of political realm that was constituted in discus-
sions among ‘free citizens’ as well as common actions,
such as the waging of war or competition in athletic
games, offered an important prototype of the public
sphere (Smith & Low 2006). By contrast, other social
groups, including women, slaves, and the throng of com-
mon people, were excluded from the public sphere and
confined to the ‘shadowy interior of the household’
(Arendt 1958, 38). In Arendt’s theory, the private sphere,
comprising households and economic units, was
164 Yiming Wang
characterised by relations of domination and was gov-
erned by necessity (Lopes 2015).
In the modern age, Habermas (1989) tells us that the
social order has been reshaped by the emergence of early
finance and trade capitalism. He claims the traffic in
commodities and news created by early capitalist long-
distance trade enabled merchant companies to open up
new markets for their products. However, unlike the
local markets that existed in the towns from the begin-
ning, the markets for foreign trade that resulted from
political efforts and military force are considered ‘insti-
tutional products’ and need strong political guarantees.
As such, the nationalisation of the town-based economy
began, and gave rise to the modern state. Moreover, in
order to meet the increasing financial needs, the modern
state was established largely based on taxation. On this
basis, local administrations were then brought under
the control of the state. As the monetary flow takes the
shape of taxation, money begins to drive the evolution
of the modern state. One result is that the state ‘no longer
follows liberal prescriptions on safeguarding the insti-
tutional order of the market system, but actually
becomes an active part of the economic process’
(Ebner 2015, 375). This process leads to the elimination
of the estate-based authorities while creating room for
the sphere of public authority.
The public sphere
The realm of social interaction emerges and interposes
itself between household and political realms (Benhabib
1992). This process leads to the rise of ‘the society’ which,
on the one hand, occupies ‘a position in opposition to the
state’, and, on the other hand, has ‘become a concern of
public interest to the degree that the reproduction of life
in the wake of the developing market economy had
grown beyond the bounds of private domestic authority’
(Habermas 1974, 52). The rise of the society blurs the
boundaries between the economic activities in the house-
hold realm and political life in public realm. The house-
hold economy and relevant activities, including
housekeeping and all matters pertaining in the house-
hold realm then rise into the public sphere. Conse-
quently, social groups that used to be confined to the
‘household realm’, such as women, workers, non-whites,
and non-Christians, can now participate in political life
and thus be deemed ‘the public’.
The extension of the scope of ‘the public’ has led to
the emergence of the public sphere which, according to
Habermas (1974, 49), is:
A realm of our social life in which something approach-
ing public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed
to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into
being in every conversation in which private individuals
assemble to form a public body.
In this sense, the public sphere is a theatre in which citi-
zens debate and deliberate on their common affairs
under the constraints of an ‘ideal speech situation’ (Ben-
habib 1992, 89). It makes the city a form of sociality, as a
potential site for the construction of utopian dreams of a
nurturing social order. Forming public opinion is an
important prerequisite of the public sphere, because
through the formation of public opinion within public
sphere citizens can transmit the needs of bourgeois
society to the state in order to transform political into
‘rational’ authority (Habermas 1974).
With regard to the way to arouse public opinion,
Habermas (1974) claims that ‘public discussions’ about
the exercise of political power is the most appropriate
approach. Similarly, Ackerman (1980) believes legitima-
tion in a democratic society can result only from a ‘public
dialogue’, which is a way of talking about power. To
achieve the widest reaching democratisation of political
decision-making processes through ‘public discussion’
or ‘public dialogue’, it is imperative to afford citizens
access to debates, reflections, and actions in public
sphere. This is termed ‘public participation’ by Haber-
mas (1989), and is fundamental to democratic govern-
ance. Habermas (1989, 27) argues that public
participation makes the public sphere ‘the sphere of pri-
vate people come together as a public’. From this argu-
ment, it can be seen that the public sphere has a
geography. In city settings, urban space, especially public
space, becomes the public sphere where people come and
form a public.
The above discussion outlines an image of urban
spaces as the public sphere. However, it is only one of
two ways of understanding urban space; the other way
emphasises social production.
The socio-spatial relation
Whereas Lefebvre put space first, David Harvey has
tended to choose social processes as his primary inter-
pretive viewpoint. Harvey (1973) first outlined this
approach in his book: Social Justice and the City. In
this book, he argues that cities are shaped by capitalists
in a way that yields profits for them and alienates others,
and he asserts:
Space is neither absolute, relative or relational in itself,
but it can become one or all simultaneously depending
on the circumstances. The problem of the proper con-
ceptualization of space is resolved through human prac-
tice with respect to it. In other words, there are no
philosophical answers to philosophical questions that

arise over the nature of space—the answers lie in human
practice. (Harvey 1973, 13)
As Obeng-Odoom (2013, 48) points out, Harvey’s book
sets the foundation of ‘a continuity of thought in Har-
vey’s theory’. Unlike Lefebvre, Harvey sees the urban
process as somewhat subordinate to production pro-
cesses. He admitted his continuing reliance on insights
from his early book (i.e. Social Justice and the City) in
one of his more recent articles, by stating ‘In Social Jus-
tice and the City I took what I still hold to be a funda-
mentally correct position with respect to the social
construction of space’ (Harvey 2005, 213). This raises
the question of how, in Harvey’s theory, are social pro-
cesses driven by capitalism shape urban space?
Urban space as commodity
Capital accumulation in space
In the first volume of Capital, Marx (1967a) claims that
accumulation is central to the capitalist growth. Follow-
ing Marx, Harvey (1978) has clearly demonstrated that
his understanding of ‘urban process’ under capitalism
is based on seeing it in relation to the theory of accumu-
lation. Harvey (1975, 9) interprets accumulation as ‘the
engine which powers growth under capitalism mode of
production’. However, capitalist growth tends to
accumulate ‘for accumulation’s sake’, which inevitably
leads to the ‘tendency to produce without regard to the
limits of the market’ (Marx 1968). This phenomenon,
as Harvey (1975, 10) points out, produces the crisis of
‘a mass of commodities on the market with no purcha-
sers in sight’. Therefore, to resolve this crisis, Harvey
(1975) argues it is important that fresh room for
accumulation must be found or created to absorb the
increasing quantities of commodities produced and, in
this way, allow capitalism to survive.
According to Harvey (1975), the only way to create
fresh room is to expand. He further points out that creat-
ing new markets and opportunities for profitable invest-
ment is a crucial way of expanding (Harvey 1981). Here,
the geography, especially spatial organisation (or reorgan-
isation) and urbanisation as the main ways to create new
market and investment opportunities, plays an important
role. Urbanisation creates new market and investment
opportunities. As a result of capitalist urbanisation, capi-
tal accumulation becomes a crucial force that shapes and
organises urban space. To explain this process, Harvey
developed the notion of ‘spatial fix’, which has two mean-
ings: one highlights geographical expansion, and the other
emphasises geographical concentration (Harvey 1975;
2001). Primarily, the notion was developed to describe
the expansion of the geographical size of the market
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography 165
(Harvey 1975). Using this concept, Harvey has revealed
that capitalism is addicted to ‘fixing’ (or ‘resolving’) its
inherent inner crisis through geographical expansion,
much as it is addicted to technological change and endless
expansion of economic growth.
However, expansion inevitably increases the physical
distance between production of products and their realis-
ation in the market. This leads to the introduction of the
spatial concentration meaning of ‘spatial fix’. The increas-
ing physical distance has become one of the fundamental
crises for capitalism growth (Harvey 2014) because,
although a large number of technological and organis-
ational innovations have been designed to increase the
speed at which goods, people, and information are circu-
lated, longer distance always means a longer time and
slower speed for capital circulation. Therefore, instead
of motion and mobility of capital, in Harvey’s recent
works the notion of ‘spatial fix’ is more often used to
describe the particular problem of ‘fixity’, namely ‘the
idea that something (a thing, a problem, a craving) can
be pinned down and secured’ (Harvey 2001, 25).
In the process of being pinned down in urban space,
capital is mainly invested in what Harvey calls fixed capi-
tal and consumption funds. According to Harvey (1978,
106), fixed capital is ‘used to aid to the production pro-
cess rather than as direct raw material inputs’. One
part of fixed capital is enclosed within the production
process, and the other part ‘functions as a physical fra-
mework for production’, which Harvey (1978, 106)
calls the built environment for production. Similarly, con-
sumption funds function ‘as aids rather than as direct
inputs to consumption’ (Harvey 1978, 106). Some
items in consumption funds are directly enclosed within
the consumption process, while others ‘act as a physical
framework for consumption’, which in Harvey’s term is
the built environment for consumption (Harvey 1978,
106). From the definition of fixed capital and consump-
tion fund, it can be seen that the built environment, for
both production and consumption, serves as the physical
framework for capital circulation and is the place where
accumulation happens.
Built environment in capital accumulation
By providing a physical framework upon which capital
can accumulate, the main goal capitalists want to achieve
is to shorten the turnover time. As mentioned in the pre-
ceding subsection, expansion leads to long-distance
trade, which separates production and realisation by a
long time interval and inevitably leads to a long turnover
period and slows down the circulation velocity (Harvey
1975). As Marx (1967b) argues, the longer the turnover
time of a given capital, the smaller its yield of surplus
166 Yiming Wang
value. Therefore, there is considerable pressure for capi-
talists to accelerate the turnover time of capital. The
turnover time of a given capital is equal to the pro-
duction time plus the circulation time (Marx 1967b).
Therefore, any reduction in circulation time can enhance
the accumulation process and create fresh room for capi-
tal accumulation (Harvey 1975). Thus, speeding up ‘the
velocity of circulation of capital’ contributes to
the accumulation process (Harvey 1975). To overcome
the spatial barrier and speed up capital circulation,
Marx (1973, 593) introduced the concept of ‘annihilate
space with time’. Harvey (2001) sees ‘the annihilation
of space by time’ as a fundamental law of capitalist devel-
opment. He argues that, in order to minimise the circu-
lation time and costs, activities of production and
consumption are thus located within a ‘rational’ distance
and with respect to each other. Capital therefore organ-
ises production and consumption within concentrated
urban spaces, and a large proportion of capital that
flows into the built environment is then absorbed in con-
centrated urban areas (Harvey 1975; 1978).
By introducing ‘spatial fix’, Harvey (2001) revealed the
strong connection between how the accumulation of capi-
tal is manifest and how the ‘spatial fix’ is pursued in urban
setting. Generally speaking, urban space is a key site for
both ‘seeking to resolve the crisis tendencies of capitalism
accumulation’ as well as ‘pinning down of large amounts
of capital in place through the production of fixed and
immobile capital in built environment’ (Harvey 2001,
28). As Bentley (1999, 66) summarises, built environment
is involved in the accumulation of capital in two ways: ‘as a
commodity which is itself produced directly for profit’,
and ‘as a physical setting which affects the profitability
of the production, distribution and exchange of other
commodities of all sorts’. Due to capitalists’ efforts to
organise the ‘physical setting’ in order to overcome spatial
barriers, the urban space is then not only produced to cre-
ate fresh room for accumulation, but also, as Marx
(1967a) argues, to concentrate production and consump-
tion geographically within a ‘rational’ distance, in order to
speed up circulation. As a result, the city will become an
arena of capital accumulation.
Harvey’s works conceptualise the commodification
process of urban space (e.g. Harvey 1973; 1975; 1978;
2006) (for a review of Harvey’s work, see Obeng-
Odoom 2016a, 25–28; Stilwell 2017). It may be argued
that not all urban spaces are ‘public’. This argument is
mainly raised by seeing ‘public space’ in a topographical
way – public space is a particular kind of place in cities
that can be separated from other urban spaces. However,
as Iveson (2007) reminds us, it would be more appropri-
ate to understand public space in a procedural sense.
Benhabib (1992, 78) claims that, by viewing public
space procedurally, public space can be any space that
becomes ‘the site of power, of common action’. As com-
mon actions may take place in various places, such as in a
park or over a kitchen table, all those places could be
considered ‘public spaces’ (Iveson 2007). As a result,
from a procedural perspective, ‘urban space’ and ‘public
space’ are two integrated ideas, rather than separable.
Any urban space that is used for collective action at a
given time will play a role as public space and thus will
have a certain degree of publicness. In this sense, the
idea of publicness becomes, in De Magalhães & Trigo’s
(2017) words, a ‘relative concept’. The relativity of pub-
licness is discussed further in the next section.
Public or private space?
While the two contrasting views of seeing urban space as
possessing inherent socio-economic and political charac-
teristics and seeing it as mainly a result of social pro-
cesses succeed in terms of analyses of power, their
attempt to grasping space falters because they mainly
concentrate on ‘public’ or ‘private’ space, without look-
ing at what is between them, especially the continuum
and relativity of public and private space. Traditionally,
in common with the public sphere, urban public space
is ‘life space’, which, according to Friedmann (1988;
2010), is ‘the theatre of life’ and an expression of ‘a con-
vivial life’; it is the space in which people gather, make
contact, and interact in the city.
However, as a result of capital accumulation in the
city, urban space has become a place where capital inves-
tors exert their power generated by the money they have.
As Harvey (1990, 101) points out, money ‘is itself a form
of social power that can be appropriated as “the social
power of private persons”’. With regard to its impacts
on urban space, Harvey (1990, 257) claims that money
power, or capital results in the commodification of
space and the production of ‘new but equally oppressive
geographical systems for the containerization of power’.
It leads to urban spaces ‘legitimized under some legal
system of rights to spaces which guarantees security of
place and access to the members of society, form a
fixed frame within which the dynamics of a social pro-
cess must unfold’ (Harvey 1990, 258). In short, with
the help of private property rights, capital investors’ pri-
vate money power becomes embedded in urban space in
capital urban processes.
Consequently, capital accumulation in the city leads to
the rise of privatised and commercialised urban space,
which is mainly what Friedmann (1988, 97) calls ‘econ-
omic space’. This kind of space is ‘abstract and discontinu-
ous, consisting primarily of locations (nodes) and linkages
(flows of commodities, capital, labour and information).’

According to Friedmann (1988, 97), the formal choice
criterion for actions that produce economic space is
‘efficiency in the accumulation of a surplus’. Zukin
(1991) reminds us that economic space helps to med-
iate the economic power of capital investors with life
space, which results in a blurring of the distinction
between the public sphere and the arena of capital
accumulation in the city. As a result, the presentation
of self in the public sphere became a substitute for rep-
resentation, and the presence of self has been increas-
ingly reduced to a matter of commodification and
spectacle (Sennett 1992). This in turn has made
the public sphere become ‘more and more mystified’
(Harvey 2003, 221). Consequently, unlike the purely
public sphere, public space is increasingly playing the
role also as an arena for capital accumulation. The
sense of ‘public’ thus becomes a commodity that not
only can be directly consumed but also can be used
to promote consumption. For example, as a scheme
for capital accumulation, investors are increasingly
interested in the production of spectacles to create a
sense of ‘public’ on their land, to attract people into
an area in orders to increase the possibility of con-
sumption (Wansborough & Mageean 2000). Once pre-
sent, the visitors themselves and their engagement with
the space and the activities happening in it then
become part of this sense of ‘public’ (Fig. 1). However,
service fees are required for most of the activities.
Fig. 1. A pop-up amusement park in front of a shopping mall in Chongqing, China (Photo: Yiming Wang, 2014)
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography 167
As such, the sense of ‘public’ itself becomes an imma-
terial commodity that can be consumed.
A critique of binaries
Urban space in capitalist urban processes becomes a mix-
ture of ‘life space’ and ‘economic space’, and plays the dual
role of both the public sphere and the arena of capital
accumulation. As a result, the relationship between ‘pub-
lic’ and ‘private’ is increasingly blurred. What is ‘public’
and what is ‘private’? This phenomenon has been noted
by Staeheli & Mitchell (2008), who point out that in mod-
ern society it is no longer the reality that urban space is a
site of only public (or inclusive) activities. Instead, the
publicness of space, as Kohn (2004) points out, has
become a ‘cluster concept’ made up of multiple dimen-
sions rather than determined by a single factor.
Similarly, in an earlier work, Kilian (1998, 115) states
that ‘public’ and ‘private’ in urban space should not be
considered as ‘situated at opposite ends of a continuum’.
Instead, urban space should be understood and analysed
as sites of both ‘publicity’ and ‘privacy’. In this work,
Kilian (1998) identifies two mainstream approaches to
the publicness of urban space in the literature. One
approach is mainly represented by the works of Jane
Jacobs (J. Jacobs 1962) and William Whyte (1980),
who see public space as a site for personal ‘contact’.
The other approach views public space as a site for social
168 Yiming Wang
‘representation’, and is less concerned with contact in
space. Don Mitchell’s (1995) influential article, ‘The
end of public space’, is a typical example of this
approach. In the article, he describes how the homeless
people who use an urban park in the USA are not con-
sidered as ‘representative of the community’ and, on
this basis, he argues that there is a need for a change in
the process by which ‘the public’ is defined, rather than
a change in the design of public spaces. However, as
Kilian (1998, 115) points out, both of the two main-
stream approaches are inadequate to explain the public-
ness of urban space because ‘they tend, albeit in different
ways, to reify their object of analysis while failing to
define it clearly’.
Kilian (1998) proposes the framework developed by
Thomas Markus (1993) to overcome the weaknesses of
the existing approaches. Markus’s framework first ranks
and classifies people who use and manage urban space
into three groups – ‘inhabitants’, ‘visitors’, and ‘strangers’
– and on this basis analyses the groups’ power of access
and exclusion over a space. However, as a result of laying
the primary emphasis on the power relationships in space,
the framework, when used to guide empirical research,
oversimplifies the influencing factors of the publicness
of space. An important question is: Do different urban
spaces have to have the same level of publicness when
they have the same ‘inhabitants’, ‘visitors’, and ‘strangers’,
whose powers of access and exclusion are also the same?
As many empirical studies have shown (e.g. Németh &
Schmidt 2007; Carmona 2010; Varna & Tiesdell 2010),
other factors, such as the space’s relation with its sur-
roundings, the spatial design of the space itself, and how
people culturally understand the space – all of which are
neglected in Markus’s framework – also make non-negli-
gible contributions to the determination of the publicness
of space.
In a more recent approach than that of Kilian (1998),
Australian geographer and political economist Kurt Ive-
son has highlighted the multidimensional characteristics
of public space. In his book, Iveson (2007, 9) argues a
‘public’ place is constituted by different dimensions,
and this complexity ‘ought to be at the heart of investi-
gations into the spatiality of publicness’. From this stand-
point, he summarises two dominant approaches to the
concept of public space: topographical approaches and
procedural approaches. According to Iveson (2007,
8–9), the former has some ‘fundamental problems’ and
is ‘inherently unstable’. He therefore recommends
understanding public space procedurally. Rather than a
particular kind of place in the city, as aforementioned,
a procedural approach sees public space as any space
that ‘is put to use at a given time for collective action
and debate’ (Iveson 2007, 3). Although drawing explicit
attention to the complex geographies of publicness that
topographical approaches struggle to capture, procedural
approaches still either simplify or neglect the multidi-
mensional nature of publicness and thus ‘fail to trace
fully the complex interactions between the distinct
dimensions of publicness’ (Iveson 2007, 17). I would
argue that the weaknesses of the existing approaches
can be solved by adopting a property rights approach.
Developing a spatial property rights
approach
Interpretations of property relations
In the literature, there are three interpretations of prop-
erty relations. First, Ely (1917) deals with property
relations as the relationship among private, public, and
commons. In this interpretation, property relations
refer to the relationship between different property
regimes. An analyst using this interpretation would be
expected to look at socio-economic, political, and
environmental outcomes, and how they relate to which
forms of property regimes were dominant at any particu-
lar time. For example, when the scope of ‘public’ space is
extended, a rearrangement of property relations in the
interest of the public and the parties that are immediately
interested will occur.
A second interpretation, derived from legal studies,
deals with property relations as different rights to land.
In this respect, ‘land’ is a legal term. In legal studies, the
concept of ‘land’ not only refers to the physical surface
of land but also to the space above the surface. The second
interpretation is therefore an approach that deals also
with property rights relations in ‘space’. In his article
‘Fundamental legal conceptions as applied in judicial
reasoning’, Hohfeld (1917) argues that the received expla-
nations of the legal relations between primary rights in
rem (i.e. multital) and primary rights in personam (i.e.
paucital) are, on the one hand, essentially faulty for analy-
sis and, on the other hand, seriously misleading when try-
ing to find practical solutions to legal problems. On this
basis, he clarifies the meaning of both paucital rights or
claims and multital rights or claims in legal research
and provides a detailed discussion on the practical
consequences and economic significance of the property
owner’s ‘right-duty’ relations and ‘privilege-on-right’
relations over land and space (Hohfeld 1917, 710).
The above-described legal approach has been adapted
by land and property economists such as Johnson et al.
(2000). They argue that the two principal rights or inter-
ests in land and space are known as freehold and lease-
hold. Both of these rights are not merely permission to
enter land and space, but are also sources from which

interest and profits can be created. For example, instead
of occupying property himself or herself, the freeholder
of an urban space can ‘grant’ or ‘let’ the exclusive posses-
sion of the premises to another person for a certain
period, usually in consideration of the payment of rent,
under a ‘lease’ or ‘tenancy’ (Johnson et al. 2000, 22).
Meanwhile, if the rent that the leaseholder has to pay
is less than the true rental value of the premises, the
leaseholder can also gain a net income from the land
or space. The use of this approach is discussed exten-
sively by Benda-Beckmann et al. (2009). It can be seen
from the works discussed above that the legal emphasis
of this interpretation of property relations remains
quite strong.
The third approach is probably the broadest. It
includes, but goes beyond, a synthesis of the other two
interpretations. Considered as an approach to property
and political economy, its historical development is
explained at length in Richard Schlatter’s (1951) book
titled Private Property: The History of an Idea. Franklin
Obeng-Odoom (2016b) has recently provided a summary
of how the approach addresses the issue of property
relations. According to him, this approach focuses on
three issues: (1) whether private property is natural or
conventional; (2) whether common property leads to bet-
ter use of resources; and (3) whether private property is
more suitable for a good society and the nature of humans.
Answers to the questions identified by Obeng-Odoom
tend to be polarised between a ‘conventional school’ and
a ‘natural rights school’ (Obeng-Odoom 2016b). The
‘conventional school’ argues that property is conven-
tional, not natural, and the common form is the norm,
while the ‘natural rights school’ scholars hold that the
institution of property is natural and that common prop-
erty leads to the dissipation of resources, rather than bet-
ter use of them.
Property rights and publicness
Guided by the three interpretations of property relations, a
property rights approach has long been used as a tool to
analyse the relations between property and people. Tra-
ditionally, property concerns the dyadic relationship
between people and things. Blackstone (1979 [1766], 2) is
renowned for defining property as ‘that sole and despotic
dominion which one man claims and exercises over the
external things of the world, in total exclusion of the
right of any other individual in the universe’. However,
as many scholars have pointed out, this dyadic conception,
exemplified more recently by the work of Alchian & Dem-
setz (1973), misses the social and political dimensions of
property (Shipton 1994; Fligstein 2001; Carruthers & Ario-
vich 2004; Milonakis & Meramveliotakis 2013).
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography 169
In modern societies, due to the changing nature of the
global political economy, property has become ‘the literal
key to a market-based capitalist economy and to demo-
cratic political structure’ (H.M. Jacobs 2013, S86). As a
result, what Hann (2007, 290) calls the ‘standard liberal
model’ has become the most influential Western theoris-
ing about property. According to Boydell & Searle
(2014), those models range from Hardin (1968) wanting
to avoid a ‘tragedy of the commons’, the ethnographic
cost-benefit analysis of Demsetz (2000), economic
interpretations of the attributes of what Henry Maine
(1861) called ‘the bundle of rights’ (Alchian & Demsetz
1973; Barzel 1997) and the new institutional economics
of North (North 1990), to the beguiling capital creation
propositions of de Soto (2000).
These divergent conceptions of property lead to the
need for a broader approach to property relations, and
one that is transdisciplinary in nature (Cole & Gross-
man 2002). For example, Rifkin (2001) has emphasised
the increasing significance of ‘access’ rather than own-
ership, and has claimed that a broader approach must
take account of such factors. Hann (2007, 290) argues
that in modern societies property has already become
‘much broader than the liberal tradition recognises,
and that the political, economic and social functions
of property are in continuous flux’. Importantly, there
is a very close connection between property and
space. According to Blomley (1998, 567), ‘if we want
to explore the social dimensions of property, we need
to think of it not only historically but also geographi-
cally, entailing both practices and representations of
social space.’ As a result, a property rights approach
in the modern sense provides a coherent legal, econ-
omic, and social framework to analyse the triadic
relationship between people, place, and property
(Bromley 1991; Boydell & Searle 2014).
With regard to the publicness of space, Staeheli &
Mitchell (2008, 141) remind us that at the heart of ‘the
quality of publicness [lays] the relationships established
between property (as both a thing and a set of relation-
ship and rules) and the people who inhabit, use, and cre-
ate property.’ In understanding the publicness-property
rights relation in this way, Layard (2016) recently carried
out three case studies in England to prove that public
space is mainly produced through property relation-
ships. Elsewhere, Boydell & Searle (2014), who focused
on the Darling Harbour scheme in Sydney, conducted
research that engaged an approach that incorporated
property rights as a lens through which to analyse the
contestations in contemporary public spaces, or in
their words ‘urban commons’. As another example,
Blomley (1998) studied the resistance to gentrification
in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood in Vancouver
170 Yiming Wang
by associating space with property relations. However,
an analytical framework that can guide empirical studies
of both measurements and interpretation of publicness
of space is missing from the above-mentioned three
works.
Multidimensional nature of publicness
To guide empirical studies, Benn & Gaus (1983) have
pointed out the multidimensional nature of publicness
in sociological research and identified three dimensions
of publicness from a sociological perspective: access,
agency, and interest. These three dimensions have been
introduced and refined by Madanipour (1995) as an
empirical tool to measure the degree of publicness of
space. Madanipour’s framework has been adopted by
some urban designers and planners, such as Akkar, an
urban designer (Akkar 2005). However, some have
argued that the three dimensions are too ambiguous
and amorphous for empirical use (Németh & Schmidt
2011), and some crucial dimensions of publicness of a
space are neglected in this framework. As a result, a
number of attempts have emerged since the 1990s to
explore what determines the publicness of urban space.
A politics perspective on space. In her book titled Jus-
tice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young
(1990) explains her understanding of urban space and
city life from the perspective of politics by defining
urban space as a model arena in which people enter, par-
ticipate, and engage in civic life with their differences.
She further points out that those unassimilable and unas-
similated differences are paradigmatic of urban life.
Based on Young’s theory, Varna & Tiesdell (2010)
claim ‘tolerance of difference’ should be a core dimen-
sion of the publicness of urban space, which means
that more ‘public’ urban space should tolerate people’s
differences in aspects such as point of view, affiliation,
race, and gender. Strongly influenced by Carol Hanisch’s
(1970) essay, ‘The personal is political’, this claim is well
exemplified by a growing strand within feminist urban
geography that examines gendered making and remak-
ing of public space (Staeheli & Martin 2000; Podmore
2001; Bondi & Rose 2003).
Studies in this strand within feminist urban geogra-
phy tend to show that, in the early 20th century, married
women were confined to ‘the safe spaces’ of suburbia in
British and North American cities (Bondi & Rose 2003).
Meanwhile, land use patterns and transportation systems
created mobility barriers for women with young children
(Tivers 1985). As a result, women’s presence in public
spaces in the city centres was constrained. Many cities
in Britain and North America then became cities of ‘sep-
arate spheres’ in the early 20th century and the ‘public’
status of those spaces was questionable (Bondi & Rose
2003). Heath Schenker (1996) notes that after the late
19th and early 20th centuries, a Victorian moral gender
order tried to reconstruct the norm of feminine domes-
ticity within Britain’s central city public spaces, to which
middle-class women increasingly gained access. This
trend also happened in American cities during the
same period (Boyer 1998). The growing presence of
women in the central city turned public inner-city spaces
into ‘space of difference’ (Podmore 2001). The trend
posed challenges to the prevailing constructions of public
space as an anathema to female virtue, and since the 20th
century it has made British and North American urban
space more inclusive (Bondi & Rose 2003).
The social significance of urban space. According to
Kohn (2004), urban public space has three core dimen-
sions: ownership, accessibility, and intersubjectivity.
The third dimension reflects the social significance of
urban space. Kohn explains that a real public space
should be a place where people from various social
groups not only can encounter each other, but also can
carry out activities interactively according to their own
desires. Although it may be argued that first and fore-
most interactions in public spaces are stimulated by
‘people coming together’, the spaces themselves play a
non-negligible role in facilitating or encouraging the
interactions. For example, people from different social
groups may come together in spaces such as cinemas
and sports stadiums, but in those spaces they are linked
by a one-way relationship to a particular central object
while isolated from each other. In other words, the
spaces bring people together without facilitating or
encouraging interactions among different individuals.
Hence, according to Kohn (2004), they are not real pub-
lic spaces. Kohn therefore argues that in a public space
the encounter and interaction should be encouraged
and facilitated by the space.
The importance of function-based urban and archi-
tectural design has been discussed by Carmona (2010)
by identifying ‘function’ as one of the dimensions of a
space’s publicness. Based on Kohn’s (2004) work, Car-
mona argues that function, perception, and ownership
are the three aspects that can distinguish whether a
space is public or private. In Carmona’s (2010) interpret-
ation, the ‘function’ dimension does not merely focus on
how the physical space is planned to be used, but to avoid
the space being over-designed, it also emphasises the
adaptability of unplanned or spontaneous use (Carmona
2010). Moreover, from the sociocultural perspective,
Carmona offers an explanation of the ‘perception’
dimension, which refers to how the space is culturally
understood by users, as well as the way users socially
engage with the space (Carmona 2010).

Physical design, management and accessibility of
urban spaces. The physical design related dimension
has been further refined by Varna & Tiesdell (2010).
Through summarising the available body of work, they
propose five dimensions to measure a space’s publicness:
ownership, control, civility, physical configuration, and
animation. The latter two dimensions, ‘physical con-
figuration’ and ‘animation’, are both design oriented.
The major difference between them is that physical con-
figuration focuses on the macro-scale design, which
includes the connection between the space and its sur-
roundings, the routes into the space, and so forth,
whereas animation refers to micro-scale design, such as
the design of street furniture within the space and the
place itself (Varna & Tiesdell 2010).
Unlike Németh & Schmidt’s (2011) interpretation of
‘management’, which is described below, the control
dimension means a much more ‘explicit control’ over
the space (Varna & Tiesdell 2010), namely applying
what Lofland (1998) refers to as ‘direct’ instruments,
including the installation of CCTV (closed-circuit televi-
sion) and surveillance by security guards, to control the
space, rather than manage it. In contrast to the control
dimension, Varna & Tiesdell (2010) use the term ‘civility’,
which refers to a much ‘softer’ way to manage and main-
tain the space. It involves the cultivation of a positive and
welcoming ambience as well as awareness of and respect
for the public use of the space (Varna & Tiesdell 2010).
More recently, by refining and developing the work of
Madanipour (1995) and Kohn (2004), Németh & Schmidt
(2011) have identified three core components with which
to assess the publicness of an urban space: ownership,
management, and uses/users. Their concept of manage-
ment has some similarity with Madanipour’s (1995)
dimension of agency. However, Németh & Schmidt’s con-
cept places emphasis on ‘how’ the space is controlled and
maintained, namely the manner in which and the specific
methods by which the owners and managers of a space
control and indicate acceptable uses, users, and beha-
viours (Németh & Schmidt 2011), whereas Madanipour’s
‘agency’ pays attention to ‘who’ controls and manages the
space. Moreover, their concept of ‘uses/users’ is quantitat-
ive as well as qualitative. In the quantitative interpret-
ation, this dimension means the number and type of
uses and users that occur in the space. In the qualitative
sense, it focuses on the behaviours of the users when
using the space (Németh & Schmidt 2011).
Private ownership in public spaces. Furthermore, as a
result of trends such as the increased use of the market,
rather than the government, to provide public goods and
the increasingly fast growth of the prioritisation of the glo-
bal economy over local public interests, privately owned
public space (POPS), has become an increasingly
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography 171
often-seen type of urban space in cities around the world
(Kayden 2000; Németh 2009). Such privately owned
urban spaces differ from their publicly owned counter-
parts in many ways. One important difference is that pri-
vate owners are allowed to set and implement their own
rules for the use of the spaces. Németh (2009) reminds
us that their rules are not necessarily vetted by public
agencies and may therefore constrain the public’s freedom
to use urban spaces. For this reason, Németh & Schmidt
(2007) have identified rules as an influencing factor in a
space’s publicness. They claim that the four dimensions
and approaches to control POPSs or what they refer
to as ‘publicly accessible space’ are (1) laws and rules, (2)
surveillance and policing, (3) design and image, and (4)
access and territoriality. The second, third, and fourth of
dimensions and approaches identified by Németh &
Schmidt (2007) are quite similar to the aforementioned
control, management, design, and accessibility dimen-
sions. However, their ‘laws and rules’ dimension and/or
approach highlights that the rules governing privately
managed spaces are often more variable and inconsistent
than the publicly managed and owned ones.
Furthermore, Smith & Low (2006) argue that, because
of the use of privately owned space is much more
strongly protected by private property rights, public
spaces are thus differentiated from private spaces in
four aspects: (1) the rules of access to them; (2) the
source and nature of control over entry to them; (3)
the individual and collective behaviour sanctioned in
them, which is similar to the notion of ‘tolerance of
difference’ coined by Young (1990), but inclined to the
specific rules and regulations; and (4) the rules
governing the use of the space (Smith & Low 2006).
On the basis of Smith and Low’s (2006) work, property
rights based research has been conducted in more detail
by De Magalhães (2010), who, by looking at the con-
tracted-out public space, claims the rights of access,
use, and control and/or ownership are the main attri-
butes of publicness. His work highlights the significance
of the ‘rules’ and ‘mechanisms’ for controlling and
managing a space. According to De Magalhães’s argu-
ment, these rules and mechanisms regulate what
restrictions might be imposed on how individuals gain
physical access to a space, and use the facilities and
resources in a space, and through them the various inter-
ests in the management of the space could be recognised,
the conflicts among different stakeholders could be
solved (De Magalhães 2010).
An analytical framework
By comparing the similarities and differences of all
the dimensions of the publicness of urban space
172 Yiming Wang

Table 1. Dimensions of publicness of urban space – an analytical framework

Process Dimension Description
Design and plan Function The planned use and the adaptability of unplanned, spontaneous use of the space
process Urban-scale design The macro-scale physical design of the space (the relation and connection between the space and its
surroundings)
Architectural-scale The micro-scale physical design of the space (the design of the space itself and the facilities within the space;
design whether the public uses are supported and facilitated by the physical design of the space)
Management Ownership The legal ownership of the space (the state–capitalist relationship in this dimension is not necessarily exclusive;
process it can be overlapping (e.g. the government may own the freehold of an urban space, but lease the space to a
private developer who then has the leasehold ownership of the space)
Agency The agents or agencies in charge of controlling and managing the space in day-to-day use
Interest The target beneficiaries of controlling and using the space, who receive the benefits and profits of the utilisation
of the space
Management The ‘soft’ or ‘indirect’ methods and the manner in which the managers control and indicate acceptable uses,
users, and behaviours (whether the manners and methods encourage and facilitate the encounter and
interaction in the space; whether the particularities of all the space users can be accepted and how they are
treated)
Control The ‘explicit’ methods and ‘direct’ instruments to control the space
Rules The rules and regulations for entering and using the space and the facilities within it
Use process Perception The users’ cultural understanding of the space, and the ways they socially engage with the space
Accessibility The accessibility of physical space, resources, and information in the space
Uses and/or Users The behaviours and activities that occur in the space, and the number and type of uses and users of them
Sources: Benn & Gaus 1983; Young 1990; Madanipour 1995; Lofland 1998; Johnson et al. 2000; Kohn 2004; Akkar 2005; Smith & Low 2006; Németh & Schmidt 2007;
2011; Németh 2009; Carmona 2010; De Magalhães 2010; Varna & Tiesdell 2010

discussed above, 12 interrelated dimensions can be
identified (Table 1). These 12 dimensions can be
grouped into three processes of design, management,
and use of an urban space, which implies that the pro-
cesses from plan to day-to-day management and end
use of a given urban space all contribute to determine
its publicness.
By using the 12 dimensions and their complementari-
ties, a researcher studying spaces newly emerged in the
urban process under capitalism, such as POPS, may ana-
lyse better the social, economic, and ecological impli-
cations of the new spaces. By using the framework, it is
possible to ask questions about whether the process of
transforming the ‘public space’ destroys the right of
access for other users.
Does the rise of the private power of capital investors
in the city suggest a decrease in the extent of publicness of
parks and in the quality of the public environment? What
property relations are emerging as a result of the changing
publicness of space? Such questions can turn our atten-
tion to process and outcomes, how they are related to
property, and in what ways new property relations
shape economy, society, ecology, and polity. In this
sense, the above-mentioned framework also sheds light
on the interpretation of the measurements of publicness
of space. It also goes beyond Karl Polanyi’s (2001) idea
that the commodification of space automatically leads
to social problems. However, this set of questions and
the framework are consistent with Polanyi’s (1957) sub-
stantivist analysis. In other words, a researcher using
the analytical framework presented in Table 1 is likely
to be looking closely at empirical reality, such as seeking
data related to how an urban space is located in the city,
questioning how the space is connected with its
surrounding urban environment, how the urban space
itself is designed, who manages the space and how the
space is managed and controlled, what the rules for
using the urban space are, how many and how people
use the spaces during the day as well as which people
use the space, and how urban space changes the ways
in which people conduct daily urban life in the city.
This more grounded approach can thus help to transcend
the socio-spatial debate and provide a critique of
existing simplistic conceptions of ‘public space’, while
keeping a critical and more nuanced view of spatial
transformation.
The framework developed and proposed in this paper
(i.e. in Table 1) is a constituent part of a wider research pro-
ject that is empirically examining the rise, publicness, and
influences of pseudo-public spaces.1 Places such as shop-
ping centres are publicly accessible and look like public
spaces but area always managed and controlled with pri-
vate interests in mind. They are therefore never truly pub-
lic; they are ‘pseudo-public spaces’. In countries where
rapid urbanisation is occurring, such as India and China,
meeting places for capitalists, the public, and the state,
such as pseudo-public spaces, are growing speedily.
Although these urban spaces are often privately managed,
the managers’ desire for social control and the specific
schemes used to design and manage the spaces vary con-
siderably. In those aspects, differences have non-negligible
impacts on degrees of publicness of those urban spaces, as
the framework suggests. As a result, in cities with such
urban spaces, the lines between the public and the private
are blurring even more quickly than has been observed in
the West. Therefore, the ideas underpinning the debate
between spatial and social justice need to be modified in
future research.

Conclusions
In departing from the viewpoint that space itself is imbued
by complex instrumentalities, I have discussed David Har-
vey’s theory of capital accumulation and circulation in
cities, together with the Henri Lefebvre ‘school’ and its
insistence that space possesses inherent social-economic
characteristics. Both approaches are important, but they
do not adequately explain the continuum and relativity
of public and private space. As shown in this article,
further research is needed to understand how the commo-
dification and commercialisation processes shape space
in urban processes under capitalism and confer on them
new features of space, but not from the established frame-
works of (1) socio-spatial relation (e.g. Harvey 2001),
(2) spatial social relations (e.g. Lefebvre 1991), (3) the
procedural approach (e.g. Iveson 2007), and (4) inter-
relations between the two (e.g. Stilwell 2000), but from a
property rights perspective, as developed in this article.
As I have discussed, the new features that combine
with the inherent social and political characteristics of
space have collectively resulted in the dual role of
urban space, which has led to the multidimensional
nature of its publicness. In recognising the multidimen-
sional nature of publicness, the property rights
approach proposed in this article differs from current
approaches to the publicness of urban space, because
rather than treating space as monolithic, it extends the
dyadic line of reasoning in the socio-spatial debate on
space by taking into account the complexities of the
publicness of space. For empirical studies, an analytical
framework has been developed and presented in this
article (i.e. in Table 1). Urban growth driven by capital-
ism has changed space into a series of complex relation-
ships between people and property in city settings, and
this process is still far from complete. The framework
presented in Table 1 serves as a lens and analytical tool
that can be used to understand, assess, and compare
the changing publicness of urban space that characterises
contemporary capitalist urbanisation processes.
Note
1. The project, titled ‘Pseudo-Public Spaces in Chinese
Shopping Malls: Rise, Publicness and Consequences, is
being run by the author in the period 2013–2018, to
explore why publicly accessible spaces in shopping
malls can grow rapidly in China, to what degree those
spaces are public, and the impacts of the growth of
those spaces on the daily urban life in China.
Acknowledgements
This article is part of a study financially supported by the China
Scholarship Council, Grant No. 201306050026. The author
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography 173
acknowledges Dr Franklin Obeng-Odoom for his valuable com-
ments on an earlier version of this article. The author also thanks
the two anonymous reviewers and the editor, Associate Professor
Kerstin Potthoff, for their critical comments that contributed
greatly to the revision of the submitted version of the article.
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