The publicness of an urban space for cultural consumption: The case of Pingjiang Road in Suzhou

Abstract

The advent of globalization and digital media compels us to reexamine the blurring and fluidity of the boundaries between public and private spaces. The construction of urban spaces for consumption is, arguably, compressing city’s public spaces. But various space-use activities, some of which are aided by digital media, may have the potentials in cultivating the public capacity of such consumption spaces. Through this lens, this article takes the historic street of Pingjiang Road in Suzhou, China, as a case to explore how in the age of digital media and globalization, such urban spaces revived for historic and cultural consumption may exhibit potential capacity for publicity or the publicness of an urban space. Through this case study, this article aims to show the tensions as well as potentials for publicity arising from the boundary fluidity in similar urban spaces.

Introduction

In the last 20 years, across all major cities in China, local governments led investors, developers, architects, and artists of varying stripes in collaborative efforts to renovate selected historic city blocks and turn them into what are called “creative spaces” (Chuangyi Kongjian). Among the most well-known examples are Xintiandi and Tianzifang in Shanghai, Nanluogu Alley in Beijing, and Pingjiang Road in Suzhou. These are urban spaces revived for enticing activities of consuming not only material goods but also the imputed historical and cultural meanings in these sites. With architectural designs, spatial layouts, visual media installations, and other material and symbolic means, a space of this kind invites visitors from around the world to stroll in the re-created “old city neighborhood,” browse traditional handicrafts, taste local delicacies, and indulge themselves in a nostalgia of the past that the space “speaks” about (Zukin, 1995). In the broader process of urbanization, such a space is also being designed and marketed as an authentic, local alternative in each city to the homogenized sites of consumption, such as mega-shopping malls; it conveys an aura of a city’s authenticity (Zukin, 1998, 2009). The blossom of spaces of this kind is reshaping China’s urban spaces and cultural landscapes. This article takes a look at such spaces, focusing on the question of how the publicity principle may be embodied in them and their production.

This question points to a theoretical issue, namely, what is publicity and how can it be accomplished in contemporary China? On this issue, prominent in the extant literature, which is largely based on Western experiences, is “the decline thesis.” It states that with the spread of consumerism, the neighborhood places where people interact with one another informally for performing and renewing their sense of belonging and community identity—places that Ray Oldenburg (1999) calls “the third places”—are shrinking. They are being replaced by shopping complexes, commercial high-rises, and expressways for automobile trafficking. Together with the penetration of domestic media technologies in people’s everyday life (e.g. Silverstone, 1994), these changes have led people to increasingly withdraw into the privacy of their homes and away from local community activities (Livingstone, 2007). As Susan Bickford (2000) has observed, we are “no longer moving with and negotiating around diverse strangers in a shared material world, but rather within a certain kind of bounded space that determines who or what we perceive” (p. 363). In brief, the diminishing of public spaces and “the fall of public man” (Sennett, 1974) together constitute declining functions of publicity.

However, “the decline thesis” is far from being a received view. For example, Paul Edwards (2006) claims that “the spatialised public-private dichotomy may be redundant and that civic space may be a more useful language” about “publicly accessible spaces” (p. 21). In the case of shopping malls, he argues, the seemingly “hyper-privatized spaces offer the possibility of embracing communal difference and heterogeneous mixing, despite their clear limitations” (p. 32). By encouraging a mixing of peoples and activities in an open space with mutual visibility among individuals present, such sites of consumption, while not fitting the traditional notion of public space, can rightly be considered “civic spaces.” In other words, these are places where people can build their intersubjectivity through seeing and being seen (Kohn, 2004), which contains the possibility of expressing to one another some shared aesthetics, concerns, and ethics embodied in the social etiquette of such places. These arguments provide a useful perspective for this article: Instead of starting with a presumed dichotomy of private and public spaces, we should examine the activities that produce the urban spaces for consumption infused with cultural and historical imputations and explore the ways in which they are embedded with capacities for publicity. ¹

Such an examination cannot be detached from the digitization of media technologies that is being increasingly an integral part of our everyday activities. This development has been blurring the boundaries between the public and private realms of life, making them porous, fluid, and contestable (Thompson, 2011). At the same time, the prevalent applications of digital and mobile network technologies are also inducing various forms of mediated “co-presence” and “visibility,” expanding the capacity for publicity of the urban spaces that are designed for specific functions (Pan & Yu, 2015). Hence, how digital media infrastructures get installed and used must be among the elements in our analysis.

Among the urban spaces for historic and cultural consumptions in Chinese cities, Pingjiang Road in the City of Suzhou is a prototypical one. It is a nationally well-known urban quarter of historic and cultural preservation. After years of excavating and renovating elements of the local history and culture on the site, it is now a commercial district crowded with retail businesses and street vendors selling things that speak of the local and historical as well as a tourist destination for experiencing the “authentic Old Suzhou.” To explore the publicity capacity of this urban space, namely, the potentials of fostering activities and relationships with elements of openness, sociality, mutual recognition, and common orientation, we will first outline the trajectory of Pingjiang Road’s restoration and redevelopment. Against this backdrop, we will then analyze and interpret the materials collected through our ethnographic observations as well as in-depth interviews with visitors, shop owners, and management personnel of the company that the city has formed to run the area’s preservation and restoration.

Through our analysis, we aim to show that the reviving of Pingjiang Road has followed the logic of the same consumerism in globalization (Bao, 2008; Zukin, 1995). On one hand, this mode of spatialization inhibits the publicity capacity of this urban space by encouraging individuals’ consumer identity and discouraging that of citizenship. On the other hand, as people perform their sociality and utilize digital media to not only weave points of social connections in this locale but also connect spaces beyond this spatial coordinate, they are enacting the potential of the space as a possible venue for a “community orientation” and a venue for publicizing or socializing their activities of personal significance. It is in such individuals’ voluntary emplacement at this site, where they are under an unrestricted gaze of others with potential mutual awareness, that the publicity capacity of an urban space resides. In brief, this article aims to develop a case study with a general theoretical interpretation of how in the age of digital media, some specific urban spaces, through people’s practices of cultural consumption, exhibit “the imperative of public space” (Smith & Low, 2006).

Public space and publicity

“What is public space?” “What characteristics should the public space have?” Even though much has been written on these issues, they remain debated in various academic disciplines. The related literature works are hugely diverse and they have attached varying meanings to public space, publicness, and publicity. ² It would be self-defeating to attempt a full representation of this body of knowledge. With a theoretical background informed by scholars as diverse as, for example, Jürgen Habermas, Hanna Arendt, Jane Jacobs, William H. Whyte, and Sharon Zukin, in this article, I will limit myself to highlighting and threading the points that directly inform the case study.

In urban design and planning, public space typically means “open space,” referring to streets, parks, plazas, and other publicly owned and managed outdoor spaces, as opposed to the private domain of people’s homes or places of work. However, the recent evolution of the forms of urban settlement with the growing number and variety of semi-public spaces managed by wholly private entities or private–public partnerships has put in question this notion. Today, public space needs to be understood as different from the public domain of the state and its subdivisions, but rather more broadly as a space accessible to the public (Tonnelat, 2010). Included also, following Smith and Low (2006), are the media, the Internet, and shopping malls. They argue that public space, more theoretically, is to be differentiated from private space “in terms of the rules of access, the source and nature of control over entry to a space, individual and collective behavior sanctioned in specific spaces, and its rules of use” (pp. 3–4). At its best, a normative public space is constituted by the elements of openness, common uses, and engagement of free collective expression and practices, which might lead to the formation of a social and political community orientation (Kohn, 2004). However, public space in our everyday life is not a homogeneous arena that is cut to fit the normative confine. There are various public places that differ in degrees and forms on the aforementioned dimensions. In addition, in reality, the public and the private are often interpenetrating, and increasingly so with the advent of digital media (Thompson, 2011).

Public space so conceived underscores the elements that constitute publicness of a space and emphasizes its structural design, as embodied in rules of access and regulations of its usage. However, this conception also needs to incorporate the subjective, situated viewpoints from which users of a space operate. Following Erving Goffman (1974), public spaces are the realm of unfocussed interactions among anonymous strangers. This perspective stresses that the production of space is not limited to the stages of design and construction but extends to subsequent space usage. This thesis is elaborated in Low’s (2009) dyadic “co-production model” of space, which differentiates and connects the material processes of space production and the subjective processes of individuals using and experiencing a space, which she calls “the social construction of space.” Following this line of arguments, public space reveals its social materiality by accommodating diverse encounters and interactions; it does not exist a priori as a spatial category but is in the process of becoming.

The advent of digital media technologies, some have argued, further complicates this process of interactive constitution of space. Through the notion of “mediated communication,” these scholars have brought to the fore the communicative dimension of spatial utilization and the capacity of space. That is, people may use media as both resources and venues in their interactions that are visible in public and oriented toward public formation (e.g. Couldry & Hepp, 2013; Couldry & MaCarthy, 2004). As Thompson (2011) has argued, the development of new media of communication has altered the very nature of the public, the private, and the relations between them. It has brought into being various forms of “mediated publicness,” which, arguably, has become a distinctive property of contemporary publicity.

We may use “variable publicness” or “bounded publicness” to think about the spatial capacity for public activities or activities of sociality. The political scientist Margaret Kohn (2004) seems to share this view. She argues that it is impossible to find an ideal-typical public space since urban environment is composed of places with varying degrees of publicness and privateness. Accepting the public and the private as two poles of a dynamically changing continuum, it is possible to conceive places of social activities as having varying degrees of publicness. In other words, most of the places that we share with strangers, such as shopping malls and cafés, are neither public nor private but rather mix elements of both, forming diverse “hybrid spaces.” With the spread of global consumerism, often these are places that are developed to bring people together for consumption, a mode of participating in the global capitalist economy (Zukin, 1998). Emphasizing, however, the potentials of such spaces in fostering spontaneous social interactions among people of various social strata or backgrounds, Kohn (2004) calls them “social spaces.” In a similar vein, Edwards (2006) calls them “civic spaces” to emphasize their capacity to accommodate individuals’ mutual visibility and enactment of their civic or citizenship oriented actions.

Following this line of arguments, our empirical task then is not to search for some places that fit some a priori definition of public space in order to answer the question, “Which urban spaces are public spaces?” Rather, we seek to inquire into the necessary elements of publicness and how they come into being in social actions; we do so by adding the roles of digital media among the objects under our analytical gaze. Taking this approach, we ask, How may the urban spaces that have been structurally designed for historic and cultural consumption reveal certain forms of publicness? How may such physical spaces interface with the virtual spaces constituted by people’s uses of digital and mobile media? How may such interface entice or inhibit the potentials of publicness of such spaces?

In more general terms, we take a perspective that recognizes the mutual constitution between urban space and communication (Pan & Yu, 2015). In this perspective, the publicness of a urban space is embodied in how people interact with one another in a locale, via various forms of mediation, how they form relationships as agentic actors through such interactions, and how in such processes, they form their “in-between spaces,” namely, their social interfaces. Kohn (2004) has expressed a similar view. She uses “intersubjectivity” to characterize the feature and capacity of the space that fosters and is constituted by communication and interaction. This theoretical perspective also prescribes an analytical approach of focusing on users of a space, what they do both in and to such a space, and what experiences they acquire from their interactions with the space.

To build a bridge between this theoretical perspective and the empirical world, we find Németh and Schmidt’s (2011) analytical model useful. The model identifies the ownership, management, and uses/users as three constituting dimensions of publicness of a space. The levels and forms of publicness of an urban space may be assessed in terms of varying intersections of these factors. More specifically, spaces may be differentiated based on whether and how they are owned by a government body (public) or a private individual or corporation (private). It is possible to locate spaces that fall somewhere between these two poles, such as spaces of mixed ownership/operation (e.g. publicly owned but privately operated). The management of a space refers to the manner in which a space is controlled, maintained, and regulated. More specifically, it refers to the methods by which owners implement their conceptions of acceptable uses, users, and behaviors. Such methods or techniques may include physical features of a space (such as making seating available) and rules of access and usage (such as the presence of surveillance cameras or security guards). The third dimension refers to actual uses and users, assessed in terms of diversity as well as users’ own perceptions and recognized realm of behavioral possibilities.

In the rest of this article, we will use the grid formed by these dimensions to organize our case study of Pingjiang Road in Suzhou. We will analyze three types of empirical materials to discuss the publicness of this urban space: (1) texts of Suzhou government’s documents on the preservation and development of the Pingjiang Road historic quarter as well as media reports on the ongoing process; (2) field observation notes from the author and members of our team who entered the field multiple times both as researchers and users of the space; and (3) records of in-depth interviews that the team conducted with the personnel of city management, shopkeepers, tourists, and consumers. ³

The changing Pingjiang Road in Suzhou

As one of China’s most well-known historic waterway towns, Suzhou is often touted as “the Venice of the East.” It is a city on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and on the shores of Lake Taihu in the province of Jiangsu. Founded in 514 BC, it has stood for over 2500 years and gone through the transformation from a famous city of commerce in history to a modern industrial city in contemporary China. The city abounds with cultural relics and historic landmarks and is famous for its traditional Old City (Gu Cheng), the network of canals, and exquisite traditional gardens. In 1982, the central government identified Suzhou as one of China’s “National Famous Historic and Cultural Cities.” Since then, the urban development of the city has been following the principle of “preserving the Old City, and developing new districts.”

Located in northeast corner of the Old City section of Suzhou, the 1606-m-long Pingjiang Road extends from south to north along the Pingjiang River, which feeds a labyrinth of watercourses across the block. A map drawn by the Southern Song magistrate Li Shoupeng in AD 1229 shows that the area’s layout has remained largely intact for centuries, and many ancient structures, such as bridges, wells, archways, and residences of historical figures, have survived the ravages of time. With its urban pattern of “double chessboard” of crisscrossing streets in parallel to canals and the spatial composition of “bridges over flowing waters and dark grey roof tiles over white painted walls,” the area is regarded as the epitome and one of the best-preserved areas of the Old City of Suzhou.

Pingjiang Road was put under preservation restriction in 1986. In 2002, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Committee decided to hold its 28th annual convention in Suzhou. Pegged on this international event, the municipal government set up the Old City Preservation and Construction Office to coordinate the development and implementation of the plan of Suzhou’s urban development. Following the aforementioned principle, the preservation was to achieve the objectives of protecting natural sceneries and cultural relics, improving facilities for utility provisions, and combining the historical aura and modern conditions. To implement these ideas, the municipal government invited scholars from prestigious universities both at home and abroad and other organizations to develop renaissance plans for Pingjiang Road. It also set up the Pingjiang Historic District Preservation & Restoration, Co., Ltd (PHDPR), as its management arm. After a series of pilot projects designed to accumulate experiences and improve the plan for preservation and development, a phased-in approach was adopted. This process led to the guideline that codified the following objectives for urban renewal in this historic quarter: improving the overall living condition of the area, protecting key architectural elements, preserving and restoring as priority, and reconstructing only where necessary (Lin & Ruan, 2006). In addition to the guideline, the overall framework for Pingjiang Road urban renewal also includes the principle of economic and financial sustainability, which is stated as implementation models “propelled by the government, operated in the market, assisted by policies, and supported by administrative departments.” With these elements comprising the scaffold, in 2003, under the general umbrella of Pingjiang Road Preservation and Environment Remediation, the city started a series of projects. Clearly, the municipal government (with explicit approvals, needless to say, of the central and provincial governments) has been exerting its public power—“public” at least in its claim of legitimacy—to plan, design, and lay down rules and regulations for the space and its uses, and through these actions, embodying and enacting the ownership of the space.

Such a state-directed “public” realm is also an arena where trained professionals, including urban design experts, scholars, and artists, put their specialized knowledge and skills to use. Organized by the government, they helped develop the technical specifications on “preservation” and “development.” These are stated as nine strategic points, including codes on things such as building height, historical building preservation, old building remodeling, traditional spatial character maintenance, streets widening, and public amenities improvement, and so on. In these stipulations, “preservation” means taking a comprehensive approach to maintaining the cultural environment of the historic quarter, which necessitates the restoration of the identified historic buildings and cultural monuments. More specifically, this involves the restoration and maintenance of all buildings of cultural values in the block from Song (960–1279), Ming (1368–1644), and Qing (1616–1911) dynasties, making them functional and visually aestheticized. Some more recent historically valued buildings, relics, and time-honored trees also need to be restored and protected as needed for maintaining the overall cultural environment of the area. “Development,” as reflected in these guidelines, means sustainable use of Pingjiang Road on the basis of an improved residential environment, accomplished by striving toward an ecological balance among various elements that have made the area unique, including the water system comprising rivers and canals, historic buildings, classical gardens, traditional courtyards, and bridges or corridors. Thus, Pingjiang Road becomes a site for professionals such as architects and other design artists to connect their creative talents with real estate capital and turn their visions into “restored” structures of the area.

Media representations have been an integral part of the ongoing project of bringing to life the Pingjiang Road Historic District (Pingjiang Lu Lishi Jiequ), as the area has been formally designated. These are not only in the ideas and imageries on the preservation and development plan that have been created and disseminated but also in the cultural significance imputed to the relics, artifacts, and spatial layouts of this city space; the promotion of the place as a tourist destination; and the elevating of the place to be a symbol of the “authentic” Suzhou. Not only the traditional print and broadcast media but also websites, blogs, and online travel and entertainment guides join the creation of the representations of Pingjiang Road or, using the differentiation by Couldry and MaCarthy (2004) on “MediaSpace,” the “space in representations.” The different media outlets and platforms reinforce one another on the claims that Pingjiang Road has been transformed into a showcase of the authentic ancient Suzhou. It has kept the traditional spatial layout of “narrow alleys threading enchanting vistas” and the traditional architectural feature of “black-tile roofs over elegant white painted walls.” Such media representations of what constitutes the “authentic” Suzhou and the Wu Culture, the ancient culture in the region of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River dating back for more than 2000 years, which is best preserved in Suzhou, in turn serve as a guide to visitors of the area on what to look for and how to impute cultural significance to them. These visitors in turn, via social media, share their observations and experiences, thus reinforcing the “branding” of this unique urban space.

The branding has proven quite successful. Pingjiang Road has now earned much recognition, including the Honorable Mention of the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, one of the first state-designated Top 10 Famous Historic and Cultural Streets in China, and one of the National Class 4A Tourist Attractions. In addition, it has been widely applauded as a classic case of urban heritage protection in China. These forms of recognition in turn have further increased the commercial value of Pingjiang Road as an icon of Suzhou City, the epitome of the city’s historic and cultural heritage, and a must-visit tourist destination. In addition, they also further legitimize the consumption logic in the preservation and development of the area, which is to gentrify the area by removing the undesirables such as noise, untidy streets, visual cues of deterioration, undesirable shops, and the visible traces of disposing everyday wastes. In short, the coming of the present Pingjiang Road involves both physical and symbolic “disciplining” of the urban space, turning it into a place for more predictable and routinized activities, namely that of consuming the “culturally framed” space (Zukin, 1995), goods and services sold there, and the cultural symbols on this site that speak about the “true” Suzhou.

Incorporated in the changing Pingjiang Road is also the municipal government’s ambitious plan for building “Digital Suzhou” in the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) and “Smart Suzhou” in the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–2015). In the auspices of these plans, building the digital network infrastructure has been incorporated as part of the sustainable development of Pingjiang Road. Accompanied with the infrastructural building are the efforts to make available digital means for consumer uses of the urban space. For instance, the online availability of the comprehensive information of the city’s geographical layout, online platforms for travel services, online tourism services, and other online searchable data services are being established gradually. As a result, visitors to Pingjiang Road use the space not only to consume the available services at the physical site but also to connect their activities and share their experiences beyond the physical space via mobile devices and “free” Wi-Fi.

What we have sketched here is the process in which Pingjiang Road got transformed from a residential neighborhood of traditional buildings, bridges, waterways, and other objects and landmarks of everyday life into an open and consumption-oriented space; from a city space for residents’ private life into a hybrid space where the private life of local residents flows together with the activities of seeing and being seen in this locale by outside visitors. This area now has become an “in-between” space in that it is between the private and public categories, in the social interactions between individuals, and in the liminal moment of people touring a nonroutine and exotic place or going through a transitional phase in life. The policies of the local government, the participation of the professionals, and the involvement of capital lured from various sources are threaded together by the neoliberal logic in the development of what Zukin (1995) calls “symbolic economy.” It continues to change in the same overall framework, as the businesses there are highly unstable, and private small businesses are giving away to the expansion of big corporations and invasion of international corporate chains.

Publicness of Pingjiang Road: three interrelated theses

Against the backdrop of the transformation of Pingjiang Road, we can now address the issue of how the publicness of this “in-between” space may be embodied and manifested. To do so empirically, we will organize our analysis by answering the following three questions. First, how is the configuration of this urban space and its affordance for different types of activities achieved via structural design and contention? Second, in this “built environment” (Lawrence & Low, 1990), what kinds of cultural practices are accommodated, supported, and encouraged? Or more simply, what do people do in this space and what experiences may they expect to acquire from their activities? And third, how do users of this urban space express and share their experiences of using the space via digital technologies and, by doing so, participate in the reconfiguration of this built space? From these analyses, we will show how publicness as capacity is built into the space, showcased in the activities of space usage, and circulated as well as shared in and beyond the physical space.

Defining and controlling the space of Pingjiang Road

As shown in the previous section, the preservation and redevelopment of Pingjiang Road is a project that is initiated and directed by the municipal government, which has enlisted commercial developers and entrepreneurial professionals to form a partnership. Together, they have worked to turn this city space into a “miniature of Old Suzhou.” There are two aspects to this process. One involves creating and assembling what may be called a “display culture” (Dicks, 2012). In this case, Pingjiang Road is being fashioned as an exhibit that showcases the “Old Suzhou.” The things that are put on display include repaired and aestheticized historic architectures, cultural relics, traditional handicrafts, and local delicacies. As part of building such an exhibit, the municipal government has designated 43 buildings and 16 other structures (e.g. ancient wells, bridges, and memorial arches) in this neighborhood to be targets of “heritage protection.” Such a designation means the application of strict renovation codes, which stipulate that exteriors of these structures, in terms of both the style and weathered surface, need to be repaired but not changed. But entrepreneurs are invited to invest in renovating the interiors of these and other buildings in the area, turning them into places for consuming publics to experience the traditional local culture. Such places can be retail stores selling traditional handicrafts, teahouses to experience the traditional mode of leisure that consists of sipping tea and listening to Pingtan, a storytelling singing in Suzhou dialect, or museums of traditional arts, including Pingtan and the local vernacular opera known as Kunqü.

The display, as well as visitors’ experiences with the display, of the local culture is made possible through commodification. In its preservation and redevelopment, Pingjiang Road has been turned into a site for consumption. Visitors who stroll along the street may purchase and consume various goods and services peddled by the licensed stores and vendors. They do so while browsing the display items and evaluating how “authentically local” they are. In other words, what they consume, in addition to the goods and services for material needs, are the added value from the imputed cultural significance of being “local” and “traditional” in these goods and services. Furthermore, even the very activities of browsing and consuming these objects in this particular location are “consumed” by visitors who come here to get a confirmation of how well this city quarter showcases the “authentic” Old Suzhou. In other words, they are not simply consumption activities but also activities of engaging a distinct cultural past. The city space, then, is transformed into a participating component of consumption, and using this space is largely part of consumption.

This spatial nature and the structural logic of constructing this city space are clearly reflected in the organizational feature of the PHDPR, the public entity charged with the responsibility of overseeing the management of the space. The company has two associated general managers, one in charge of engineering and the other responsible for marketing and branding. The main responsibility of the former is to oversee the maintenance and renovation of the protected heritage structures, while that of the latter is to market Pingjiang Road as a destination for leisure enriched by “cultural experiences.”

Correspondingly, one of the PHDPR’s main businesses is to attract and select business tenants. It also has a major role in reviewing the developers or construction contractors for the business tenants who aspire to renovate the buildings rented. In essence, the PHDPR is a “gatekeeper” in maintaining the nature of the “historic and cultural district.” The very first batch of tenants who were selected to open businesses on Pingjiang Road in 2002 were all “cultural merchants,” who made and retailed local handicrafts and traditional silk wears. Since then, tenants have included local delicacy eateries, teahouses, cafés, boutique hotels, gift shops, and so on. In addition to considering the business orientation toward historic and cultural consumption, when selecting tenants, the PHDPR also enforces the principle of commercial and financial viability. This does not mean that all prospective move-in merchants must be demonstrably profitable. Rather, the focus is on the immediate investment in the proposed renovation project and the long-term sustainability of the project. The PHDPR makes available several options to attract the right businesses to the city space, including the “rental deduction via renovation” option. That is, a prospective tenant may invest in renovating a rented property in compliance with the city’s “heritage preservation” codes and be exempt from paying rent for 3–5 years. The PHDPR of course carefully assesses the prospective merchant’s financial strength and the viability of its proposed renovation.

Within such structural confines, Pingjiang Road, as a space for historic and cultural consumption, has nevertheless been in nonstop changes. This is reflected in part in the fluid composition of the merchants operating on the street and, correspondingly, available goods and services. In addition, the designated quarter has also been expanding. For example, during the time of our study, renovation projects were underway to implement the plan of “moving further to the east and extending to the north” (dongjing beikuo). The objective is to extend the renovated street further north, doubling its length, and link the east-west waterway that connects Pingjiang Road to the Humble Administrator Garden (Zhuozheng Yuan), one of the traditional gardens in Old Suzhou, located to the northeast of Pingjiang Road. The project also involves excavating cultural and historic relics along the way and incorporating them into the historic district. In addition, the small alleys that intersect Pingjiang Road have also been under renovation. For example, an interviewee at the PHDPR told us, Daru Alley (Daru Xiang), where the PHDPR management offices are located and many local residents still live, is to be developed into “a street of locally produced traditional handicrafts, such as jades.”

These new projects follow the same model that has been developed since the beginning. That is, the owner of the city space, through the PHDPR as its managerial agent, exercises its public power to define the course of excavating cultural and historic resources in the space, formulating plans for their preservation, and cultivating their commodity values by leasing them to merchants who comply with the official codes that define the orientation of the historic district. All these operations take place in the market place and are aimed to attract more visitors, aka, consumers, to this place that exhibits Old Suzhou. If there is something new in these new projects, it is a greater openness to international investments and the nonlocal cultural elements that they carry.

A good example is Wang Xiaohui Art Gallery featuring contemporary arts that opened in 2013. Located at 54 Daru Alley beside the bustling Pingjiang Road, the Gallery was mainly funded by Suzhou government and housed in a beautiful Ming Dynasty residential building, a 400-year-old Suzhou landmark called Ding Mansion (Ding Zhai). The renovated and refurbished building is configured into four exhibition rooms, one large exhibition hall, and a courtyard that is designed as a garden. It stands out in that the renovation has gone beyond the strict stipulation of “repairing to restore the original” (xiujiu rujiu). Instead, the art gallery has modified the building’s exterior with some elegant fusion of traditional and modern elements. The idea, as we learned from the PHDPR, is to “bring an ancient building alive” (huohua gujianzhu), a point that has been invoked in descriptions of the renovations of at least six other protected historical heritage buildings.

Embedded in the success of the government-led and market-based model to transform Pingjiang Road are also tensions among different stakeholders, including shopkeepers and their customers, local residents who want to keep the “Old Suzhou” neighborhood that they once knew, and out-of-town visitors. Such tensions arise from contestations among different actors who are differently disposed to the same urban space. In our interviews, many shopkeepers who opened businesses in the earlier years of the street’s development, while celebrating the change of the street from a sleepy residential neighborhood to a bustling retail and tourist district, spoke about the transformation in a nostalgic tone. They lamented the replacement of the “authentic” local delicacies by bland snacks and milk tea, the local handicrafts by memorabilia items that had no local cultural connection. In their eyes, the street had been bleached of its cultural imprints. This “de-culturing” trend has been part of the making of the space managers on behalf of the city and the challenge that they are facing. While striving to maintain the “cultural flavor” of the street by selecting merchants who specialize in selling the local and the traditional, they also have to attract tenants who have the financial strength to invest in the required renovations of historical heritage buildings that they aspire to rent and meet the needs of the city to gentrify the urban space. As Pingjiang Road soars in its reputation as a “miniature of the authentic Old Suzhou,” it is flocked by visitors from all walks across the country, especially college students and white collars. In many cases, their consumption appetite far exceeds their available time for and competence in appreciating local culture and ancient history. Cultural bleaching is thus both a result of these dynamics and a contributing factor. The group that loses in this spatial contestation is local residents, who are supposedly the living “soul” of this historically preserved neighborhood. In addition to losing the space for their serene everyday life, they also find that their private life is taken as part of the display culture that outside visitors exoticize and consume.

Changing shops and the changing street

Pingjiang Road is a dynamic urban space. In addition to the above-depicted process of spatial production, the dynamism also arises from activities of the users of this space, including shopkeepers and visitors. As Low (2009) articulates in her “co-production model,” an embodied space emerges from the joint work of the materialistic processes of space production and “the phenomenological and symbolic experience of space as mediated by social processes such as exchange, conflict, and control” (p. 24).

The users’ experiences of Pingjiang Road and the practices that constitute them to a large degree are “framed” by the branding of this space (Goffman, 1974). In various media outlets, this urban space is represented as an “Old City” neighborhood for cultural consumption and recreation, as well as a place for nostalgic encounters of the authentic Suzhou. For example, in the city government’s official website, the promotional text describes Pingjiang Road as “a zone to experience Suzhou traditional slow life,” “an area to practice trendy slow life,” “an open-air museum displaying the traditional architectures of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River,” and “a memory deposit of the ancient Suzhou.” ⁴ Similar depictions can also be found in the materials that promote Suzhou to prospective tourists. Participants in the production and circulation of such depictions clearly include municipal government, its managerial and marketing arm of the PHDPR, local as well as national media, retail businesses, and tourists. Often, these depictions frame Pingjiang Road as part of ancient city of Suzhou and its surrounding region in the south of the Yangtze River named Wu. They help define and market Pingjiang Road as a site to experience the Wu Culture that has been preserved there physically and to consume the retail merchandises that materialize either the culture in “its original flavor” (yuanzhi yuanwei) or particular memories of the culture.

But in reality, since 2002 when the first batch of shops opened for business, Pingjiang Road has been in continuous change. Lining the stone slab street are shops in iconic architectural structures, shop signs and banners, as well as displays of merchandises in these shops. As visitors stroll along the street, next to them in the Pingjiang River, periodically, a rowing boat floats by, carrying tourists busy pointing their cameras at cultural symbols and icons on the river banks. As required by a “culture of display,” the space is highly visual, and all the visual elements are consumable by visitors in the sense that they can be purchased or experienced as added values of purchased goods and services. Looked at more closely, after years of development, the street now also embodies what Foucault (1994) called “heterotopia,” with elements signifying different historical periods and varying aspects of life juxtaposed in one space. Mixed with traditional and local objects, many of the shops have features that reflect the owner’s taste and aesthetic orientation as well as their striving toward distinction. The diverse goods and services that these shops peddle also vary, from tea to music instruments, from local cuisine to embroidery silk wear, from art studio to café, and from art crafts in precious stones to delicacies such as marinated chicken feet. Through their business operations, these shoppers, as some observers (Wang & Gao, 2014) commented, have built a place with “harmonious co-presence of the traditional and trendy, nostalgic vanity and indulgence of physical comfort, as well as romantic leisure and cultural exploration.”

The changing shops have also been changing the street as a “built environment” (Lawrence & Low, 1990). To be clear, the principle of “preservation guiding renovation” or “renovation for preservation” continues to be implemented by the government-owned management company, the PHDPR. This is reflected in the practices of architects designing a renovation project, who go to great lengths to preserve the visual impression of a building’s distinct aging architectural features. In total, two examples illustrate the point. One is the Pingjiang Youth Hotel. The historic building from Ming dynasty that houses the hotel has the peeling patchy external wall facing the street. It looks like being left untended, but in fact it was coated with a transparent chemical to stop further wind erosion without ruining the irreplaceable patina of age. Another hotel, Archi Garden (Zhuyuan Huiguan), is housed in a century-old complex. Before renovation, the building was near the point of crumpling. Architects shored up its elaborately structured roofs with iron and steel and replaced rotten pillars with new ones, but kept other changes to a minimum.

At the same time, shop owners on the street navigated within the codes of building renovation and spatial management creatively for their own business interests. One example is Dashufang, presently a restaurant that features the traditional local cuisine called Subangcai. The owner is among the first group of merchants that opened businesses on the street in 2002. In an interview with us, he proudly proclaimed himself “a guardian of Pingjiang Road” for his nostalgic love of the street’s “beauty of fragmentedness” in the old days. Still, even though he has been striving to help maintain the aura of Old Pingjiang Road, his efforts have been limited to interior renovation and decoration of his shop. His business, while at the same site, has changed from a teahouse, a café, a pub, to a restaurant now. The reason, he said, is that he has to cater to the changing consumers. Another illustration of the fluid nature is the well-preserved Qing Dynasty courtyard named Pan Mansion (Pan Zhai). When we started the project, it had been renovated and was used as a clubhouse for private parties. At the end of our fieldwork, it had been converted into an open space that had a handicraft shop, a boutique bookstore, and a teahouse. It also rent out its spaces for book-reading gatherings of scholars or artists that are also open to the public. In addition, we have also observed that in recent years, multinational corporations have begun to have a foothold in the street: Starbucks opened its store in a renovated traditional building on Pingjiang Road in 2014.

If ethnographic observations via repeated visits and multiple interviews could help us depict in some details the changing shops and business compositions on Pingjiang Road, it is much more difficult to capture how tourists and consumers participate in the changing Pingjiang Road. To some extent, we have learned about it indirectly from the tensions that the management of the PHDPR felt and pressures that the shop owners experienced. That is, the clientele of Pingjiang Road as a space for historic and cultural consumption has always been fluid and changing toward the direction of consuming images or appearances, reminiscent of a trend toward what has been characterized as “hyperreality” (e.g. Baudrillard, 1988). Among the highly fluid and diverse activities of consumption and sociality taking place in this unique space is a type of frequently observed activities that manifested the framing of the street as a remnant of the authentic Old Suzhou and site of cultural nostalgia. These are photoshoots for brides’ glamor photos or young couples’ wedding photos. The brides or would-be-brides may be wearing traditional cheongsam (Qipao) or western-style wedding gown, but they stand by an ancient bridge or lean against an aged white painted wall. When using this urban space, it seems, they want these visual cues of the tradition, history, and local culture to be part of their life, appropriated into the recorded memories of the critical and liminal moment of their life. Through such activities of inscribing their memories in material objects, they are not only consuming the remnants of the history and culture in the urban space but also affirming, first, the framing of the space as a site for consuming the preserved history and culture of the city and, second, demonstrating the capacity of the space for diverse acts of sociality.

Interaction and communication among users

In addition to being open and accessible, as well as socially accommodating of diverse activities, how does the Pingjiang Road area articulate or reveal the potentials of its publicness with the media representations that users of the space circulate and share beyond the bounds of the locale? More specifically, how do people’s onsite activities intersect with their activities of creating and sharing images and experiences in the virtual space via their mobile devices?

These questions arose from our observations that signs of free Wi-Fi connections and websites were prevalent and mobile phones were ubiquitous on the street. On one hand, as some scholars (e.g. Drotner, 2005) have pointed out, using mobile devices, individuals appropriate a physical space more flexibly. They can be at once part of the co-present public in a place and a node of a network that connects other publics in other places. Specific to visitors of Pingjiang Road, when using their mobile phones, they are not only appropriating the public setting, but potentially they may also be contributing to opening up the space in other directions via the Internet. They may also be transgressing the boundaries between the physical and virtual spaces and creating multi-directional flows of connections and sharing, which in turn may reconfigure the space as well as the publicity capacity of the landscape of Pingjiang Road. On the other hand, such spatial appropriation and reconfiguration via mobile devices are contingent on the information and communication infrastructure that is now increasingly a part of a geographic space (Adams & Jansson, 2012). Building such an infrastructure is an important part of Pingjiang Road’s renovation. Indeed, Suzhou municipal government made developing “smart tourism” a key component of its 12th five-year plan mentioned earlier. The “smartness” here refers to the networked capacity to collect, process, integrate, and share information and, on such a basis, enhance decision-making in both the city’s governance and residents’ everyday life.

Building an infrastructure for the goal is well underway, and the model is market-driven, not different from that used for the preservation and renovation of the city space. The PHDPR has built its own website and opened its official microblog (Weibo) account. But at this point, both are limited to publicizing government policies and promoting the Pingjiang Road historic quarter. Its manager told us that they had no plan to support a Wi-Fi connection to cover the whole area or provide their online forums because “many stores offer Wi-Fi connections, it’s more convenient to tourists.” What they neglect is the balkanized Wi-Fi network in this area. ⁵ Many cafés, teahouses, and restaurants provide “free” Wi-Fi connections only to their own customers. They place a visible sign at the entrance of their store stating, “No purchase, no use of Wi-Fi.” The store controls the access by installing its own router and sharing the password only to customers who have decided to order their food or drink. Routers of different stores also vary in speed and setup. As a result, many visitors who wish to share photos and video clips or perform online search find such a balkanized Wi-Fi infrastructure frustrating. As a microblogger with the online name “Private travel” (silüxing) commented on his microblog page, “it would be nice to have an open-access Wi-Fi coverage for the whole area” because “I want to search online to find a particular store to visit and share my whereabouts with my friends so they can join me any time they can.” As of now, users of the space mostly rely on paid data plans on 3G or 4G telephone networks to roam the cyberspace while visiting Pingjiang Road.

Still, mobile communication advances a sense of belonging to a public setting and opportunities to perform in public communications. In our interviews, we paid much attention to whether and how shop owners on Pingjiang Road use digital media to promote their businesses and interact with customers. We find that their practices vary. Green Poplar Tree Tailor (lüyang caifengpu) is a tailor shop specializing in handmade traditional cheongsam. Its owner, Ms Yang, finds it important to have an online presence. She believes that her business, in terms of both the products and the shop’s exterior decoration, has strong traditional Suzhou elements and matches well with the street’s cultural atmosphere; it is well positioned to attract tourists who are looking for the authentic Suzhou. But while customizing a cheongsam is a slow process, “the majority of customers are tourists who are not living in Suzhou” and thus do not have enough time to spend in the store for getting measures and trying on various fabrics and designs. At the time of our interview with her, she was planning to register a website to build her shop’s online presence, where she could “update classic and creative new designs online, and upload photos of models in various styles of cheongsam.” She saw such an online presence as a way to create a fusion between visitors’ visual tours and their onsite experiences on Pingjiang Road.

Possibilities of such fusion mean that users’ experiences of Pingjiang Road’s landscape get more intertwined with their sharing and consumption of media images (Jansson, 2002). For example, the owner of the yogurt shop named Fox’s Home (huli jia) claims that he interacts with customers online quite a lot. He has his own microblog account, and it was through his microblog that we set up our interview appointment with him. He said, “I spend a lot of time on the microblog, responding to almost every customer who comments on our shop.” He believes that such interactions will facilitate “a sense of belonging that Fox’s Home strives to foster.” In his analysis, the new media platforms such as microblog could amplify a media message geometrically. A single online comment saying “the food of Fox’s Home tastes terrible” could have a major impact, and it is thus important to interact with customers online proactively and build a good rapport.

This recognition of the power of customers’ online comments is widely shared. Many shop owners pay close attention to Popular Reviews (Dazhong Dianping), an online platform for user-generated reviews on restaurants, cafés, bars, hotels, beauty salons, gyms, and many other kinds of retail and service establishments. At Yushifandao, a highly rated and popular restaurant on Pingjiang Road, a manager admitted that his team paid close attention to user comments on their restaurant because the website is a place where consumers share their experiential knowledge voluntarily, and it could have significant impact on a business’ reputation and the market sentiment in which the business operates. Integrating our field observations and experiences of using the site, we have ascertained that the website is a community orientated place. Anyone can get on the site to search for, say, a restaurant in a city, see its reviews and ratings by other customers, learn about customer-recommended dishes, and see the photos or video clips of the establishment and its dishes that others uploaded. Through their searching, uploading, and commenting activities, users of the online platform and Pingjiang Road are connected in the highly fluid virtual space; they also build connections between their offline and online activities. For shopkeepers, this double connectivity not only provides new venues for promotion and opportunities for reaching prospective customers but also operates as a constraint and surveillance on their services.

In a number of senses then, the Pingjiang Road historic quarter is an assemblage of “privately owned public spaces” (Németh & Schmidt, 2011). Different space users or even the same user at different times or in different situations may experience the area differently. Digital online media play important roles of introducing, shaping, and sharing the built space in idiosyncratic ways. For example, one microblogger with the account name xiyafly writes, he first visited Pingjiang Road at the recommendation of a friend, but since then, because he liked it so much that he had visited there two more times in a close succession. He exclaimed that “only there can (an old city quarter) be so well preserved, with harmonious co-existence of businesses and residences. Plus, it’s still so peaceful. With restaurants, bookstores, old brand-named stores, distinguished boutique stores, and traditional Pingtan, … it’s just wonderful.” Indeed, many first came to know Pingjiang Road through “recommendations” or “how-to travel guides” on websites such as Popular Reviews. One visitor whom we interviewed is Ms Chen, an amateur photographer. She first encountered Pingjiang Road when she read a travel log on Mingtang Youth Hotel someone posted on a website called Hornet’s Nest. That prompted her to book her reservation in this hotel for her visit to the street. She thought the historic quarter was ideal for photography. She recalled,

On some online photography forum, I saw some photos of aged wooden windows. I was very attracted by their peculiar flavor … also reflections in waters. They gave me a visual sense of the water towns in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River.

To her, situated in the picturesque scenery, the flowing river under an ancient bridge, a primeval well by the side of the bustling Pingjiang Road, a local resident doing laundry at the river bank, and so on are all great images to be captured.

Visitors, aided by the city’s digital network infrastructure and their own mobile devices, actively participate in the framing of Pingjiang Road as a place for the authentic Old Suzhou. Their experiences of this urban space, to use Jansson’s (2002) terminology, involve integrating their experiences in three realms, landscape, mediascape, and socioscape. These realms are intricately interpenetrated. We may add to Jansson’s analysis our observations that people use digital technologies to thread their experiences in the three realms closely and actively. This is a point that interestingly is clearly recognized by many visitors of Pingjiang Road. For example, a microblogger with “yang_yang_” as his account name mused in his interview with us, “Nowadays, we’ve become enslaved to our phones. We’ve been entrapped by mobile phones. Being physically at some place is no longer sufficient.” What he expressed, using our theoretical vocabulary, highlights the blurring boundaries between public and private spaces and the feature of “in-betweenness” of Pingjiang Road as an urban space for historic and cultural consumption.

In the three strands of analyses in this section, we took urban space as a conjoint process of production and construction via various encounters and activities (Low, 1996). We have shown that Pingjiang Road is open by their structural and functional design; when combined with private uses by profit-seeking shopkeepers and gratification-seeking consumers, it entails certain affordances, or capacity (Jiménez, 2003), “a showcase for practices” (p. 138) of individuals for their own pursuits, enabling a space of this kind to be used in unexpected ways. Clearly, city planners and official space managers play very important roles in shaping such a space. Meanwhile, the flexible adaptability of individuals’ uses and experiences of the space means that their practices necessarily incorporate various feedback or reactions, as reflected in competitive claims, criticisms, discussions, and reflections, which are activated as part of the organically emerging endeavors for some order, meaning, or, simply put, coordination among diverse social activities in one open space. These are communicative activities of publicity; they express the publicness of the space. Normally they are too diverse and microscopic to stir the structural disciplining impulse of city planners and management officials, but they are the “sociological facts” (Durkheim, 1895/1982), so to speak, that constitute the empirical ground of the publicness of an urban space. Furthermore, such activities of individuals’ sociality, on and through digital media, may traverse spatial boundaries, including those between the physical and the virtual, and connect individuals and groups who may be differently emplaced.

Concluding comments

In this article, taking Suzhou City’s Pingjiang Road Historic District as a case, we explored how against the backdrop of digital media and consumerism, publicity may be embodied and articulated in an urban space of this type, an open and renovated space in an old city that encourages private cultural consumption via nostalgic longing for its historic and cultural significance. In building this case study, we first outlined a theoretical framework on public space and publicity and discussed three analytical elements for assessing the publicness of urban spaces. On this basis, we then discussed the changes of Pingjiang Road in the preservation and renovation scheme that the municipal government devised and interpreted how together the structural configuration of the urban space and practices and experiences of users of the space have embodied and articulated its potential publicity capacity.

Our analysis shows that Suzhou’s Pingjiang Road becomes a consumption space as a result of the collaborative production by the municipal government and commercial interests in real estates, retail, and commercial arts. It involves transforming historic remnants and cultural relics into commodities or added values to consumer goods hawked in the space in service of encouraging the consumption of some manufactured “authenticity” of Suzhou. Such deeply engrained consumption orientation is also developed with a cultural mission. It is to excavate the historic legacy of an ancient city with 2500 years of history and, with the aid of private capital, revive commercially usable past in a contemporary urban district. Hence, preserving and renovating the Pingjiang Road historic quarter is an official strategy in Suzhou’s city development; it is for branding the city and embodying a collective memory; it is also to construct a place to perform such a memory. Thus, the municipal government uses the preservation and renovation codes and its managerial arm of the PHDPR to ensure this city quarter to be aestheticized to meet the tastes and preferences of the rising but diverse urban middle class. Some in this class are longing for a place of escape from the high-voltage city life, others are hoping to be awed by the exotic past, and still others may be simply looking for a fun place to hang out with friends accompanied by affordable foods and drinks. But the necessary openness of the space and heterotopic juxtaposition of varying physical and visual elements that constitute its texture also make it a hybrid space: While encouraging users to perform their identity as consumers and fleeting visitors, the space nonetheless provides opportunities for people to act out their sociality and acquire a sense of historically rooted collective identity in their consumption activities.

This mode of renovating an old city quarter for contemporary usage is not unique to Pingjiang Road in Suzhou (e.g. Kong & Qian, 2011; Sun, 2007). But the case does reveal two specific features. First, the municipal government played a dominant role in the preservation and renovation of Pingjiang Road Historic District. From its conception, the project has been part of the overall plan to preserve the Old City. It is the government that recruited experts and urban planners to develop a detailed plan, formulated the renovation codes, set up the PHDPR to manage the space, and attracted capital investments from various sources, including global conglomerates. Second, the changing of Pingjiang Road has been dynamic, revealing certain features of “variable publicness” or “bounded publicness.” In our analyses, we have demonstrated these features with descriptions of users’ practices and experiences. We have also shown that the publicness of any specific site in this district is highly fluid, indicated by the fluid nature of the business operations.

The analysis of the case has provided an empirical basis for us to develop a few theoretical propositions on publicness of urban spaces. First, we need to examine publicness and its composition in the fluid boundaries and varying mixtures between the public and private realms. More specifically, a public space must be open in terms of public access, inclusion of diverse cultural elements, and receptiveness for people to act as members of the public, namely, to engage in expressions, exchanges, and connections. To have such nature encoded in the structural configuration requires systemic arrangements in city planning and governance. But it is also possible to examine space-use practices to see how they may entice a process toward such a structural configuration. Taking this approach rather than presuming some predetermined nature of an urban space may enable us to uncover potential publicity capacity in the space.

Second, it follows that the publicity capacity of a city space is not in its predefined state but in a process of its becoming. This is a configuring dynamic that is simultaneously material, social, and technological. In the digital media era, the calls for building a “digital city” or “smart city” are leading to more than building a digital network infrastructure. Rather, they inspire people to engage in more interactions, exchanges, and sharing at concrete sites and beyond. We have seen from the above analyses that such lively and diverse transactions not only realize the public openness of a physical space, but also generate the interfaces with cyberspaces. As a result, users’ activities of connecting and sharing with one another also potentially expand the publicity capacity of such a space.

Third, as we pointed out at the beginning of this article, as a type of urban space, Pingjiang Road is not unique. Many other cities in China now have been developing such renovated and aestheticized historic quarters to encourage tourism and other modes of consumer activities. While this pattern of city development has long ago been observed in other parts of the world (e.g. Zukin, 1995), it is a relatively new strategy in China’s urban development. It has also been an integral part of China’s urban gentrification process. In the United States (e.g. Zukin, 1987), this may be a process of city governments luring private capital to invest in changing a city’s downtown area, attracting the businesses and creating the aesthetic visuals that help induce desires of the urban middle class and drive away the socially marginal and economically disadvantaged residents. Complicating the process, in China, there also seems to be the active participation of entrepreneurial artists, historians, and art curators who have recently discovered tremendous commercial values in manufacturing culture. The process in China also entails the intense excavation of the historic and local remnants and relics, in sharp contrast to the decades of historical and cultural annulation in the Cultural Revolution from the late 1960s to the late 1970s.

The generality of the urban development strategy raises questions on how publicity or publicness may be embodied in and articulated by not only such urban spaces but also the very processes of developing such spaces. In even broader terms, under the contemporary condition of hybrid spaces expanding in cities, how should we theorize more fruitfully public spaces and publicity in relation to the undertaking and prospects of public life (e.g. Cupers, 2005; Jiménez, 2003)? An implication from our case study is that our approach to answering such questions cannot be limited to starting with an a priori categorization of public versus private spaces or taking an urban space as “a passive and abstract stage” (Cupers, 2005, p. 731); rather, it may benefit from treating an urban space as an actively produced participating component of everyday activities (Low, 2009). Following this logic, then, we may examine how private and public elements are interwoven, how boundaries of the public and the private are transgressed and used as “in-between” spaces, and how interfaces of physical and virtual spaces are generated. Such analytical foci, in our view, bodes well with a more agentic and dynamic envisioning of the publics in people’s lifeworld.