Imperfect forms of public space – even in a digital age

All images are extracts of drawings by Ed Wall.

Through a series of vignettes, Ed Wall explores tensions across old and new public platforms, revealing the entanglement of spatial and digital ecologies and far-from-ideal forms of public space.

How have public spaces changed? In recent work, I settled on defining public space as sites and practices of coming together around issues of concern – places that are inclusive of the social and spatial relations of streets and squares, cafes and pubs, town halls and libraries, newspapers and television news, political meetings and violent protests. While none of these are perfect forms of public space, claims of some digital platforms as sites of free speech and emerging democracy require a rethinking of what public spaces can be.

Media

It has long been accepted that social media platforms create public spaces for coming together, sharing and debate. With the advent of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, public space has expanded, like it did in the 17th century with the innovation of printed newspapers. Published media disseminates issues of interest, it provides forums for people to come together and it has the power to hold business interests and elected officials to account. New ecologies of digital public spaces have been further formed as print media migrates to online platforms, leaving behind their declining print sales.

Space

Despite fears that physical spaces of public discourse would also disappear into the web, in some UK cities over the last four decades the number of publicly accessible landscapes has grown. Many new forms of public space have also emerged, but these are often not the state-mandated forms of community parks and town squares that we were familiar with in the UK up until the 1980s, or even through the New Labour government of the 1990s. Instead, we see largely privately owned public spaces financed by corporate interests and facilitated by local, metropolitan and national government.

Change

There have long been varying forms of public space in cities like London where streets, squares and parks are owned and managed by the different councils, government departments, the Crown Estate, housing associations, commercial developers, private landowners and more. But when their terms of ownership and publicness significantly shift, it could be argued that these sites are no longer effective public spaces. They become seen as compromised platforms for governments or corporations to push partisan agendas that serve commercial interests. Concerns in the digital realm are similar. In 2022, Elon Musk claimed that Twitter was a ‘de facto public town square’ and that ‘Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy.’ When he acquired the platform, Musk fired content moderators in order to make speech less regulated. But as behavioural scientist Douglas Yeung wrote, ‘Firing all the rangers might let anyone walk into national parks, but trails would go unmaintained, trash would pile up, traffic would snarl and the majestic landscapes that attracted everyone to begin with would suffer.’

Regulation

The lack of regulation of big technology companies has left the publicness of their social media increasingly skewed. But as with historic tensions regarding physical public spaces or traditional news outlets, where self-regulation has long been argued for, government imposed controls raise concerns about free speech and independence. The nature of regulations and policing impacts publicness and the motives behind these controls can push them further towards a private realm. When journalists critical of Musk are excluded from X for reasons beyond the platform’s ‘terms of service’ the publicness of this town square comes into question.

Ownership

Much like the privately owned public spaces that dominate many contemporary cities, the private ownership of social media platforms –whether by individuals or corporations – makes a difference that many commentators struggle to reconcile with traditions of public space. But just because Musk bought Twitter and changed the name and rules for the social media platform, this does not preclude its presence as a public space. While all public spaces have restrictions placed on them, by varying combinations of governments, owners and managers, the rules also establish tensions which contribute to the contested politics that frequently plays out within these spaces.

Freedom

Public spaces are of course not neutral containers of political activities or impartial platforms across which public life is performed. Whether in city halls or online forums, there are always limits to public spaces, from legal boundaries to digital surveillance cordons. To simultaneously advocate for free speech while restricting users of the platform to do so is a paradox, as we have seen play out across digital and physical realms. Public spaces are not free spaces and town squares have never been synonymous with free speech. To claim otherwise ignores long histories of public space exclusions, told through the experience of women, homeless people, marginalised groups and enslaved populations that have in the past been shut out of public life.

Coalescence

Public spaces are now designed, managed and used spatially and digitally: landscape architects plan simultaneously for CCTV surveillance and Instagrammable scenes; global events are broadcast from one city onto large pop-up screens in another; and everyday functions of waste collection and traffic control are managed with smart technologies and digital twins. But can digital be the answer to such a plethora of spatial problems? The writer Shannon Mattern cautions against such an embrace of digital technologies: ‘the city as computer’ she claims, ‘appeals because it frames the messiness of urban life as programmable and subject to rational order.’ It is also unlikely that the inefficiencies of a public life that are produced through many diverse actions would survive the rational mind of computer scientists or the drive for profit of corporate owners.

Speed

We can recognise that digital technologies have accelerated public debate and public actions – online and on our town streets. Issues of concern, like violence that has disrupted communities, rapidly draws angry publics together, often to spill back into urban public spaces. What has been termed ‘networked incitement’ can be seen around the world, including the role of social media platforms in the January 6 insurrection in Washington DC in 2021, or the UK summer riots in 2024. Events in public spaces, whether cultural celebrations or political demonstrations, have also recognised that digital platforms are essential to amplify their message or generate more revenue. Political organisers know that photos of single protesters with bold signs are more attractive to media audiences than the issues around which public demonstrations form.

Scale

Despite a spatial-digital hybridity evident in many urban public spaces, the planetary expansion of digital networks and what the philosopher Nancy Fraser terms ‘transnational publics’ points to further forms of spatial-digital public landscapes. Disparate networks of activists and communities, which come together to raise concerns around collective issues, from climate change to racial justice, define new public spaces. These constellations of public spaces have been facilitated by the expansion of digital networks and access to social media. They are frequently grounded in specific landscapes, where impacts such as those of global warming or racial discrimination are most pronounced. The entanglement of spatial and digital public spaces provides a means to form collective action while revealing the relations between where decision makers reside (usually capital cities), landscapes impacted by these decisions (frequently less visited places) and public sites of resistance (more visible city squares and media platforms).

Unevenness

Public spaces are unevenly distributed and not consistently accessible. The provision of public spaces between and within cities is rarely fair. Restrictions and regulations imposed on public spaces also vary between nation states. Access to digital networks and social media platforms depends on who you are, where you live, what you can afford, the government you live under, as well as the rules of engagement of each platform. X is a distorted form of public space – but so was Twitter before Musk bought it. And while in a space like Trafalgar Square, its relation to the state may limit public rights to access and protest, this does not make X a ‘de facto public town square’. Social media is just one of many public places where people come together to form publics – even when the ‘terms of service’ are inconsistently enforced.

Ed Wall is the director of the Centre for Spatial and Digital Ecologies at the University of Greenwich and a visiting professor at Harvard University. He is the author of Contesting Public Spaces: The Social Lives of Urban Redevelopment in London.