Embodied geographies of liveability and urban parks

Introduction

Liveability is at the fore of urban policy in Australia and worldwide. For example, the Australian Commonwealth Government (2011: 54), in Our Cities, Our Future: A National Urban Policy for a Productive Sustainable and Liveable Future, defined liveability as ‘the way the urban environment supports the quality of life and wellbeing of communities’. Forms of higher density living options, including high-rise apartments, are encouraged in Australia as part of sustainable city planning policies to enhance liveability (Australian Commonwealth Government, 2013). As Fullagar et al. (2013) remind us, these urban policies seek to change not only house design and suburb configuration but also everyday interactions with neighbours and the outdoors, including urban parks. Questions of how urban parks contribute to the ‘liveable’ quality of communities usually point to various ‘social units’ that measure the benefits of proximity to ‘greenspace’. The statistics are compelling. Statistically, people living in closer proximity to greenspace are likely to be more physically active (Maas et al., 2008), to live longer (Takano et al., 2002) and to express an enhanced sense of life satisfaction (Ambrey and Fleming, 2014). These human metrics shape justifications for the provision of greenspace amongst decision-makers. Yet, one must note the statistically significant difference of perceptions of safety and accessibility between survey respondents and activities that privilege younger affluent white men (Lapham et al., 2016). Such findings are provocative. They fail to account for unequal access to urban parks (Baum and Gleeson, 2010), the processes where different social groups carve out private territories (Bannister and Kearns, 2013) and the challenges of difference and belonging (England and Simon, 2010; Scraton and Watson, 1998). Lloyd et al. (2016: 11) argued that ‘the social dimensions of liveability are not well explored, clearly defined or well integrated in the policy and practices of urban planning’. What is required is an account of the experiences of urban parks that is attentive to the social (emotions, affects, meanings) and material (weather, plants, pathways, fences, built infrastructure) entities working together towards or against liveability.

Our aim is to address liveability as embodied. We explore liveability as a bodily configuration where a sense of self can possibly be achieved, or not, in and through the different kinds of entities – discursive and non-discursive – that come together to constitute an urban park. Hence, we pay attention to sensations, feelings and moods that are enriched and leveraged through trees, canopies and street furniture in order to produce a sense of self among diverse residents. To achieve this, we have divided our argument into four sections. The next section reviews some key academic theorisations of urban parks. We then outline the dualistic qualities of liveability as both objective and aesthetic, before thinking through the term as embodied geographies. After Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we conceive urban parks as territory. Thereby, we understand territory not as a thing but as a continuous coming-together of humans, non-humans and other forces into a working order, which entails a set of expectations rather than a space delimited by stable borders and fixed confines. In this reading, territories are denoted by their function even (and perhaps especially) when the function is achieved through actors and materials that are not normally associated with that function or capacity. The concept of territory provides the necessary lens to think through the implications of liveability in terms of embodiment, emotion, affect, spatial ordering and differentiation. Influenced by the work of feminist philosophers, the concept of territorialisation allows a reimaging of the modes of becoming, specifically the bodily and spatial configurations of subjectivity; how it can be achieved and how it can disappear (Ahmed, 2004; Braidotti, 2002; Probyn, 2005). The following section introduces our case study and methodology. Our interpretation rests on a sensory ethnography combining participant observation with interviews and ‘go-along’ with 18 relatively affluent and white high-rise apartment residents in Wollongong city centre. The concept of territory enables us to illuminate how the embodied geographies of being and becoming in and through urban parks are techniques of spatial ordering and differentiation. We illustrate that those living in higher density apartments possess an orientation to liveliness in their embodied capacity to affect and be affected. Parks and their attributes harness these already existing capacities of dense populations. Finally, we suggest how embodied geographies can be used in liveable city planning agendas.

Progress towards urban parks research

Urban parks are an integral aspect of urban studies. Consideration of the critical urban park literature spans a wide variety of disparate approaches: urban parks as site of class struggle; imagining park natures as a commodity; urban governance and bio-politics; and the subjective realm, including the emotional and affective attachments. Informed by a Marxist tradition of urban studies, parks are conceived as a material expression of class struggle, capital and labour. For instance, Cranz (1982) and Taylor (1999) implicitly understood urban park design within capitalist relations of the western 19th century industrial city. Cranz (1982) initially provided a four-stage model embedded in class relations to account for metamorphoses of urban park design in the United States: the Pleasure Ground (1850–1900), the Small Park Movement (18900–1900), the Reform Park (1900–1930) and the Recreational Facility (1930–1965), subsequently adding a fifth stage, the Ecological Park (1990s–), embedded in the politics of sustainability (Cranz and Boland, 2003). Taylor (1999), on the other hand, documented the eviction and increased property prices that displaced lower socio-economic groups from Senecca Village to create Central Park, New York. More recently, in Mitchell’s (2003) account, urban parks are refurbished to comply with specific bourgeois needs often through municipal and state policies endorsing privatisation. Smith (1996) termed this process ‘revanchism’. Within this Marxist tradition, urban parks are understood as increasingly restricted places along the lines of class because of becoming a commodity within the neoliberal project of capitalist urbanisation (Harvey, 1989).

Imagining park natures as a commodity within a capitalist process of urbanisation is a key theme of early neo-Marxist urban political ecology (Heynen, 2014). For example, Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw (2006: 5) argue that urban nature is ‘constituted through the social mobilisation of metabolic processes under capitalist and market-driven social relation’. They further suggest that ‘the material conditions that comprise urban environments are controlled, manipulated, and serve the interests of the elite at the expense of marginalised populations’ (Heynen et al., 2006: 6). The work of early urban political ecologists helped rethink urban park natures as an active participant in the constitution of urban subjects in a variety of ways, including as a site of political struggle (Gandy, 2002) and as an instrument of governance (Brownlow, 2006). Most early urban political ecology literature focused on the implications of the dominance of hegemonic environmental imaginaries of nature as a commodity within a process of capitalist urbanisation that shape and reshape the process, practices, politics and use of parks (Gandy, 2002). This work spoke directly to the role that parks play in maintaining, producing and circulating a specific knowledge of the relationship between the city and urban natures.

The attention to capitalism, class and the state is understandable and important as such work helps to understand urban park design emerging entirely from capitalist relations, or as a form of resistance to them, an emphasis on structuralist theorisations of power. Nevertheless, this tends to ignore the sets of concerns related to the role of self-governance and subjectivity. Urban political economy is often critiqued for being overly deterministic in the production of urban nature and for treating social power top-down to position citizens as self-monitoring subjects born of capitalist relations that impose risks and responsibilities on the poorest in the interest of the affluent.

The ways in which urban parks are enlisted in the formation of subjects is not new to the literature, and spans a wide variety of disparate approaches. Alongside the psychogeography of Lynch (1960), this work includes the environmental psychology of Marcus (2014) and Francis et al. (1980). Indeed, drawing on the psychologist Carl Jung, the work of Marcus (2014) argues for space as an experiential register of our sensibilities; moods solicited from our placement in the environment. Alternatively, the work of Lynch (1960) – which foreshadowed the humanistic strand of behavioural geography – argued that people have ‘mental maps’ or ‘images’ of cities based on five categories of cognitive information held in their mind about the built environment. In turn, these ‘images’ then act as the basis for their everyday behaviour. Although, following Rabinow’s (2003: 355) discussion of urban space, Foucauldian-inspired analysis would suggest that parks may be conceived as ‘part of a shifting field of power and knowledge showing the gradual self-formation of a class, a nation or a civilisation’. The spirit of Foucault’s writing direction drew urban studies’ attention to governance, self-management, knowledge/power, discourse and ‘truth’. Foucault understood that governance does not occur through oppressive regulations, but creatively through the arrangement and management of people and objects, producing the material conditions that make specific ways of living possible.

As illustrated by Gabriel (2011) and Carpenter (2013), interest turns to tracing who produces and circulates certain knowledge about urban parks, and the subjects made by it. A focus on the way in which urban park imaginaries produce a governable space and subject is long present in the literature. This work highlights how gendered, classed and racialised sets of ideas shape urban park design to help constitute specific subjects, places and practices. Byrne and Wolch (2009) remind us how it is hard to ignore the ways in which the aesthetic ideals of urban park natures are mobilised to differentiate and categorise people along the lines of race, class, (im)mobility and morality. Byrne (2012) draws on critical race theory to conceive urban park natures as a white cultural artefact. He illustrates how parks are tied intimately to the cultural politics of race, gender and class in western culture and philosophy.

Since the mid-1990s, geographical accounts that address the subjective dimensions of urban parks have entered the more-than-human realm to re-animate the missing ‘matter’ of urban parks within humanistic and environmental psychology approaches (see Wolch, 2002; Wolch and Emel, 1995). One strand of this more-than-human work grappled with the dilemmas of ‘how animals figure into the moral landscape, once claims of human dominion and lack of animal subjectivity or agency are open to question’ (Wolch, 2002: 733). This strand of thinking opened up questions about the moral choices we make in designing and visiting urban parks as if animals mattered. Another strand of work focused attention on bodily involvement in which urban parks are co-fabrications with more-than-human bodies. For example, animal geographers explored human–dog interactions in urban parks to improve understanding of when certain animals are understood to be in or out of place (Urbanik and Morgan, 2013; Wolch and Rowe, 1992). These strands come together in the work of Instone and Sweeney (2014), who adopt a relational political ecology approach to better understand the importance of the emotional attachments and affective entanglements that turn some dog owners into ‘interspecies night soil collectors’ to mediate the access and use of urban parks (Instone and Sweeney, 2014: 359).

Rethinking liveability through the body

From this literature review, interpretations of who and what belongs to urban parks is thereby multidimensional. Three definitions of liveability emerge within this urban park literature: an objective measure; an aesthetic sensibility; and an affective intensity. First, an objective definition of liveability often seems to be at the forefront of contemporary public health literature on open space (Ambrey and Fleming, 2014). Crucially, in this definition of liveability, urban parks are objectified and made tangible by various measures or ‘social units’. Second, liveability characterised as aesthetic sensibility; that is, a feeling of belonging to the urban park that might include memories, the presence of others or design (Francis et al., 1980; Marcus 2014). Underpinned by environmental psychological thinking, the job of architects is to design urban parks with the capacity to affect and engender a sensation of community. This anthropocentric definition of liveability considered the relationality between things (seats, paths, plants) and a certain user, but as discrete, pre-existing entities. Finally, liveability may be defined as specific affective resonance. In this case, liveability is conceived neither as solely an attribute that can be measured nor as a design aesthetic, but rather as sensations circulated between and through objects and bodies.

To focus on the affective sensibilities of liveability, we draw on Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to conceive urban parks as territory. Thereby, a territory is not a given, but stabilises a sort of ‘play’ in the world, and this play likewise constitutes the individuals within it. Territories hold social and material entities together and function in alliance. As a conceptual device, territories produce order that operates as a mechanism of exclusion and inclusion; without territories, sets of material and social elements would remain in a chaotic setting. For example, imagine entering an urban park that does not ‘fit’ you; possibly one that is too dark or too noisy, where there is too little grass or too few trees or one that is occupied by the wrong kind of people. An uninviting territory is one where you could never be yourself. This is because the urban park is territorialised by other social groups; the homeless perhaps, whose postures, gestures and speech convey you as an intruder.

After Deleuze and Guattari (1987), we conceive territories as comprised of oppositional forces working along two axes or dimensions that constitute, assemble and reassemble urban parks and subjectivities. As Braidotti (2002: 62) argues, this enables us to conceive of subjectivity as an ‘embodied, embedded, assemblage of agentic sub-materials within; and through encounters with the material and more-than-human world’. An embodied geography of liveability thus turns to performativity, sensation and the unfolding events in which subjectivities emerge and are made felt to belong or not. Following Braidotti (2002: 68), liveability is understood as a case of ‘the actualization of the immanent encounter between subjects, entities and forces which are apt to mutually affect and exchange parts of each other in a creative and non-invidious manner’. Therefore, we conceived that a person in a park might derive a certain kind of subjective legitimacy via the territorial arrangements assembled and reassembled. On one axis, there is re-territorialisation that maintains a working arrangement and order in such a way that certain bodies (gestures, postures, speech and signs) appear taken-for-granted in the parks (towards regulation, stability, unity, ‘selfness’ and fixing of normative categories within sanctioned power apparatuses). The second axis is de-territorialisation (towards the possibilities of difference, plurality, otherness and movement, or moments of change and openness when a threshold or paradigm is broken). De-territorialisation is a separation from a given purpose, where materials and actors perform in unexpected or unusual ways in another domain, relative to their usual or known identities or roles. Consider, for instance, how men’s public urinals in urban parks move from being part of a social arrangement of sanitation to a means to fulfil same-sex desires (Brown, 2008). The concepts of de-/re-territorialisation enable us to conceive of how our bodies and the material attributes of and meanings attached to urban parks are all linked together and transformed by the working arrangements that enable us to organise, change and reassemble a certain sense of self. In sum, our embodied geographical approach to liveability conceives of urban parks and subjectivities as folded together and involved in an enduring process of change while, at the same time, being fixed by social, biological and technological classifications that can be slow to change.

Location and methods

We interpret urban parks as territory through the bodies of high-rise apartment dwellers in inner-city Wollongong, one of the fastest growing Australian regional metropolitan centres in New South Wales, some 80 km south of Sydney. The city centre parks of Wollongong are a good example of a regional centre where, since the millennium, there has been a growing focus largely on high-rise apartments. Equally, Wollongong is not exempt from how over the last decade the term ‘liveability’ has become part of the discursive parameters that underpin the revitalisation strategies of many city centres. The Wollongong City Council promises on its website that: ‘We are committed to maintaining and delivering new infrastructure projects across the Local Government Area (LGA) that will improve the liveability, sustainability and keep our LGA progressive and innovative’. Elsewhere, delivering on this promise is shaped by the design aesthetic of the architect Gehl (2011). Urban parks are an integral part of this design ‘vision’ to generate more ‘liveable’ high-density city-centres, alongside attracting shoppers, visitors and finance (Burton, 2000).

In Wollongong city centre, there are four principal urban parks: Market Square, Stuart Park, Lang Park and MacCabe Park (Figure 1). Market Square dates from the 1830s, as a market place in the original Wollongong town plan. However, according to Fleming (1976), Market Square rarely operated as a market place, and the contemporary park design dates to the 1880s. The design illustrates Cranz’s Reform Park agenda as demonstrated by the planting of fig trees, the construction of a pathway and the erection of a band stand. Likewise, Stuart Park was a variant of the Reform Park as illustrated through the provision of changing facilities and picnic shelters from the early 1900s (Metusela and Waitt, 2012). Similarly, while Lang Park was created as a relief project in the 1930s by the draining of a lagoon, this coastal park was imbued within early 19th century middle-class moral values associated with sunlight, sea air and sea-bathing. In contrast, MacCabe Park is an example of Cranz’s (1982) Recreational Facility, illustrated by the provision of specialised sporting facilities in the wake of suburban growth in the 1930s – a velodrome, a football field and tennis courts. In the 1950s, these recreational facilities were closed and MacCabe Park was reimagined as an Art Park and place of remembrance. While a war memorial was constructed, the sculpture park was never realised (Waitt and Gibson, 2009).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

City centre parks of Wollongong.

Our analysis is based on 18 people – seven men and 11 women – who consented to participate in a project on apartment living in Wollongong city centre. Recruitment occurred through an invitation contained in a short postal survey exploring ‘liveability’ and distributed to 3970 households living in high-rise apartments in Wollongong city centre. Of the 341 responses, our sample of 18 was recruited from the 68 respondents who expressed interest in future research participation. Our participants reflect the demographic composition of the city centre. All were relatively socio-economically advantaged and Anglo-Australian. They were differentiated by age: four were in their 20s or 30s, four were in their 40s or 50s, while 10 were over 60 years of age. Three were parents, six were grandparents and only two participants lived alone. Two had lived their entire life in Wollongong. Ten migrated to Wollongong more than five years ago, four migrated more than 10 years ago and two migrated more than 20 years ago. In terms of employment, two were university students, seven were professional service workers and 10 were retired. All participants were able-bodied.

With Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) idea of territory, we used methods that are alive to the discursive, affective and material textures of everyday life. Hence, sensory ethnography is our methodological approach. This approach, described as by Pink (2009), is mindful to how different research materials facilitate ways of being close to the embodied, affective and material textures of everyday life. Our analysis employed a form of affective mapping to ask how urban parks work towards or against liveability. Affective mapping pays attention to the feelings, emotions and affects experienced by participants to shed light on the processes of de-/re-territorialisation. Hence, rather than attending to meanings, our analysis attended to the processes of being and becoming in and through urban parks.

We employed Pink’s (2009: 129) advice and considered analysis as a ‘continuous and incremental process’. Our fieldwork conducted between April and May 2014 combined semi-structured interviews, park ‘go-alongs’ (Carpiano, 2009) and participant observations. These mixed qualitative methods provided a diverse empirical data – written notes, transcribed interviews and photographs. Participant observation provided opportunities for the researchers to immerse themselves in the urban parks of Wollongong city centre at different times of the day, and to document different sensations – for instance, the sound of the birds, the feel of the grass or the sight of the ocean. The transcribed semi-structured interviews provide insights into the differences participants experienced between urban parks, their reflections on their motivations for visiting, what they would like to change and a comparison with the researchers’ sensory realities. When reading, listening to and reflecting on these transcribed interviews, we paid attention to how participants felt as they occupy urban parks and the subjectivities that emerge. Having attended each park and conducted semi-structured interviews, we began to interpret how urban parks were felt as anthropic, misanthropic and restorative.

The ‘go-along’ allowed opportunities to further explore what sensations, feelings and emotions participants associated with urban parks, and in what ways certain places are important or not. After Carpiano (2009), situated and embodied knowledge generated by the go-along provides an opportunity for a more nuanced account of how the sensory and material elements of urban parks made participants ‘feel’. We wanted to learn more about the smells, textures, sights, sounds and other embodied and emplaced feelings. Equally, based on Longhurst et al. (2008), we treated bodies as important vectors of these affective dispositions as they were described and enacted by participants through the go-along. Hence, attention was given to the route taken and to bodily gestures, and we remained alert to changes in tone of voice or walking pace. Therefore, this method combined conversational ad hoc questions with fieldnotes of the research contexts, with specific emphasis on documenting the more indeterminate affective dispositions of bodies (human and non-human) encountering one another. On one level, this embodied engagement is crucial to our analysis. It helped us to connect with non-verabilised ways of knowing. On another, it offered us an opportunity to situate participants in the analysis by encouraging a process of reflection on how they use sensory knowledge and experience to organise and make sense of their lives. What follows next is a consideration of the embodied geographies of liveability and urban parks.

Urban parks sensed as restorative

The restorative or therapeutic affective sensibilities were attached to ‘most favourite’ urban parks, specifically Market Square and Stuart Park (Figure 1). Our participants frequently used phrases like ‘heaven’ and ‘paradise’ to describe the sensations of these urban parks. The concept of territory allows us to conceive how urban parks territorialised as ‘heaven’ enable people to manage anxiety in their lives. For example, sitting on a seat in Market Square, Jean (67 years of age, retired professional, nine years resident in Wollongong) drew attention to how territorialisation operated through the capacities of bodies for affecting and being affected by the arrangement of social and material entities they encounter here:

This Market Square, this little place here, I think is absolute heaven … I think the natural world actually kind of energises us in a way that we’re not aware of … I think that they actually have that kind of [pause] that psychic kind of benefit of calming down – the green space, the beauty of it; just calming you down a bit as kind of a way of … almost like getting oxygen into your … as you’re gonna head back into the hard-surfaced Mall and all that stuff … Even a park that’s not landscaped has still got that soft edge or just the grass under your feet or a tree. I think that’s what the town centre stuff, it’s all … it’s all hard, not a soft edge.

Jean illustrates the limitation of conceiving liveability solely demarcated by statistics or aesthetic design. Omitted from these definitions are affective sensibilities that energise bodies and increase human capacities to act. The distinctive affective transition registered on Jean’s body is noted by her use of the words ‘soft edge’ to describe her sensory experience and knowledge of Market Square in comparison to the Mall. Market Square, territorialised as heaven, is an example of the materialisation of imperceptible forces on the body. These sensations increased Jean’s power for acting and her capacity to continue with everyday life. For Jean, at the centre of how Market Square is territorialised as a restorative place is the circulation of affective sensibility in and through slower or stilled bodies by the sight of green, the touch of grass and social ideas about beauty manifest in park design. Jean reminds us that slow-moving bodies or corporeal stillness are integral to the material design and social norms of most urban parks. In this respect, we argue that it is important not to reduce urban parks to design or a shared cultural understanding of nature as pristine or beautiful. Rather, a embodied focus is maintained when urban parks are conceived as territory. Sensations of calming, peace or restoration are contingent on slow-moving or still bodies that organise material and elements into a working order to help sustain lives in the otherwise fast-paced city.

Similarly, Shelly (63 years of age, retired, four years resident in Wollongong) illustrates that liveability may be conceived not solely as a cultural artefact but also as an anticipated pleasurable affective resonance that sets the tone of urban park territories circulated through the sensory capacities of bodies. Since moving to Wollongong, Shelly explained that after every monthly doctor’s visit, she returns to sit on the same bench in Market Square. As an English migrant and mother, she outlined how the anticipated affective resonances of certain parks offer her body desirable sensibilities that help her to live. While seated on this bench, Shelly commented:

When I lived in Sydney, I used to go, and, [pause]. A few sad things happened in my life, and I used to go into the Botanic Gardens and sit under the gum trees and cry. It’s [the Sydney Botanic Gardens] like, it’s a very peaceful place … I can get it in an art gallery sometimes or, but for me, here, it’s [Market Square] the green and the trees and probably because I’m English. I think green is important to me because there’s lots of green in England, coz it rains a lot. So, trees and green are [a] huge emotional pull. So, if I come to sit in a park, any park, there is some emotional reasons for doing that, not just doing it for the sake of doing it. I get strong.

How Shelly draws upon the language of ‘emotional pull’ underscores the anticipatory affective resonances circulated by the sensations of trees and green she found in certain urban parks. The ways these affective resonances help assembled the urban park as territory gave social and material form to the process of becoming well. In her words, ‘I get strong’. As Duff (2016: 59) reminds us, recovery may be envisaged ‘as an emergent capacity to manipulate the affects, signs, spaces and events of a body’s “becoming well”’. Shelly’s account of regularly returning to sit in Market Square illustrates a moment of becoming well through the circulation of affective resonances of trees and green that enhance her bodily capacities to affect and be affected. Shelly goes on to explain how these regular visits and affective resonances accumulate and resonate together to cultivate a sense of self in Wollongong:

I like it because it’s a small intimate space in this cul-de-sac sort of thing, which makes it as quiet. Green. Lots of green [and] lots of trees which has a huge emotional connection for me … So, it’s not trying to be smart and sophisticated, even though I actually think it is smart and sophisticated. It’s [Market Square] actually quite Sydney. […] So, and it’s very peaceful and it’s very green. And, I like green; and there’s lots of trees, lots of seating. It just is … it’s just me.

For Shelly, the seated sensory engagement with Market Square was to become herself. The regular practice of sitting in Market Square – understood as a ‘smart’, ‘sophisticated’ and ‘small intimate space’ – is integral to becoming herself and making Wollongong a liveable city. The work of Shrauwers (2001) provides important insights into what it may mean for Shelly to sit as a form of meditation and silence. Here, the stillness of the body creates the opportunity for relaxation and wellbeing. Yet, Shelly illustrates how liveability can only be partially attributed to the meanings of sitting and the aesthetics of places. Alongside meanings and aesthetics, liveability relies on the affective resonance that circulates in and through seated bodies in the juxtaposition of the social and material properties of urban parks.

Urban parks sensed as anthropic

To further build our argument that liveability is an affective sensibility, this section considers the embodied geographies of sociality. Through the affective language of community and public space, urban parks were designed in Wollongong, like elsewhere, to emphasise the appeal of sociality. The design of urban parks is provisioned with footpaths, lawns, barbeques and seats to facilitate approved leisure practices, such as walking, picnicking, barbequing and sitting. In a similar vein, many urban parks promote an anticipatory sense of being antisocial, using signs that prohibit ball games, skateboarding, alcohol and camping. However, we argue that sociality cannot solely be attributed to urban park design, as the embodied geographies must be considered. For example, Phoebe (34 years of age, professional, three years resident in Wollongong) draws our attention to how the bodies of people are attuned to their environment, and how urban parks bring new forces into existence, in comparison to streets, that often intensify pleasurable bodily sensations and transform people. Phoebe gestures towards how sociality is a quality that does not reside in the urban park itself, but that rather is brought into being through walking bodies:

If I am walking in a park, people have a habit of saying ‘Hello’, which they wouldn’t if they’re walking along the street, which I always find fascinating [laughs] … it’s [Lang Park] quite a social place and Wollongong is a very family city, I think. So, if it’s a nice day, you can bet your life, there’ll be lots of people in the parks.

Phoebe illustrates how from a performative perspective the notion of sociality is maintained in urban parks, rather than streets, through greeting performances that enact a specific collective identity she named as a ‘very family city’. Our participant observation confirmed Lang Park as a site where heterosexually parented families walked and played together. To draw on Butler (1993), such performances could reinforce a certain notion of family based on the normative assumptions of sexuality and gender. At the same time, Phoebe illustrates sociality as a set of affective resonances through the tactile qualities of sunlight and warmth that fold and circulate through these performances.

Likewise, Jean illustrates the performative registers of sociality:

I think parks and open spaces, again, incidentally encourage communality, encourage the social. Even if we’re not going out there for that … We’re sitting down and somebody walks past and it’s like, ‘Hi’, ‘How are you?’ or ‘I’ll be finished with the barbecue in a minute’.

Jean goes on to illustrate the importance of broadening out the notion of sociality to include sensations that rely upon on the capabilities and capacities of bodies themselves:

But, it just seems like parks invite people to give … to be more tolerant of each other than we wouldn’t do if we were kind of rubbing against each other in the street […] I’ve always found them really, really terrifically cooperative and [pause] yeah, I like … [pause] I think … I mean, I find Wollongong a very friendly city anyway but in parks; people seem to be [pause] yeah, they’re very open to: ‘Good morning!’ and sharing and … yeah, being able to acknowledge that [pause] ‘Would you like to sit down?’ or move along, let you sit down; that cooperative kind of stuff.

The routine acts of urban park walking and sitting are at once performances that enact a specific identity and are at the heart of how sensations of sociality are understood and evaluated. What Jean values about Stuart Park, and open space more generally, is how the anticipatory affective affordances she named as tolerance make sharing practices possible. Jean illustrates how embodied sociality folds through the proximate bodies and environment. Jean holds in relief how the joyful affective sensibilities from greetings and sharing seats and barbeques have the power to work against anonymity and towards sociality. With the seat affording Jean a place to rest and relax, the pathway and/or barbeque beckoning brief future encounters, it is possible to discern the affective force in the convivial gestures, tones and utterances. Importantly for this project, the affective force that circulates between and that folds through bodies and objects tends to increase the capacities of people to share, regardless of the degree of acquaintance characterising these relationships.

Urban parks sensed as misanthropic

Participants tell about their diminished capacity to occupy urban parks through the absence of seating, walking bodies, trees, light and warm weather. Furthermore, none of our participants who regularly walked around the city centre had difficulty in articulating the difficulties of territorialising MacCabe Park (Figure 1), the ‘least favourite’ park. For example, standing in MacCabe Park, Ian elaborates how design and aesthetic sensibility renders this park more misanthropic.

Unimaginative, no design, no aesthetics. Yeah, it’s just really a bit of grass with a few chairs and crisscrossing paths. And nobody has really sat down and thought about turning it into a jewel of the city, which most many country towns around Australia do have with a feature park so close to the city. It [MacCabe Park] is clotted by buildings around the outside.

According to Ian, MacCabe Park has ‘no design’, the lack of design perhaps reflects the planning blight that surrounds MacCabe Park since the closure of the recreational facilities in the 1950s. MacCabe Park does not conform to the conventional urban park designs modelled by Cranz (1982).

Ian goes onto explain the impossibility of ordering MacCabe Park in ways to positively affect and induce sensations of sociality, even given the affective potentiality of daylight and good weather:

And, if I look at it now, I cannot see one person in the park. Here we are on a sort of very nice day but on an afternoon, there is not even a person walking through it. It just is testament to the lack of sort of work that’s been done on it to make it a good park.

For Ian, the potentiality of sociality resides in the people walking through the park, as well as in the park’s objects (chairs, grass and paths). Ian’s rendering of sociality points towards the affective resonance not as a sensibility locked into objects or bodies, but as one which circulates and moves between and through bodies and objects. We argue that this is how the anticipatory affective forces that circulate and flow through bodies in proximity to MacCabe Park work against occupancy and the sensibility of embodied sociality.

For some participants, specifically women, the anticipatory affective resonance of fear is central to the ways in which bodily and social space align. The response of fear is itself dependent on well-established narratives of who is fearsome – including men cruising for sex, loiterers, undesirables, bums, drug addicts, drunks and unaccompanied teenagers – and is bound up in the gendered and sexed politics of mobility. Fear does not reside in a specific body; rather, as Ahmed (2004: 62) argues, fear ‘works through and on bodies of those who are transformed into its subjects, as well as its objects’. In what follows, we explore the accounts of participants who evoke a sense of fear through encounters with bodies constituted as ‘bums’, ‘men cruising for sex’ and ‘loiterers’.

Through the figure of ‘the bum’ Brie (20-something years of age, service worker, life-time resident of Wollongong) demonstrates well how a circulation of fear as an affective resonance operates as a technique of spatial ordering and differentiation:

MacCabe seems dodgy … Well the bums that are around there or the, like I know this is not very nice to say, lower socioeconomic that are around it. Not that you feel they are going to do anything to you, but you just feel like you’re going to get robbed or not necessarily get robbed, but I don’t know. It just feels a bit dodgy and that you need to wear jeans and joggers or you need to wear ugly clothes so you won’t feel so out of place. I think that’s more it. You just feel really out of place in that one.

Brie demonstrates Ahmed’s (2004) argument that fear may be conceived as affective resonance involving relationships of proximity that restabilise the ‘apartness’ of gendered, racialised and classed bodies. For Brie, ‘the bum’ is the object of fear encountered in MacCabe Park. Brie reads difference in clothing. Her reflection involves the repetition of well-rehearsed stereotypes, as if all people of lower socioeconomic bodies are threatening. Brie illustrates how ‘the bum’ is rendered an object of insecurity by how she repeats, and then questions, the stereotype that renders all lower socioeconomic people as potential muggers. ‘The bum’ is felt as a threat, which is anticipated as future pain or injury. The fear announces itself through Brie’s statement: ‘MacCabe seems dodgy’. For Brie, safety becomes a question of avoiding MacCabe Park, or of not moving through that urban park alone. In her words, ‘You just feel really out of place in that one’. Brie reminds us of the feminist critiques that posit fear as a response to the threat of violence, rather than vulnerability being an inherent characteristic of women’s bodies. From a performative perspective, for Brie to have access to feminine respectability she must avoid walking through MacCabe Park alone, particularly after dark.

Second, Samantha (50-something years of age, home-maker, life-time resident of Wollongong) provides another illustration of how fear works to align bodily and social space, by illustrating how the fearful affective resonance of the figure of the man cruising for sex with other men involved the quickening of bodily mobility through MacCabe Park:

MacCabe Park has got a bit of a reputation as too prone to having a sexual pickup park, but I’ve never felt threatened. I suppose, because of the fact that if I’m going down to MacCabe Park, I’ve been on a mission in the sense that I’m going from point A to point B doing something. So, I really haven’t been loitering which is a shame because it is really a lovely park. I don’t know whether or not the toilet that used to be there is still there. I think that was a bit of a deterrent for people in the sense of as I said before, it had a reputation for it [cruising].

The toilet in MacCabe Park unleashes the forces of de-territorialisation. Samantha recalled well-established narratives in Australia that suggest same-sex-attracted men cruising for sex are a threat (Aldrich, 2004). Samantha illustrates how these narratives generate an affective resonance that calls for everyone to be on guard when visiting MacCabe Park. Narratives of cruising generate fear, rather than are its origin. The affective resonance of fear emerges when Samantha encounters slow or stilled bodies in MacCabe Park. For Samantha, in response to potential threatening encounters, safety here becomes a question of quickening rather than curtailing her movement through MacCabe Park. The de-territorialisation force created by discourses of men cruising for sex remains strong, despite the demolishing of the toilet block that has re-territorialisation at the heart of its logic.

Third, the figure of the loiterer plays a key role within the anticipated affective resonance of MacCabe Park as a misanthropic territory. As Stella (60-something years of age, retired professional, 25 years resident in Wollongong) confirms while observing some people sitting on the grassy hill in MacCabe Park:

For me, it’s bare and open, exposed. It doesn’t even entice my senses … I’m not, what’s the word I’m looking for when you’re … I’m not contained. I’m never comfortable. I like smaller spaces. I need to be enclosed. It doesn’t look safe. Sometimes I see undesirable people so you just don’t go there. Or I would sit here but if I saw them out there now, I would tend to move, but I certainly wouldn’t go down there. I think I’ll look rather odd sitting here on my own as well not unless she might be waiting for somebody there’s a couple of people over there … And that’s what I meant when I mentioned people loitering up there and probably down south. Yes. Which I supposed loitering that’s what the parks are for, isn’t it? To relax or to hang around and wait for people. So, it’s probably a wrong perception from reputation.

Stella reminds of how liveability may be conceived as a set of affective resonances circulated by narratives alongside a variety of sonic, tactile and visual media. Furthermore, subjectivities emerge from the capacity of the body to fold through and into the physical sensation of MacCabe Park. For Stella, MacCabe Park is territorialised by the wrong kind of people. In Stella’s words, ‘undesirable people and loiterers’. Creswell (2010) argues that the subject of the loiterer is a disquieting figure. The loiterer seemingly has no purpose and is understood as a shadowy figure. Interestingly, the behaviour of sitting in MacCabe Park is defined not in terms of relaxation as in Market Square or Lang Park but moves to becoming a sign of criminal intent. This illustrates how de-territorialisation is the separation of a specific behaviour from a given meaning within one territory and the constitutions of the identities within it and the re-territorialisation in another. As Dewsbury (2014: 430) eloquently argues, ‘the loiterer can thus be defined quite reasonably as an exemplification of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s line of flight, a movement (deterritorialisation) that acts as a withdrawal from the mainstream ideology determining the kind of world we live in’. Without purpose, for Stella the figure of the loiterer becomes a source of fear, an unpleasant experience and a reason for avoiding or moving quickly through MacCabe Park to protect the territory that is her body.

Conclusion

The liveable cities agenda is underpinned by the important rationale of how the urban milieu supports quality of life and wellbeing. This suggests a strong reason to study urban parks as territories put in place to enable specific kinds of lives. More specifically, our argument is based on an analysis of liveability that is alive to the social and material entities that comprise how people make of themselves and places. Our sensory analysis offers alternative insights to liveability than scholars attuned to quantifying demographic characteristics, wellbeing or health benefits. However, we think that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of territory and the feminist logic of affect, emotion and subjectivities are helpful to understand the study of liveable cities by bringing to the fore bodies and what they can do. We offer an embodied geography of liveability and provide a more nuanced account of the uneven occupancy of urban parks along the lines of social difference as found in surveys. It is impossible to understand the uneven social occupancy of urban parks according to surveys without appreciating how subjectivities are always embedded within culturally situated lived experiences. Important insights into the analytics of liveability are achieved through the study of performative, material, affect and emotional dimensions.

Our interpretation suggests that liveability is not a stable entity. Instead, how liveability is configured is always contingent on an array of human and non-human bodies, discourses, affects and emotions. We charted liveability through how bodies and spaces are brought together and transformed through the process of de-/re-territorialisation of urban parks as territory to enable specific subjectivities and collectives to emerge. Our empirical work suggests that affective resonances circulated through a variety of visual, sonic and tactile qualities of objects (seats, paths, barbeques), plants and animals which are active in assembling the urban park territory as a restorative place within dense urban populations that animate practices of self-care. The park mobilises an affective care through the affects folding in the body. However, as our discussion of urban parks as misanthropic territories illustrates, stereotypes are reproduced, fear is mobilised and boundaries of exclusion are readily established. While violence in urban parks can be addressed in part by urban park design, we suggest policies that target people who commit specific criminal acts rather than criminalising generalised groups of park users (for example the homeless, young people, drinkers). We also suggest that erecting signs which welcome and are inclusive of social diversity would be more beneficial than those informed by institutional designation of ‘proper use’. Important future research agendas are required for designing liveable cities that analyse the affective forces territorialising urban parks that enable people to socialise and relax. Our research points to the importance of studying how embodied geographies help sustain the therapeutic and convivial dimensions of liveability. Our call is for future research to address the embodied geographies of liveability and urban parks of different social groups.