Speaker
Description
Keywords: everyday publicness; creative clusters; place-shaping; governance legibility; non-consumptive lingering
Introduction and research problem
Creative clusters are assessed mainly as economic formations and branding strategies, with far less attention to the public spaces they produce and the terms on which people can use them. Yet these spaces are where the uncertainties of contemporary planning are lived. In post-industrial districts repositioned through culture, creativity and public-realm investment, squares and streets are promoted as open and inclusive while also serving place branding, investment attraction and value creation (Peck, 2005; Zukin, 1995). Responsibility for their design and daily management is increasingly distributed across developers, estate managers and public-private partnerships rather than held by local authorities alone (De Magalhães, 2010). For everyday users, this can create a practical uncertainty about whether they may sit, stay, gather or linger without buying, and about who decides. Here, everyday uncertainty does not refer primarily to felt insecurity or confusion. It denotes the practical indeterminacy that arises when users must infer what forms of occupation are permitted, whether a provided space will remain available over time, and which institution is responsible for setting or altering those conditions.
This paper examines how that uncertainty is conditioned and navigated in two London creative clusters shaped through contrasting place-shaping processes. King's Cross was shaped through a comparatively coordinated masterplanning and estate-management framework (Bishop & Williams, 2016). Old Street grew incrementally as a digital cluster from the 1990s (Nathan & Vandore, 2014), was retrospectively branded as 'Tech City', and later received a transport-led public-realm retrofit. The paper asks how planned and incremental place-shaping trajectories condition how permission is read, whether provision remains available over time, and whether the responsible authority can be identified, and how users navigate these conditions in everyday public space.
The paper argues that publicness should be assessed not only by whether space is formally provided, but by how permission is inferred, whether provision remains temporally available, and whether the authority able to alter it is institutionally legible. Place-shaping trajectories structure the terms on which public life is supported, but everyday publicness is realised through the interaction of spatial cues, management practice, temporal availability and ordinary use, often under conditions where the institutional authorship of space remains obscure to those using it.
Conceptual framework
The study links three literatures. Creative-city and creative-cluster debates position clusters as instruments of regeneration and place promotion (Florida, 2002; Peck, 2005). Drawing on work on cluster formation, the study treats planned and incremental trajectories as analytical ideal types rather than as a strict empirical binary, each tending to structure ownership, management intensity, urban grain and behavioural regulation differently. Public-space scholarship, meanwhile, moves beyond the public/private ownership binary to treat publicness as a layered condition produced through legal access, management, physical affordance, observed use and perceived entitlement (Carmona, 2022; Madanipour, 2003).
These strands are brought together in a linked analytical framework connecting place-shaping process, governance framework and everyday publicness. Publicness is operationalised through Varna and Tiesdell's (2010) five dimensions of ownership, control, civility, physical configuration and animation, and through Gehl's (2011) distinction between necessary, optional and social activity. Non-consumptive lingering, the capacity to remain without purchasing, is treated as a concrete but partial test of publicness in commercialised settings. Governance legibility refers here to the extent to which users can identify the institution responsible for managing a space and altering its conditions of access.
Within this framework, uncertainty is examined in three bounded dimensions: the legibility of permission, the temporal availability of provision, and the identifiability of responsible authority. These dimensions connect long-term place-shaping and governance arrangements to the immediate spatial and social cues through which users interpret what is permitted.
Methods
A qualitative-led comparative case study combined three evidence streams addressing intended, enacted and perceived publicness respectively. Documentary analysis examined planning, legal, management and promotional materials, including the King's Cross Section 106 agreement, planning officer reports, transport consultation records and cluster branding documents. Structured public-life observation, following Gehl and Svarre (2013), covered five sub-zones at each site across twelve rounds on weekday and weekend days in July 2026, recording movement, staying, activity, management presence and contextual conditions through counts, activity mapping and fixed-point photography. Semi-structured intercept interviews with thirty-one participants across eighteen encounters explored reasons for visiting, comfort, welcome, awareness of management, and the perceived freedom to remain without purchasing.
The three streams were coded separately, integrated within each case through a matrix structured by the five publicness dimensions, and compared across cases with attention to convergence, complementarity and contradiction. The design supports analytical rather than statistical generalisation, and the cases differ in scale, morphology and user composition as well as in their formation trajectories. Because interviewees were recruited from people already staying, the study cannot speak directly to those who avoided the sites, passed through without stopping, or felt unable to remain.
Results
The documentary record showed that the two cases differed less in whether public realm was promised than in how that promise was sequenced and institutionalised. At King's Cross, public access was formalised early through a Section 106 agreement that secured passage across designated estate-managed areas while retaining qualified powers of closure and exclusion (London Borough of Camden, 2006). At Old Street, public space was pursued later through a highway and station reconfiguration, with responsibility divided between a transport authority and two boroughs, and with provision framed as temporally provisional from the outset (Transport for London, 2015). A proposed rooftop seating terrace was removed before construction after officers and police raised concerns about late-night congregation, antisocial behaviour and operational management (London Borough of Islington, 2019).
Observation showed that staying occurred somewhere within each site in every round, but was distributed very differently. At King's Cross, staying was recorded across all five sub-zones, often simultaneously, and management presence was recorded in every round. At Old Street, staying concentrated on the station-front square while surrounding routes sustained movement more than staying. The most weakly scripted behaviour recorded at Old Street, including smoking, extended conversation and sleeping, occurred in Old Street Yard, a sub-zone that lay outside the documented retrofit realm altogether. At King's Cross, one observation round recorded the grass steps, which had held around one hundred people at lunchtime, being withheld for a private reservation by early evening; the study cannot establish the legal basis or recurrence of that episode.
Interviews converged on one point directly implicated in critiques of privatised public space (Loukaitou-Sideris & Banerjee, 1998; Minton, 2009): participants at both sites generally treated purchasing as a choice rather than a condition of remaining, and none reported being challenged or moved on. No participant referred to a stated rule, and three accounts made the spatial basis of perceived permission explicit: benches that did not appear to belong to a shop were assumed available, a bench in London was assumed to be for sitting, and free tables were distinguished from café seating where purchase seemed expected. Permission was read from spatial configuration and the visible use of others, rather than from stated rules or identifiable authorities.
A second convergence concerned institutional illegibility. No participant at either site accurately and confidently identified the responsible management arrangement. Most attributions defaulted to the local council and were hedged. One King's Cross participant had noticed staff in estate-branded uniform and still attributed responsibility to the borough. Management was operationally visible while its institutional authorship remained obscure.
The sites diverged in what a pause could become. At King's Cross, programmed activity gave people reasons to arrive and remain; at Old Street, participants repeatedly described a space accessible enough to permit occupation but offering little through which a brief stop might develop into longer optional or social activity.
Discussion and conclusion
The planned-incremental distinction explained how staying was provided, animated and managed more convincingly than whether it was possible. Coordination at King's Cross created not only designed settings but the institutional capacity to operate several staying environments at once. Yet within the same managed setting, a private reservation temporarily withdrew the most heavily used staying space from general use. At Old Street, the transport-led retrofit organised formal provision around movement and waiting within a more distributed and temporally contingent governance setting, while the least scripted public life emerged in a space the formal intervention did not reach. Control thus operated prospectively at Old Street, through the omission of a proposed staying space before any use began, and episodically at King's Cross, through an observed restriction on an already-provided space.
The findings suggest three distinctions through which planning decisions condition uncertainty and the capacity to act. First, the possibility of staying must be distinguished from the terms on which staying is supported. Non-consumptive lingering was possible in both cases, but the cases differed sharply in provision, animation and the visibility of management. Second, provision must be distinguished from temporal availability. A space can remain within the publicly accessible realm while becoming unavailable through managerial discretion, and the authority and rules governing such restrictions may not be readily legible to users. Third, visible management must be distinguished from institutionally legible responsibility. Users navigated these spaces without knowing who governed them, reading permission from configuration and from one another. This supports a relational account of publicness (Carmona, 2022), but also exposes a vulnerability: where entitlement is inferred from spatial cues, reconfiguration could alter perceived permission without any formal change in access, and accountability may be weakened when access decisions or behavioural rules are contested (Mitchell, 2003).
In these cases, uncertainty was not removed by coordinated planning but relocated across different dimensions of publicness. At King's Cross, coordination supported more extensive provision, maintenance and programming, but neither made institutional responsibility legible to users nor guaranteed continuous temporal availability. At Old Street, responsibility remained more distributed and provision more spatially bounded, while some peripheral spaces were less scripted but also less supported. Creative-cluster public realms should therefore be assessed not only by what is formally provided, but by how permission is inferred, how long provision remains available, and whether those able to alter it can be identified and held accountable.
References
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