Speaker
Description
Introduction and research problem
Uncertainty has become a central concern in planning scholarship, commonly associated with incomplete knowledge, changing socio-ecological conditions, institutional instability, or the difficulty of anticipating future urban trajectories (Ruiz Sánchez & Musco, 2021). Yet uncertainty is also experienced at a much smaller temporal and spatial scale: in the ordinary question of whether one can remain in a place, for how long, under what conditions, and with what degree of legitimacy. This everyday dimension is especially relevant to public space, where formal accessibility does not necessarily guarantee an equal capacity to inhabit, appropriate, or remain.
This paper examines everyday uncertainty through Plaza de la Independencia, the central civic square of Concepción, Chile. Rather than approaching the square as a neutral and universally available container of public life, the study analyses publicness as something continuously produced through the interaction of material arrangements, formal and informal norms, and situated subjectivities. The central argument is that planning does not only respond to uncertainty: through design, regulation, maintenance, and the normalization of particular uses, it can also produce and distribute uncertainty unevenly.
To examine this process, the paper develops the capacity to stay as an analytical lens. Staying refers here not simply to physical presence, but to the possibility of sustaining presence without having to continuously justify, modify, or anticipate the consequences of one’s occupation of public space. The research asks: How do material arrangements, formal and informal norms, and everyday subjectivities shape unequal capacities to stay in Plaza de la Independencia, and what does this reveal about the production of everyday uncertainty through planning and urban governance?
Conceptual framework
The paper brings together scholarship on public space, spatial justice, diversity, and relational understandings of place. Public space is understood not as a fixed legal category but as an ongoing socio-spatial accomplishment. Its public character depends on the relations among built form, institutional practices, social expectations, bodies, and everyday uses (Amin, 2008; Madanipour, 2003). This relational perspective is particularly useful because it shifts attention from the formal existence of public space to the conditions under which publicness is actually experienced.
The analysis is also informed by debates on spatial justice and the right to public space. These traditions have demonstrated that urban rights are not exhausted by formal access: they concern the capacity to use, appropriate, encounter, and participate in the production of urban space (Mitchell, 2003; Soja, 2010). Likewise, planning for diversity requires attention not only to redistribution, but also to recognition and encounter, including the ways institutions render particular needs, practices, and users more or less legitimate (Fincher & Iveson, 2008).
From this perspective, uncertainty is socially differentiated. For some users, remaining in a civic square can be taken for granted. For others, presence may require continuous interpretation of environmental and social signals: where to sit, how long to remain, how visible to become, which practices are likely to be tolerated, and when a legitimate presence may become interpreted as inappropriate occupation. Research on the negotiation of public space has shown that uncertainty regarding access and continued presence is closely tied to power, norms, and differentiated rights to space (Hackenbroch, 2013).
The paper therefore distinguishes three interconnected dimensions. Materiality refers to the physical and spatial arrangements that enable, channel, or constrain particular practices. Norms include both formal regulation and informal expectations concerning legitimate uses, behaviours, and durations of presence. Subjectivities refer to how people interpret and negotiate their own position within these material and normative environments. Following relational accounts of place, these dimensions are treated not as independent layers but as mutually constitutive processes through which publicness is continuously made and contested (Massey, 1994).
Methods
The paper draws on a qualitative case study developed as part of doctoral research on Plaza de la Independencia. The methodological design combines 20 narrative interviews, non-participant observation, photographic records, documentary analysis, and qualitative planimetric mapping.
Narrative interviews were used to reconstruct experiences, interpretations, memories, and strategies associated with the use of the square. Non-participant observation documented recurrent patterns of circulation, pause, encounter, occupation, and interaction across different areas and times. Photographic records supported the analysis of material arrangements and spatial configurations, while documentary analysis examined institutional representations, regulations, and planning interventions affecting the square. Qualitative planimetric mapping integrated these materials spatially, allowing relationships between physical configuration, observed practices, and narrated experiences to be examined in specific locations.
The analytical process was organised around materiality, norms, and subjectivities, with particular attention to moments in which these dimensions converged to facilitate or constrain staying. Rather than treating uncertainty solely as a reported feeling, the study examines how it becomes spatially and socially produced through recurring relations between built environments, regulation, interpretation, and practice.
Results
The findings identify three interrelated processes through which the capacity to stay becomes unevenly distributed.
First, material configurations shape the temporal possibilities of public space. The ability to remain depends not only on access but on the availability and spatial distribution of conditions that support pause, rest, observation, sociability, and prolonged occupation. Seating, edges, circulation routes, environmental exposure, visibility, and the relationship between areas of movement and areas of rest influence whether people are encouraged to pass through, stop briefly, gather, or remain. Material design therefore does more than organise movement: it participates in organising duration.
Second, formal and informal norms transform presence into a question of legitimacy. Public space is governed not only through explicit prohibitions or regulations, but also through socially embedded assumptions regarding appropriate users, behaviours, and durations. Similar practices can be interpreted differently depending on who performs them, where they occur, and how long they last. Everyday uncertainty arises when users must interpret shifting thresholds between accepted and questioned forms of presence. In this sense, exclusion is not always produced through direct prohibition; it can also emerge through the cumulative demand to remain alert to whether one’s presence continues to be regarded as legitimate.
Third, users actively negotiate these conditions through situated spatial practices. Interview and observational materials show that people learn to read the square: they identify locations where particular activities are easier to sustain, adjust visibility and duration, choose between exposure and retreat, and develop practical knowledge about where and when remaining is more comfortable or less contested. These practices demonstrate agency, but they also reveal unequal burdens. The need to continuously adapt is itself evidence that the apparent openness of public space does not translate into an equally secure experience of publicness.
Taken together, the findings suggest that everyday uncertainty is a distributed urban condition. Some users can approach their presence as predictable and largely unquestioned, while others experience staying as contingent and negotiated. The capacity to remain is therefore not simply an individual preference or behavioural outcome; it is relationally produced through the encounter between bodies, spatial configurations, institutional practices, and cultural expectations.
Discussion and conclusion
The case contributes to planning debates on uncertainty in three ways.
First, it relocates uncertainty from exceptional events and future scenarios to the ordinary temporalities of urban life. Planning under uncertainty is not only a question of how institutions make decisions without complete information. It is also a question of how planning decisions produce different degrees of predictability in everyday spatial experience. The Chilean case thus complements approaches that understand uncertainty as a structural condition of contemporary urban planning by showing how it can become embodied, localised, and routine.
Second, the paper proposes the capacity to stay as an analytical lens for evaluating public space. Accessibility remains essential, but it is an incomplete indicator of publicness. A space may be legally public and physically accessible while offering highly unequal possibilities for resting, meeting, observing, appropriating, or remaining. Asking who can stay, for how long, and at what social or bodily cost introduces duration and legitimacy into debates on spatial justice.
Third, the findings highlight the need to analyse design, governance, and social meaning together. Material interventions alone cannot secure inclusive publicness if regulatory practices and informal norms continue to make some forms of presence more questionable than others. Conversely, formal rights of access remain limited if spatial configurations do not support diverse forms of use and prolonged presence. Planning for inclusive public space therefore requires attention to what this paper calls infrastructures of staying: the material, institutional, and social conditions that make sustained public presence possible.
This argument is particularly relevant from a Global South planning perspective, where planning concepts should remain attentive to situated urban experiences rather than assume that formal categories automatically correspond to lived realities (Watson, 2009). Plaza de la Independencia shows that the public character of a civic space is not secured once and for all through ownership, design, or statutory designation. It is continuously negotiated through the everyday interaction of space, rules, and embodied practice.
Ultimately, the paper argues that planning should ask not only who can access public space, but who can remain without continuously negotiating the legitimacy of their presence. This shift makes visible a subtle but consequential form of urban inequality. Everyday uncertainty becomes a planning problem when the ability to stay is predictable for some and conditional for others. Recognising this uneven distribution opens a path toward planning public spaces not only for circulation and access, but for sustained, plural, and legitimate urban presence.
References
Amin, A. (2008). Collective culture and urban public space. City, 12(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810801933495
Fincher, R., & Iveson, K. (2008). Planning and diversity in the city: Redistribution, recognition and encounter. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hackenbroch, K. (2013). Negotiating public space for livelihoods: About risks, uncertainty and power in the urban poor’s everyday life. Erdkunde, 67(1), 37–47. https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.2013.01.04
Madanipour, A. (2003). Public and private spaces of the city. Routledge.
Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. Polity Press.
Mitchell, D. (2003). The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. Guilford Press.
Ruiz Sánchez, J., & Musco, F. (2021). Incertidumbre. Planificar en marcos de incertidumbre / habitar en tiempos de incertidumbre. Revista INVI, 36(101), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-83582021000100001
Soja, E. W. (2010). Seeking spatial justice. University of Minnesota Press.
Watson, V. (2009). Seeing from the South: Refocusing urban planning on the globe’s central urban issues. Urban Studies, 46(11), 2259–2275. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009342598