Community of citizens: intimacy of belonging and public space in Melbourne

Abstract

'We are many, but we are one,’ reads the popular slogan that has been continuously in place since the beginning of the intense neoliberal wish to place diversity under its one-dimensional umbrella. Different, but the same rhetoric has been prominent not only in political speech, but also in social practices, design and usage of public space in Melbourne. This slogan is a reproduction of the desire for national unity national built via the multicultural diversity, and presents us with contradictions of inclusion/exclusion. The city of Melbourne, with Federation Square as its landmark, reflects the paradox of the desire for construction of a myth of communion and community based on its own myth. The paper argues that to think about citizenship as belonging and/or citizenship as a shared identity, we need to first problematise the multifaceted concept of ‘community’ and how the community is constructed through sentimentality and (public) intimacy. We will think about the ‘community of citizens’, the production of borders of citizenship and belonging and consequently materialization of symbolic borders in the city space. Following readings of works by Jean Luc Nancy and Étienne Balibar, the paper will argue that it is not exclusion that forms the deepest level of social alienation but inclusion itself, especially when it goes hand in hand with an intimate and normative fetishization of ‘being-in-common’