My first real encounter with a genuinely inclusive space happened at the State Library of Queensland. Coming from a Middle Eastern country, a concept like inclusive urbanism had always felt to me more like a slogan than something tangible.
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Something that, within the planning system, would eventually be reduced to a few design interventions, a particular kind of bench, an urban edge, a playground, and things of that sort. Perhaps because of that, I had always been somewhat sceptical of concepts like this: beautiful words that could easily find their way into urban planning reports without necessarily changing much in the actual life of a city.
But I think I am beginning to understand what inclusivity can mean when it moves beyond the language of reports and becomes something you can actually experience.
Perhaps my experience of living and working within a planning system in the global south partly explains this scepticism. I would even argue that planning systems in many countries of the global south are, in some respects, considerably more complicated than those we encounter in the global north. Saying that “the economy is the base” may sound somewhat clichéd today, but there, you really are dealing with the base.
You are dealing with issues so immediate, so fundamental, that thinking about inclusivity can almost seem like a luxury. Not because inclusivity does not matter, but because the material conditions for making it possible often barely exist. And so, the “inclusive city” can easily become little more than a beautiful phrase sitting somewhere in an urban planning report.
This is not, of course, intended as a celebration of the neoliberal planning systems of the global north. In fact, it is precisely within these cities that social inequality, housing crises, homelessness and less visible forms of exclusion can call the very idea of inclusivity into question. Perhaps it is exactly this contradiction that makes the subject so interesting to me: can an unequal city still produce genuinely inclusive spaces?
For me, the State Library of Queensland is one of those spaces. Over the six months in which I have used this library almost continuously, what has caught my attention more than the architecture of the building itself is the extraordinary range of people who seem to take their right to be there for granted.
There are the many people experiencing homelessness who are already waiting before eight in the morning for the ground floor doors to open, looking for a warm space, chairs more comfortable than the hardness of the pavement, free internet, and computers where they can spend a few hours watching films, playing games or listening to music. This is not something I have simply read about. It is something I have repeatedly seen during months of using the library as part of my everyday life.
Alongside them are older people who sometimes come to attend public events and sometimes simply to use the computers, walk around or sit for a while. Their presence is remarkably visible. Some write notes, some read newspapers and books, and some seem to spend hours working on something of their own.
There is one older man I see almost every day who may be experiencing homelessness. He sits at one of the computers surrounded by piles of books and works with such concentration and speed that I often find myself wondering what he is working on. Perhaps serious research. Perhaps a book. Or perhaps a project that matters only to him. I simply do not know. But perhaps that not knowing is itself important: in this space, I do not need to know who he is or why he is there for his presence to be legitimate.
There are babies and young children who come with their parents or grandparents to use the children’s area on the ground floor. Mothers arrive with prams for particular activities and then stay, talking to one another. School children of different ages sit doing their homework. University students spend hours behind their laptops. Employees who could work remotely from home choose instead to spend their working day in a public space.
And perhaps most striking of all is the diversity of the people themselves: Indian, Iranian, Chinese, Black, Anglo-Australian, and many others; people whose appearances could hardly be more different, from someone covered in tattoos to someone in perfectly pressed office clothes; people of different ages and genders, people with disabilities, and people with different ways of living.
But what interests me is not simply the diversity of this population. What seems more important is the possibility for all these differences to coexist in the same space.
None of these people needs to buy anything in order to justify being there. They do not have to be customers. They do not have to look a particular way. They do not even have to provide a particular reason for being there. One person can be conducting university research while another is simply trying to stay warm for a few hours. One comes to work, another to play; one to care for a child, and another perhaps simply because they need somewhere to be. Perhaps this is where, for me, inclusivity stops being a planning term and becomes a spatial experience.
Can we really not call this an inclusive space?
The question, of course, is not that simple. The person experiencing homelessness who enters the library in the morning may still have nowhere to sleep that night. The library has not solved homelessness. In the same way, the presence of different ethnic groups within a public space does not mean that racial or economic inequality has somehow disappeared from the city. An inclusive space, therefore, does not necessarily mean an inclusive city.
But should that limitation prevent us from recognising the value of such a space? Perhaps part of our habit in urban studies is to read the city primarily through its failures: exclusion, inequality, privatisation, surveillance, discrimination, housing crisis and unequal access. All these critiques are necessary. But does urban analysis always have to be negative? Can we not sometimes ask a different question?
What has actually worked?
And for me, as an urban researcher, this question may ultimately be even more interesting than the observation of the library itself:
How did a space like this come into being?
Was this degree of inclusivity planned? Is it the result of deliberate decisions about the design and management of the library? Is it the principle of open access? The architecture of the building? Its location within the city? Public funding? Social programs? The way security is managed? Or is it the cumulative effect of many smaller decisions which, even if they were not originally intended to produce this particular kind of space, have somehow made it possible? And perhaps the more important question is:
Can a quality like this be planned?
If the answer is yes, then inclusivity is no longer simply a collection of design standards, a few lines in a policy document, or an appealing phrase in a planning report. It can become a real and tangible quality of urban life, one that perhaps reveals itself most clearly in one of the simplest urban rights of all: the ability to be somewhere without having to buy something, prove something, or be anyone other than yourself.
