Encounters on the footpath: tracing the Sri Lankan diaspora’s place-making in everyday urban and suburban spaces

ABSTRACT

Existing scholarship on footpaths, sidewalks, streets, and pavements integrates laudable discussions about legal and regulatory concerns alongside debates about safety and place-making. Yet there are fewer debates about diasporic encounters and place-making processes in this everyday space. Accordingly, this paper examines encounters that occur on footpaths and outside adjoining shops by the Sri Lankan diaspora in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. The footpaths fall within the semi-public realm; they are public spaces connected to privately owned shops. I draw from a critical autoethnography and in-depth interviews conducted with Sri Lankans living in Australia to better understand how their place-making processes are entrenched in the semi-public realm. This paper provides a fresh case study to highlight the importance of warm and convivial encounters in everyday spaces that strengthen feelings of familiarity and belonging in host communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Footpaths
• Sri Lankan diaspora
• encounter
• conviviality
• place-making
• everyday spaces

Introduction

Footpaths (also known as sidewalks, walkways, and pavements) are complex, multilayered, and multidimensional spaces. They blur boundaries between public and private spaces while simultaneously facilitating transactional, formal, and sometimes informal activities. These complexities occur alongside encounters with moving, still, and/or waiting bodies. Users and observers of public spaces know that footpaths are experienced differently in various spatial, temporal, and geographical contexts (Jacobs 1961). In Australia, for example, access and mobility are prioritised as essential uses of footpaths. Yet, footpaths can be meaningful gathering spaces for diasporas. They also comprise materialities – such as shops and street vendors – and sensory qualities that are encountered frequently. While footpaths are commonplace in cities and suburbs, the meanings attributed to them are varied and multiple.

In this paper, I focus on footpaths in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia that are used by the Sri Lankan diaspora. The footpaths herein fall within the semi-public realm; they are public spaces connected to often privately owned shops and buildings. As such, footpaths intimately intersect between the public and the private. It is this kind of edge space, where people mingle between shops and restaurants and footpaths, that creates opportunity for diasporic encounters. We know that footpaths are heterogenous since they are located across different times and places (Fyfe 1998), thus this multidimensionality provides an interesting avenue for further exploration. Moreover, there is an opportunity here to bring a fresh, contemporary case study – the Sri Lankan diaspora’s encounters on footpaths – to geographical debates on diasporic place-making and encounters in host communities.

Scholarship on footpaths in urban and suburban landscapes is not new (Jacobs 1961; Fyfe 1998; Hall 2012). Several scholars have had a longstanding fascination with the footpath. Seminal scholar Jane Jacobs (1961, 29) understood the footpath (or sidewalk, as she calls it) as a key space in cities, arguing that ‘streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs’. Jacobs traced some of the dramas and doings of everyday life through the lens of the ‘sidewalk ballet’, which was an intricate dance where individuals and ensembles took on distinctive roles on the sidewalk. The sidewalk ballet ‘never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations’ (Jacobs 1961, 50); Jacobs described the sidewalk ballet – that is, the intricate rhythms of everyday life – of Hudson Street in New York City to claim that streets and the sidewalk play a crucial role in generating communal life. However, Jacobs’ interest in the sidewalk focussed predominantly on safety and the ‘eyes on the street’ of locals and traders who provided surveillance of the activities taking place on the neighbourhood streets. This seminal scholarship is still important when we think about the footpath and its way of connecting people to each other and to place through routines or punctuated, significant moments.

Geographers and urban planners have also been interested in the footpath – and similar spaces like streets, streetscapes, sidewalks, pathways – as a planned and designed space, a space of social identities and practices, and a space of control and resistance (Fyfe 1998; Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009; Hall 2012; Kim 2012; Rannila and Mitchell 2016). Early work by Fyfe (1998) explored how streets were both specific and local landscapes that ‘manifest[ed] broader social and cultural processes’ and generated debates about how the street intersected with society and space. With an aim to build on formative discussions, Fyfe’s (1998) collection traversed a diverse array of streets. One contribution by Edensor (1998) highlighted the regulated qualities of ‘Western’ streets by examining the diversity of activities in Indian streets. Edensor (1998, 206) traced the multiple uses of the street in India – it merged public, private, work, play, holy, and profane and, through such diversity, created ‘a host of micro-spaces: corners and niches, awnings and offshoots’. There are certainly resonances between streets of India with those in Sri Lanka. From my experience, the sidewalk ballet in Sri Lanka is a multi-sensory experience; smells of food from street vendors waft, textured fabrics and bags are flung at you while walking past, music echoes from buses passing by, and all you can see ahead are bodies – some gathering with friends, others buying something, and few perched against a building chewing betel nuts. Kim (2012) similarly argued that there are many users of the footpath/sidewalk. Sidewalks are often associated with political activism, homelessness, and renewed interest in night life and ‘gourmet food truck entrepreneurs’ claiming the space too (Kim 2012, 226). There is another subset of scholarship, then, concerning laws and regulations that govern footpaths. Rannila and Mitchell (2016) discussed the snowy sidewalks of Syracuse to better understand how they appeared in law and whose responsibility they were. These examples demonstrate that significant and diverse scholarship on urban and suburban footpaths exists, but we still need more scholarship targeting the experiences of, and narratives from, specific diasporas.

While writing this paper, I was inspired by the work of many scholars who have discussed migrant place-making practices and dynamic ways their lives take shape in new places (Yeoh and Huang 1998; Law 2002; Neal et al. 2015). Amin’s (2002, 959) rich scholarship on the ‘local negotiations of ethnicity’ in everyday spaces is especially foundational. It provided a useful lens to examine ways that practices, encounters, and habits played out in public and everyday spaces like footpaths. As such, I build on these multiple threads of literature to examine how footpaths espouse meaning for the Sri Lankan diaspora (or not). I situate my examination of footpaths and adjoining shops as valuable sites of encounter. Additionally, there are very limited discussions that centre the Sri Lankan diaspora’s experience in Australia (Kandasamy, Perera, and Ratnam 2020). In this paper, I apply a framework comprising Cresswell’s (2009) definition of place alongside concepts of place-making and geographies of encounter. These concepts coalesce to share stories from the Sri Lankan diaspora that occur on and around the footpath. The stories, together with my critical autoethnography, inform this paper’s empirical contribution. As a result, this research is attentive to diasporic narratives that are shaped by encounters with everyday spaces in Australian cities and suburbs. Herein, I present the conceptual framing of the paper and then detail the context of the project followed by the methods and analysis. The discussion is presented in three sections, drawing from Cresswell’s definition of place – materiality, meaning, and practice – which contextualises and reinforces analysis of the footpath.

Conceptual framework: place, place-making, encounters

To better understand diasporic place-making on and around footpaths, I present a framework that comprises and brings together three interrelated concepts: place, diasporic place-making in public spaces, and geographies of encounter. Multiple components become knitted together in a specific ‘place’ – here, the footpath – that is encountered and given meaning. As such, I have drawn on Cresswell’s (2009) conceptualisation of place to guide my thinking around what footpaths might comprise for the Sri Lankan diaspora: materiality, meaning, and practice. Overlaying this notion of place is that of diasporic place-making, which involves visiting and using public and everyday spaces within a new host community. Finally, what brings these two concepts of place and place-making together are encounters that are had on the footpath and with other members of the diaspora that can proffer feelings of belonging and familiarity or tensions and hostilities. This section steps out each concept to shape how we might think about the footpath.

Place

While richly explored in geography, Cresswell (2009) argued that place is comprised of materiality, meaning, and practice. Materiality is the ‘things’ that construct, or pass through, a particular spatial location. Yet, as Iaquinto (2020, 338) cautioned, materialities of place are not so straightforward to understand; they are ‘always being built up, broken down, shifted around, and it can take many different forms’ at various times. Meaning refers to associations people make, and connections they have, to/with/in places (Cresswell 2009). These meanings relate to individual, cultural, and collective memories, which create the social, religious, and cultural touchstones etched into place(s). Practice, then, involves what happens in places – here, it encompasses tracing what people do on and around footpaths. Practices can involve routines such as walking between shops to run errands, eating at a Sri Lankan restaurant, or waiting for public transport. Additionally, practices could occasion encounters with monuments that are representative of significant events or visiting cultural/religious sites (Eulberg 2014).

Materiality, meaning, and practice are interwoven concepts that construct places across various temporal scales. Footpaths comprise materialities of shops. Often, meaning imbues through sensory memories of food that leech out from restaurants onto footpaths (Longhurst, Johnston, and Ho 2009; Ratnam 2018; Dinmohamed 2023). These are then connected to fateful encounters and practices of eating, passing by, or stopping to look inside shops while smiling and acknowledging others on footpaths. There may be a certain point to ‘hang out’ or meet people before deciding where to go next. These decisions have a temporal quality – the meeting time may influence the activity undertaken, or a certain sensory experience may take them back to past places. The footpath affords everyday practices, including moorings that can occur alongside its conventional purpose of resolute movement (Bissell 2007). Thinking about footpaths through Cresswell’s (2009) definition of place can uncover nuanced understandings of everyday spaces that sit at the intersection of the semi-public realm and stretch existing analyses of place-making further.

Diasporic place-making in public spaces

Sizeable geographical scholarship centres migrant experiences in public spaces, how and why spaces are used, and by which diasporas (Wise 2010; Neal et al. 2015; Fincher et al. 2019). Aligning with these debates, Koch and Latham (2012) proposed three heuristics to expand scholars’ interpretations of public spaces: materiality, inhabitation, and atmosphere. These heuristics underscored pathways for scholars as they pursue to unpack complexities entangled in public spaces. Their scholarship stressed the importance of being ‘attuned to the material and practical affordances [public spaces] offer’ (Koch and Latham 2012, 527). Cattell et al. (2008) emphasised the value of public spaces for fun and enjoyable social interactions that support well-being and deviate from mundane routines.

Other scholarship demonstrates that migrants continuously redefine public spaces based on feelings of familiarity, belonging, and comfort (Yeoh and Huang 1998; Law 2002; Becerra 2014; Cancellieri and Ostanel 2015; Neal et al. 2015). This literature focuses on conventional public spaces such as parks, plazas, and community halls; there are only a few that analyse the entanglements of streets, and specifically the role of everyday spaces for diasporas (Jacobs 1961; Fyfe 1998; Law 2001; Hall 2012). Migrating to a host country ‘creates social ruptures’, where ‘migrants can find ways of relating to each other, reinvent their identities, and recreate [a] sense of community’ (Becerra 2014, 336). Such place-making processes are complex and involve practices that become critical in daily life.

Everyday spaces are those that are repeatedly visited, encountered, and used, and where practices such as shopping, walking, or gathering typically take place. These spaces have long captured the interest of scholars. Amin (2008) suggested that encountering everyday spaces impacted processes of negotiating sociality, consumption, and urban environments rather than the role of everyday spaces in shaping civic engagement and political culture. These negotiations occur spatially and temporally on footpaths too. Amin (2002) set an early agenda for examining intolerances and conflicts in everyday spaces when multiple groups came together. My interest in this paper slightly deviates from this agenda by honing in on footpaths as spaces of multiple, convivial encounters. Diasporic place-making is not necessarily about significant spaces or events, it just as importantly includes everydayness and mundanity of spaces like the footpath. Cancellieri and Ostanel (2015) revealed that migrants gathered at railway stations in Padua, Italy, during peak hours to meet new people from their country, speak their own language, and overcome isolation. These everyday spaces are connected to encounters and temporalities that create a vibrant and fluid place (Massey 2005); certainly, they are also embodied and porous (Till 2008). Relatedly, Powell and Rishbeth (2011, 75) argued that new migrants used street signs to learn English and interacted with others to learn social norms. Everyday spaces have multiple uses, including meeting points for diasporas that allow them to learn new norms and cultures. Similarly, I position the footpath as an everyday space encountered by diasporic bodies with intersectionalities, positionalities, and multiple purposes that can (re)shape the space.

Geographies of encounter

Encounters involve ‘the embodied nature of social distinctions and the unpredictable ways in which similarity and difference are negotiated in the moment’ (Wilson 2017, 455, emphasis original). They are embodied and interlaced with memories, emotions, and practices. Thinking spatially and temporally, footpaths enable planned or spontaneous encounters, contributing to how these spaces are constructed/experienced. These encounters can also be convivial, such as waving to neighbours at the local shops. Such encounters embrace unscripted identifications with others that produce ‘an easy familiarity and conversational warmth’ felt in a space (Fincher 2003, 57). Other encounters might occur by chance – they are unplanned, spontaneous. These encounters come with an unfamiliarity too. Migrants might experience this type of encounter when they first move to a neighbourhood with unfamiliar surroundings and people. Analysing footpaths pushed me to consider spatial and temporal features of diasporic encounters. Such encounters reverberate with memories, feelings, and practices that are associated with these spaces and position the space, temporally, as always in flux. ‘These situated, relational practices and registers of [connection] colour and are coloured by everyday encounters in other times and spaces’ (Wilson 2011, 634). Encounters on the footpath offered fateful reminders of Sri Lankan culture and identity. On footpaths where I undertook autoethnography, I attuned to the array of convivial, planned, and chance encounters while also reflecting on their complexities.

This paper concentrates on encounters that are convivial, warm, associated with familiarity, and a crucial part of diasporic place-making. However, encounters are complex and not always positive. Footpaths can be associated with ambivalence, tension, or discrimination. In many contexts, the street ‘lies at the heart of every struggle for social justice’ that is encountered, embodied, and ‘therefore always spatial, which is to say, part of a process of making a place’ (Gilmore 2002, 16). In some instances, encounters are planned, where people plan to visit certain spaces for activism, cultural/religious practices, or to connect with their diaspora.

The Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia

The presence of Sri Lankans in Australia¹ is driven by multiple factors. Sri Lankans began arriving in Australia from the 1970s due to ‘intensifying political upheaval in Sri Lanka’ (Kandasamy, Perera, and Ratnam 2020, 3) and to pursue professional opportunities and tertiary studies. More Sri Lankans arrived in the 1980s when a civil war commenced between the two dominant ethnicities – the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority (Perera 2016). Throughout the conflict (1983-2009), Sri Lankans migrated to many countries including Australia, United Kingdom, United States, and Canada (Kandasamy, Perera, and Ratnam 2020). Sri Lankans arrived in Australia through both skilled migration (employment/education) and humanitarian (refugee/asylum seeker) pathways.

The diaspora predominantly resides in Australia’s major cities, specifically Sydney and Melbourne.² I focused on these two cities for this project due to the diaspora’s emergence in these cities and because of my positionality as a Sri Lankan migrant living in Australia. Conversations with participants meandered through suburbs across Sydney and Melbourne as they related to public spaces they used, how often, and for a range of purposes. Discussions about footpaths then developed as we identified shops and restaurants many Sri Lankans visited. In Sydney, these were mainly situated in the suburbs of Homebush, Pendle Hill, Toongabbie, and Seven Hills while in Melbourne, these were in Dandenong, Glen Waverley, and Narre Warren.

Methods and analysis

This paper stems from pilot research³ with the Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia, which involved employing a mixed method approach comprising in-depth interviews, autoethnography and observations, and photography. At the time of writing, I completed 11 in-depth interviews with Sri Lankan migrants in Sydney and Melbourne in 2020. Participants were recruited through snowball sampling; they were from both Tamil and Sinhalese backgrounds. Some recruitment challenges emerged because the interviews were conducted during a major COVID-19 lockdown in Australia meaning that many participants had limited availability or were not able to take part. Among the cohort that did participate, here were socio-demographic variations – some had arrived either through humanitarian or skilled migration pathways to, or been living in, Sydney or Melbourne for most of their lives. There were other participants who had arrived in Australia within the last 10 years for tertiary education.

The interviews were conducted remotely and traversed themes including participants’ migration pathways, experiences of settlement, and uses of public and everyday spaces. The interviews were capped after 11 participants were involved because a sufficient sample was reached. On completing 11 interviews a repetition of themes and topics of discussions emerged. Once I analysed all the data, employing both inductive and deducting thematic coding, it was confirmed that ‘meaning saturation’ was reached (Hennink, Kaiser, and Marconi 2016). However, the public and everyday spaces that participants discussed in interviews were multidimensional, which meant that relying on interviews alone would perhaps not be sufficient to capture their sensory, material, and visual components. By integrating autoethnography and photography, I could experience these spaces myself, gaining insight into the smells coming from the restaurants, the textures of the conversations happening around me (often in Sinhalese and Tamil), the touch and taste of different Sri Lankan food, and I could see how encounters and place-making ensued on footpaths. Thus, I conceptualised the footpath as multidimensional because it became much more than just a concrete slab to walk along. I completed the autoethnography and photography in public spaces in Sydney suburbs of Pendle Hill, Toongabbie, Homebush, and Seven Hills and Glen Waverley and Narre Warren in Melbourne. I chose spaces to observe based on those participants had discussed when asked questions like: ‘When I say ‘public space’, what comes to mind for you?’; ‘Can you think of any public spaces you use or know of in Sydney/Melbourne that other Sri Lankans use as well? Where are these spaces located – suburb, street, name?’

A critical autoethnography in Sydney and Melbourne overlaid the interview data. Critical autoethnograhy as a research methodology involves researchers using ‘their own personal experiences to do research into social contexts and cultural backgrounds’ (Phan 2022, 117). There are three components in critical autoethnographic research: self (auto), culture (ethno), and the process (graphy) (Ellis and Bochner 2000). In this autoethnography I was both the researcher and the researched, which meant that I constantly reflected on public spaces my participants spoke about and that I visited. I kept a journal from October 2020 until June 2021, not just for this particular fieldwork, but also to write reflections on the research broadly and when I wanted to make thematic connections. I also took photographs when and as necessary – all photographs were taken during daylight hours, due to university and ethics protocols⁴, at public and everyday spaces across the aforementioned suburbs. Autoethnography is a unique lens to ‘connect personal experiences to cultural processes’ and when overlaid with interview and visual data can reveal meaningful insights into spatial, temporal, and relational aspects of place (Phan 2022, 117).

My motivation to include autoethnography related to my positionality as a Sri Lankan with a dual ethnicity – my mother is Sinhalese and my father is a Tamil. Overlaying my identity, I had lived in both Sydney and Melbourne and knew that suburbs in these cities were home to the diaspora. I have always been interested in the different types of encounters the diaspora had, with people and place. I was particularly drawn to potential encounters between Sinhalese and Tamils in public spaces, and what types of relationships and junctures could be fostered. Through the autoethnography, I positioned myself in the research too and considered my own identity, experiences, engagements with people and public spaces as I observed.

I combined interview transcripts, field notes, journal entries, and photographs for data analysis. Using NVivo 12, I integrated both inductive and deductive thematic coding for the text and photographs. The codes covered themes including public spaces, spaces Sri Lankans use, and everyday spaces, along with codes related to materiality, memories, practices, and sensory experiences. I sought to capture and interrogate ‘encounter’ in my analysis, denoted through participants’ stories, photographs that displayed encounters on footpaths, and notes in my journal related to how I read and experienced encounters in the landscape. Examples of codes related to encounters included: passing by, convivial, chance, and planned encounters.

Encountering footpaths, shops, and spaces in between

Most participants referred to footpaths that sat at the juncture of shops – spice shops, restaurants, jewellers, and clothing stores – that encouraged formal transactions. Yet, much more happens in these spaces. I observed passing by encounters where people went about their daily routines while others gathered in groups outside shops (Figure 1). I documented spatiality, temporality, and encounters on one footpath:

The number of Sri Lankan shops outnumbered the other shops in the main suburb area. There were a few [shops] that sold traditional dress and saree material. Many of these shops had advertisements for Diwali. There were also restaurants – many of them were empty because it was the middle of the day. As I walked along the main strip, I kept my eye on the few people waiting at the bus stop. There was a Sri Lankan couple at the bus stop speaking to each other in Tamil, the man crossed the road and [walked by] me. Along the main strip of shops, a family (a couple with one child) walked past me speaking Tamil and got into their car. Near them, another … (late teens to 20s) woman was on the phone speaking Tamil … it seemed that everyone in this area was hurriedly running errands or moving from point A to B (Author’s field notes, Pendle Hill, Sydney).

This excerpt captures the sidewalk ballet with markers of Sri Lankan culture and identity aurally and visually present on the footpath and its surrounds (Jacobs 1961). The sensory experience was common across all my field encounters, and participants conveyed similar sentiments as our discussions traversed different everyday spaces across Melbourne and Sydney. In this section, I present findings stemming from Cresswell’s (2009) definition of place, and by interspersing analyses of the different types of encounters, particularly convivial ones, that occurred on and around footpaths.

Figure 1. An example of a typical footpath space that was observed and photographed during the critical autoethnography. Photo: Author.

Materiality: contextualising footpaths

As we walk along footpaths, we encounter materialities including shops, outdoor dining tables, bus shelters, and benches. In discussions with Sri Lankans living in Sydney and Melbourne, the materialities of footpaths extended beyond concrete slabs. Rather, they contextualised this space within discussions of the Sri Lankan spice shops, restaurants, and clothing stores they visited. Many participants referred to these areas as the ‘shopping strip’ (Figure 2). As such, here, I curate a picture of footpaths through a discussion of its material elements. For participants, footpaths were an access point to shops that connected past and present places.

Figure 2. A ‘shopping strip’ described by participants in Sydney. Photo: Author.

Shopping strips were a material feature, often located in the suburbs where Sri Lankans lived, and had a specific atmosphere instilled with smells of spices and curries and sounds of Tamil and Sinhalese songs playing inside shops that drifted out onto the footpath. Tharini⁵, who was living in Sydney for 24 years, explained that she settled with her family in the Sydney suburb of Homebush:

We followed the same trajectory as every other Sri Lankan family that migrated to Sydney, which was to find a place in Homebush, and I think the way it worked out [was that] we had family who lived in Homebush, my dad’s sister. So, he lived with them for a while and then he, kind of, had an apartment down the road from them and I’m sure it was on the advice of them saying ‘there’s a really good school down the road’ [that] all the Tamils went to (Tharini, in-depth interview).

Tharini detailed that Homebush rendered its visitors and residents back to Sri Lanka. For Tharini, Homebush ‘was like a little mini Jaffna, really, that whole area. Like Wellington Road … we had the Sri Lankan takeaway shops’ (Tharini, in-depth interview). Five per cent of people residing in Homebush were born in Sri Lanka, with arguably more identifying as Sri Lankans even though they were born in Australia/elsewhere, which meant that what was being bought and sold, and the visibility of those who walked around Wellington Road, reminded Tharini of what Jaffna, Sri Lanka was like. ‘Mini Jaffna’ resembled a sort of ethnic precinct where Sri Lankan Tamils lived or visited. Ethnic precincts are places in the city that encompass an assemblage of materialities: public and private spaces, cultural economies, and encounters between producers, consumers, and infrastructures (Zukin 1995). Mini Jaffna comprised shops and other cultural, religious, or symbolic elements, along with the adjoining footpaths and thoroughfares that people would use to walk between shops, gather while waiting for takeaway, or wait for transport.

Sharmila’s descriptions of shopping strips in suburban Melbourne paralleled Tharini’s accounts of Homebush. When I asked about areas home to Sri Lankans, Sharmila responded:

[In] Glen Waverley [there is] is one [street]. If you go to the High Street Road. Along the High Street Road, you can find Sri Lankan spice shops, there’s a saree shop – it’s Indian and Sri Lankan, a mix … restaurants, several [Sri Lankan] restaurants … Also, we are going to another [suburb] called Narre Warren. There, they have that strip with a spice shop, food, and [Sri Lankan] restaurants and stuff (Sharmila, in-depth interview).

Analysing participants’ accounts alongside photographs allowed me to ‘disentangle the often-ignored materiality from its urban fabric’ in a way that brought a rhythm of the footpath to life (Yi’En 2014, 214). For example, portable signs were lined outside shops, sometimes creating an obstacle course for passers by to weave through, stop and read, go inside to have a look, and then continue their day. In Glen Waverley, I noted:

I only ever noticed portable signs outside the Sri Lankan shops. The other shops didn’t have much else. There were some Sri Lankan people chatting in Sinhalese next to me. Everyone just had a familiarity with this particular spot (Author’s field notes, 29 October 2020).

Law (2001, 277) claimed that the ‘absence of familiar material culture, and its subtle evocations of home, is one of the most profound dislocations of transnational migration’. Indeed, participants’ accounts and my observations highlighted just how critical materialities were in this everyday space to offer a sense of home and ‘Sri Lankaness’. The material elements on, around, and next to the footpath drew people to that space, created routes of movement, and offered key access and vantage points to shops and restaurants as well as their Sri Lankan identity and culture.

Meanings etched onto footpaths

The meanings we associate with everyday landscapes are often impelled by our lived experiences that we take into various spaces. Sometimes the footpath ‘looks and feels differently depending on the perspectives of those spaces’ (Law 2005, 440). One participant, Maya, and I discussed the shopping strips in Sydney that Sri Lankans visited. She mentioned that she would visit these shopping strips to buy Sri Lankan food and groceries, using footpaths to access shops and wait for takeaway. When I posed the question: ‘Why do you think Sri Lankans find those spaces important?’, she responded without hesitation: ‘I guess, you get a taste of home’ (Maya, in-depth interview). Maya’s comment drew a link between spatiality, temporality, and encounters. ‘Home’ straddled the sidewalk ballet between Sri Lanka and Australia and, thus, was deeply embedded in her spatial knowledge of the shopping strip and motivated by her memories of Sri Lanka that permeated onto the everyday space. For Maya, these threads resonated with daily life, including routines, behaviours, and objects that gelled familiarity, memory, and meaning between people and place together.

I use Maya’s reference to a ‘taste of home’ to discuss how the footpath was meaningful for Sri Lankans. In a broader discussion about public spaces, Maureen, who lived in Melbourne for most of her life, revealed:

The space enables people to connect with each other and what I’ve found … with the first generation [migrants is] that they’re looking for spaces where they can be comfortable, and be themselves, and not have people look at them and think less of them because they’re displaying their Sri Lankan heritage (Maureen, in-depth interview).

Reflecting on Maureen’s excerpt pushed me to (re)consider the value of encounters between diaspora members in spaces. Maureen advocated for spaces where Sri Lankans could feel comfortable to gather, socialise, and express their identities. She explained that ‘it’s really the connections they can make to each other and what they do in that space that’s really important’ (Maureen, in-depth interview). Maureen’s reflections echo similar arguments made by Ye and Yeoh (2022, 3246) who asserted that there are everyday spaces where ‘both newcomers and longer term residents co-exist with difference of various configurations’ which fosters ‘spaces of mixing, integration and living with difference’. The Sri Lankan diaspora is heterogeneous and comprises multiple ethnicities, religions, cultures, and practices. Yet, the participants often blurred these distinctions when discussing the diasporic encounters they had in everyday spaces. Similarly, Marni discussed that Sri Lankans encountering other Sri Lankans becomes an important part of living in a host country:

You know, when you come to a country like this, or any country really, I think it’s just natural that you gravitate towards other Sri Lankans or people of the same ethnicity … if you come in and you don’t know anybody else, I think these spaces are quite useful for them’ (Marni, in-depth interview).

Encountering and sharing familiar everyday spaces were crucial for the participants who longed for a ‘taste of home’ (Neal et al. 2015). There was a need to ‘gravitate towards’ one another, which perhaps reinforced the convivial, chance, and planned diasporic encounters they had. While some Sri Lankans plan to meet at a designated space, it is the visibility of other Sri Lankans that can simultaneously give meaning to places. Maureen’s and Marni’s narrations of everyday spaces resonate with provocations from Hall’s (2012) work; footpaths and adjoining shops offered localised familiarity and comfort that was valued by the Sri Lankan diaspora. At the same time, for the diaspora, encounters of ‘knowing and being known by returning to the same spaces [and] engaging with familiar faces’ become pertinent in everyday spaces like the footpath (Hall 2012, 98).

The data unsettled knowledges of the footpath and adjoining shops by attuning to sensory, social, spatial, and temporal registers (Yi’En 2014). Meaningful encounters on footpaths featured in my discussions with Tharini:

My husband [and I] were in Wentworthville [in Sydney] a couple of days ago … when you go out to, kind of like, shops where they’re doing like takeaway food, it’s almost like Sri Lankans are continuing to gather [and socialise outside] as a form of connection … it’s like working for them, right, it’s a way of not being isolated (Tharini, in-depth interview).

Tharini’s observation underscored the multilayered nature of the footpath – here, both as a facilitator of diasporic gatherings and a thoroughfare for mobility. In this sense, the diaspora was involved in redefining the footpath and moulding its ‘social and spatial fabric’ (Cancellieri and Ostanel 2015, 499). While gathering in groups in public space in Australia is threatening to some or considered loitering, these types of social gatherings on the street resembled life in Sri Lanka. The footpath was a safe space for the group that Tharini observed, and perhaps even a space that felt like home. From Tharini’s musing, we can deduce that these footpaths and the edge spaces that comprise shop facades are certainly not banal or ordinary. In fact, they form part of convivial place-making processes for the diaspora.

During observations, I experienced places vicariously and attuned to certain senses and encounters that leeched out from shops and restaurants. I could smell curry powder and cinnamon from spice shops that trickled out onto footpaths. As I walked past, I was reminded of the bustle of the footpaths in Sri Lanka. In these instances, I felt spatially and temporally situated across multiple footpaths. Edensor (1998, 212) claimed that ‘the pedestrian enjoys an infinitely more vivid sensual experience in the Indian street than in the Western street’, however the findings from this research suggest that Sri Lankans attempt to sensorially connect everyday spaces in Australia back to Sri Lanka. Sanya drew similar connections between smell, taste, and memory in our conversation about footpaths in Sydney (Law 2001):

The other one is streets with Sri Lankan shops … if you think about Pendle Way in Pendle Hill [in Sydney], that entire strip is just … you literally feel you're back home, because everyone you see on the [footpath] looks like you. You walk [along], you smell it as well. You park your car down … that street where the dentist is on the corner, and you can literally smell it. You smell the food and you walk down the footpath, there are jewellery shops, spice shops, coffee shops, clothes shops, just along that entire strip (Sanya, in-depth interview).

What sets these everyday spaces apart are the sensory stimuli that waft out onto the footpath – the smell of the spices and food – along with the encounters with others. These warm, convivial encounters proffer meaning – that is, Sri Lankans visit these footpaths to feel like they belong and to spark memories of the homeland. Degen and Lewis (2020) contended that individuals can transform spaces through their sensory and embodied routines and engagements over time, which generate distinct meanings and attachments to those spaces. As I listened to Sanya’s description, I too ‘placed’ myself on different footpaths. Figuratively moving between the footpaths of Sri Lanka and Australia meant that when I was actually walking through spaces of inquiry, I was lured in and out different shops along the footpath and towards different shop facades to read more about their offerings. During one observation I wrote:

… after walking along the [shopping] strip, I was craving a wadais. I stood in front of a spice shop [in Narre Warren] that had a sign glued to the window with a list of takeaway food. I analysed the menu while listening to some Sri Lankans speaking to each other in Tamil outside the shop (Author’s field notes, 12 November 2020).

Another shop’s signs leeched onto the footpath, attracting passers-by into the shop for ‘Indian, Pacific, Sri Lankan, and South African’ spices and takeaway food (Figure 3) – much like how I was enticed during observations in Narre Warren. The signs may not prompt immediate or palpable feelings, but they used familiar words – ‘biriyani’, ‘milk toffees’, and ‘ribbon cake’ – that impart a ‘taste of home’ and cultural-making onto the footpath. The signs were an invitation to read the content and experience the footpath, strengthening the footpath’s multiple dimensions that intricately integrated materialities, senses, and meanings. Yet, these only became clear as I analysed the narrations, journal notes, and photographs together. Through these analyses, I was able to grasp the spatial and temporal constructions of footpaths and broader spaces that were encountered and experienced by Sri Lankans.

Practices on footpaths

On footpaths, practices included activities such as walking, gathering, waiting for transport, shopping, and sometimes moments interrupting the mundanity of everyday life that centred bodies and materialities, and multisensory elements in the space (Amin 2002; Neal et al. 2015). To think through multisensory elements, I interrogated the kind of sidewalk ballet that occurs in the spaces of this inquiry, including intersections between bodies, experience, and practices on footpaths and adjoining spaces (Jacobs 1961). Maureen took pause to consider how Sri Lankans undertook specific practices in Australia that paralleled their lives back home:

Some of my friends … would socialise with other Sri Lankans. That’s a very common story … and so everything they did, it was almost like living in Sri Lanka for them … they would go to the Sri Lankan grocery shops (Maureen, in-depth interview).

Regular practices of going to Sri Lankan shops, eating at Sri Lankan restaurants, and socialising with Sri Lankan friends all formed part of their place-making process and, as Maureen points out, made it feel like they were ‘living in Sri Lanka’. These practices cultivated a sense of belonging to the diaspora and perhaps even to Australia. Simultaneously, the footpath itself encouraged practices and activities. While discussing the shifting uses of public spaces during COVID-19, Maureen recalled a specific moment where her friends met outside a Sri Lankan food and grocery shop in Melbourne to exchange meals:

Figure 3. Portable signs outside a Sri Lankan takeaway food shop in Sydney. Photo: Author.

In the first lockdown … one of our friends cooked up a big meal of biriyani for everyone in that group – there’s like four families in the group – and said ‘come to MKS in Dandenong [, Melbourne]’ … MKS is an amazing Sri Lankan food shop. It’s Tamil, Tamil run, and they do the most amazing food … it’s so delicious. But we said, we’ll meet outside that shop because it’s still opening for groceries so we have a reason to go to that shop. And they literally ran out of the car, gave us the food, and ran back (Maureen, in-depth interview).

Visiting the MKS store formed part of Maureen’s regular routine of buying Sri Lankan food, but this story related to how she continued to use the footpath outside the shop to quickly exchange food with friends. Thus, this ballet played out very precisely – it was situated directly on the footpath as a space to meet, purchase, and exchange. The exchange was a practice; for Maureen, it involved waiting and exchanging. These movements, practices, and moments of stillness while waiting for friends occurred as a quick set of sequences. As I reflected on this story, I was drawn to Lorimer’s (2005, 84) argument that being in a space encompasses ‘shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements … unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions’. Thus, practices formed part of the diaspora’s use of the footpath and the shop facades acted as visible meeting points.

Routines also contributed to wider diasporic place-making that amplified the role of the footpath in everyday life. Tharini explained one routine that she undertook with her friend:

For us growing up, even with my friends, even when we would go for a walk on a Sunday, we’d walk down to one of the shops, get two mutton rolls, one each, and then do another walk around the block to come back [to the shop] (Tharini, in-depth interview).

Tharini’s routine of meeting her friend, buying food, and then walking along footpaths, while seemingly mundane, illuminated how the footpath afforded sociality. Sociality was also a practice carried out by the wider Sri Lankan diaspora:

In the evenings, [my clients] would come back from work … and they would kind of hang out outside the Sri Lankan shops in like Pendle Hill and Wentworthville, where you kind of hear everything that’s happening around Sydney, [in] other people’s lives, and that’s where they gathered (Tharini, in-depth interview).

Tharini’s account resonates with Law’s (2001) analysis of Filipino domestic workers gathering in the streets of Hong Kong on their days off as a performative practice of identity and diasporic place-making. Tharini highlighted the temporal rhythms of the footpath too. Gathering on footpaths, like in Tharini’s anecdotes, was safe (even after dark) and formed a convivial and familiar encounter that created social connections within the diaspora. These encounters parallel Neal et al.’s (2015, 474) contention that:

Some of this has been a conviviality in its most obvious form – sociality built on connective experiences of a shared physical space – but some of it has been a less obvious form of conviviality in which [diaspora members], unknown to each other, have come together.

My analyses of the footpath involved attentiveness to encounters in multiple forms: intimate, meaningful, fleeting, and centred on regular practices. I noted such encounters:

Someone kept walking in and out of the restaurant, chatting on the phone to someone. He bumped into another person (a friend I think) and they walked up and down the footpath a few times. They headed into to the Sri Lankan/Indian grocery shop and back to the restaurant where another person was waiting for them on the footpath (Author’s field notes, 5 November 2020).

As my field notes indicate, footpaths elicited an array of practices, such as mobility, socialising, and running errands. But these practices were not just couched within the shops – they spilled out onto the footpath. Spending time on the footpath assembled everyday practices and sociality in one place, resonating with Jacobs’ (1961) ballet of individuals and groups doing the intricate dance of daily life. For many participants, warm encounters occurred in everyday spaces, which were formative to diasporic place-making. I remained attuned to place-making, practices/routines, and encounters as occurring concomitantly. These included shopping, walking, and waiting, but they simultaneously involved planned and serendipitous encounters. These practices transpired on the footpaths laden with diasporic feelings of familiarity and belonging.

Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to better understand how the Sri Lankan diaspora’s place-making processes were embedded in everyday spaces and through encounters. To do so, I examined the multiple ways that urban and suburban footpaths espoused meaning for the Sri Lankan diaspora residing in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. To fully comprehend encounters on the footpath, Cresswell’s (2009) definition of place – comprising materiality, meaning, and practice – was integrated to separate out how each of these components was present (or not) on the footpath and adjoining shops which was then interspersed with examples of different types of diasporic encounters. The findings revealed that the footpath proffered feelings of familiarity, belonging, and conviviality for the Sri Lankan diaspora. The footpath was an access point to private shops and restaurants, but it simultaneously offered space to gather, socially connect, run errands, and even wait, which resonated with similar spaces in Sri Lanka.

The paper brings Jacobs' (1961) sidewalk ballet to life by examining the materialities, meanings, and practices that coalesced as an intricate dance on the footpath. This paper builds on existing literature on footpaths and similar spaces and provides a new and diverse case study for understanding it (Jacobs 1961; Fyfe 1998; Yeoh and Huang 1998; Law 2001; Hall 2012). Public footpaths, similar to other mundane everyday spaces like train stations, can be important sites of place-making for the diaspora. There are parallels in this paper with Fyfe’s (1998, 5) argument that the street ‘can be an active medium through which social identities are created and contested’. Indeed, such spaces can generate feelings of familiarity and belonging where the diaspora can shape, negotiate, and redefine a collective and harmonious diasporic/national identity.

The participants’ encounters on footpaths – using the footpath to weave in and out of shops, the frontages of the shops as meeting points, and ways in which sensory elements of shops wafted onto the footpath – provided traces of memories and opportunities to share diasporic life in public settings (Amin 2002). In some conversations, I felt I was on the footpaths myself – either in Australia or Sri Lanka – (re)engaging with the smells, sounds, and materials on footpaths. In that sense, the paper echoes findings from Law’s (2001, 280) research where the ‘sounds, sights and aromas of Little Manila dislocate the authoritative visual space of Hong Kong culture’. There were strong indicators of Sri Lankan culture and identity across the Australian footpaths examined and discussed that brought visibility of the diaspora to the neighbourhood. Presenting participants’ stories from the footpath, along with the critical autoethnography, connected footpaths to encounters, sensory experiences, and memories.

My analysis of this distinctive everyday space was motivated by a need to amplify diasporic experiences and encounters. In doing so, this paper reinforces Wise’s (2010, 935) argument that:

little recognition has been given to the fact that sharing real places – contact zones, if you like – is not always an easy thing to do. It is something we learn to do through practice and everyday negotiation, and it is more difficult for some groups … than others.

Like Wise (2010), I contend that focusing on participants’ experiences of living in a host city and navigating everyday spaces is imperative to migration and geographical scholarship. Participants’ stories were enriched by visual components and captured in photographs, demonstrating how ‘sharing real places’ led to encounters with materialities, memories, and regular practices. Yet, there remain gaps in understandings of how footpaths are shared and negotiated. Footpaths can be further investigated in multiple contexts – diasporic, urban/regional, spatial/ temporal. Analysing different footpaths provide momentum for us, as researchers, to learn more. They may comprise encounters with diversity that foster ambivalence. Alternatively, diasporas may resonate with completely different spaces of encounter (steps of houses, ‘ventanitas⁶’, public benches). We need additional scholarly contributions that both amplify diasporic experiences and deepen understandings of negotiations in everyday spaces that form part of crucial place-making processes.

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to the two reviewers for providing valuable feedback that strengthened this paper. I am grateful to the participants involved in this project for openly sharing their lived experiences of migration and settlement in Australia. I would like to thank Dr Marilu Melo Zurita, Professor David Bissell, and Professor Alex Piquero for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charishma Ratnam

Charishma Ratnam is a Human Geographer and Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Australia. Her research spans a number of areas including experiences of (re)creating home, refugee resettlement, and migrant settlement in Australia. Charishma is particularly interested in developing novel methodologies with her participants, including digital, walking, and visual methods.

Notes

1 The national census conducted in 2006, 2011, and 2016 showed a steady increase in numbers of Sri Lankans living in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistic (ABS), 2017).

2 The 2016 national census showed that 26,564 Sri Lankans resided in Greater Sydney and 54,030 resided in Greater Melbourne (ABS 2017).

3 The aim of the wider project is to examine the public and everyday spaces that the Sri Lankan diaspora uses to generate a sense of home, belonging, and inclusion in Australia. These spaces extend to parks, community centres, plazas, temples, and churches.

4 Ethics approval was received from Monash University’s Human Research Ethics Committee. The approval number is: 24605.

5 All participant names are pseudonyms.

6 Ventanitas refer to “walk-up windows” that sell Cuban-style coffee, pastries, and snacks. These are common spaces of gathering and sociality for the Cuban diaspora in the United States.