Invisible boundaries to access and participation in public spaces: navigating community diversity in Leicester, UK

ABSTRACT

This paper considers how institutions responsible for urban public spaces might promote more equitable access. Focusing on the Gujarati community in Leicester, UK it reveals multiple cultural sensitivities that are often not taken into consideration by institutions, even as they seek to enable participation. The research maps invisible boundaries which prevent ethnic minority communities accessing urban public spaces, including complex dynamics of ethnicity, caste and class. We suggest that considering how residents imagine boundaries traversing the urban environment, and how these bound them from others – including powerful institutions – explains why certain physical spaces and spaces of participation remain inaccessible to them. It finds institutional practices perpetuate these boundaries by not recognising such complexities and how they alter local participation. This research demonstrated that the perception of accessible spaces extends beyond distance and physical accessibility to a desire for power to shape those spaces. By critically examining the factors that delimit movement in space, this article extends understanding of access and participation, highlighting that the two are not in a straightforward linear or hierarchical relationship in which one precedes the other. Rather the two can be sought together, with participation a prerequisite for access. Secondly, effective participation does not just require power to be shared across the boundary between institution and “community” – it should also be distributed across the community, and traverse social boundaries within it.

KEYWORDS:

• Access
• participation
• public space
• boundaries
• ethnic minority
• power
• community

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by Canal and River Trust.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 We acknowledge that this term is problematic, particularly when referring to a community like the one discussed which represents a minority nationally but not locally. However, UK institutions like the ones discussed here, typically distinguish between the majority white population and those of other ethnic backgrounds or who are racialized as such. Research participants frequently used the term community to denote those they identify with, often in relation to ethnicity or religion, and described the cities’ residents in terms of its many communities.

2 LCC was not willing to accept the migrants from Uganda they had taken out an advertisement in the Ugandan newspaper ‘Uganda Argus’ warning the South Asians against coming to Leicester or they will face the expulsion (McLoughlin 2013).

3 The caste system is a social hierarchical structure in Hinduism that divides groups into ranked classes. The members of the higher caste have got higher social standing and privileges than members belong to lower caste.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canal and River Trust.