Geography Compass 8/11 (2014): 834–847, 10.1111/gec3.12183 Public Space in non-Western Contexts: Practices of Publicness and the Socio-spatial Entanglement Junxi Qian * Centre for Cultural Industry and Cultural Geography and School of Geography, South China Normal University Abstract In Western traditions, conceptions of public space have been pivotal to ideas and imaginations of civic and political life. Public space is understood as a political forum where ideas and claims are expressed and as a civic arena where identities and differences are rendered visible and thereby acknowledged. Recently, studies on public space have made a timely theoretical move towards theorising the ways in which spatial practices are constitutive of social processes, and contribute to the relational construction of identities and subjectivities. This review focuses on the practices of public space and publicness in non-Western contexts. It engages with the multifarious ways that contingent conceptions of publicness are construed, negotiated and contested in contexts without civic and political conceptualisations of public space con- ceived in the West. While building on the practice-oriented approach towards public space, this review suggests that f luid and f lexible perspectives and conceptualisations need to be rendered more intelligible and concrete by engaging with the richness of empirical processes taking place in non-Western cities. In cases across the globe, public spaces, in putting together multiple meanings, views, actions and relations, are intrinsically productive of everyday politics and broader socio-cultural transformations. Introduction In Western traditions, public space has long been celebrated as a political forum where ideas and claims are expressed and as a civic arena where identities and differences are rendered visible and thereby acknowledged (Orum and Neal, 2010). Recent theoretical advancement in human geography and cognate disciplines, however, has cautioned against conceptualising public space merely in terms of normativised civic and political ideals. Practices of public space, as Madden (2010) argues, invoke diverse and context-specific conceptions of publicness that are ‘assembled and built into the landscape’ (p. 187). While certain (in fact most) practices centred on public space do not fully live up to the democratic visions of unfettered participation and expression, they nonetheless act as fundamentally constitutive forces in the formation of relations, meanings and identities. In a sense, this re-conceptualisation of publicness enables us to geographically extend the applicability of the notion of urban public realm (Lof land, 1998; Sennett, 2000) to include non-Western public spaces that may not bear the normative values conceived in the West, but are nonetheless extensively used and appropriated, as well as profoundly politicised and contested. Indeed, the recent one or two decades have witnessed a rapid growth of works on public spaces in non-Western contexts, with contributions from a wide variety of disciplines. This article is an attempt to examine practices of public space in urban settings outside the West, and it also makes efforts to unpack social processes that these practices not only respond to but also constitute. This article asks whether public space also attains significant social and cultural weights in non-Western contexts, and my answer to this question is unequivocally positive. I © 2014 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd