The “Fall” of What? FIFA’s Public Viewing Areas and Their Contribution to the Quality of Public Life

Cultural Pessimism: The Orthodox View

In early modernity, Rousseau (1759, p. 12) declared, “We imagine ourselves to be in company at the theatre; whereas there every body is alone.” By pointing to the capacity to feel “alone” in the “company” of others, Rousseau illuminates the ambiguity of public space in which congregations of strangers often assemble in spatial proximity, but seldom interact. With the theatre operating as a metaphor for urban experience, such a statement has broader implications for debates concerning the nature of public life by prioritizing substantive definitions formed around intersubjective praxis (Joas, 1985) and communicative action (Habermas, 1984) over orthodox notions of “the public” limited to temporal and spatial co-presence, or a geographic locale. Rousseau’s concern about the condition of public communication is emblematic of a trend in modern social thought in which a series of “cultural pessimists” have critiqued what they perceive to be the increasing decline of public life spanning early to late modernity, resulting in “the culture of narcissism” (Lasch, 1979) and, even more dramatically, “the fall of public man” (Sennett, 1977). Here, the city is understood as a modern form of industrial society, in which the money economy dominates and the intimacy of gemeinschaft is replaced by the anonymity of gesellschaft (Tonnies, 1887/1955). Contemporary debates build on 19th- and 20th-century theses in which the rapid “tempo” and “quantitative relations” of the metropolis are believed to have had an inexorable effect on social and mental life, cultivating civil indifference (Giddens, 1991), the blasé attitude (Simmel, 1903/1950), alienation (Marx, 1867/2007), and a state of anomie (Durkheim, 1897/1997) in a lonely crowd (Riesman, 1950/2001) as the mechanics of industrialism, capitalism, and urbanism disengage “the public” from the communal structures that traditionally governed public life.

The tendency to lament the degeneration of the city as an urban space once inhabited for social purposes corresponds to the proliferation of theories on sport that critique the decline of the stadium as a collective public forum. It has been argued that the commodification of sport has introduced new inequalities associated with the commercialization of fandom (Williams, 2006). Critiques of this kind tend to celebrate amateurism as “morally superior” to the professional regime in which athletes are “paid to play” (McKay et al., 2001), with commercialization thought to manipulate “cultural citizenship” (Miller, 2006), and, instead, as a corollary to romanticize the collective experience associated with place-based, topophiliac fandom (Rowe & Gilmour, 2010).

The “decline” of public fandom is believed to be further intensified by a series of media innovations (beginning with domestic television and now encompassing third-generation mobile phones and computers) and the privatization of media coverage associated with the increase of subscription networks over free-to-air television (Rowe & Gilmour, 2009) that, together, are considered to replace traditional public viewing with the private consumption of sporting events. Indeed, sport television itself has been accused of overwhelming traditional, topophiliac modes of fan culture (Sandvoss, 2003). It is ironic, therefore, that recent attempts to enhance public life should take the form of media communication where “mega events” are broadcast to mass audiences at public viewing areas (PVAs) most commonly situated in city centers. Mega events are large-scale cultural or sporting occasions designed to attract tourists and media attention (Roche, 1992, p. 564). Characterized by their impulse to transcend the boundaries of space and time, mega events use media communication technologies to be distributed to global audiences while nonetheless working to “produce” dispersed spaces, notably PVAs, as sites of spectatorial participation.

Mediating Mega Events at Public Viewing Areas

The proliferation of PVAs in recent years reveals the self-conscious attempts of various government agencies, city councils, and organizations to facilitate sociality in the public sphere through the mediation of cultural events. In Sydney, Australia, for example, the New South Wales State Government has sought to increase the quality of public life through hosting a range of festivals involving PVAs—the Sydney Festival, Vivid/Creative Sydney, and the 17th Biennale of Sydney—and the principal subject of this article, FIFA’s International Fan Fest. With the latter four festivals staged in winter, the public funding invested in these events reflects the significance that the State Government places on enhancing the quality of public life in Sydney’s urban landscape. The State’s endorsement of PVAs is also a tourism-related strategy, and specifically relates to Sydney’s competition with Melbourne as an inbound tourist destination (Sydney Morning Herald, 2008).

PVAs have emerged as common spaces where spectators with diverse sociocultural characteristics (e.g., those related to ethnicity, gender, age, and leisure preference) can assemble to take part in a global spectacle. During the 2010 World Cup, this phenomenon extended to many places across the world and was organized mainly by civic authorities. FIFA (2010a) endorsed nine South African cities as official PVAs and seven international sites declaring this global configuration: “A Global Platform Which Unites the World.” FIFA’s International Fan Fest sites reflected the Federation’s global strategy to extend the “festival atmosphere” of the World Cup in time and space beyond the geographical boundaries of the South African sporting arenas in which the physical event was situated. Together with other projects, such as the Public Space Broadcasting strategy launched in 19 cities in the United Kingdom in 2003, these initiatives invoke questions regarding how PVAs might contribute to the quality of civic culture and promote new forms of social interaction by linking local, national, and even transnational networks through common collective experiences. The possibility of these urban sites contributing to the formation of a transnational public sphere, beyond those gathered in spatial and temporal proximity, highlights the potential that media communication has to manufacture public space.

In potentially making these places “public,” mega events reflect a deliberate attempt to integrate broader communities into the city’s urban landscape, including those members of society who are typically marginalized from conventional public life. Such an endeavor was exemplified at the Sydney Fan Fest by its hosting the 2010 Big Issue Street Football Festival for homeless and marginal participants. While the establishment of large screens for public use is a relatively recent initiative, the construction of urban spaces as sites from which to circulate cultural practices and enhance public life is not a new phenomenon. For example, successive French governments of the Fifth Republic have consciously incorporated environmental design to quash civil unrest and social exclusion in the banlieues (French working-class, migrant-dense suburbs) by investing in sport infrastructure to transform these “sensitive” urban areas into functional, creative spaces for the ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged population residing there (Silverstein, 2000). Similarly, the principle of crime prevention through environmental design, the development of public housing projects in Chicago during the 20th century, and the strategic official acceptance of graffiti in parts of northern American cities are variously considered by urban planners to be ways of maintaining safe environments, and of forging a sense of belonging for the disenfranchised youths inhabiting these urban settings (Wimsatt, 1994). These examples of urban design endorse the view that public space is “relational,” so that what happens in one urban environment influences social relations in other parts of the city. Such a strategy of manufacturing the built environment and investing in civic architecture to enhance public culture is founded on the conviction that the public’s behavior is altered by different urban landscapes. With the city being a structured space that necessarily engenders social segregation and exclusion at some level (Häußermann, 2008), urban design maintains a long tradition of attempting to improve public life through community integration and facilitating shared cultural experiences in common public spaces. As Shields’s (1991) case studies of marginal places vividly reveal, being on the periphery of cultural systems of space under modernity is an effect of much more than geographical locale as it is conventionally conceived.

The significance of examining the social implications of FIFA’s PVAs as part of this global strategy is that the proliferation of these public spaces seek to challenge trends inherent in contemporary sociological literature that lament the decline of civic life in modernity (Lasch, 1979; Sennett, 1977), as has been given conspicuous expression in Robert Putnam’s (2000) communitarian critique of the perils of Bowling Alone. Suggesting that declining sociality is the repercussion of social structures being generally more diffuse in liberal democracies, such individualist doxa tends to overlook the formation of new modes of solidarity in the present age. That in modern liberal democracies traditional ties may encounter fragility, however, does not necessarily entail a “fall” in public life. What these changing social arrangements do imply, as will be discussed, is that the media, together with public and private organizations, are likely to play a more significant role in staging civic performances by assuming the position of public benefactor traditionally held by religious institutions, monarchies, and political heads of state. In modern democratic contexts, PVAs provide the opportunity for spectators from diverse backgrounds to communicate liberally with strangers, locals, and other global football fans. We now consider the extent to which this opportunity may be realized as social practice.

The World Cup as a Global Spectacle

Recurring every 4 years, the World Cup may be considered variously global by facilitating global human relocation to a particular time and space where the tournament is played; establishing patterns of global media production and consumption; attracting global forms of advertising from transnational companies, and through fostering a complex sense of belonging between spectators across the globe. This conception of the World Cup as a mediated global spectacle is distinct from traditional theories of spectacle, which largely situated the phenomenon in a static sociospatial arena. Rousseau (1759), as formerly discussed, was critical of the capacity of spectacles to facilitate meaningful public communication, arguing that spatial proximity, especially when the co-present gaze is directed toward a staged performance, is not synonymous with public life. The point is that public life is a corollary of civic interaction and, thus, a place that facilitates deliberation is more “public” than one that does not. This understanding of the public as contingent on meaningful communication informs Rousseau’s distinction between spectacles, which separate subject and object, and festivals that encourage active participation. Rousseau (1759) encourages the sociality engendered by festivals, especially that moment when the division between self and society is temporarily breached through the feeling of “true happiness” that accompanies public participation:

But you want to know the nature of the festivals . . . there is the seat of true happiness…let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; let them be actors themselves; let each man feel and love himself in others, to the end that they may be all the more intimately united. (p. 173)

It is precisely the notion of the individual as an actor, “intimately united” with fellow citizens on the civic stage, that Rousseau considers “public” life to promote. In this sense, his thesis resonates with the cultural pessimist position formerly discussed, in which the “fall of public man” is considered to be the repercussion of a series of social developments that have eroded those elements of urban culture that sustain “meaningful” social interaction. This critique of spectacle is significant, for by condemning the passive relationship engendered by the theatre, Rousseau questions commonplace understandings of public life that rely purely on topographical concepts or shared spatial co-presence alone. Thus, despite organizers promoting the “festival atmosphere” of FIFA’s Sydney Fan Fest site, to be truly public, in Rousseau’s sense of the word, these PVAs must cultivate active participation between diverse “strangers,” rather than established gatherings between friends and family that fail to open up city life to new possibilities for social exchange.

Another way of assessing the civic implications of FIFA’s global spectacle is to examine how modern forms of capitalism and democracy have affected social interaction at the Federation’s official PVAs. Is public viewing conducive to “meaningful” (i.e., beyond basic co-presence) social interaction, or do PVAs merely exemplify Debord’s (1967/1994) society of the spectacle, in which social encounters are increasingly reduced to commodity relations mediated by images? For Debord, the spectacle is not simply a form of entertainment that exists in an isolated domain such as the theatre: “The Whole Life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles,” with his concern being that “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (p. 12). The spectacle, accordingly, is more than a collection of images; it is a social relationship between people mediated by images:

If the spectacle—understood in the limited sense of those “mass media” that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation—seems at times to be invading society in the shape of mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it . . . if the administration of society and all contact between people now depends on the intervention of such “instant” communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially one-way; the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration. The social cleavage that the spectacle expresses is inseparable from the modern State, which, as the product of the social division of labour and the organ of class rule, is the general form of all social division. (Debord, 1967/1994, pp. 19-20)

While Debord considers the “society of the spectacle” to be a repercussion of the economic and technological developments inherent in modern industrial society, and the division of labor in particular, he argues that the spectacle cannot be understood simply as a product of technology. Rather, it is better understood as weltanschauung: “a world view transformed into an objective force” (Debord, 1967/1994, pp. 12-13), in which active citizens are transformed into “Homo Spectator.” Here, Debord’s notion of the spectacle as “one-way” communication resonates with Rousseau’s critique of the spectacle as an objectifying mode of entertainment designed to amuse passive audiences. Of course, to consider these perspectives is not to embrace them without question—Alan Tomlinson (2002), for example, has provided a strong (though sympathetic) critique of Debord’s totalizing cultural pessimism. But the matters that they raise remain relevant, not least because at any one time nations and cities are in the process of competing vigorously to stage mega events and are required to persuade their own urban populations of their benefits.

Given the complex nature of public life, when assessing the social significance of spectacles, it is necessary to question whether these events facilitate meaningful deliberation among audience members or merely attract a series of isolated, passive spectators, as Debord and Rousseau, respectively, believed. Key to rendering public spectacles communicative is the capacity for spectators to interact spontaneously with concrete and abstract (mediated) others though meaningful social exchange. While the global spectacles afforded by PVAs may produce collective patterns of behavior in different urban contexts, the specific architecture and demographics that comprise city life must also be taken into account. We argue that it is not the spectacle in abstract, but the way in which it is governed, which informs whether the experience of viewing events from PVAs differs or resembles “being there” live at the event.

Our observations ¹ indicate that the relatively subdued atmosphere at FIFA’s Sydney PVA was accentuated by the high level of governmentality operating at its Darling Harbour venue. A multitiered governance platform was established to manage potentially “deviant” spectator behavior but at the expense of a vibrant collective atmosphere or of more spontaneous displays and forms of fandom. The level of surveillance permeating this manifestation of “public life,” therefore, questions the plausibility of theories that attribute the popularity of sport to spectators’ ability “to slip the disciplinary mechanism of the workday world into reverse gear” (Fiske, 1993, pp. 84-85). Sport, from such a standpoint, functions as an inverted panopticon where spectators, who are monitored and totally “known” in their everyday lives, monitor players through their total visibility on the sporting arena, and so challenge hegemonic power. In considering spectator sport as a functional antidote to the regimes of power that Foucault (1977) associated with the governmentality of social life and the rationalizing consequences that Weber (1905/1991) ascribed to the “iron cage” of modernity, Fiske echoes Elias and Dunning’s (1986) appraisal of sport as a means to evoke the civic “we-feelings” and “controlling-decontrolling” of emotions that are increasingly evacuated from public life. Fiske’s argument that spectatorship facilitates an inverted panopticon is undermined, however, by the heightened police surveillance regulating sporting arenas. It has been well-documented that state attempts to manage sport have resulted in a loss of spontaneity and play (Huizinga, 1938/1970). Ironically, it appears that despite the effervescent atmosphere conventionally associated with being a crowd member at a live event, spectatorship is increasingly hindered by state measures to regulate public conduct in modern, “civilized” societies.

There were, then, despite such positive aims as harm minimization and crime prevention, negative repercussions associated with the level of governmentality at FIFA’s PVA. Although providing a safe environment from which fans could gather to watch the World Cup collectively on television, FIFA’s Sydney venue lacked the passionate atmosphere typically associated with spectator sport (with the exception of the matches featuring Australia), thereby questioning FIFA’s (2010a) claim that “FIFA Fan Fests are about more than football watching, they are truly a fan experience”. The extent of regulation at the Sydney site was, of course, accentuated by the fact that the New South Wales Government invested both financially and culturally in the event, explicitly using the venue to “put Sydney and Australia firmly on the football map—particularly as we launch our bid to host the FIFA World Cup finals in 2018 or 2022” (FIFA, 2010b). Thus, again, as Debord (1967/1994) forewarned, the social cleavage that the spectacle expresses appears to be inseparable from the modern State, with the global event ostensibly dedicated to immediate fan pleasure caught in a web of calculations and agenda.

Media Reflexivity and the Quality of the Transnational Public Sphere

Despite the relatively subdued atmosphere that characterized FIFA’s Sydney site, there is considerable potential for PVAs to promote civic interaction through live sporting and cultural events. In fact, it could be argued that media technological advancements have increased the capacity of the public sphere, with virtual communication enabling global citizens to interact with spectators (“strangers”) outside their immediate temporal and spatial spheres. Dayan and Katz (1992)—who are themselves pessimistic about “carnivalesque” urban expressions of sports fandom (Rowe, 2004, p. 175)—employ the term media events to describe the growth of private consumption of public events, while McQuire (2008) has coined the term media cities to capture the spatial experience of modern life in the 21st century. The modern metropolis, McQuire argues, is radically different from that described in classic theories of urbanism because mobile modern media pervade urban space, thereby constituting a distinctive mode of social experience that emerges through a complex process of coconstitution between architectural structures and urban territories, social practices and urban feedback: a media-architectural complex. Thus, places are not merely established by territorial boundaries, they are also performed on the global stage with “places to play” becoming “places in play” (Sheller & Urry, 2004, p. 1). The very notion of a transnational public sphere, extending temporally beyond those gathered in spatial or national cultural proximity, is a testament to media reflexivity, with FIFA’s Sydney PVA enabling the city’s local inhabitants to interact with an international public through common communicative content and experience in a global space.

Indeed, FIFA’s global initiative reflects the Federation’s deliberate strategy to extend the festival atmosphere of the World Cup in space and time beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of South African sporting arenas. With conventional boundaries increasingly challenged by the time–space compression that various technologies have facilitated, spectators across the globe have more potential to interact in what Bauman (2000) has influentially termed liquid modernity. When interrogating how PVAs might cultivate civic culture, promote new forms of social interaction, or bind networks locally, nationally, and even transnationally through shared collective experiences at PVAs, such questions inevitably facilitate new understandings of the global corresponding to the dynamics of urban public life in the 21st century. If only at a symbolic level, broadcasting popular global events at PVAs has the potential to counter theories of atomization and individualism typically associated with modern social life. “Large screens,” as McQuire (2010, p. 568) argues, “belong to a paradigm shift in the place of media technologies that is rapidly altering both the ambience and dynamics of public space in contemporary cities.” The capacity of these global “urban spectacles” to contribute to a heterogeneous public culture, nevertheless, requires critical interrogation of whether the media and civic architecture come to realize this ambition.

When assessing the potential of a transnational public sphere to emerge, a series of questions about the nature of the media and urban spaces must be posed. These concern the kinds of experience of spectators at PVAs when compared with “being there” live at the stadium, including the differences between the “sensational” experience of collectively cheering for a team and performing public displays of fandom motivated (at least partially) toward directly influencing players at the live event and viewing the game on a screen from a distance. That the “crowd” at PVAs can be seen (via screens) but not heard by fellow onlookers at the live event, and, moreover, the mediation of their public performances relies on the discretionary professional practices of editors, camera crew, and broadcasting networks, demands analytical scrutiny. Furthermore, given the level of security personnel involved in managing access to, and conduct at, these urban spaces, just how “public” are PVAs? Finally, while media reflexivity undoubtedly conveys the appearance of intimacy, it is necessary to question whether these emotive and dramatic factors are as “authentic” as the experience of being there live at the event, or merely another example of Homo Spectator and the commercialization of the metropolis that scholars such as Debord have critiqued.

The potential for virtual and media communication to enhance the public sphere is arguable and evidently complex. It is contingent on a range of factors, foremost of which is how the public can be defined and qualitatively assessed. The modern metropolis is a dynamic place that cannot be limited to a single urban experience, with the governance of such places an equally complicated task (Sheller & Urry, 2004, p. 10). To assess the quality of public spaces, therefore, is to evaluate the social fabric of these urban settings according to a range of criteria. For example, is the mediated public sphere contingent on a group of spatially co-present individuals, or could an individual watching public coverage from the privacy of their own home be considered part of such a transnational public space? Despite the dense urban locales in which FIFA’s Fan Fest sites are situated, the experience of public viewing from these sites may ultimately prove to be more private than viewing the World Cup with an ensemble of acquaintances and strangers at a friend’s residence, or in the consumptive social space of the pub (Weed, 2007), or while interacting with social networking sites on one’s own, for example. The point, nevertheless, remains that the private and public spheres do not clearly correspond to distinct spatial demographics.

Particularly problematic is that the vast body of literature lamenting the degeneration of public space not only presumes a common understanding of what constitutes public life, but more importantly implies that “the public” is in decline and that in the past public spaces used to be more inclusive—more “public,” as Iveson (2007, p. 6) explains. Bruce Robbins (1993) reiterates the point thus:

The list of writings that announce the decline, degradation, crisis, or extinction of the public is long and steadily expanding. Publicness, we are told again and again and again, is a quality that we once had but have now lost, and that we must somehow retrieve. (p. viii)

For Robbins, such orthodox narratives reveal a “conjuring trick,” a form of naïve idealism for a past that has never existed. Despite the architecture and entertainment of ancient Greece and Rome being equally susceptible to state manipulation, regulation, economic incentives, and propaganda, culturally pessimistic literature conventionally laments the decline of these public spaces as somehow more “public” or “pure” than their modern-day equivalents. Sennett (1992), for example, argues that modern metropolitan life suffers from a divide between subjective and worldly experience, self and city. This is because, for him, city life is atomized by “fear of exposure” among strangers with inhabitants striving to protect themselves from “difference.” While Sennett laments the lost moral dimensions once afforded by ancient architecture (the Greeks learning about sexual desire at the gymnasium, for example), the exclusionary cultural customs that prevented many members of society from participating in these public spaces because of gender, class, and “race” prompts the obvious question concerning for whom these spaces were putatively more public. A similar criticism can be made of Habermas’s (1984) idealized public sphere on the basis of 18th-century London cafe society (Schudson, 1993). Access to public spaces and cities has always involved a political struggle and, as Don Mitchell (1995, p. 117) points out, the rhetoric and nostalgia for an ideal public forum emerges as a platform from which marginalized groups can argue for their rights as part of that struggle, although, as we have noted, it can also have a culturally pessimistic tone that discourages intervention and action.

The political struggle for democratic urban space is “an activity involving creation and construction, not repair and retrieval” (Phillips, 1992, p. 50). The emergence of PVAs as a focal point for collective gatherings in urban spaces describes a similar trajectory, with the significant difference being that the screen does not so much substitute for a public gathering as become the occasion for one (McQuire, 2010, p. 574). Considerations of whether PVAs enhance civic life in the 21st-century rest on evaluative definitions of the term quality. Here, quality social interaction in public space has been understood from a Durkheimian (1897/1997) standpoint as a sensory experience with another (concrete or abstract) that is felt through cheering, dialogue, and display as modes of public communication and crowd membership. From this perspective, the affective register of cities connects with the physical and sensory relationships exchanged between its inhabitants. The temporary nature of PVAs evidently represents a different media logic to traditional social interactions in well-defined territories, such as a sporting stadium. These sites can, nevertheless, be just as public as their conventional counterparts, if the opportunity remains for spontaneous, corporeal-sensory interactions with unknown others in these “common spaces.” Such a definition, of course, questions the extent to which private (residential) viewing experiences can technically be termed public, given that the viewer has the capacity to choose with whom, and when, they will interact. For, in virtual spaces, the opportunity for spontaneous, corporeal-sensory interactions is significantly decreased when the individual spectator is in control of their involvement with public life.

Furthermore, when assessing the quality of public life in these urban spaces, the power relations that govern social interaction at PVAs are pivotal. For example, given the strategic partnerships between sports organizations, government agencies, local councils, and multinational sponsors in providing the infrastructure required to mediate live events publicly, the freedom of these urban spaces from government and commercial intrusion is substantially delimited. It is essential also to determine precisely what is meant by “quality” public interaction because, as has been argued in this article, it is apparent that spatial proximity does not equate with meaningful social interaction; nor does public life necessarily emanate from the private consumption of public broadcasts. The passive spectator relationships and mutual disinterest that Rousseau associated with the theatre may be just as prevalent in modern PVAs and, consequently, each case must be carefully examined to assess relative levels and types of social interaction, atomization, and alienation.

To examine whether FIFA’s Sydney PVA contributed to complex public interaction in the city’s landscape, a revealing paradox emerged. The surveillance measures used to regulate the spatial dynamics of PVAs have a direct correlation with the levels of sociality experienced in these spaces, with the very policies and technologies that appear to be exclusionary supported on the grounds that they enhance citizens’ experience of public space (Iveson, 2007, p. 5). Government agencies’ claim to enforce security measures on behalf of “the public” to ensure order and safety are themselves also capable of degrading the quality of public life (Giulianotti & Klauser, 2010). Thus, at FIFA’s Sydney PVA, what we deem to be an excessive police, supervisory, and surveillance personnel presence are declared as “security measures . . . put in place to ensure a safe, friendly environment for all to enjoy,” and to prevent antisocial and criminal behavior from tarnishing the “family friendly” atmosphere of the event as well as assisting the State Government’s bid to host prospective World Cups: “This is about putting Sydney and Australia firmly on the international football map—particularly as we launch our bid to host the FIFA World Cup finals in 2018 or 2022” (FIFA, 2010b). The destructive ramifications of football hooliganism and the violence commonly associated with the public viewing of sports events highlights the need to regulate communal spaces, particularly when alcoholic lubrication is intensified as part of the “night time economy.” Hooliganism, surveillance, regulation, and recreation are all subject to shifting calculations of risk and reward (Leopkey & Parent, 2009). It is not the use of surveillance that hinders social interaction at PVAs but rather the excessive presence and display of law enforcement agencies that, ironically, can diminish the very form of public life that security personnel aim to enhance.

Conclusion

We have attempted in this article to demonstrate that debates about culture, space, and sociality are enduring, yet necessarily dynamic. The Platonic claim that Attic tragedy threatened to stimulate unruly passions and “destroy” the rational underpinnings of his ideal Republic persists many centuries later in critiques concerning the susceptibility of sports stadia to civic disorder (Giulianotti & Klauser, 2010). No longer reduced to spatial or temporal proximity or simple television broadcast in the domestic domain, these global spectacles not only have the potential to bind local and national audiences but to contribute to the rise of a transnational public sphere. While the realization of such an aim is contingent on a range of factors, the proliferation of these public fora across the world to some degree undermines the cultural pessimist thesis in social theory that equates the “fall” of public man in the 21st century with the dynamics of metropolitan life.

We have argued that the cultural pessimist thesis lamenting the degeneration of public life subsequent to the rise of communication technologies in modernity is limited for several reasons. First, the proliferation of marketing via mass media communication technologies in the present resembles the role of religious propaganda in the past. The ancient world is, itself, full of examples of religious institutions and public benefactors developing and restoring monuments and public spaces to symbolize their own wealth, power, and benefaction. Second, the nostalgic idolization of an older public culture tends to ignore the gender, racial, and class inequities that restricted the ability of the broader demos to occupy certain public spaces prior to the advent of feminism in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and the emergence of civil rights movements (Baker, 2010). Indeed, from an Aristotelian standpoint, Attic theatre may have cultivated “better” citizens, just as the gymnasium facilitated civic participation as a public forum where healthy Greek citizens could physically interact. Yet with only 10% of the population qualifying as Athenian citizens (Taplin, 2010), these spaces were accessible to a highly restricted public. Third, the emergence of PVAs as mediated forms of communication in the public sphere demonstrates that theses critiquing the media for facilitating the privatization of public culture need to be situated within a specific historical conjuncture (McQuire, 2010). The very same communication technologies that were once thought to engender atomization and individualization by encouraging withdrawal into the private sphere are now incorporated into the large screens at PVAs to enhance civic communication in common urban spaces. Whether PVAs are successful in enhancing public life remains arguable but it is evident that to conflate modern media communication technologies with individualization and privatization is a historically limited view. The nature of public life has undoubtedly been affected by a series of economic, religious, political, and sociocultural developments, yet a changing public is not synonymous with a declining one.

We have attempted to demonstrate through this broad discussion and small case study that nostalgia for a once-democratic public is built on a limited understanding of the demos, and that modern tropes documenting the “rise” and “fall” of the public sphere are historically and analytically flawed. PVAs are only one example of emergent public spaces in metropolitan life, resonating with the proliferation of commemorative instillations during the 1990s, and city-government policies that reveal an association between cities and public memory. A novel feature of modern social life is the way in which technological initiatives compress spatial and temporal boundaries and have made places conventionally considered to be private, public (and vice versa), through virtual as well as media communication. The potential for mediated viewing to expand the public sphere is evident yet, as has been argued, the capacity for the affective register of the city to be acquired through the media is contingent on the quality of the public communicative interaction that takes place.

When examining whether PVAs enhance the quality of public life by promoting new forms of social interaction in urban space, a significant tension emerges between governmentality and regeneration in these highly regulated spaces. The concepts of spectacle and sociality have been employed in this article to interrogate whether the mediation of mega events at PVAs have the potential to enhance or degrade social relationships. Whereas for Rousseau and Debord, spectacles depoliticize social life by passively forming an audience, it has been argued that those involved can play a more active role in their appraisal of the viewing experience. Nevertheless, the highly regulated forms of surveillance monitoring the experience and display of fandom at PVAs (and, it should be mentioned briefly, the common clustering of fans into small, relatively enclosed groups as observed at the Sydney FIFA Fan Fest site) undermine the potential for spectators actively to interact with others and, thereby, contribute to the regeneration of public life. The “public” nature of PVAs is undermined if participants are prevented or discouraged from encountering a diversity of strangers in unknown circumstances, only to remain “gathered” with established networks of family and friends. While it was a relatively young cohort attending FIFA’s Sydney PVA, the venue also showcased the multicultural diversity that has come to epitomize the metropolis. In such contexts, spatial and temporal co-presence in public spaces with diverse others opens up the possibility of dynamic encounters (perhaps even tentatively establishing the conditions for the emergence of a transnational public sphere), although this opportunity is frequently not realized when fragmented spectators remain strangers.

While the affective response generated by PVAs is not guaranteed, it appears that “meaningful” public communication and its environments can be tailored to cultivate quality social interaction. That we have qualified the words “meaningful” and “quality” clearly indicates that they are by no means self-evident or static, but we suggest that degrees of spontaneous contact outside immediate primary groups are necessary for PVAs to do more for urban life than function as intermittently populated spaces of consumption and pedestrian flow (Rowe, 2008). If the city is to operate as a forum for sociality beyond mundane co-presence, public space must allow for dynamic interactions between strangers, in addition to sensory, embodied practices through which individuals may understand themselves in relation to “others.” Such interactions need to balance reasonable regulation with self-expression to enable involuntary, impersonal exchange between citizens in public encounters. Only then can the expressivity made possible by urban life transcend the quantitative social bond that Simmel critiqued in making way for the “intimately united,” spontaneous modes of public life that Rousseau desired.