Abstract:
This chapter considers the evolving presence of urban “shared spaces” remaking a cluster of the oldest, inner-city streets of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Eschewing the previous disciplinary coursing of speed and movement on these streets (footpaths, vehicles services, etc.), their resurfacing and refurnishing has permitted a minimally demarcated modulation of pedestrian and vehicular trajectories, trajectories unfettered by curbs or obvious rights of way. This shift from moulding to modulation in street space is suggestive, as Gilles Deleuze (1992) has asserted, of a parallel transition from disciplinary to control societies. This parallel is tested in light of Maurizio Lazzarato’s (2006) investigation of contemporary noo-politics – or modes of governance and influence that emphasise cognitive control over corporeal discipline. Predicated on an urban regeneration aiming to produce “the world’s most liveable city” (Auckland Council, n.d.), shared spaces appear to entangle the city’s sensitive built heritage sites within new attention economies, themselves seeking to renovate both local and international structures of belonging and privilege. Considered is an interlinking of liveability discourse with memory and the mobilisation of temporal virtualities, a crossing foregrounding the centrality of affect and politics in emerging urban place relations. The resulting sketch seeks an image of thought for an Antipodean noo-politics, itself underpinned by what Deleuze (1989) has seen as our contemporary noo-shock.
