Recently I was waiting for a bus at Southern Cross Station in Melbourne. Normally Southern Cross is a hive of activity, with business people and well-dressed tourists everywhere. This time, however, it was early morning, and the place was deserted.
Well, almost deserted. A motley collection of people was sleeping in the waiting room while a few more had scattered themselves on some nearby seats. One young man was asleep sitting up, with his head on his knees. Someone else clutched a backpack. A young Vietnamese couple had laid out a bedroll underneath some benches.
At first I thought these people might have been backpackers, but then I realised that they were homeless. They are largely hidden during the day, but when mainstream Melbourne retreats to apartments and homes in the suburbs, the underclass emerges. The 'space' of inner Melbourne changes.
I caught my bus to the airport and several hours later was browsing a newspaper in Brisbane. One article caught my attention. It described how a local council was investigating ways to keep homeless people out of bus shelters. It was replacing the conventional seating in shelters with 'bumbars' — horizontal lengths of pipe that people can sit on or lean against, but which are impossible to lie down on.
This project had drawn criticism and praise. The council predictably said that pole seating would sweep southeast Queensland, while a spokesman from the Salvation Army was concerned about how it would affect homeless people. This discussion was largely practical. It did not consider how the construction and use of space reveals society's attitudes towards different groups of people.
The space that Southern Cross covers is designed to be used by the mainstream public. Its use by homeless people after hours is, for most people, irrelevant. Bus shelters are also a form of space intended for the majority. But they still provide shelter for homeless people — even if the people who designed and built them didn't intend this.
This shows that a social space can have different uses for a variety of social groups. So we must ask critical questions when a space is altered so that it excludes certain groups. In northern Brisbane, the council has redesigned bus shelters so that they can be used only for public transport. Although this action may