‘Civilising’ Urban Life: Governmentality, Alcohol, and Sydney’s Public Spaces 2005-2022

Abstract

Over the last two decades Sydney experienced seismic shifts in nightlife regulation, driven by a moral and expert panic over alcohol-related violence and local drinking ‘culture’ which culminated in the 2014 ‘lockout laws’ that significantly diminished aspects of the city’s cultural life. At the same time, public spaces within the city have been subject to intensifying processes of privatisation, commercialisation and enclosure. My thesis asserts the critical role that alcohol governance has played in attempts to ‘civilise’ urban life and re-articulate public space within the post-industrial context. Locating my research at the interstices of cultural studies and critical drug and alcohol studies, critical policy studies, urban studies, and cultural history, I draw on a range of sources including media discourses of drinking, televised dramatisations, and government strategy papers in order to explore when the recent drift toward enclosure of public space began, the discourses that undergirded it, and what the implications have been for public life in Sydney. I interrogate the linear-causal framing of state-government and media discourses on ‘alcohol-related violence’, as well as the City of Sydney’s classist pushback to this panic through the urbanist discourse of ‘civilised drinking’. I reveal the ways in which invocations of ‘drinking cultures’ tend to obscure histories of technical interventions, and highlight alcohol-free zoning as a key technology in the privatisation of public space through the mechanism of the liquor license. Recent attempts to re-activate public space in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic are haunted by memories of convivial publics, and remain characterised by a lack of attention to forms of governmentality that serve to impede publicness. I conclude that these interventions are premised on class and other forms of social segregation and that they threaten a more expanded sense of public space.