Co‐inhabiting public spaces: diversity and playful encounters in Darwin,Australia

When fear and anxiety circulate in public spaces of diverse western cities, heightened surveillance can provide a sense of safety and comfort. These measures of surveillance that target bodies that are ‘out of place’, however, are limited in animating public spaces. This paper focuses on Darwin, a small but rapidly growing north Australian city where the visibility of Aboriginal people from Greater Darwin/regional communities and migrant newcomers from countries in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East often circulates fear and anxiety and deadens public spaces. I argue that playful events or spontaneous multisensory encounters of humans, non‐humans and material things, however, have the potential to animate these public spaces. The paper focuses on these events in a Drop‐in open‐air café‐community garden‐Op shop in a culturally diverse northern suburb of Darwin. It suggests that the vibrancy of matter and the vitality of non‐human forms of life can inform how we co‐inhabit cities of difference and unsettle policies of social cohesion that focus on integration into a dominant white majority culture.