Enacting separate social worlds: ‘International’ and ‘local’ students in public space in central Melbourne

In creating separate and distinct spaces and forms of socialising for themselves, ‘international’ and ‘local’ university students in central Melbourne are influenced by three key, spatially-linked processes. The first is institutional - it includes the allocation of international students to a certain type of housing which differs from that chosen by local students, and the practice of universities, student clubs and local churches to gather international and local students into separate groupings. The second is locational. It is the process by which international students find themselves living principally in and around the edge of the central city, an entertainment district with rowdy characteristics that these students often find distasteful. Local students, in contrast, locate in the inner suburbs for the most part, at a distance from the city centre hotspot. The third process sees socialising habits that are enacted in and by virtue of the public places in which they occur. This self-enacting socialisation further separates local students from international students. All three processes demonstrate how certain characteristics of the built environment can be invested with particular meanings and become complicit in shaping racialised social interactions.