Ian Woodcock is a research fellow and PhD candidate in the Faculty of Architecture,

The idea of contested places is increasingly common in theorisations of multicultural cities, spaces whose identity is the product of competing claims and attempts to enact power over a particular territory. The question of how we can share cities of difference presents an almost insoluble conundrum if it is assumed that these competing claims must be settled to somehow return places to a harmonious and orderly unity that is imagined to have previously existed. In this paper, we are interested in those more subtle processes of place and power, where rather than just contestation, modes of ‘power over ’ and ‘power to ’ both operate in the same place. From this view, we argue that place-identity is an ongoing process of the particular interaction between these modes of power in specific spatial contexts. To explore this idea, we use a case study of Sydney Road, a traditional commercial strip in one of Melbourne’s most multicultural districts, a place that raises questions about how power is associated with multiculturalism in everyday life rather than sensationalised, high-profile spaces. Drawing on Hage’s ‘White Nation fantasy’, we examine how ‘power over ’ and ‘power to ’ are interwoven, enacted and negotiated within this de facto multicultural space, where everyday multiculturalism is ‘done’