Public Space Reader

Miodrag Mitrašinović, Vikas Mehta, Miodrag Mitrašinović, Vikas Mehta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351202534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

Recent global appropriations of public spaces through urban activism, public uprising, and political protest have brought back democratic values, beliefs, and practices that have been historically associated with cities. Given the aggressive commodification of public re- sources, public space is critically important due to its capacity to enable forms of public dis- course and social practice which are fundamental for the well-being of democratic societies.

Public Space Reader brings together public space scholarship by a cross-disciplinary group of academics and specialists whose essays consider fundamental questions: What is public space and how does it manifest larger cultural, social, and political processes? How are public spaces designed, socially and materially produced, and managed? How does this impact the nature and character of public experience? What roles does it play in the struggles for the just city, and the Right to The City? What critical participatory approaches can be employed to create inclusive public spaces that respond to the diverse needs, desires, and aspirations of individuals and communities alike? What are the critical global and comparative perspectives on public space that can enable further scholarly and professional work? And, what are the futures of public space in the face of global pandemics, such as COVID-19?

The readers of this volume will be rewarded with an impressive array of perspectives that are bound to expand critical understanding of public space.

Public Space: State of the Question

The chapters in this section—spanning over half a century—include seminal writings on the public sphere and public realm that frame the broader argument for public space as well as present a critique of the canonical texts by post-modern and post-structuralist theorists. In doing so, these writings lay out a new intellectual territory for the study of public space and situate it in the context of current philosophical and political debates. In the rapidly heterogenizing city, these definitions and (re)definitions hold strong implications for the practice and production of contemporary public space. These writings offer clear arguments in relation to critical questions, such as, what is ‘the public’ as a theoretical construct? And, how does it relate to the city as a social and political entity?

The discourse of the public or publics brings to fore the concepts of the ’public sphere,’ the ’public realm,’ ‘public domain,’ and ’public space.’ Although some of these are used interchangeably, the selection of chapters in this section suggests clear conceptual distinctions and disciplinary associations. Public sphere, the broadest of all and most commonly the domain of philosophers, political thinkers, and legal scholars, deals with the extents and limits of public space as a discursive, political space more often than not focusing on communicative aspects. Public realm, although somewhat interchangeable with public sphere, is most commonly associated with symbolic communication and spatial practices, and thus with the sociology of the publics. Public realm fits at the intersection of public sphere and public space and is conceptually where real political action takes place. At the same time, public realm is also a term most commonly used to describe public space as a site of collectivization through the uses and activities in an urban area. Meanings, uses, and scales of the term ‘public space’ abound but most commonly, public space is considered an important component—a physical manifestation—of the public realm. Public domain usually refers to regulatory domains where legal and policy dimensions of public sites and public gatherings are determined and debated, such as the right to free speech, free assembly, or the right of access to privately owned public spaces.

Figure 1.0 Street parade in Cincinnati, Ohio, July 2019. Photo © Vikas Mehta.

Two chapters in this section make the argument for the correlation between the public sphere, public realm, and public space by emphasizing the spatial quality of politics and linking the spatial dimension of public space to the public sphere. Hannah Arendt argues for a human presence in public space to enact politics since politics is a public activity, and because participation creates the conditions of civility and solidarity among citizens. Arendt makes clear the contrast between community, intimacy, and authenticity on the one hand, and public values of impartial civic friendship and solidarity on the other. Although Arendt’s conception of politics is over half a century old, its relevance is repeatedly made visible at the global scale in these challenging times of diminishing democracy. The social and political uprisings and resistance movements in Istanbul, Caracas, Madrid, Hong Kong, Taipei, Paris, St. Louis, as well as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have all drawn attention to the civic and political significance and value of the physical public space as political space, the public sphere. Smith and Low specifically argue for the value of public space as the “geography of the public sphere.” They categorically state, “An understanding of public space is an imperative for understanding the public sphere” and that the “spatiality of the public sphere potentially transforms our understanding of the politics of the public” (2006, 6).

Smith and Low argue that it is necessary to re-politicize public space by scrutinizing the historical and geographical specificity of its origins in the United States, in order to re-imagine the politics of public space. They also importantly suggest the necessity for the “spatial turn” in the study of public space: while scholarship in the social sciences has been “spatially undifferentiated,” the work in the so-called spatial fields has tended toward an anti-social turn. The question for the authors is how to establish the scholarly grounds for bringing the now parallel but separated work on public space together. Spatializing ‘public sphere’ and re-politicizing ‘public space’ ultimately creates capabilities for “remaking and retaking public space and the public sphere.”

Nancy Fraser builds her thesis by critically examining the Habermasian conceptualization of the public sphere. She discusses the formation of a bourgeois public sphere in early modern Europe and how it led to the formation of public opinion, the consensus about the common good, and its ability to hold the state accountable. Fraser’s now canonical critique of Habermasian public sphere posits it as constituted by significant exclusions of many publics—women, peasants, the working class, and other subaltern publics. Fraser shows how the bourgeois conception of public sphere became an instrument in creating a hegemony that eventually translated into forms of political power. Fraser argues that a strict separation between the state and civil society is the precondition for the bourgeois conception of public sphere, and moreover that such an informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion serves to counterweight the coercive power of the state. She argues that such a strict separation creates “weak publics,” a public invited to take part in the opinion formation but not in decision-making. Such a conception of public sphere is built upon structural socio-economic inequalities and generates a hypothetical equity in political participation, while de facto creating exclusions of multiple counterpublics searching for spaces of discursive contestation, identity formation, and political action. Fraser asks what kinds of institutional frameworks can support the formation of public spheres in which “strong publics” take part in both opinion formation and decision-making? New, more critical, post-bourgeois definitions of public realm thus become critical in “expanding our capacity to envision democratic possibilities beyond the limits of actually existing democracy.”

Questioning the normative and rigid context and manifestation of traditional public space, Crawford critiques the many canonical writings (Habermas, Sennett, Sorkin, Davis, and her own past work) and provides an alternative to the “end of public space” narrative of the latter part of the twentieth century. Building on the work of Nancy Fraser and Henri Lefebvre, Crawford asks, “how can public space be connected with democracy?” and expands the idea of multiple counterpublics to the physical realm of public space where it translates to the need for and production of “multiple sites of public expression.” With critical observations of the prosaic everyday spaces in Los Angeles—“everyday public spaces”—Crawford provides a refreshing view of the many publics, counterpublics, and public spaces alive with use and meaning in the contemporary city, thus expanding our conceptions of ‘the public’ as well as of ‘space.’ In these trivial and marginal spaces, argues Crawford, the emerging micropolitics begins to outline new possibilities for democratic practice, and for public space to act as a medium through which democracy does its work.

Mark Kingwell reveals the enigma and ambiguity of public space describing it variously as “the age’s master signifier,” a “loose and elastic notion,” a “site of suspicion, stimulation, and transaction,” and “the basis of public discourse itself.” Citing Hardin’s The tragedy of the commons, Kingwell builds on the current common model of public space with the “porousness of public and private.” He posits if what we consider public space is no more than an open marketplace of potential transactions, often monetary or otherwise, between isolated individuals? In doing so, Kingwell poses some challenging questions: Is public space a form of public good? How public are certain so-called public spaces? How porous or controlled are the transitions between public and private spaces? And ultimately, how are the identities of individuals and societies related to public space?

Figure 1.0.1 Extinction Rebellion on Hannah Arendt Strasse, Berlin, 7 October 2019. Photo © Leonhard Lenz. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 1.0.

1.1 The Public Realm: The Common

Hannah Arendt

Source: Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 50–58.

The term “public” signifies two closely interrelated but not altogether identical phenomena: It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized, and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.⁷⁰ The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experiences. But we do not need the form of the artist to witness this transfiguration. Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before. The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the modern age and the concomitant decline of the public realm, will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.

[…]

What the public realm considers irrelevant can have such an extraordinary and infectious charm that a whole people may adopt it as their way of life, without for that reason changing its essentially private character. Modern enchantment with “small things,” though preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all European tongues, has found its classical presentation in the petit bonheur of the French people. Since the decay of their once great and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the art of being happy among “small things,” within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today’s objects, may even appear to be the world’s last, purely humane corner. This enlargement of the private, the enchantment, as it were, of a whole people, does not make it public, does not constitute a public realm, but, on the contrary, means only that the public realm has almost completely receded, so that greatness has given way to charm everywhere; for while the public realm may be great, it cannot be charming precisely because it is unable to harbor the irrelevant.

Second, the term “public” signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it. This world, however, is not identical with the earth or with nature, as the limited space for the movement of men and the general condition of organic life. It is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together. To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic seance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.

Historically, we know of only one principle that was ever devised to keep a community of people together who had lost their interest in the common world and felt themselves no longer related and separated by it. To find a bond between people strong enough to replace the world was the main political task of early Christian philosophy, and it was Augustine who proposed to found not only the Christian “brotherhood” but all human relationships on charity.

[… ]

Worldlessness as a political phenomenon is possible only on the assumption that the world will not last; on this assumption, however, it is almost inevitable that worldlessness, in one form or another, will begin to dominate the political scene. This happened after the downfall of the Roman Empire and, albeit for quite other reasons and in very different, perhaps even more disconsolate forms, it seems to happen again in our own days. The Christian abstention from worldly things is by no means the only conclusion one can draw from the conviction that the human artifice, a product of mortal hands, is as mortal as its makers. This, on the contrary, may also intensify the enjoyment and consumption of the things of the world, all manners of intercourse in which the world is not primarily understood to be the koinon, that which is common to all. Only the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the lifespan of mortal men.

Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no p...