Abstract
In classic social theories, the concept of public space traces back to the Greek agora and the Roman forum. Ever since its birth, public space has acted as a central social and political arena in which free expressions of ideas and opinions are allowed and encouraged. In the agoras and forums, the citizens of Athens and Rome exchanged their opinions on the public matters of the city, making public space the primary locus of reason and rationality. According to Hartley (1992, pp. 29–30), the Greek agora is “a place of citizenship, an open space where public affairs and legal disputes were conducted”, and “where words, actions, and produce were all literally on mutual display, and where judgments, bargains and decisions were made”.
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Notes
- 1.
Habermas’ standpoint that the public sphere is accessible to all citizens is open to suspicion, since in The structural transformation of public sphere, the public sphere refers exclusively to a political body of the bourgeois urban class, while Habermas himself criticized the dissolution of the boundaries of public sphere to include other social groups (see Habermas 1989; 1974). For the critiques of Habermas’ exclusive conceptualization of the public sphere, see Goheen (1998) and Fraser (1990) for a review.
- 2.
The mutated forms of the shopping mall are limited to the cases I will describe, of course. For example, the rising popularity of waterfront development also speaks to the postmodern nostalgia for the past and for the elsewhere. As Goss (1996, p. 223) critiques in his remarks on waterfront development: the city is “constructed as an object of bourgeois desire, in which is realized the dream of social solidarity among a community of strangers in an authentic public realm; of social interaction and transaction in a free market(place), of imaginative and spontaneous “acting out” of individual and cultural identity in the practices of street theatre and festival; and of social liminality on the waterfront where past and present, nature and civilization, and self and Other meet” (see also Boyer 1993).
- 3.
Exclusive politics of public space is often justified with the discourse of fear and safety. The 9/11 attack in New York has pushed this ecology of fear onto its summit (see Benton-Short 2007). To exclude marginalized social groups from using public spaces, dominant discourses intentionally stigmatize the poor, the homeless, etc. into rude and uncivil criminals who are responsible for the rising insecurity of urban life. The regulation of public space is thus a situation in which, as Ellin (1996) calls, form follows fear (see also Hannigan 1998; England and Simon 2010).
- 4.
The revanchist regulation of the homeless people reached a peak as several cities in the US decided that even giving food to the homeless people for free or at a low price is not acceptable—in other words, the intervention from the civil society in alleviating the suffering of the homeless people is also subject to criminalization; see Mitchell and Heynen (2009).
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Qian, J. (2018). Public Space: Ideals, Predicaments, Practices. In: Re-visioning the Public in Post-reform Urban China. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5990-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5990-2_2
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