Abstract
New public spaces are commonplace in urban redevelopment schemes in the affluent world. In Britain, their provision was encouraged by the Urban Task Force led by architect Richard Rogers in 1999 as a means to create civic awareness and social cohesion.’1 Yet the inclusion of a new piazza in a business park or cultural zone does not guarantee democracy. For architects, such sites may echo iconic public spaces such as the Campo in Siena or the agora of classical Athens; but those historical sites were not places for democratic exchanges in a modern sense. Now, a new piazza is as likely to be a place for consumption in the designer bars and cafés that surround new cultural institutions as a democratic space. Seemingly nonproductive while in effect key to the immaterial production of a city’s image for external perception, such new public spaces mask increased surveillance and increasing control of protest. The underlying point, however, is that democracy takes place rather than requires a specific (or specifically designed) site. Occupy’s use oipublic spaces in 2011–2012 reiterates democracy’s performativity, taking place in public spaces because the controls exercised by private owners of space are often stronger than those of the state (reflecting the state’s shrinking in a period of neoliberalism).
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Notes
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© 2014 Diana Boros and James M. Glass
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Miles, M. (2014). Critical Spaces: Public Spaces, the Culture Industry, Critical Theory, and Urbanism. In: Boros, D., Glass, J.M. (eds) Re-Imagining Public Space. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373311_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373311_6
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