espaço público e cidade- mitchell

8/2/2019 espao pblico e cidade- MITCHELL

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INT RO DUCT IO N: P UB L IC SP ACE AND T H E CIT Y

Don M itchellDepartment of GeographyUniversity of ColoradoBoulder, CO 80309-0260

Public space, as the cliche goes, is very much "o n the a gen da" these days. But this isnot jus t the intellectual age nda of geography, urban studies, cultural studies, or otherdisciplines; it also is very much on the agenda of public discourse surroundingeverything from the nature of citizenship to the threat the rise of hom elessne ss seem sto present to urban pu blic spac es; from the rights of protesters ou tside abortion clinics,military bases, or on downtown streets to the perpetuation of violent acts in publicagainst wom en and people of color; from the seemingly random violence associatedwith declining urban cores to the putative sanctuary offered by a pocket-park in agated suburb; from the types of city and suburban spaces we profess to want to thosewe actually build.

Yet it is not at all clear what public space actually is . Is it, as the United StatesSupreme Court recognizes, simply those spaces in cities (and elsewhere) that arepublicly owned and have "alway s" been used by citizens to gather and co mm unicatepolitical ideas? And if it is that, which streets, parks, squares, and so forth trulyconstitute a public space in any meaningful sense? Have there ever been spaces suchas these? Feminists and many others, pointing to the bodily exclusions that markidealize d pub lic spaces such as the agora , argue that there are not and never have beenany truly open public spaces where all may freely gather, free from exclusionaryviolence. Even so, there are coun tless exam ples of peop le fighting often quitefiercelyfor inclusion as political actors in public space s: witness the radical suffragemovements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the free-speech fights of theIndustrial W orkers of the World in the 1910s and 1920s , the struggles over the right topicket and assem ble by striking workers in the 1930 s, the spatial strategie s of the civilrights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the resurgence of feminist activism in the1960s and 1970s, and, to a degree, the struggles by homeless people to retain a placein public spac e against the full force of both law and benevolent reform in the 1980 sand 1990s.So, in other w ords, is public space simply the sp ace of politics, as some traditionaltheory has held? If it is, then to what de gree d oes a kitchen-table strategy mee tingconstitute political activism in public space? Furthermore, what then is the relationship betw een p hysical, ma terial public spac es and the construction of a public sphe re?Are the terms "public s pac e" and "public sphe re" interchange able, as they often seemto be in much of the literature? Is "spa ce" simply a metaph or for something else? Forgeographers such questions are unsettling. We know, for example, that when oneargues that there "must be a space for politics," space must be taken quite literallyindeed (at least at times). Activists do not dance on the head of a pin, any more than

12 7Urban Geography, 1996 ,17, 2, p. 127-131 .Cop yright 1996 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.


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angels do. Thus, in a deeply political sense, to raise questions about both the politics inand politics of public space necessarily requires an examination of how boundariesbetween w hat is public and what is private, what is material and what is metaphorical,are constructed, contested, and continually reconstructed.Boundaries of all types thus mark public space. Exclusions and inclusions in publicspace based on gender, race , and class frequently are theorized and often remarkedupon. But to what degree is public space constructed around inclusions and exclusionsbased also on age? Are urban public spaces age specific? Are public spaces differentfor children, teens, adults, and the elderly? If, for example, children are excluded froma public space, then is it still public in the same sense? Or if public space is (or is seenas) inherently unsafe for minors, then does it remain much of a public space? Ofcourse, this question is not much different from those raised above, but it does beg thequestion of the degree to which minors canfightfor inclusive (or otherwise appropriate) public spaces. But the issue of safety raises another, perhaps deeper, question. Andthat is the question of what we imagine a good public life in a city to be.

Behind all the interest in public spacewhether on the part of leftists arguing forthe ideal of an inclusive (even anarchic) public space, rightists demanding greaterpublic order in public space, urban and suburban m all builders seeking to recreate anideal past of liminal and libidinal public economies, or social critics imagining theagora that could have been (if only the mall builders were not so hard at work) areimages fraught with nostalgia for what never was, images Utopian in their expectationof what could be. We all have a sense of the world we w ant to be a pa rt of. For most ofus it is a world selectively public and private: a world in which there are spaces inwhich unstructured, but not threatening, encounters "remain" possible, where therealways is room to have one's voice heard and one's demonstration (or other performance) seen before retreating to a more private realm in which encounters arestructured according to our own dictates.1 So what now is public space? Is it simplynostalgia or Utopia? Is it at all attainable as an ideal, or does it come to us alreadycompromised by the working of power, the economy, the government? Or do thesequestions presume too much? Can weand do wesatisfy ourselves with theambiguity that public space necessarily is?

Thefivepapers that follow (three in this special issue and two in the following [Vol.17, No. 3]) seek to answer some of these questions, if only provisionally. Theambiguities of public spaceas a place, an idea, an ideal, a contested conceptaretoo many, and the issues too great, for only five papers to address in anythingapproaching a complete sense. Moreover, within the papers that follow, the d isagreements between authors are many. These disagreements have been retained preciselybecause they illustrate the complexity and contested nature of public space.Susan Ruddick opens the issue by laying out the ambiguities that constitute publicspace, and questioning how racialized violence in public exposes not only thecompromised nature of presumably "open-m inded" public space, but also the "limitsto the celebration of difference." That is, since public space is "an active mediumthrough which new identities are created or contested" it is essential that we understand how exclusions in public space (based on the combinatory effects of race, class,gender, sexuality, and so forth) close off possibilities for some identity construction. Byexamining the sensational reaction to a recent murder in a Toronto coffee house,Ruddick exposes how public space is deeply implicated in the process of "othering."


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But the m edia reaction to this murd er also throws into stark relief the nature of publicspace itself.Ruddick argu es that scho lars have focused for too long on the purely localat the expense of larger-scale processes that construct local public spaces (such asnational m edia) and, indeed, that construct public spaces a t all m anner of scales (fromthe global to the local). Public violence, then, exposes any num ber of contradictionswithin public spaceand within identities constructed through public spacethatare not easily resolved by rather simplistic appe als to ideals of "open -min ded ness " inpublic space.

Violence is central to the secon d paper, in which I seek to explore som e of the legalunde rpinnings for the operation of Am erican urban pu blic spac es. My goal is to showboth how ideals of inclusion are compromised by the exercise of (legal) power, andhow the use of space (either in conformance with laws or transgressing them) in turnhelps recreate the legal contexts within which public spaces reside. I take a relativelystraightforward definition of "sp ac e" in my paper, so as to exam ine laws governing thema terial, physical public spac es of the citythe streets, parks , squares, etc. that theUS Suprem e C our t often is called upon to regu late in the nam e of public order and freespeech. My argument is simply that in orde r to unde rstand th e legal structure of publicspace in American cities, one must attend not only to the laws written about thesespac es, but also to the social struggles that forced or respond ed to those laws. Behindthis argument is the further argument that no matter how impossible the ideal of aninclusive public space, no matter how powerful the forces arrayed against inclusive-ness and in favor of a narrowly defined "order" that serves the interests of thepowerful, dissidents of all types must continually assert their presence into publicspac e, if they ever are to be seen and hea rd. That is, there is no guarantee of free spee chin America; there is only the exercise of itoften in direct defiance of the laws thatthemselves are meant to "guarantee" it .

In the third article, M egh an C op e argu es that restricting analysis of politics to thosepolitics that obviously occur in "public" is insufficient. Similarly, it is insufficientsimply to assume that political activities are easily seen and recognized as political.Rather, if we attend more closely to the "everyday"to the multifarious relationsbetween personal interaction, group action, the arrays of power, and the types ofspaces involved in the everyday (and sometimes extraordinary) lives of peoplewewill understand a good deal m ore not only about how public spaces are formed andused, but also when they are. Similarly, we w ill learn when other kind s of spaces ta keon political importance, sometimes in quite unexpected ways. Hence "publicity"becomes something of a strategy, used or not used depending on the ever-shiftingconditions of everyday life. Moreover, by focusing on the relations between peoplesand spa ces, we can learn a great dea l about identity construction. Identities are woven,Cope argues, out of a continual, provisional, shifting between the putatively publicand private, between identification as "worker," or "wom an," or "Italian," dependingon how circumstances change. By closely following the actions of workers in thetextile mills of Lawrence, Massachu setts in the 1920s and 1930s, Cope concludes thatpeople "c arve out m aterial and m etaphorical spaces in which to live, work, celebrate,worship, and govern" and that these spaces cannot be understood through a simpledichotomy be twee n "pu blic" and "private," which themselves are constantly neg otiated categories.


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If thefirst hree papers explore the construction of public (and private) spaces, theydo so almost exclusively in the realm of the "adult" world. Gill Valentine argues in thefourth paper (which leads the following issue, Vol. 17, No. 3) that public space isindeed more and more "being produced as a space that is 'naturally' or 'normally' anadult space." She argues that the label "public" is even more problematic than everwhen we consider the degree to which teens and younger children are activelyexcluded from participation in most public spaces. For many parents, keeping theirchildren out of public space is an important aspect of good parenting. In the past twodecades, public space has been so clearly scripted as "dangerous"especially tochildrenthat it would be the height of irresponsibility to allow children on the streetsor into public parks and arcades on their own. Valentine explores the social construction of public space as an adult space in the m edia and on the ground, checking thisconstruction against the reactions of parents in England. She finds historically that asthe meaning of "child" or "you th" changes, so too does relative access to public spacechange (for better or for worse). But it is more complicated than that. As "strangerdanger" is closely associated with the male body (and even more so with the racializedmale body), men find their ability to act around children in public space highlycircumscribed. Hence, the restructuring of public spaceand the roles of childrenand adults in that spaceis always already structured by race, gender, class, andsexuality. For parents, for children, for men and for women, public space thereforeremains a highly ambiguous place, presumably a place of freedom, maturation,exploration, and so forth, but also a place of restriction, of all manner of unwrittenrules and regulations governing interactionrules that may or may not have anythingat all to do with either the people or the spaces involved. Public space, for Valentine,becomes very much a space of and for control.

In the last paper (also in Vol. 17, No. 3), Jon Goss seeks to explore the am biguitiesthat are public space by examining the phenomenon of the urban "festival marketplace." Recognizing at once the validity of the cultural critique against such places(they are contrived, controlled, somehow false, etc.), but m ore interested in why theywork so well as "public" spaces, Goss tacks back and forth between social theory,advertising copy, experiential data, and critical reflection to show not just howambivalent festival marketplaces are as public spaces (they are, after all, privateproperty), but also how they present spaces (in a quite literal sense) for all manner ofunanticipated politics. Yet Goss's account is no celebration of festival m arketplaces;rather, he seeks to show how complex they are as libidinal sites in the urban politicaleconomy, at once compromised and open , scripted and malleable, manipulative andauthentic (why discount the experience of so many users of these spaces?).Goss provides a fitting conclusion to the special issues of Urban Geography onpublic space, for he clearly lays out the ambiguities of public space in all theirforcefulness. He makes clear (as does Ruddick) that geographic and planningperspectives on public space that bemoan its "end" in the contemporary city, as itseemingly is replaced by more structured "single-minded" space, are too simple forunderstanding how spaces are appropriated and used, and how people form identitieswithin them. He also shows (as I hope I do also) that although there never "really" ispublic space, it is always there for the m aking. While private and privatized spacesmay certainly foreclose some opportunities, he recognizes (like Cope) that they mayopen others. And he explains (along with Valentine) that the social forces that script


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PUBLIC SPACE AND THE CITY 1 31

"pu blic" spa ces often do not know w hat "the y" are doing; rather, the construction of"p ub lic" spac e is always the outcom e of mu ltifarious forces w ell beyond the control ofany individual or social formation. P ublic space is always and inesc apably a product ofsocial negotiation and contest. As Goss concludes, these ne gotiations may themselvesbe tainted by the smell of a nostalgia that idealizes an urban public space that neverwas. But there is no reason why that nostalgia, following Benjamin and Jam eson , cannot be "nostalgia conscious of itself," and therefore a potent political force.

N O T E1I do not mean to ignore the fact that the private space of the home also is hierarchicallystructured, and it is often a quite violent place that is not at all a refuge of any sortfor women,certainly, but also for children. My point is rather that most of us carry in our heads a dream of asafe, protective, private space from which we can move out into a more public realm at timesand under conditions of our own choosing.

espaço público e cidade- mitchell

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