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Editorial: The Centrality of Public Space

This issue of City & Community assembles four articles on the theme of public space. Few topics in urban sociology are as timely. Around the world, citizens have been assembling in central squares to protest injustices and demand democratic rights. In contrast, cities are privatizing the construction, maintenance, and policing of parks, streets, waterfronts, and plazas, creating zones of exclusion. Municipal governments and planners are redesigning public spaces largely to attract private investment and affluent taxpayers, while displacing, banishing, and even criminalizing “undesirables.” Not surprisingly, conflicts over the city’s public space—its extent, openness, regulation, and control—are multiplying. Sociologists have traditionally adopted a liberal democratic orientation toward public space. In this perspective, the city holds back the State, enabling the flourishing of a broad civil society. Stadtluft macht frei (“urban air makes you free”). The city materializes the abstract communicative freedom of the public realm described by Habermas. In the autonomous “world of strangers,” a moral code of civility governs human relations among essentially equal citizens. Spaces are open to all classes, the “universal otherhood,” and an ethic of tolerance or even a “cosmopolitan canopy” prevails. Civility, Richard Sennett maintained, is behaving with strangers in an emotionally satisfying way and yet remaining aloof from them. Face-to-face contact among strangers, who are neither brothers nor enemies, is noncommittal but “ritually ratified.” In this ritual exchange of gifts, strangers reciprocally perform social rites of public behavior, concealing private sentiments and enacting manners, politeness, niceness. In Cuddihy’s phrase, “civility is not merely regulative of social behavior; it is an order of ‘appearance’ constitutive of that behavior.” Yet both capitalism and private family life threaten “public man.” From Olmsted to William Whyte, designers of public spaces aimed to moderate class conflict and ethnic stresses of the industrial workplace through common recreations, civic pride, and civil exchanges. In the conventional view, “the public” is also politically constituted and deliberates in public space. The agora was more than a marketplace; it embodied democracy. In cafes, lodges, and other “third places,” discursive interaction produces “civic virtue” and “public opinion.” Citizens learn to compromise their differences and practice leadership. As Margaret Kohn argues, public space promotes democracy not least because it forces the middle and upper classes to confront the common humanity of fellow citizens usually avoided and stigmatized as “the other.” Today, growing disillusionment with electoral democracy and communication mediated by commercial mass media are contributing to a revival of direct participation in community affairs. While Robert Putnam bemoans the decline of social capital, new forms of public engagement are emerging. Publicity calls for performance. As the revival of interest in Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau suggests, simply strolling the streets and taking in the passing pedestrian parade are quintessential popular amusements in the city. In the best public spaces