INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC SPACE AND THE CITY

Don Mitchell Department of Geography University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0260

Public space, as the cliche goes, is very much "on the agenda" these days. But this is not just the intellectual agenda of geography, urban studies, cultural studies, or other disciplines; it also is very much on the agenda of public discourse surrounding everything from the nature of citizenship to the threat the rise of homelessness seems to present to urban public spaces; from the rights of protesters outside abortion clinics, military bases, or on downtown streets to the perpetuation of violent acts in public against women and people of color; from the seemingly random violence associated with declining urban cores to the putative sanctuary offered by a pocket-park in a gated suburb; from the types of city and suburban spaces we profess to want to those we actually build. Yet it is not at all clear what public space actually is. Is it, as the United States Supreme Court recognizes, simply those spaces in cities (and elsewhere) that are publicly owned and have "always" been used by citizens to gather and communicate political ideas? And if it is that, which streets, parks, squares, and so forth truly constitute a public space in any meaningful sense? Have there ever been spaces such as these? Feminists and many others, pointing to the bodily exclusions that mark idealized public spaces such as the agora, argue that there are not and never have been any truly open public spaces where all may freely gather, free from exclusionary violence. Even so, there are countless examples of people fightingoften quite fiercelyfor inclusion as political actors in public spaces: witness the radical suffrage movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the free-speech fights of the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1910s and 1920s, the struggles over the right to picket and assemble by striking workers in the 1930s, the spatial strategies of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the resurgence of feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s, and, to a degree, the struggles by homeless people to retain a place in public space against the full force of both law and benevolent reform in the 1980s and 1990s. So, in other words, is public space simply the space of politics, as some traditional theory has held? If it is, then to what degree does a kitchen-table strategy meeting constitute political activism in public space? Furthermore, what then is the relationship between physical, material public spaces and the construction of a public sphere? Are the terms "public space" and "public sphere" interchangeable, as they often seem to be in much of the literature? Is "space" simply a metaphor for something else? For geographers such questions are unsettling. We know, for example, that when one argues that there "must be a space for politics," space must be taken quite literally indeed (at least at times). Activists do not dance on the head of a pin, any more than 127
Urban Geography, 1996,17, 2, p. 127-131. Copyright 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 in and politics of public space necessarily requires an examination of how boundaries between what 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 public space based on gender, race, and class frequently are theorized and often remarked upon. But to what degree is public space constructed around inclusions and exclusions based also on age? Are urban public spaces age specific? Are public spaces different for children, teens, adults, and the elderly? If, for example, children are excluded from a public space, then is it still public in the same sense? Or if public space is (or is seen as) inherently unsafe for minors, then does it remain much of a public space? Of course, this question is not much different from those raised above, but it does beg the question of the degree to which minors canfightfor inclusive (or otherwise appropriate) public spaces. But the issue of safety raises another, perhaps deeper, question. And that 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 for the ideal of an inclusive (even anarchic) public space, rightists demanding greater public order in public space, urban and suburban mall builders seeking to recreate an ideal past of liminal and libidinal public economies, or social critics imagining the agora that could have been (if only the mall builders were not so hard at work)are images fraught with nostalgia for what never was, images Utopian in their expectation of what could be. We all have a sense of the world we want to be a part of. For most of us it is a world selectively public and private: a world in which there are spaces in which unstructured, but not threatening, encounters "remain" possible, where there always 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 are structured according to our own dictates.1 So what now is public space? Is it simply nostalgia or Utopia? Is it at all attainable as an ideal, or does it come to us already compromised by the working of power, the economy, the government? Or do these questions presume too much? Can weand do wesatisfy ourselves with the ambiguity 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. The ambiguities of public spaceas a place, an idea, an ideal, a contested conceptare too many, and the issues too great, for only five papers to address in anything approaching a complete sense. Moreover, within the papers that follow, the disagreements between authors are many. These disagreements have been retained precisely because they illustrate the complexity and contested nature of public space. Susan Ruddick opens the issue by laying out the ambiguities that constitute public space, and questioning how racialized violence in public exposes not only the compromised nature of presumably "open-minded" public space, but also the "limits to the celebration of difference." That is, since public space is "an active medium through 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. By examining 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 media reaction to this murder also throws into stark relief the nature of public space itself. Ruddick argues that scholars have focused for too long on the purely local at the expense of larger-scale processes that construct local public spaces (such as national media) and, indeed, that construct public spaces at all manner of scales (from the global to the local). Public violence, then, exposes any number of contradictions within public spaceand within identities constructed through public spacethat are not easily resolved by rather simplistic appeals to ideals of "open-mindedness" in public space. Violence is central to the second paper, in which I seek to explore some of the legal underpinnings for the operation of American urban public spaces. My goal is to show both how ideals of inclusion are compromised by the exercise of (legal) power, and how the use of space (either in conformance with laws or transgressing them) in turn helps recreate the legal contexts within which public spaces reside. I take a relatively straightforward definition of "space" in my paper, so as to examine laws governing the material, physical public spaces of the citythe streets, parks, squares, etc. that the US Supreme Court often is called upon to regulate in the name of public order and free speech. My argument is simply that in order to understand the legal structure of public space in American cities, one must attend not only to the laws written about these spaces, but also to the social struggles that forced or responded to those laws. Behind this argument is the further argument that no matter how impossible the ideal of an inclusive public space, no matter how powerful the forces arrayed against inclusiveness and in favor of a narrowly defined "order" that serves the interests of the powerful, dissidents of all types must continually assert their presence into public space, if they ever are to be seen and heard. That is, there is no guarantee of free speech in America; there is only the exercise of itoften in direct defiance of the laws that themselves are meant to "guarantee" it. In the third article, Meghan Cope argues that restricting analysis of politics to those politics that obviously occur in "public" is insufficient. Similarly, it is insufficient simply to assume that political activities are easily seen and recognized as political. Rather, if we attend more closely to the "everyday"to the multifarious relations between personal interaction, group action, the arrays of power, and the types of spaces involved in the everyday (and sometimes extraordinary) lives of peoplewe will understand a good deal more not only about how public spaces are formed and used, but also when they are. Similarly, we will learn when other kinds of spaces take on political importance, sometimes in quite unexpected ways. Hence "publicity" becomes something of a strategy, used or not used depending on the ever-shifting conditions of everyday life. Moreover, by focusing on the relations between peoples and spaces, we can learn a great deal about identity construction. Identities are woven, Cope argues, out of a continual, provisional, shifting between the putatively public and private, between identification as "worker," or "woman," or "Italian," depending on how circumstances change. By closely following the actions of workers in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts in the 1920s and 1930s, Cope concludes that people "carve out material and metaphorical spaces in which to live, work, celebrate, worship, and govern" and that these spaces cannot be understood through a simple dichotomy between "public" and "private," which themselves are constantly negotiated categories.

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If thefirstthree papers explore the construction of public (and private) spaces, they do so almost exclusively in the realm of the "adult" world. Gill Valentine argues in the fourth paper (which leads the following issue, Vol. 17, No. 3) that public space is indeed more and more "being produced as a space that is 'naturally' or 'normally' an adult space." She argues that the label "public" is even more problematic than ever when we consider the degree to which teens and younger children are actively excluded from participation in most public spaces. For many parents, keeping their children out of public space is an important aspect of good parenting. In the past two decades, public space has been so clearly scripted as "dangerous"especially to childrenthat it would be the height of irresponsibility to allow children on the streets or into public parks and arcades on their own. Valentine explores the social construction of public space as an adult space in the media and on the ground, checking this construction against the reactions of parents in England. She finds historically that as the meaning of "child" or "youth" changes, so too does relative access to public space change (for better or for worse). But it is more complicated than that. As "stranger danger" is closely associated with the male body (and even more so with the racialized male body), men find their ability to act around children in public space highly circumscribed. Hence, the restructuring of public spaceand the roles of children and adults in that spaceis always already structured by race, gender, class, and sexuality. For parents, for children, for men and for women, public space therefore remains a highly ambiguous place, presumably a place of freedom, maturation, exploration, and so forth, but also a place of restriction, of all manner of unwritten rules and regulations governing interactionrules that may or may not have anything at 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 ambiguities that 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 more interested in why they work so well as "public" spaces, Goss tacks back and forth between social theory, advertising copy, experiential data, and critical reflection to show not just how ambivalent festival marketplaces are as public spaces (they are, after all, private property), but also how they present spaces (in a quite literal sense) for all manner of unanticipated politics. Yet Goss's account is no celebration of festival marketplaces; rather, he seeks to show how complex they are as libidinal sites in the urban political economy, at once compromised and open, scripted and malleable, manipulative and authentic (why discount the experience of so many users of these spaces?). Goss provides a fitting conclusion to the special issues of Urban Geography on public space, for he clearly lays out the ambiguities of public space in all their forcefulness. He makes clear (as does Ruddick) that geographic and planning perspectives on public space that bemoan its "end" in the contemporary city, as it seemingly is replaced by more structured "single-minded" space, are too simple for understanding how spaces are appropriated and used, and how people form identities within them. He also shows (as I hope I do also) that although there never "really" is public space, it is always there for the making. While private and privatized spaces may certainly foreclose some opportunities, he recognizes (like Cope) that they may open others. And he explains (along with Valentine) that the social forces that script

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"public" spaces often do not know what "they" are doing; rather, the construction of "public" space is always the outcome of multifarious forces well beyond the control of any individual or social formation. Public space is always and inescapably a product of social negotiation and contest. As Goss concludes, these negotiations may themselves be tainted by the smell of a nostalgia that idealizes an urban public space that never was. But there is no reason why that nostalgia, following Benjamin and Jameson, can not be "nostalgia conscious of itself," and therefore a potent political force. NOTE I do not mean to ignore the fact that the private space of the home also is hierarchically structured, 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 a safe, protective, private space from which we can move out into a more public realm at times and under conditions of our own choosing.
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