15.1 Introduction
Current attention for the role of public space in urban environments plays out against the background of neo-liberal and technocratic appropriations of public space. The privatization and homogenization of spatial contexts may threaten democratic qualities of public space, such as the presence of normative plurality and general accessibility (Barnett, 2007; Low & Iveson, 2016; Springer, 2011). These threats are especially urgent in combination with the ascent of the so-called ‘smart city’, which is based on the surveillance and control of technical and social infrastructures.
Claims about public space often involve a number of theoretical and political assumptions. First of these is that public space tends to be seen as unambiguously separated from a heterogeneous set of private spaces. Second, people that enter public space are assumed to be hermeneutically independent: they bestow their own meanings and categorizations upon their lifeworld. In contrast, the third assumption is that neoliberalism and technocracy are forces that are external to this hermeneutic independence by imposing meanings and categorizations that are non-negotiable (Kohn, 2013; Low, 2006; Mitchell, 1995; Shaw & Graham, 2017). Fourth, technology is seen as something that exerts power or reproduces existing power asymmetries, while also being a homogenizing power in itself. Acknowledging their character as crude generalizations, these assumptions will be qualified in this paper by sketching out the historical development of public space in order to see how certain sets of values have become embedded in public space as normative dimensions. By showing how the conditions for democracy have coevolved with public space itself, this paper aims to contribute to a further understanding and uptake of the democratization of public space within in the context of contemporary challenges.
The paper will present four critical periods, in which new substantiations of public space become manifest that create new societal norms, values and relations. The first period is that of the liberal city, which is socially constituted by the omnipresence of strangers in daily life, and which was answered by the physical differentiation of a public from a private space. In turn, this setup of spheres was ideologically reconstructed in the dogmas of political and economic liberalism as well as in the development of a democratic doctrine. The nineteenth century gave birth to the sanitary city, in which governmental authorities became the designated manager of public space, while public space itself became a metabolic system that had to be arranged so as to allow flows of matter and people. The third period is that of the rational city in which modernist architecture transformed public space into a sphere of vacancy. Also the rise of organizations and the introduction of neo-liberal politics contributed to a public space that is vacant, denying any intrinsic qualities of publicness. Recently we have entered the age of the experimental city, in which new forms of relations between actors and institutions are explored, also because of the introduction of new technologies. At the same time, existing conceptualizations of public space continue to guide these explorations. As such, the experimental city should be further developed while taking full account of historically evolved normative demands.
It needs to be admitted that this account is historical only in a revisionist way. The concepts and principles, which are used to describe the four periods, have in some cases only been introduced later on. It should also be noted that the geographical scope of these periods varies over time. While the account of the liberal city has a clear euro-centric focus, the sanitary and rational city can be associated with developments in both Europe and North America. Urban initiatives connected to the experimental city may be found all around the globe. The purport of the paper above all is to explore the normative connotations of public space as have been developed over time. It aims to identify the values that are introduced in these different periods that are, in turn, shaped by discourse, institutions and technology. The four periods of urban history have provided us with normative dimensions of public space that co-exist, build upon each other, or conflict in a myriad of ways. In the light of urban challenges posed by new technological developments, it is highly important that these normative dimensions are reflected upon in order to allow for a trade-off between values that is both socially responsive and ethically acceptable.
15.2 The Liberal City
According to the famous lines of Jane Jacobs (1992a, p. 30): “Great cities are not like towns only larger; they are not like suburbs only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” This makes the essential challenge for any city how to deal effectively with the omnipresence of people that do not know each other. In most social structures, the confrontation with strangers is a recipe for violence and exclusion. In the liberal city, these threats have been resolved by a separation into different spheres of life, which entice different norms for interaction (Ariès, 1962; Silver, 1997; Valentine, 2008). It is here that we find the defining criterion for a social infrastructure that allows for a peaceful life while one is surrounded by strangers.
Most elementary, the separated social spheres can be equated with street life on the one hand and domestic life on the other. On the city streets, people maintain Goffman’s disposition of civic inattentiveness: “one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present (and one admits openly to having seen him), while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from him so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design” (Goffman, 1963, p. 84). In the safe environment of one’s house, more intimate forms of interaction may take place, and personal convictions may be pursued.
The liberal city has evolved as a context in which diversity and pluralism can prosper. Its historical seeds can be found in the Dutch cities of the seventeenth century in which economic prosperity, religious heterogeneity, and the presence of strangers gave rise to a new kind of urban context based on tolerance and the separation of the lifeworld into different spaces. Cities like Amsterdam could thrive because of their location as a node in the major marine networks in Europe. This brought along trade, money and many strangers from all over the continent (Braudel, 1982; Nijman, 1999; Shorto, 2013).
Characteristic of Dutch cities was the absence of nobility and ostentation in the urban architecture (Schama, 1988). Even the biggest houses were relatively small, modest and inconspicuous. Streets and homes are clearly and unequivocally separated by the presence of a wall, and not much more than that. The houses on the Amsterdam canals have no front garden, no zone which acts as a transferal from life outside to life inside. Outside on the street we will find the public space in which we are all equals, indifferent and restrained; the streets figure as a theater stage upon which we play a role. The inside of the house is where we lose our masks and where we can be the ones that we want to be. The home is the sphere of inequality, where we may reserve a special place for the ones we love, and where we may legitimately keep the door shut for others. It is in the private space where your wealth can be displayed and an intimate identity can be developed.
Critical for the development of the public sphere appears to be the emergence of and tolerance for semi-clandestine churches, that were used by different factions of the patchwork that characterizes the Dutch religious landscape. These churches were not recognizable from the street as houses of worship, only on the inside they figured as such. Admittedly, being secretive about religious practices was a necessity in the beginning as persecutions were still omnipresent. Later, however, these churches became tolerated, as long as they were distinctively private spaces (Kaplan, 2002). This ambiguity of the categories of publicness and privateness will be shown in this paper as one of their key attributes, which creates a highly adaptive social order that is capable of incorporating interests, values, and concerns that emerge in society.
15.2.1 Politics Without Politics
The separation of the lifeworld into a private and a public space can be seen as the starting point for the ideology of political liberalism. In the private sphere, an individual pursues what she finds worthy of pursuing. The public sphere is that of the state, which exists to protect the autonomy of the private sphere. With that, the public sphere is fully subservient to the private sphere, and should be arranged in such a way that individuals do no harm to each other (Macpherson, 1962; Minogue, 1963; Ryan, 1983).
The contingency of these dematerialized public and private spheres is legitimized by building on Hobbes’s invention of the state of nature. The political state is derived not from the empirical state of things, but from an idealized reconstruction of society from the starting point of an individual agent with her own drives and convictions. Ironically, there is no state in the natural state, just people. Politics are a necessary evil that evolves from the fact that individuals are confronted in their daily lives with other people, who are similarly autonomous, and similarly subject to personal motivations and passions. This autonomy should be warranted in a liberal state, the physical, moral and psychological integrity of others should be left intact. In other words, one should not induce harm upon another, as has been described by John Stuart Mill (1985) who saw the private sphere as the sphere in which one’s life and conduct only affected oneself, or if it affected others it was based on free and voluntary choice. In this sphere of action you, as an individual, are free to frame the plan of your own life to suit your character. The legitimacy of the public sphere of the state only evolves from the need to prevent individuals doing harm upon each other, other than that the state should retreat from intervening in the courses of people’s lives. By the introduction of impartial rules, the strict adherence to the legal constitution, and by the separation of the public and private space, the biggest harm is to be prevented: the exertion of state authority in personal autonomy.
15.2.2 Seeking Prosperity: A Space for Trade
In our common discourse, the market has become an ideal-typical entity. As Michel Callon (1998) observes, we know a lot about the ‘market’, but not about markets. The ‘market’ presents a way to understand transactions between actors that exchange money, goods, and/or services. This theoretical understanding distracts the focus from the physical origins of the market as a location where goods are traded, where people come to sell and buy products.
In most European cities, market places—open spaces designed for trade—figured as the central squares. Products could be sold or acquired, giving rise to the laws of the market, in which the pursuit of individual gain could lead to collective well-being (Polanyi, 2001; Sedlacek, 2011). The concentration of people also facilitated the laws of specialization. A seemingly endless reservoir of workers could help to create the impression of laws that were based on the availability of infinite resources. As such, liberal economics is also liberal in the sense that it pertains to the influx of strangers. The expansion of cities has always been based on the supply of young people, predominantly men, that were looking for prospects for a better life (Sennett, 1993). Failed crops and uneven heritage arrangements drove them from the countryside towards the city.
In all, cities came to figure as the social contexts that inspired modern economic theory (Dumont, 1977). Cities presented economic actors as individuals without further feudal constraints, which came to constitute a system made up of atomic parts that pursued the same goals, namely economic well-being. Traditionally, the egoism and materialism that motivated these actions were found to be immoral, only acceptable out of sheer necessity. Bernard de Mandeville (2017) was the first to see benefits of the aggregate of immoral actions for the system as a whole. In his book The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, he compared people acting on the market with bees in a beehive, each individual strictly minding his own business, but producing general welfare. The premise of this book has been further developed by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1998). Smith explained how the constellation of individuals seeking private gains will by the intervention of an ‘invisible hand’ generate prosperity at the aggregate level. By exchanging products for products, products for money, money for money and money for products, it becomes possible to improve one’s position, while, unintentionally, also improving the general level of well-being.
The system of the market co-evolves with so-called bourgeois values that emphasize individuality, thriftiness, entrepreneurship, and above all self-love (Jacobs, 1992b; McCloskey, 2010). Nowadays, self-love would be understood as self-interest, which, according to Albert Hirschman, resolves the capriciousness of the passionate nature of self-love (Hirschman, 1977). The market increasingly becomes understood as a predictable system that mechanistically relies on fixed motivations. The need for control emerged out of the desire to make society more moderate and more peaceful. Douce commerce could replace the violence-ridden constellation of fighting royal families for whom securing pride and power was more important than maintaining peace.
Economic liberalism is a reductionist expression of political liberalism, in the sense that it identifies individuals strictly as economic agents and the private sphere strictly as the market. Like in political liberalism, the state should be kept as small as possible, not for ideological reasons, but in order to facilitate prosperity. With the reduction of the private sphere to the market, the domestic domain is excluded from the public sphere. This creates a new situation as the market originally was connected to the domestic domain, in which the production of goods was a joint effort by the whole family. So, on the one hand the emergence of the modern market confirmed the hierarchy of the public realm to serve the needs of the private realm; on the other hand, it meant that women were firmly delegated to sphere of privacy (Pateman & Phillips, 1987). They had no role to play outside of the house. In sum, the market brought peace, but also brought along a stripped version of liberalism that, in a disguised fashion, enforced a new structure upon domestic life.
15.2.3 The Public Sphere as a Space for Speech
In opposition to the liberal conception of the public/private divide, another conception emerges in which public space is explicitly substantiated as a realm that acknowledges the intrinsic value of politics, namely that of democracy. In this space, individuals, in their role as citizens, aim to define a public interest outside of the realm of the state. The two conceptualizations, as contrastive as they may be, came to coexist and influenced and often implied each other.
The genealogy of this democratic conception of the public space knows its paradoxes, as it can be said to evolve from the private sphere. Jürgen Habermas (1999) notably located the roots of this public sphere in coffeehouses of London. But before that, the clandestine churches of Holland seemed to have played a constitutive role, as these churches were among the first places in which a social collective came together to decide upon its identity by organizing an ongoing debate. A similar type of secretive proto-public spaces were provided by masonic lodges (Kaplan, 2002). The activity of judging public matters spilled over to debates about culture, building on developments such as the commodification of literature, the commercial popularity of theaters, and the emergence of parks and squares that invited people to stroll around, to meet up and have a conversation about life in the city (Van Horn Melton, 2001). These new forms of urban public space and sociability also became embedded in a culture of print, with the rise of newspapers, political journalism, novels and criticism. The result was a culture that was engaged with the creation of a body of shared meanings that was not only independent from the patchwork of private spaces, but also from the public space of the state. As such, an authentic bourgeois culture emerges in the eighteenth century.
This new public space can be seen as a culmination of the set of separations that characterizes the modern city, at the background of an even wider range of cultural achievements. First, the separation of an autonomous society from the authoritarian state, the pursuit of individual and collective goods became independent from the mechanisms of state coercion. This newly found autonomy also had its expression in the free market and in the emerging domain of science (Van Horn Melton, 2001). Instead of obeying authority, these realms were increasingly subject to self-contained laws. Second, the separation between the household as the sphere of intimacy and secrecy, and the street as the sphere of sociability and openness in which everything, including politics, could be subjected to criticism.
The propensity of members of an autonomous civil society to discuss political matters cannot be fitted into the liberal model well, which after all does not acknowledge the existence of a substantive political realm in the first place. The historical analysis of Habermas (1999) has inspired the articulation of an alternative model that tries to identify the conditions for a politically engaged society that is able to decide on its shared norms, values and goals by means of deliberation. Inspiration was not only found in the coffeehouses of the eighteenth century, but also in the classic works of Aristotle. Deliberative models that have been developed in which the value of participation and civic empowerment came to be stressed (Bohman, 1998; Dryzek, 1994; Fischer, 1999). An important ingredient of this deliberative sphere is that it can build on the plurality of views, moral principles and ideological starting points that are nurtured in the multitude of private spaces; a debate based on a heterogeneity of claims can be seen as productively binding people, while emphasizing their autonomy.
15.2.4 Accommodating Paradoxes
It is useful to make a short expansion here to the origins of ‘public’ and ‘private’. The liberal conceptualizations that have been shown in previous sections have Roman sources and have become part of Medieval jurisprudence via the Corpus Juris Civilis, emperor Justinian’s compilation of Roman law from the sixth century AD (Weintraub, 1997). These concepts were mainly used to differentiate public law from private law, where public law referred to concerns of the empire and private law referred to the interests of individuals (Geuss, 2001). Over time, more meanings have been bestowed upon these terms. Most important of these originate from ancient Greek philosophy. The common translations of public and private are, respectively, to koinon and to idiom (Saxonhouse, 1983). The first term refers to something that is held in common, something that is shared, especially connected to the sphere of a family that shares ancestors, space, religion, meals, etc. The second term refers to something that differentiates or separates.
The public sphere of democracy relates very strongly to the Greek understanding of the polis, which was most basically seen as a context that resembled the sphere of the family, in which what we share defined us as members of a certain collective. The public sphere that revolved around deliberation and critical assessment of the affairs of the collective is one that defines its commonality on the basis of speech and exchange of arguments. With this, societies can actively establish their own identity and its own collective course.
The role of the family is completely reversed in this deliberative account, instead of being the core of the private sphere, it now becomes symbolic of the public sphere. This ambiguity characterizes liberal democracy (Berlin, 1969; Mouffe, 2000; Pesch, 2005). The addition of a sphere of commonality is necessary for allowing a functional democracy, and it stresses the values of inclusivity and a common identity (Taylor, 1995). However, like any notion of kinship it also brings about a fundamental opposition between those who are members of a community and who are not. Exclusionary tendencies are intrinsically tied to inclusion—even while acknowledging the need for plurality.
In all, the liberal public space embraces contradictions and paradoxes. It allows the establishment of connections and separations between different societal groups; it includes plurality and heterogeneity, while maintaining commonality; it juxtaposes fixed rights and ongoing deliberation. The public space is continuously subjected to the confrontations of these contrasts and finds ways to reconcile them in practice.
The accommodation of contradictions and paradoxes appears to depend on the separation of our physical and mental world into different contexts. The distinction between spheres of sociability has spilled over in different roles, different institutions, and different activities. Indeed, our moral universe has come to be defined by the boundaries between different spheres in which contrastive morals may reign (Rawls, 1997; Walzer, 1983, 1984). The plurality of conceptions of distinctions between the public and the private as well as the indeterminacy of these conceptions recruit continuous processes of negotiation and renegotiation about what exactly is to be considered public or private. As such, public space is fundamentally open to take on new concerns and new issues (Dewey, 1927; Marres, 2007).
15.3 The Sanitary City
The contours of the sanitary city can be found in the work of Edwin Chadwick, an attorney from London who was concerned with the circumstances of the poor. His Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (Chadwick, 1842) became a bestseller, and defined the thinking of the hygienic movement: the supposed lack of civilization was no longer used as an explanation, as it became clear that the lack of hygienic infrastructure was the culprit for epidemics. This awareness brought along a shift in cultures of care and charity. Instead of relying on individual benefactors, economic circumstances and the lack of public hygiene had to be addressed.
Not only was there a moral demand for improving the environment of poor classes, there also was the conviction that a science-based approach could effectively resolve sanitary problems. By creating waterworks, paved streets, ventilated buildings, viaducts, water towers, filtration techniques, pumps, and so on, the city could be turned into a body in which infrastructures played the role of arteries that, according to Chadwick, had to allow the flowing of vital streams. The city came to be seen as a living metabolism, which was marked by movement and in which all houses were organically connected to streams of waste, air and water (Melosi, 2000; Sennett, 1996). Chadwick’s idea were turned into reality after the ‘Great Stink’ that occurred in the dry, hot summer of 1858 when feces and other forms of organic waste created an intolerable smell in the city center of London. Members of Parliament, who were in the middle of the stench, saw firsthand that change was necessary. London was given underground sewers, increasingly governed by authorities.
The developments of London were not idiosyncratic—sanitary systems were also constructed in other European and in North American cities. For instance, Georges-Eugène Haussmann considered Paris to be a sick body from which tumors had to be removed and its blood circulation had to be started again (De Waal, 2012). For this he created his famous boulevards, but above all he developed a sewerage system that allowed water to clean the city without people even noticing.
The new waste infrastructures, and to a significant extent also further infrastructures, were based on the way organic waste was dealt with. Our idea of pollution was, and basically still is, based on the way we deal with human feces. These have the role of a taboo, something that has to remain hidden (Douglas, 1966; Jewitt, 2011; Moore, 1985; Pesch, 2015b). The infrastructures developed in the nineteenth century allow cities to remove human excretion from public eyesight, by transporting it by underground pipelines to places that are not visited. Other forms of waste management follow this template; for example, streams of dirt have to be transported in such a way that it minimizes visual impact. It is not surprising that around the turn of the twentieth century, the role of local authorities was compared with that of housewives who, just like the municipal services, swept up the dirt in their homes and collected it in garbage cans (Melosi, 1981).These underground galleries would be the organs of the metropolis and function like those of the human body without ever seeing the light of day. Pure and fresh water, along with light and heat, would circulate like the diverse fluids whose movement and replenishment sustain life itself. These liquids would work unseen and maintain public health without disrupting the smooth running of the city and without spoiling its exterior beauty (Hausmann (1854), quoted in Gandy, 1999, p. 24)
To a large extent, the sanitary city builds on the liberal city. It perfects the distinction between the roles that we play in visible life and the secretive intimacy of our genuine selves. Playing a role boils down to self-control, will power overrides our direct urges. Biological necessities had to be suppressed in public life. Physical processes had to take place in sheltered spaces. The establishment of sanitary infrastructures meant that bodily control could be pursued even more effectively, it allowed everyone to retreat from eyesight in order to relieve oneself.
The industrialization of cities posed new challenges for cities, adding new conceptions of publicness to the already existing repertoire. Most notably, these conceptions follow the development of the sanitary city: a city in which infrastructures take care of the flow of streams composed out of waste, goods, traffic and people. Three dimensions of publicness can be connected this new type of city. On the one hand, the constellation of infrastructures that characterized urban contexts gives rise to the metaphor of the metabolic city (Gandy, 2004; Melosi, 2000), turning the public space of city streets into canals for moving streams instead of spaces for meeting other people. The agencies necessitated for managing urban infrastructures resurrects the role of government as the dominant bearer of publicness. On the other hand, the establishment of these infrastructures, especially regarding waste, can be related to the growing awareness of the interconnectedness between socio-economic strata. Civil society that in earlier times could be secluded from the concerns of the poor and of women now had to give in to the fact that the urban fabric of the industrial city is deeply interwoven.
15.3.1 A Space for Government
It was not a self-evident outcome that governmental authorities assumed the management for the sewage systems. The earliest initiatives for public hygiene had a private character, carried out by groups of citizens and charity organizations (Houwaart, 1991; Lintsen, 1992; Van Zon, 2002). Also there was no instantaneous development of systems that were based on the principle of circulation: many different technologies for disposing human waste were tested (Dekkers, 2014; Noort, 1990). However, over the course of time, the image of a city being controlled by local authorities became dominant. In classic liberalism, the state presents the conditions for the market, but is no economic actor itself. However, in many cases the state is the only agency that can develop economic initiatives that are beneficial to the general welfare of to the market itself (Pesch, 2005; Wright, 2000).
Cleaning human and urban bodies above all seems to boil down to making feces invisible. Human hygiene has increasingly been based on the control of bodily excretion. Urban hygiene basically applies this control dogma to the level of the city; the urban metabolism that comes into existence comes to include an increasing range of waste, which, in turn, has to become subjected to control. More and more stuff is seen as wrongly located, as things that need to be hidden (Douglas, 1966; Gastelaars, 1994; Pesch, 2015b).
As the range of pollution increases, the government is given more tasks. While waste at first consisted out of rags, leftovers, and old iron, at later stages, dirt from households and industry were added to this repertoire. The management of these forms of waste became the designated job of a corps of professionals that were increasingly on the payroll of public organizations (Van Zon, 1990). These professionals collected waste, and came to control its flow towards reserved locations that allowed for invisibility (Melosi, 1981, 2000).
It can be said that the model of waste management has been created to liberate the city streets from excretion, and over time this model has come to serve other forms of waste. Scientifically trained experts together with public professionals were designated to take care of a new form of public hygiene: the aim was no longer to battle epidemics that were the result of the discharge of feces on the streets, but to protect the ‘health’ of the living environment itself. Instead of dealing with waste, ‘pollution’ had to be targeted; everywhere around us, there could be stuff that made us ill. A local approach to manage such pollution would no longer do, and around the turn of the twentieth century, Western states centralized the science-based care for public hygiene.
With local and national governments administering flows in urban infrastructures, public space was overtaken. It now became the space supervised by the public sector, up to the point they coincide, especially in Western European states. Little is left of a neutral public space in which free citizens met each other. The responsibility for the public space, both above and beneath the pavement, was given to the authorities and professionals; their job was to facilitate public space as a space of movement, so it remained clean.
Sanitary infrastructures brought along a new substantiation of public space. Streets were seen less as meeting places, but became increasingly understood in terms of the transport they allowed. The physical public space that created societal coherence became invisible, existing out of underground pipes and cables that connected all individual households to the greater urban context.
The management of public space also had implications for the private space. The liberal city had been based on a clear separation between the public space of the street and the private space of the home. In the sanitary city, the city becomes a body, an autonomous subject controlling itself. Many of its subterranean bifurcations, pipes for water, gas and excretion, cables for electricity and information, effortlessly crossed the boundary between public and private. The authorities got access to the area behind the front door, as far as to the toilet bowl itself, providing essential household services.
15.3.2 A Space for Emancipation
The hygienist movements brought along a physical and an ideological idea of community. Physical in the sense that the proximity of poor people can affect the general level of health, as such it is simply beneficent to establish encompassing infrastructures that serve the city as a whole (De Swaan, 1990). Ideological as it creates a common fate; the hygienists felt solidarity with those less well off (Van Zon, 2002). Sanitary initiatives were soon followed by other initiatives to relieve poor classes. At the same time, such initiatives had strong disciplinary intentions and with that severe stigmatizing ramifications. Just like the sewers allowed for dirt to be controlled, welfare reforms aimed for the control of disorderly behavior by the lower classes (Gandy, 1999).
In contrast with these initiatives that clearly had a top-down character, the nineteenth century also witnessed the reverse dynamic. Up from the bottom came a range of emancipatory claims that can be seen as demands for access to public space. In spite of the emphasis on individuals, the liberal city only allowed a minority of people to act as the kind of liberal individuals that could alternate the public sphere of politics and equality with the private sphere of the home (Pateman & Phillips, 1987). Women were confined to the private sphere of the house, and as such they were effectively denied citizenship. A professional career, contributing to public opinion, and participation in civil society were all out of reach. Also large segments of the male population, such as laborers, minorities, and immigrants, were excluded from public and political life. The right to vote was usually based on income, so that the democratic system was above all the effective guardian of the interests of the richer classes.
Increasingly, however, groups deprived of a public role came to organize themselves, appealing for more equality. One may, admittedly anachronistically, describe the rise of such emancipatory movements as the formation of ‘counterpublics’ (Fraser, 1990; Warner, 2002). These counterpublics challenge the unitary character and exclusionary tendencies of the liberal public sphere. Different groups may develop their own common discourse and shared identity, and claim their right for such self-expression. The paradox of these counterpublics is that they aim to create a protected, almost semi-private, realm that allows the development of an identity that is, in the end, comprehensively accepted as a legitimate identity. Emancipation means both becoming equal and becoming autonomous.
In the account of the liberal city, it has been shown how any political community has exclusionary features. A political community is not the same as the social collective that is contained by the rules and arrangements that are consented with by the citizens. Suffrage is not universal, groups like children and tourists are not given citizenship rights. The emergence of counterpublics can be seen as the appeal of social groups to gain access to the political community. This raises some paradoxes with regards to the liberal creed, because these groups often present their claim for access in terms of their identity as a group, which might contradict the individualist starting points of liberalism, while these at the same time are justified by the liberal ideal of equality. Another upshot is that the public sphere of deliberative politics does not only relate to the outcome of a certain debate, but also to the struggle about which groups are allowed to participate in this debate. The ambiguity of public space that has been described earlier allows such contradictions to be discussed and resolved. Expanding circles of emancipation and empowerment are based on the possibility of renegotiating what belongs to which side of the public/private divide.
The development of the sanitary city did not only bring centralized management of infrastructures and flows, it also contributed to the homogenization and emancipation of society. The infrastructures allowed societal groups to become connected, not only in spatial terms, but also in terms of culture and morality. These processes have, in many cases, involved the emancipatory struggles of counterpublics. At the same time, we may observe the emergence of a split between the social production of the physical creation of public space and social construction of the symbolic experience of public space (Lefebvre, 1991; Low, 1996). The ‘hardware’ of the sanitary city composed out of urban arteries came to be opposed to the ‘software’ of publics and counterpublics that used urban space as the arena for creating both shared and contesting meanings. The conceptual distinction between the social construction and production of public space has become a common understanding in urban studies and it is often used to oppose the capacity of communities to create their own understandings about a place with the meanings and norms that authorities aim to maintain in the physical design of that space. As such, this distinction figures as a major factor in the contemporary understanding of public space.
15.4 The Rational City
In this section, I will introduce an intellectual infrastructure that is added to the social and technical infrastructures presented earlier and which presents a description of the world in terms of objective, universalist rules. Such a description allows for mechanistic manipulations in order to achieve certain preset goals. This worldview in which goals and means are clearly separated and in which mechanistic rules motivate actions, utilizes Max Weber’s thesis on the rationalization of the life-world.
While the liberal and the sanitary city are also manifestations of this process of rationalization, as these pursue societal progress by deliberate design, this new phase of rationalization also pertains to these processes of design themselves. In other words, the social and technical arrangements that had been implemented earlier also become subject to objectification.
The historical developments that underlie the rational city are firstly formed by the processes of industrialization that were furthered in the nineteenth century, and secondly by the emergence of modern business organizations. The industrialization of cities in Europe and North America is deeply connected to the development of the sanitary city sketched in the previous section: the introduction of controllable energy sources created the possibility of concentrated forms of production. The rhythm of life came to be determined by the steam engine and the assembly line. It has been described by Thorstein Veblen (1994) how the machine came to govern the production process. The machine necessitates standardization and regularity, while the laborer needs to adjust his actions, choices and skills to these necessities, and as such his physique becomes servile to the demands of the machine.
The steam machine can be seen as the first appliance that incorporated cybernetics. The centrifugal governor invented by James Watt controls the speed of the machine by figuring as an internal feedback system. The constant speed that was enabled by this system came to directly control the functioning of the laborers. Gradually, the machine also came to determine the shape of the city, concentrating laborers in factories and their families in nearby urban settlements.
The rational city as it is described here not only pertains to the rationalization of mechanical force and labor capacity, but it also pertains to the rationalization of public space. The key for this rationalization, as will be contended here, emerges from the development of mobility infrastructures. First, railroads came not only to connect cities, harmonizing different regions of a country, but also gave rise to a new way of coordination, namely the modern business organization. Second, the car came to define not only mobility, but also the city of the twentieth century. The emphasis on movement as was introduced in the sanitary city came to denote not just dirt that needed to be flushed or swept, but also people that transported themselves, necessitating urban planners to introduce the infrastructures that facilitated these movements. What we see is how technological and social infrastructures start to figure as the physical landscape determining the ways in which people act and interact. At the same time, infrastructures create their own dependencies, they create a lock-in of technologies and related practices that very much provide a fixed platform of values and concerns that are to be shared (Correljé & Groenewegen, 2009).
15.4.1 A Space for Functionality
The liberal city that embraced both a public and a private sphere has been contested in the twentieth century by modernist architects, most notably by Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. These renowned designers share their ‘metropolophobia’; seeing the city as an unnatural, impure living environment. Instead of sanitizing the city, their cure was to eradicate the city. Frank Lloyd Wright (1932) claimed: “To look at the plan of any great city is to look at a cross-section of some fibrous tumor.” It was the task of the architect to destroy this tumor, by redesigning the built environment so that people could live in a ‘humane’ way. The city they loathed was the disorganized and wasteful nineteenth century city. Architects and urban planners gave themselves the task to rationalize these industrial sites of chaos (Fishman, 1977).
Frank Lloyd Wright spent a great part of his life working on to the never realized utopia Broadacre City. The degenerated big city needed to be conquered by a planned city, which was based on new technologies such as cars, telephones, and radios. Every family was to be given one acre, and all transport was to be done by car. With sixty miles per hour, you were able to visit any of your 30,000 neighbors within 15 min. At gas stations on the edge of the city, standardized consumer products could be purchased. Broadacre City was a city without a recognizable center, without having a clear transition from city into nature. No urban districts, just hundreds of uniformly separated houses in which people could be occupied only with their own concerns. The industrial, centralized city belonged to the age of the machine. Such cities were monsters, aberrations build on greed, destroying efficient production and human values. Only the return to the natural habitat of humans, the rural context, could revive this natural balance.
Le Corbusier based his utopian city on an idealized version of Paris: a center of art, culture and industry in which elites and avant-garde could meet. He found the real Paris horrible: it was crowded and loud, houses were uninhabitable and roads were congested. For Le Corbusier such an organically grown city belonged to an age of artisans, not to an age of the machine. Modern times allows for a drastic top-down planning that could reintroduce harmony. Houses, districts, and cities had to be approached as ‘living machines’: like a factory in which first the functions had to be analyzed before they were assembled into an effective process, a city should also be based on functional separations. The city should allow for speed and efficiency, which could only be done by building the city from scratch. Highways, subways, bicycle roads, pedestrian lanes all had to be designed to contribute to great speed, so that an optimal exchange of information, talent and pleasure could take place.
In hindsight, the modernist architects have made a number of impressive buildings, but never created great streets or great cities (Kelbaugh, 1996). Their legacy is formed by utopian cities such as Chandigarh and Brasilia that continue to struggle for coherence. However, they have been hugely influential for urban design in the twentieth century. Most followers of the modernist utopists did not make new cities, but added new districts at the periphery of existing cities, taking transport by car as a starting point—creating a profound lock-in situation in which it has become unavoidable to drive a car.
The consequence for public space is that it has been hollowed out, it had no intrinsic value apart from facilitating people to go from one place to another (Sennett, 1992). Meeting strangers, the essence of the liberal public sphere, was discouraged by the mobility infrastructures that were to be developed in the twentieth century, these infrastructures were above all designed to cater traffic by car. The ideal situation being a trip from garage to garage, not having to engage in the pluralism that was intrinsic to the public sphere of the liberal city (Duany, Plater-Zyberk, & Speck, 2001).
15.4.2 A Space for Efficiency
Factories absorbed capital, labor, and also power. They did not bring about the modern organization, which may have more to do with another application of the steam engine, namely the construction of an extensive railroad. Alfred Chandler (1977) describes how this construction in the United States brought about a new type of business enterprise. Instead of an owner that controlled the daily affairs of a company, the vast distances that had to be covered by the new railroads necessitated the division into multiple organizational units that had to be managed separately. The multi-unit enterprise came to be run by a class of professional managers that coordinated decisions inside of and between organizational units. With that, the multi-unit organization created a new kind of strategic behavior on the one hand and bureaucratic routines on the other hand.
Organizations are a new phenomenon to the liberal templates that differentiated individuals (and families) from the encompassing domains of the state, the market and civil society. It is here that we recognize Roald Coase’s notion of transaction costs, which explains the existence of organizations in the supposedly self-ruling system of the market, because there is a cost of using the price system that may be reduced by control over information (Coase, 1937).
The behavior inside of the organization became an object of academic studies, which had the aim to rationally optimize the processes taking place inside of the organization. These processes were to be described in terms of resources that had to be deployed as efficiently as possible in order to achieve the preset set of organizational goals. Labor was one of the main resources, and one that needed the most drastic revision. Ever since the Scientific Management of Frederick Taylor (1914), the goal of hierarchical structures related to questions about how to control human resources by aligning activities of employees with organizational demands: the division of tasks and responsibilities and the motivation of individuals by stick, carrot or sermon came to be objects of systematic study (e.g. Simon, 1997).
For the objectified study of organizational behavior the public or private status of an organization does not play a structural role. It is a contingent feature that might impact the conditions that need to be managed, but are of no further intrinsic relevance (Pesch, 2005, 2008). At the same time, the template of the modern organization originates in the private sector, which is generally assumed to create more efficient forms of management—efficiency being the holy grail of rationalization. Especially in the 1990s, the neo-liberal creed inspired the modelling of state organizations on market organization. The idea of new public management was that government ‘should steer not row’, this creed implied that the public status of an organization has no distinct features (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992). Privatization of state organizations, but also the stimulation of entrepreneurial activities of state officials could be observed throughout the world.
These developments suggest that the responsibility for managing vital infrastructures could be taken away from the government. Subsequently, the provision of many urban infrastructures has been taken over by private companies and all aspects of public life have fallen prey to the dictates of the private sector, which are managerialism and efficiency. There are many degrees of privatization—a service can be fully or partially taken over by a for-profit organization, or a government can act entrepreneurially—but the outcome is the same: public services become products that obey the same logic as market products. Moreover, following globalization and the dominance of neo-liberal policies, liberalism is increasingly understood exclusively in terms of economic liberalism.
The upshot of the developments sketched in this section is a significant hollowing out of the public space. In modernist architecture the space that is not of private, commercial or cultural relevance loses any intrinsic value. What is left is a functional space that allows people to travel as effectively as possible from one point to another, and in which public management is seen as no different than private management. What is missing in the rational city is the attention to empowerment and emancipation, which have played a role in the previous two sections. It may be that these values become harder to pursue. Not only do technical infrastructures take away a share of the adaptiveness necessary to allow negotiations about the content of public space, the increasing porosity of the boundaries between the public and the private also make it hard to distinguish an identifiable public space in the first place (Pesch, 2014). With that, it becomes unclear where and how to make appeals for inclusion and participation.
15.5 The Experimental City
According to Manuel Castells (1993) the age of the industrial city has given way to the information society. Industrial societies were characterized by immobile factories, in which employers could easily spend their working life. It was, in the words of Zygmunt Bauman (2000), the age of ‘heavy modernity’, in which everything was based on steadiness. Now we have entered the age of ‘fluid modernity’ in which everything is in flux. The market is now a global phenomenon based on real-time transactions. Cities have become nodes in socio-economic networks in which capital and knowledge have been integrated. The public space of the city has become occupied only temporarily by a caste of business nomads.
Public space has become diffuse, and just like the virtual space of the internet, it knows no clear spatial qualities. Public space is subjected to commercialization and commodification and citizens are increasingly seen as mere consumers. Without a clear idea of publicness, public space becomes further privatized. As government retreats from the public space, it will be left empty. The same can be said about the urban landscape which has come to exist out of an endlessly repeating series of shopping malls, megastores, fast-food chains and other ‘non-places’ (Loukaitou-Sideris & Banerjee, 1998).
The privatized nature of public space can also be connected to a changed relation between sanitation and urban metabolism. According to Gandy (2004), our current metabolic system can be characterized as ‘antibiotic’; diseases are addressed as separate entities, instead of addressing them as epidemics that could affect a collective and that had to be managed by developing a ‘bacteriological’ form of urbanism. The shared destiny that was the result of the equalizing threat to public hygiene is not needed any longer; one can conveniently retreat into individualized patterns of healthcare. With the withering of boundaries and categories due to processes of globalization and digitalization, the metabolic character of the city can be more aptly described as ‘rhizomatic’ (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), in the sense that the underground city acts like a fungus which can be traced by seemingly random patterns of popped-up mushrooms.
Earlier we have seen how the categories of citizens and consumers emerged in the context of the institutional domains of the democratic state and the free market. It is not that these categories have become defunct, however, what can be observed is that the boundaries between them have become fundamentally porous, giving rise to hybrid activities and orientations (Pesch, 2014, 2015a). At the same time, to grant legitimacy to these activities and orientations, existing dimensions of public space are still appealed to. The different dimensions of publicness continue to play a role in contemporary cities. This will be shown first by exploring how private companies take over public responsibilities with regards to infrastructures that are increasingly integrated into ‘smart systems’ in order to pursue the efficient management of collective goods and services (Kitchin, 2014; Townsend, 2013; Van Timmeren & Henriquez, 2015). This development has ramifications for conceptualizations of public space that go much further than the mere osmosis between the sphere of the market and the sphere of the government, as it bestows public space with a dual function, namely that of a testing platform and of context in which people live (Evans, Karvonen, & Raven, 2016; Jackson, Gillespie, & Payette, 2014). Second, I would like to point at a wide range of activities instigated by collectives of non-institutional actors, such as local groups and communities, that deploy economic and political activities (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013). With that, individuals as citizens and users try to define their own public space to an unprecedented degree, while building strongly on liberal traditions. Though these developments are contrastive in many regards, they build on the same socio-economic and technological basis, namely the availability of information flows that minimizes the costs of coordinating collective behavior.
15.5.1 The Hybrid Publicness of Smart Systems
New ICT systems come with a seemingly infinite capacity to establish and control flows of data. As such, the existing infrastructures can be managed, new infrastructures can be added, and the full repertoire of infrastructures can be integrated into one seamless web that has been given the label ‘smart’ (Kitchin, 2014; Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015; Pesch & Ishmaev, 2019). The integration of infrastructures allows the creation of circular processes that may revert the tendencies of the pollution management model to control waste by making it invisible. Instead, by connecting different industrial streams, waste may be regarded as a resource (Pesch, 2015b). Ideas such as cradle-to-cradle, industrial ecology and circular economy are all based on the capacity to change waste from output to input. Making such circular approaches possible demands detailed knowledge about production and consumption processes as well as detailed monitoring of material flows.
Governmental authorities can hardly neglect the promises with which they are confronted: after all, how could they withstand the lure of more efficiency? Then again, the developers of these smart systems are market-based companies that come with their own definition of what a smart city should be, a definition that becomes embedded in the technological artefacts they produce. In many cases, these companies also take over the actual control of these systems, tapping into the development noted in the previous section that the management of public infrastructures does not have to be the responsibility of public authorities. Private actors may present themselves as equally, or even better, equipped to fulfil this job.
The work of companies like Siemens, IBM and Cisco resembles that of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier: they present a template of how the city should function and with that comes an imaginary of the public space that has strong normative connotations. Also this imaginary is remarkably similar to the above discussion: it portrays the public space as a space that needs to facilitate flows, be it of cars or of information. The actual management of these flows should be laid down in the hands of experts, not of politically motivated authorities.
Just like the modernist architects, the developers of smart systems have built working prototypes of their design (Van Timmeren & Henriquez, 2015). New cities like Songdo in South-Korea and Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates act as showcases for what a smart city could entail, stacked with sensors that monitor flows of traffic, waste, energy, water, air, and people. Smart systems producers also intervene in existing cities and by that actively change the already prevailing public space. To a significant extent, these interventionist activities can be characterized analogously to activities that internet companies deploy. New systems are not thoroughly tested before they are released in society, but they are tested by being introduced in society. In the jargon of internet companies: ‘beta-versions’ of new technologies are introduced so that user feedback can be used to improve the product (Jackson et al., 2014). This means that a community of consumers acts as both as a user platform and a testing site.
In the context of a city, the legitimacy of releasing beta-versions might be problematic. Cities are not just conglomerations of consumers or users, they are also conglomerations of citizens whose capacity of collective self-determination might be compromised by being subjected to experiments run by commercial enterprises. But this is not the only challenge to liberal starting points. As the conditions for ending the experiment are not given, it becomes almost impossible to hold public and private authorities accountable for eventual mishaps. After all, the possibility of failure is one of the key characteristics of experiments—not something to be prevented. Moreover, we have seen that the liberal city has been based on the interaction with strangers. By designing efficient infrastructures that allowed private forms of transport, the modernist architects had tried to reduce the possibility of being confronted by strangers. Smart cities can be said to go a step further: not only do efficient infrastructures reduce the possibility of being confronted by strangers, the presence of digital forms of surveillance also exert control over anyone who is considered to be out of bounds.
The eradication of strangership hints at mechanisms of exclusion that characterize smart cities, by externally defining public space, smart systems also define the conditions for accessing public space. People that are not able to fulfill these conditions, because of poverty, personal history, physical or mental qualities are effectively disabled to partake in public life. As such, it can be said that the ramifications of these processes increase the ongoing fragmentation of public space.
15.5.2 Grassroots Experiments by Community Initiatives
The reduction of the costs of controlling information flows not only allows more efficient management of institutional processes. It may also be taken up by individuals or societal groups to organize themselves to pursue certain collective goals (Hajer, 2011). With that, new citizen-based initiatives emerge that can be said to regain or at least develop new conceptualizations of public space. In this, we may recognize ideas and ideals that have originated in the liberal city. These initiatives emphasize the democratic quality of a community to actively shape their shared identity by speaking out in participatory settings (Arendt, 1958; Dryzek, 1994).
Community based initiatives are not new to society, there have been traditional forms of civic engagement as described for instance by Robert Putnam (2001). These traditional forms of engagement usually involved activities related to churches, schools, or local politics, or related to groups such as professional organizations (including labor unions), sports clubs, and literary societies. There also have been social movements that have tried to empower minority groups or criticize dominant political ideas and practices. As social movements, community initiatives mobilize resistance to existing power structures, which can be categorized according to their identity, adversary and societal goal (Castells, 1997, p. 71).
Nevertheless, we may now observe a new form of such initiatives, as these revolve around the use and development of sociotechnical systems that are implemented next to or instead of existing parts of the metabolic infrastructures that constituted the sanitary city (Smith, Hargreaves, Hielscher, Martiskainen, & Seyfang, 2016). This novel form of community initiatives can be recognized in services that allow the sharing of products such as tools and cars (Schor, 2014), community gardens (Holland, 2004; Naylor, 2012), energy cooperatives that produce electricity locally (Walker & Devine-Wright, 2008), and holistic initiatives like transition towns (Feola & Nunes, 2014; Amanda Smith, 2011) and eco-villages (Boyer, 2015; Höflehner, 2011). Civic engagement takes place against the background of a globalizing economic system that is partly driven by neo-liberal paradigms, and the tendency of sustainable civic engagement to revolve around the uptake of technology, instead of taking social and cultural elements as their starting point. The result of these features is that community initiatives are more directly connected to the provision of certain public goods, and as such bear a more functional character than conventional initiatives (De Moor, 2013). This aspect of civic engagement can be characterized as the substitution of the production of goods and services.
In these initiatives, citizens are given the opportunity to create insight over the way that they relate themselves to these sociotechnical arrangements—basically incorporating the concern for innovation as part of a deliberative space (Pesch, Spekkink, & Quist, 2019). With that, community initiatives can be seen as opportunities to ‘cultivate’ more democratic innovation processes as is expressed by Smith and Stirling (2016), as these initiatives may contribute directly and concretely to the ‘democratization of innovation’.
Actors from institutions, such as policy, industry and science, have become increasingly interested in engaging with the ‘energetic society’, labels like co-creation, urban living labs, and social innovation are used by these actors to create legitimacy on one hand and to learn from these societal initiatives on the other hand. At least to a certain extent, these accommodation efforts are complicated by the emphasis on efficiency and the dominance of neo-liberal policy dogmas. It seems important however to take these initiatives seriously, as they are public space experiments that may counterweigh activities instigated in institutional contexts (cf. Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013). The activities of citizens testify to the need for collective self-determination, as opposed to being the uncritical consumers of goods and services. Policymakers have to set aside their inclination to see such initiatives as testbeds for new institutional arrangements and engage in a symmetrical relation in which citizens have an equal opportunity to explore alternative substantiations of public space.
15.6 Conclusions and Discussion
In this concluding section, I will return to the assumptions that have been stated in the introduction. The first of these assumptions was that public space could be clearly demarcated from the myriad of private spaces. This assumption does not hold: throughout this paper it has been shown how different, sometimes even contrastive, conceptualizations of publicness have been connected to urban space. Moreover, the boundaries between public and private spaces have always been the subject of ambiguity. The interpretative flexibility allows public space to be reinvented and to be fundamentally open for new actors and new substantiations.
Periods of urban development
Period | Characterization | Key values |
|---|---|---|
The liberal city | In this period the liberal conception of the political realm was introduced, which can be seen as a derivative sphere that allowed for conceptualizing public space as empty in itself | Equality Welfare Empowerment |
This period also introduces a substantive public sphere that was added to the liberal conception, and which allowed for social empowerment and inclusion | ||
The sanitary city | Here, public space was transformed into an infrastructural system that facilitates metabolic flows | Hygiene Emancipation |
Infrastructures brought along the homogenization of society, raising demands for further social and political equality | ||
The rational city | The control of this metabolic system by efficiently managed organizations | Functionality Efficiency |
The experimental city | The increased digitalization of infrastructures and management | Smartness Engagement |
Civic initiatives developing outside of existing institutional and political contexts |
Given this analysis, it is key for the experimental city to accommodate the identified dimensions and values in order to further the moral assets that over time came to be associated with public space. The endorsement of the values has served as the basis for further development of concrete public spaces, but they also motivate moral demands of a heterogeneity of publics that pursue access to these spaces. The analysis presents the perhaps vexing finding that the ongoing privatization of public space and the increased significance of neoliberal policies are features that are intrinsic to the dimensions of publicness. While the discourses of privatization and neo-liberalization contribute to the hollowing out of public space, the value of efficiency that they embody is not by definition external to public space. The same may be said about the role of technology, which functions as an important facilitator of the metabolic flows that provide hygiene; moreover, as has been shown above, technologies may also be utilized by a heterogeneity of publics to bestow meanings upon public space in an independent, that is democratic, way.
These insights compel us to rearticulate the threats to public space that are presented by the experimental city. The threats may not so much lie in neoliberal discourses and privatized technologies themselves, but in the way they might exclude other dimensions to be effectuated. More specifically we may observe the following challenges. First, there is the increasing reliance on technical infrastructures, giving rise to configurations that are hardly adaptive to societal and ideological changes. This rigidity goes to the extent of the character of public space in the liberal city as a space that alluded to contrastive conceptualizations of publicness, as such they were spaces that accommodated paradox—allowing social and political tensions to be addressed and resolved. Second, there is the increased privatization of the lifeworld. The pursuit of societal values and the accommodation of contradictions becomes problematic in the lack of a public space that can be recognized and appealed to, as such it seems desirable to reinvigorate public space as a domain that is fundamentally visible, open, and accessible—which is to say genuinely public (cf. Benn & Gaus, 1983; Weintraub, 1997).
This implies that, above all, we need to democratize infrastructural innovation. This need is especially urgent, because the metabolic system not only includes an increase of the types of flows, such as people, data, energy, and waste, but these flows are increasingly integrated into connected infrastructures. Network technologies like infrastructures create sociotechnical interdependencies that become unreceptive to demands for change, they become locked-in as self-reproductive entities. Creating a network of networks will only multiply these interdependencies (Arthur, 1989). At the same time, as these integrated infrastructures provide the physical shape of urban contexts, it comes to define the lifeworld of people, and as such they have a strong public character: they forward values, practices and relationships to the people that use them (Correljé, Cuppen, Dignum, Pesch, & Taebi, 2015).
To a significant extent we have come to live in a time of ‘cyborg urbanization’ in which the technical and the social are seamlessly connected to each other (Gandy, 2004; Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015). This suggests that there is a need to find ways for urban populations to become empowered with regards to the development of sociotechnical systems. Above I have introduced community initiatives as explorative efforts in that direction, but this experiment has not yet given rise to further diffusion of methods and policies. It seems paramount that such diffusion take place, as it cannot only be part of society itself, because the state has to ensure the liberal values of equality and inclusivity—values that cannot be easily secured by bottom-up initiatives. In the end, the physical character of public space has strong and direct political and social ramifications, and active connections have to be established to effectuate the full potential of public space.