However, according to (Bridge and Watson 2002) as Detsche discuss, 'power defines urban space, as she discuss how constitution of public realm since ancient Greece, have had some sort of exclusion (example of being a democratic space), and she examines how artistic and urban ideologies were combined during the last decade to legitimise urban redevelopment programmes that claimed to be beneficial to all', yet in reality Detsche argues, they tried to wipe out traditional working classes from the city and tried to support dominating groups such as white, middle class males (mostly).
Therefore Detsche (2000) calls for a democratic spatial critique that takes account of the conflicts that produce and maintain all spaces, including the space of politics itself. She pays lot of attention to public arts and argues that public art can collaborate with gentrifying planning practices to make places appear more public than they actually are, acting as a kind of public relations agent. Even though an open civilise space would accept and give access to difference, diversity, exclusion and open contestations such as above mentioned in civilised society, ‘some may argue that urban public spaces are not so inclusive as they can be potentially progressive’ (Bridge and Watson 2000).
For example unpredictable encounters, (as mentioned by Sennett) may not just result in positive outcomes, but also could result in conflicts (as mentioned by Deutche) or even threats, such as attacks and mugging may happen in public spaces, in one sense places where free access is allowed on the other hand, places where its not safe at all. For example, As Beazley (2000) explain in her work, public space can also be seen as a place of temporary security, however with constant threats.
Corresponding to the above argument, (Bridge and Watson 2000) summarise, that construction of certain identities in open public realms can emerge as a result of this relationship between open civilise realms, accessibility as well as the authorities certain groups/people may have in public realm. For example (Bridge and Watson 2000) as well as homeless person in contemporary society, there are the prostitutes and streetwalkers who challenged the public realm.
As for example, according to (Bridge and Watson 2000) ‘streets were seen as contradictory public places for women, as even though Victorian moralities kept women off the streets, they were also spaces of freedom for women’. Historically, women's role in the public space of the city has been an unsure one.
Walkowitz in (Bridge and Watson 2002) identify the ways in which women in public space were managed and regulated by social and economic interests, women were also subject to strict codes of conduct. According to Walkowitz, in public women assumed to be rare and a source of danger for those men who gathered in streets, however in mental landscape, she argues, they occupied huge symbolic (sexual) position.
According to walkkowitz (2002), in public prostitutes were seen as ‘corporal smells’ and animal passions that bourgeois male had rejected, as well as being the logo of divided city itself as they used to loiter in back alleys and major shopping districts, such as Kings cross (even today). In one way they were also seen as lonely streetwalkers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vidler (1993) had speculated that the condition of ‘agoraphobia’, the fear of open spaces, (which for Vidler, was basically female neurosis) must have linked to a self-conscious inner desire to walk the streets, to be streetwalkers (Vidler 1993, 35), because of the way they’ve been portrayed by society, being identified as prostitutes.
Even though this is an example of diverse groups associated in ideal democratic realms and how their identities being created, it also emphasise how prostitutes were seen as a potential source of disorder to the respectable public realm, while Wilson (2002) describes how bourgeois males had the freedom to move freely in society observing the diversity without getting involved was given because of his position in the society, being affluent as well as the gender (male).
Similarly, Bridge and Watson (2000) argue ‘even though other groups show resistance to dominant representations of public space, city space is confusing for women as urban public realms has been constituted as settled, predictable, rational and they way how certain parts are occupied by men’.
Both Walkowitz and Wilson (2002) argue that the cities of the nineteenth century eroded the boundaries between private and public spheres and divisions of labour between men and women discussed earlier. Concern over women entering these new public spaces were obvious in a discourse of danger and morality, underpinned by the idea that women were at the mercy of their passions and required control and guidance.
However, women do experience very specific gender-related constraints in the city. Although women are not the only group whose activities in public space are constrained or who are overly confined to the private world of the home, this should not be difficult to understand the fact that the "gendered city" (Beall and Levy, 1994) is still an aspiration and not yet a reality.
Also moving on to examine a different scenario of identify construction in public realm, Looking back at Beazley’s chapter, where she Use Visano’s (1990) concept of a street child’s life as a ‘career’, examine the socialisation into the street child subculture: the Tikyan.
By using Turner’s (1985,1994) ‘self-categorization’ theory, she discusses how a street boy’s individual identity construction and performance involve a continual interaction with the Tikyan collective identity. Further, by drawing on the work of subcultural theorists, she reflect on how the Tikyan have developed their own code of street ethics and values, as a reaction to, and a subversion of, their imposed exclusion. (Example of a democratic and open space, which allow all citizens to participate). Further, over the years street children and youth learn to interact with the expectations of their own group, and are more influenced by it.
According to Beazley, It is in this way that the Tikyan community enables a street child to establish a new identity, and is a means through which street children can voice their collective indignation at the way they are treated by mainstream society.
However, in contrast Young in (Bridge and Watson 2002) argues that in the same way how an open public realm has been socially constituted in response to power (of certain groups/ people/ authorities as seen earlier) so as the ideal community, therefore Young rejects the ideal of community and offers a variety of reasons for her position. Two are especially significant in this context. First, Young holds that any definition of community is based on the exclusion of others. As she argues, community often occurs as an oppositional differentiation from other groups, who are feared or despised, and therefore the ideal of community, supports the fear and hatred some social groups show toward others.
Second, Young (2002) holds that, because of its commitment to the logic of identity the ideal of community denies difference among subjects. Young suggests that a failure to acknowledge the otherness of some people is a failure to acknowledge their opacity. What makes them difficult presumably is that we cannot understand them.
She argues that city life is all about ‘being together’ with strangers and being able to encounter one another, (similar to sennett’s1970 argument of heterogeneous space earlier) face to face or through media rather than excluding certain groups, class or ethnic minorities, as every one have the right to experience the city life. She argues in this way people are not internally related, and would not judge each other by their own perspectives and can experience each other, from different groups to professions.
Young also argues ‘in democratic open realms strangers live side by side, giving to and receiving from one another, which creates social relations with different identities and individuals, creating less exclusions’, and she argues possibility of becoming acquainted with new cultures, groups and identities always exists in ideal cities. Therefore she concludes, that ‘unoppressive city is therefore defined as openness to unassimilated otherness. (pg437)(Even though in realty such openness does not exist in current society)
The following section examines some of the critics made by writers in regards to limitations of an ideal democratic space.
‘It has long been argued that the physical space of public realm of western cities is in crisis, caught between privatising and commodification and the rising fear of crime and the 'other'’ in the postmodern city (Boyer, 1994).
Many citizens, welcome the themeing of the urban public space, and its increased control through more and more sophisticated technological means such as CCTV systems As Davis noted, The obsession with physical security systems in luxury life styles, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990's" (Davis, 1990; 223). This modern city of Los Angeles has become, thanks to the writings of Davis and others, the icon of the fragmented, anti-social western metropolis, the stereotype of the city of fear, in which "most of the bungalows in the inner ring now tend to resemble cages in a zoo.
Shopping malls are also considered by many, as extreme examples of the erosion of genuine public space in the contemporary city, as (Sorkin, 1992) argued that public spaces are becoming more controlled by private interests. Although they can look like colourful streets hosting clusters of shops, it has been noticed that they are "characterised by a tendency to confine public social life to 'certain locations, certain hours and certain categories of 'acceptable' activities'" (Bianchini, 1988), which are strictly controlled to maximise consumption and profitability.
From a certain viewpoint, these places are so effective in fulfilling their functions that they have become a paradigm for these new types of urban sites that could be
Classified as "private public space" (Bianchini, 1988): trouble-free, clean, ideal places that have the appearance of being 'public' but which are developed and controlled purely to sell or advertise commercial goods, rather than places where people chat or appreciate one another as they should be doing in an ideal democratic places.
However in contrast Sorkin, (1992) mentioned The very fact that such spaces are not truly 'public' becomes an attraction to many consumers, because of the dangers now implied by the term, where public spaces are sometimes seen as dangerous places, because of the same reason that makes them democratic, and open: free access and the diversity of people associated in these areas, which can bring all sorts of strangers into open realms.
However, Sennett on Bridge and Watson (2002) argues that contemporary urban planning and architecture should be blamed for creating ‘dead public’ places and poor public realm. While similarly Jacobs (2002) blames the ‘diversity’ of cities, not specifically an ethnic diversity, although she vaguely include this in her arguments. Rather, diversity means different buildings, different residences, and different amounts of people in an area at different times. According to her Cities that work best employ a wide range of diverse interests that attract, different people. Unfortunately, Jacobs argues that bureaucrats and social planners always believe top down planning is better than bottom up initiative as she tried to show the fallacy of social planning. According to Jacob, this lack of diversification leads to slums, crime, and a host of other horrors that are all popular in contemporary open public realms.
Especially she blames the isolation of low-income people in towering projects surrounded by empty space. She examines the role and practicality of parks, sidewalks, business interests, city government, streets, automobiles versus pedestrians, and boundaries. And Jacobs discovered serious errors in how planners build cities. She found parks placed in the sunless shadows of skyscrapers or at the end of dead end streets, narrow sidewalks incapable of carrying heavy foot traffic, and city governments too fragmented to carry on effective management. All of these things, she argue eventually led to abandonment and degradation of physical public realm.
Schuler (1996) believes while these developments represent decentralised public realms, as large cities become more fragmented physically, socially, and culturally, computer communications are seen as potentially integrative medium, tying the disparate fragments together into new types of public discourse, in ways that other media can manage.
In favour of this type of new democratic public spaces, Schuler (1996) argues, there are new, (not physical) Internet-based, public realms are beginning to emerge, known as 'virtual cities’, which provide varieties of 'electronic spaces' accessed through computers, and have been developed variously to market cities as nodes of global investment, and to engineer the emergence of new democratic 'electronic' public spaces, at the local level, to replace the undermined physical public spaces of cities.
According to Schuler Net has already managed to promise to rearrange world where the individual can sample a community life that has long been damaged by the rush for individual gains, as Schuler writes The net has been cast over that collective space once filled by the family hearth, the church yard, the village marketplace.
However Calhoun (1986:342) in favour of physical public realms argues that “Telematically linked communities", could fragment our larger society, enabling each of us to pursue isolation from everything different, unfamiliar, and removing the occasions for contact across lines of class, race and culture.
Similarly Frazer (1994) discussing the architectural relevance of cyberspace suggests that ‘virtual world should not be seen as an alternative to the real world or a substitute, but an extra dimension which allows us a new freedom of movement in the natural world’ as They add crucial functionality to the non-built space that was supposed to be exclusive to the built one, including many-to-many communication, information exchange, and transactions.
According to Frazer (1994) The emergence of cyber-based communities, offering new interactive public arenas, is perhaps especially relevant for the most marginalized groups, who have been most hit by economic restructuring and the growing urban privatism.
In summary, the contemporary trend of privatisation of public spaces as shopping malls, theme parks, and office parks is considered as worrying by many writers. (As seen earlier) Similarly the Internet is being understood as an extension of existing institutions.
For example, Internet is partly used to deliver entertainment products like a huge virtual theme park or is functioning as an electronic shopping mall. There is a rising trend toward more safer and privatised places. Past public spaces, therefore, will continue to be transformed and will be diversified with the new ones.
As Boyer (1993) argues, ‘sold-style 'public space' declines and popular control of the streets becomes a thing of the past, a new-style 'publicity' or 'promotional space' evolves on which the reputation of the sponsoring corporation is visualized and its production of 'civic Values’ promoted’.
Similarly Mitchell on Bridge and Watson (2002) argues that with the new technology, the idea of public realm has to be reformed. As ‘cyberspaces’ offer new opportunities for mutual interests, create new identities, and self representation, despite the existence of organising framework and the fact that people’s right to create private or public in cyber place is intensely contested. According to Mitchell, virtual communities are where people meet, just like large-scale structures of places, which are organised to meet the needs of their people governed according to certain norms. So really, it is same as open democratic civilise realm, only physical infrastructure is missing.
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