Public Spaces (Setha Low)

What Are They?
  • All of us have a sense of place about locations that are important to us, and strong meanings and emotions linked to these intimate spaces. Hometowns, idyllic vacations spots, grandparents’ houses with their sights and smells; these places are linked to familiar landscapes that comfort us even when they are not particularly beautiful or comfortable. 
  • Nonfiction writers like Barry Lopez and Wallace Stenger speak about the importance of place in shaping human experience. As Stenger notes in his essay A Sense of Place, a place becomes significant not only because of its physical existence and the events that happen there, but because it is remembered and recounted in the memories of a community:

…[A] place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it – have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef…No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.
  •           These remembered stories are histories, and the most salient role of the anthropologist, one might argue, is to help tell the stories of situated others. As Lopez states: 
            “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and 
            compassion.”
  • Literary critics and social scientists have applied the concept of linguistic “performativity,” to understand phenomena outside of the realm of “speech acts.” Judith Butler, for example, describes performativity as “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” 
  • In applying the notion of performativity to the analysis of place, the essayist Michel Certeau asserts that storytelling and memory, as forms of speech, are culturally creative acts and that the continued existence of culturally definitive spaces, like hometowns, requires their repetition in telling. In this sense, storytelling becomes in his view a performative action.

… {T]he story plays a decisive role. It ‘describes,’ to be sure. But every description is more than a fixation,…[ it is] a culturally creative act…It even has distributive power and performative force (it does what it says) when an ensemble of circumstances is brought together. Then it founds spaces. Reciprocally, where stories are disappearing (or else are being reduced to museographical objects), there is a loss of space: deprived of narrations.


     Wallace Stenger, The Sense of Place (Random House, Inc, 1992), 2.
     J. L. Austin, How to Do things with Words. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975.
     Judith Bulter, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), vii.
     Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 123.
  • Actual public space
  • Virtual public space
What is the values of public space?

  • productivity
  • contributes to a flourishing society
    • recreation
      • socialization of children
      • sports and team building
      • relaxation/retreat
      • creativity
    • democratic practices/social justice
      • social inclusion/belonging
      • recognition
      • representation
      • ethic of care
      • contestation/resistance  
    • social/cultural/economic activities
      • informal economy 
      • sustainability
      • social capital
      • cultural identity
      • collective memory
    • community and individual well-being
      • physical health
      • mental health
      • safety and accessibility
      • sense of security
      • resilience


Constraints to interactions in public spaces:

  • structure of ownership and property relations
    • privatization/partnerships/gentrification
  • planning, design, physical features
    • aesthetics/flexibility/furniture/ecological considerations
  • laws and governmental policies
    • rules and regulations/zoning
  • secularization and fear of others
    • policing/surveillance/barriers/walls
  • Profit driven (rather than social welfare driven) policies
    • commodification/commercialization/corporatization

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