Analysis of Power Interventions into Public Space as a Tool for Research into Cities in Non-Democratic Regimes (Sociological-Historical Approach)

Abstract

According to the prominent sociologist Henri Lefebvre, space is an instrument of power. Every state regime strives to use space for social control through various interventions. While in democratic regimes the use of public space is the result of by majority-accepted interventions, in non-democratic regimes these are power interventions usually based on ideological starting points, not generally accepted by society. On the contrary, interventions into public space are becoming one of the tools for implementing state ideology into the consciousness of society. In their research on public space, German sociologists Walter Siebel and Jan Wehrheim defi ned its four basic dimensions – legal, functional, social and material-symbolic. Interdisciplinary sociological-historical research of interventions into each of these dimensions seems to be a suitable analytical tool in understanding the relationship between public space and the state regime, the conclusions of which allow a detailed understanding of the nature of individual non-democratic (authoritarian or totalitarian) regimes typical for twentiethcentury Europe, as well as transnational ideological connections. In the article we introduce our interdisciplinary socio-historical approach on the example of the authoritarian para-fascist regime of the Slovak state (1939–1945).