Book Review: The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City

Abstract

In The Public and its Possibilities, John D Fairfield synthesizes the work of a multitude of scholars to give a detailed overview of the trajectory of the public throughout American history. It is an impressive survey of American social, political and labour history as seen through the lens of a civic public created through deliberation and engaged with political questions. In it Fairfield weaves together case studies from different times and places into a single complex story of experience, stimulation and repression of participatory democracy and its connections to market, political, social and cultural forces. The word public has a wide range of meanings both popularly and in academia. In urban studies, our use of the word public often implies both a civic public constituted through debate and also public spaces, spaces that are openly accessible to all, have some sort of public (often governmental) ownership, and/or help make possible the constitution of a civic public. Fairfield engages with the spatial meanings of the word in this last sense, for example in his discussion of the first major public space created by public policy in 1792, the post office, where reading rooms with newspapers and open access for all men created a space where �citizens came to learn about and discuss public affairs� (p. 72). In the preface, Fairfield states that his use of the word �