Cities, citizenship, contested cultures: Berlin's Palace of the Republic and the politics of the public sphere

Abstract

The notion of the `public sphere' stands in principle for normative as well as historical conditions of civic participation critically legitimating the democratic state. Yet it also tends to be associated very readily with the distinctly spatial dimension inherent in the terms it is related with, such as public space, agora, or more recently, the network. Arguably, however, an ill-defined distinction between these concepts in fact obscures rather than highlights the role public space — and particularly urban public sites — may play in the creation of an active public sphere. Taking recourse to the debates surrounding the future of Berlin's `Palace of the Republic', the former parliament building of the German Democratic Republic, this article seeks to explicitly consider the role urban sites may play for the participation of civil society in decision-making processes. Public urban spaces, it argues, while historically taken to provide citizens with regulated sites for interaction and debate, increasingly become the object of, rather than the place for, civic discourses and will-formation.