People’s Park again: on the end and ends of public space

Abstract

This paper uses three recent struggles over public space in California’s East Bay (Berkeley and Oakland) to critically interrogate the ‘end of public space’ thesis. Developing a historical analysis of the discourse of the ‘end of public space’ over the past two and a half decades, the paper shows that dismissal of arguments about the end of public space both ignores the dialectical nature of the original interventions and comes at a real political and scholarly cost. The paper concludes that the tendency towards the end of public space in capitalism is closely related to the necessity for capitalism to produce abstract space. Both this tendency and this necessity are struggled over and contradictory, and it is out of these struggles and contradictions that actually-existing public space is produced.