Representation of power in public spaces: epistemic scientific versus value rationality in social‐spatial constructions

Abstract

Public spaces can be read as representations of power relations in society. It is often underexposed that these spaces are produced in, and are the result of, complex political and social struggles that entail a complex relation of power/knowledge. Since the transition to modernity, state agencies have become involved in social‐spatial constructions in which the production of space has often been rationalized as a politically neutral activity, legitimated by the apparently neutral foundations of Cartesian reason, and the ‘general interest’. In this paper the creation of the Palace and Garden of Vaux‐le‐Vicomte (1661) will illustrate the rise of epistemic rationality of (green) public spaces. While the type of bureaucrat changed (from courtier to civil servant) as modernity advanced, during the seventeenth to the early or mid‐twentieth century, much of the epistemic logic remained relatively constant. The experts who proposed these socio‐spatial constructions were largely embedded in an epistemic community that rationalized its work relative to principles and methods founded in the natural sciences which, as such, made a pretence of political neutrality. In this regard, the public spaces of the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, constitute an iconic representation of this age of high modernity. In the second half of the twentieth century this epistemic logic was challenged as too technocratic, and by its exclusion of ‘the political’, also as inadequate to satisfy democratic conditions. This epistemic shift is interpreted in terms of a phronetic approach which focuses on ‘value rationality’. To illustrate this, the recent rebuilding of ‘Roombeek’, in the Netherlands, is analysed.