Politics Of Public Space Research Articles

On the plaza: the politics of public space and culture

Setha M. Low,On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000, 274 pages (paper).Reviewer: Pamela J. DowneUniversity of SaskatchewanThis book offers a highly readable and quite interesting historical and ethnographic narrative of plaza life and public space in San Jose, Costa Rica. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork in Parque Central and Plaza de la Cultura (the two most central plazas of Costa Rica's capital), Setha Low addresses three fundamental questions throughout the course of the book: (1) Why is public space culturally and politically important--particularly urban civic spaces such as the plaza in Latin American cities? (2) What are the theoretical under-pinnings of the relationship of space and culture, that is, of spatializing culture? (3) How are individual narratives, ethnographies and histories interwoven into a loose fabric in which fragments of experience and memory are juxtaposed with theory and interpretation? (pp. 34-35). For the most part, Low succeeds in convincing readers of the importance of plazas as meaningful public spaces in Costa Rican society and of the significance of the spatialization of culture. Her commendably nuanced readings of historical process, contemporary interactions and ethnographic mapping represent a more insightful appreciation and knowledge of Costa Rican cultures than her previous work in the area and this book is sure to be of value to a broad range of readers.On the Plaza consists of four discrete sections, beginning with an introduction (Part 1) that establishes the context for analysis with excerpts from the author's fieldnotes and an interspersion of photographs. This is an engaging strategy that allows the reader to feel connected to the fieldwork experiences and the challenges of initial observation. The anthropological study of public space is immediately humanized with the personal--and stark--comments about the perceived ugliness of the bandstand in Parque Central and the apparent youthfulness of Plaza de la Cultura. This lends great salience to the more pedantic introduction to the central analytical concepts of spatializing culture and the meanings of place that follow. The greatest strength of this introductory section, however, is the succinct but inclusive discussion of methodology that includes and explanation of method, observation, interview and historical documentation, ethnohistorical archival research, photographic documentation and analytic strategy. This discussion, which preludes the similarly revealing methodological insights that are scattered throughout the text, stands as an excellent example of methodological rigour and innovation, and would be well suited for any undergraduate course on ethnographic methodologies.Part II: Histories comprises three chapters which, together, present the historical processes influencing the design, use and interpretation of the Costa Rican plaza. The first chapter in this section examines the sociopolitical and economic history of Costa Rica and San Jose, with particular attention given to the interaction between physical space and the absolute as well as abstruse power structures of society. Low provides a reasonably sound overview of the general Costa Rican context and, like others, she successfully echoes the arguments against the prevailing view of Costa Rica as an historically egalitarian, homogenous nation free from political conflict and discontent. However, the disappointing brevity of this discussion, particularly that pertaining to the ways in which nationalism has informed the shaping of Costa Rica's public cultures, results in a lack of detail and theoretical sophistication. This cursory treatment of national context is fortunately offset by a far more in-depth and interesting exploration of San Jose as the supposedly modern and progressive vanguard of Costa Rican society, class structure and political activity. …

Setha M. Low, "On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture" (Book Review)

Setha M. Low, "On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture" (Book Review)

Class, Masculinity, Manners, and Mores

The politics of public space are often conceptualized in terms of social geography. Scholars have shown how the crowd’s invasion of municipal spaces, the transgression of local ethnic boundaries, or the rituals of particular street festivals have structured political protest. Public space can also be discussed in more general terms. Space has always served as a means of pressuring state or local authority, an arena in which subaltern groups—women, workers, sansculottes— expressed and enforced their moral economies. By the nineteenth century, these immemorial uses of public space had undergone significant change. In many cases, riots and charivari were complemented by soldierly public marches, quiet meetings, and well-disciplined strikes.This respectable use of public space was linked to subaltern groups’ increasing exploitation of a new form of political authority: that of public opinion and public debate, the realm of the “bourgeois public sphere.”

Intrusions and exclusions: Democratization in Thailand in the context of environmental discourses and resource conflicts*

This article sketches the process of democratization in Thailand, focusing on shifting relations between civil society and state actors. Environmental discourse and conflicts about natural resources, specifically forests, during the last two decades, have been one of the main fields of social controversy and change. In the context of these controversies, civil society actors, in resistance to and alliance with state agencies, drove forward democratization by intruding into power domains of the state. State agents, increasingly forced to justify their actions according to democratic norms in the expanding space of public debate, had to search for allies and majorities within civil society. The successful establishment of public debate as an integral part of political decision making, on the one hand, resulted in a diversification of civil society, on the other hand, forced powerful segments of society to organize and defend their interests within the new public political space. Strategies of exclusion, referring to nationalism and ethnicism, have become an important instrument to secure positions and power, threatened in the process of democratization and emancipation of discriminated social groups.

Sculpture and photography: envisioning the third dimension

Introduction Sculpture and photography: envisioning the third dimension Geraldine A. Johnson 1. Nineteenth-century photographic depictions of sculpture and the rhetoric of substitution Joel Snyder 2. The mystification of antiquity under Pius IX: Rome 1846-1878 Mary Bergstein 3. Eakins's Arcadia: sculpture, photography, and the redefinition of the classical body Michael Hatt 4. Montrer est la question vitale: Rodin and photography Helene Pinet 5. Modelling the body: physical culture, photography, and the classical ideal in fin-de-siecle France Tamar Garb 6. Sculpture's negative: the photography of Constantin Brancusi Paul Paret 7. Malraux and the power of photography Henri Zerner 8. Private views/public images: David Smith's photographs Joan Pachner 9. Splitting the index: time, object, and photography in the work of Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein David Green, and Joanna Lowry 10. Striking poses: the absurdist theatrics of Eva Hesse Anna C. Chave 11. The minimalist object and the photographic image Alex Potts 12. A lazy man's approach: Robert Mapplethorpe and the language of sculpture William Hood 13. Sculpture, photography, and the politics of public space: Serra's Tilted Arc and Lin's Vietnam veterans memorial Geraldine A. Johnson 14. The space of anxiety: sculpture and photography in the work of Jeff Wall Briony Fer.

“Chinese Society,” Coffee-Shop Talk, Possessing Gods: The Politics of Public Space among Diasporic Chinese in Malaysia

“Chinese Society,” Coffee-Shop Talk, Possessing Gods: The Politics of Public Space among Diasporic Chinese in Malaysia

Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Diasporic Imagination 1. A Sikh Diaspora? Contested Identities and Constructed Realities 2. Bhakti and Postcolonial Politics: Hindu Missions to Fiji 3. Projecting Identities: Empire and Indentured Labor Migration from India to Trinidad and British Guiana, 1836-1885 4. Homeland, Motherland: Authenticity, Legitimacy, and Ideologies of Place among Muslims in Trinidad 5. Hindus in Trinidad and Britain: Ethnic Religion, Reification, and the Politics of Public Space 6. New York City's Muslim World Day Parade 7. Indian Immigrants in Queens, New York City: Patterns of Spatial Concentration and Distribution, 1965-1990 8. Gendering Diaspora: Space, Politics, and South Asian Masculinities in Britain. 197 9. New Cultural Forms and Transnational South Asian Women: Culture, Class, and Consumption among British Asian Women in the Diaspora Contributors Index

Polis and Praxis: Exercises in Contemporary Political Theory.

The touchstone of these seven original essays is the relationship between polis and praxis--the public-political space and the political that maintains and is conditioned by that space. The argument flows from Martin Heidegger's lament in his Letter on Humanism that modern philosophers have failed to understand that the essence of action is accomplishment. Dallmayr's lucid essays are a step toward achieving that understanding.Dallmayr assesses and puts into perspective the work of many of the seminal thinkers of the 20th century--Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott--as he takes up such topics as the plausibility of friendship as a model for political relations, the relationship between political praxis and experience, Heidegger's ontology of freedom, Foucault's treatment of power, and the merits and disadvantages of Habermasian critical theory. The result is a stimulating and original contribution to current political discourse that explores and advocates the manifold possible levels of active political life below and above the level of the State.Fred Dallmayr has established a reputation as a theorist and critic who is equally well attuned to European and American currents of philosophical and political thought. Like Hannah Arendt, he sees the essay as an ideal form for exercises in theorizing en route while venturing beyond traditional categories and philosophical benchmarks. His aim in this book is not a close-knit propositional framework but a set of tentative and partially continuous explorations that are provocative and inviting, like the movements of a musical suite.

Ideological Straitjacket or Irreplaceable Principle of Democracy? Reflections on the French Debates about Laïcité and the Questions They Raise for South African Social Scientists

ABSTRACT Laïcité, a particular product of French history and philosophy, is usually represented as having been formalised in the 1905 law providing for the separation of church and state, that is, the separation of religion from political power. But, the concept of removing religion to the private space as opposed to the public space of politics and the civil sphere is currently fiercely contested, driven in particular by reactions to various manifestations of Islam. This article surveys major debates under the provocative image of laïcité as'ideological straitjacket' provided by the left wing mayor of the'new' town of Évry, Manuel Valls. The article probes anxiety about Islam, and assumptions that it is inherently threatening, not only to laïcité, but to the very democracy upon which the Republic is founded. Valls speculates that some of the government's recent conciliatory gestures to Islam may be symptoms of France's'bad conscience about its colonial and slaving history, the Algerian'trauma' and the recognition that immigrants, especially from outside of Europe, are not being effectively integrated into French society. The ultimate question is: can a new history of'light and shadow' be written into the meaning of the Republic? The article is intended to prompt questions about the future of history in South Africa too.