Harvey: The Political Economy of Public Space

It was just a year ago that I first attempted to decipher anything called 'political economy' in a formal way, and the phrase threw me into a fit of underacademic-identity anxiety. after much effort from an entire class of graduate students to make michael p. smith speak comprehendably to only somewhat above-average education levels, we finally got him to say that politics and economy belong in the same dialogue, and that once upon a time politics and economics were the same thing instead of separate disciplines.

oh. ok.

The experience certainly contributed to my ability to get anything out of Harvey's article, though I still hate the way these people organize a sentence and rely on lingo, and anyone citing Richard Sennett is going to take me at least an hour and a half to read. Gear up.

The article uses a case study from second empire paris to describe the process of segretation of space by class interest happening simultaneously with militarization and the emergence of conspicuous consumption as a social value/practice.

If this sort of thing didn't exist before, is this tied up in deepening lines between physical space and exclusionary spatial practice? Sure. If anything, it points out the deeper causes for spatial practice to be spatially exclusionary -- the behavior differences between classes arent neccesarily new, but there were other forces at play that separated spaces further, so that exclusion might happen not just at a specific locality (you can't come in this restaurant dressed like that) but more district-wide (Ugly Betty belongs in Queens, and midtown manhatten is something different.) It made the grain coarser, and there are several ways to observe this in place.

He states his conclusion pretty clearly: "The character of public space counts for little or nothing politically unless it connects symbiotically with the organization of institutional...and private spaces. It is the relational connectivity among public, quasipublic and private spaces that counts when it comes to politics in the public sphere." The bourgeoisie in paris could "assert their hegemony in politics as well as in economy at the same time that they claimed privileged access to and control over the public spaces of their city" (31-32) This has implications for the role of public space in facilitating democracy, or maybe more specifically, dissent and disobedience. walk through open plazas and public-looking gathering spaces in san francisco and ask yourself, 'could we hold a protest here? could workers strike here?' when a space masquerades as public but behavior is actually policed, it can be profoundly disempowering for already disadvantaged groups and increases power of the already powerful, who use the commons for something very different and have agency in government and the knowledge of the internal system to enact their politics within the institution.

Here's what I'm interested in further - He goes on to assert that "no amount of 'new urbanism' understood as urban design, can promote a greater sense of civic responsibility and particiaption in the intensity of private property arrangements and the orgainzation of commodity as spectacle...remains untouched" (33). I appreciate the clarification -- you can't just build it differently and expect behavior to change without changing this other stuff too. And the way things get built -- new urbanism included -- is clearly processed in a capitalist political economic context, and if it is a process of privileged power and control, it's bound to be impossible to build anything that really shakes the system. But which comes first? can building spaces with intention of facilitating participation and responsibility help to change the system? Or do we have to find some way to change the system so that we can build our cities in a more egalitarian way? I mean, I sort of think that if the public spaces and public sphere serves in part to make room for educating folks with less access/agency (signage, teach-ins, demonstrations), then they have to exist for the system to change. or else we have to find a different space for that education and communication to happen in. the internet helps, but you still have to know how to use it (and it has to stay neutral) and be able to get to it/own a computer and pay a utility bill for it. and surveilance is a huge and still-growing issue. (how did i get on that wierd 5-year special-search list, anyway? I'll never know.) and i don't think it's a substitute for the physical environment, by any means. we didn't evolve as a species to live in computer-land, and no technology fetishizing or sci-fi future-human-evolution sketch will make it so.