5x5 Public Space Presentation
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Transcript of 5x5 Public Space Presentation
“Theorizing Public Space”A 5x5 presentation on John R. Parkinson’s Democracy & Public Space
What is public? What is private?
John Dewey’s definition of public:
“…all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent
that it is deemed necessary to have these consequences systematically cared for”(p. 50)
Parkinson (2012)’s concept of private:
• “…a private sphere of activity that is the ‘locus of initiative’ in which free individuals
makes autonomous decisions…”(p.50)
The characteristics of public
1. “Freely accessible places where ‘everything that happens can be observed by anyone’, where strangers are encountered whether one wants to or not, because everyone has free right of entry (Geuss, 2001: 52)…
2. The things that concern, affect, or are for the benefit of everyone, Arendt’s second sense of ‘public’ (1958: 52). This realm includes ‘common goods’ (Hardin, 1968), goods like clean air and water, public transport, and so on…
3. The people or groups that have responsibility for that realm covered in (2), which might include rulers, or ‘public figures’, or might be defined more broadly to mean all of us: ‘the public’ as a noun, not an adjective.
4. Things which are owned by the state or the people in (3) and paid for out of collective resources like taxes: government buildings, national parks in most countries, military bases and equipment, and so on.”
(Parkinson, 2012. p. 51)
Key concepts
Issue of “liminal spaces” – between private and public; area of conflict
Principle of civil inattention or disattendability
Scripts for encountering others in public
The socially constructed elements of physical space
Considerations
What are the ‘scripts’ that are being ‘written’ for Lisgar Park? How we can influence or change these?
How can we work to overcome the principle of civil inattention or disattendability?
What are the democratic implications of public space in Toronto?