ancient cities

624 Public Realm
finances, is the concern of economists. Finally,
sociologists address the social public realm as the
location of everyday interactions where identities
and shared meanings are constructed. Within each
of these dimensions, attention is often focused on
the erosion of the public realm and the shift
toward a more private society.
These several dimensions are closely related and
influence one another directly and indirectly, bringing
them together into a single framework: (1) the
spatial public realm provides a location for (2) discussion
in the political public realm (3) about
resources in the economic public realm by (4) individuals
and groups that have constructed shared
understandings in the social public realm.
Spatial Public Realm: Built
and Virtual Environment
When investigating the spatial dimensions of the
public realm, the term public space is commonly
used. Public space refers to those spaces that are,
in principle, open and accessible to all members of
the public in a society. The most obvious examples
include such places as parks, streets and sidewalks,
and government buildings. However, not all public
spaces are physical; the concept is often expanded
to include virtual gathering places such as online
chatrooms, blogs, and social networking websites.
In many cases, places that are technically private
but practically public—shopping malls, restaurants
and bars, or entertainment venues—are also included
under the umbrella of public space.
Despite their definitional openness and accessibility,
public spaces are not unregulated spaces.
They are all governed by informal social norms of
interaction and frequently by specific rules of use,
as when glass bottles or loud music are prohibited
in a park. Of particular significance in the regulation
of public space in the United States is the
public forum doctrine, established by the U.S.
Supreme Court decision in Perry Education
Association v. Perry Local Educators’ Association
(1983), which defined three tiers of freedom from
regulation: traditional public forum, limited public
forum, and nonpublic forum. Similar legal classifications
of public space have developed in other
countries.
Public spaces are used for a wide and overlapping
range of activities. As social spaces, parks and
plazas offer groups and individuals an opportunity
to gather and socialize. As cultural spaces, they are
often sites of artistic performances, ranging from
formal performances like concerts in the park to
informal activities like sidewalk chalk drawings.
They can also function as political spaces where
grievances against the government can be raised
and struggles against power and authority take
place. These uses, again, can range from the formal
and organized, like a proceeding in a government
courthouse, to the unplanned, like a skirmish
between local authorities and the undesirable
occupants of a park. Finally, public spaces can
often take on a commercial character. Genuinely
public spaces often serve as locations for public
markets (e.g., farmer’s markets, craft fairs), and
private spaces such as shopping malls and restaurants
are frequently used as public spaces as well.
Both academic research and popular media frequently
address the erosion of these spaces’ publicness
by a variety of forces. Local police, private
security guards, and closed­circuit cameras are
often employed to overtly regulate the use of certain
public spaces. In other cases, regulation is
achieved through indirect means, as when coffee
carts were introduced in New York City’s
Washington Square to attract a more affluent
crowd and create a less hospitable environment for
drug dealers and vagrants, through a process
Sharon Zukin has called “pacification by cappuccino.”
The design of public spaces also plays a
significant role in how they are or are not used and
by whom. Gated communities, which appropriate
such traditionally public spaces as streets and sidewalks
for the exclusive use of residents, involve the
use of physical barriers. More subtly, developers
often intentionally make plazas uninviting spaces
to linger by limiting access to seating or to the
space itself.
Political Public Realm:
The State and Civil Society
Whereas the spatial dimension of the public realm
focuses on the actual locations where public life
plays out, the political dimension is more concerned
with the abstract space where individuals
come together to form opinions, build consensus,
and pursue mutual goals through collective action.
The political public realm, therefore, encompasses