13

Ending Public Space as We Know It

Ending Public Space as We Know It

Bernd Belina*

he right to use and appropriate urban spaces such as sidewalks, streets,

squares, and parks is permanently contested in capitalist cities. In this essay

I argue that the notion of public space is not useful for describing these
conflicts, but is a strategy used within them. My starting point for making this point
is a conflict related by Homer in Ulysses. I then discuss the idealistic pitfalls in
Jrgen Habermas twofold bourgeois public sphere, followed by a sketch of how
the weaker point of this concept usually structures the current use of the notion of
public space. From this theoretical basis, I argue that given recent changes in
the hegemonic meaning attributed to the notion of public space in the United
States and Germany, it might be better to refrain from using it when striving for
social justice and radical change. This claim is grounded in a discussion of urban
debates and practices concerning the treatment of racialized bodies, the poor, and
other undesirables whose exclusion and expulsion from urban spaces are legitimized with reference to the quality of public spaces in the context of broken
windows policing.
1. Public as Strategy
In Ithaca, around 800 BCE, Telemachos is very dissatisfied. His father, Odysseus,
has been missing for 20 years, and for the last three years suitors for the hand of his
mother Penelope have been besieging his house. The uninvited guests are threatening
to eat him out of house and homehis own private space! The suitors behavior
can only be described as blackmail. Their spokesman, Antinous, declares: But
we are not going back to our own lands / or some place else, not until she marries
/ an Achaean [Greek] man of her own choosing (2, 171173).1
In this situation, Telemachos convenes the first peoples assembly in Ithaca in
20 years. In this agora, a term that originally referred solely to the assembly of the
male freemen of the polity and only later described the location of this assembly
in the polis (Kenzler, 1999: 31), he is faced with a problem: the assembly can only
confer on issues of public interest. For this reason, he is asked at the start of the
assembly if it is public business / he will introduce and talk about (2, 3839)?
This he must answer in the negative:
The issue here
is my own need, for on my household
*Bernd Belina is professor at Goethe Universitt, Frankfurt am Main, Institute for Human Geography
(e-mail: belina@em.uni-frankfurt.de).

Social Justice Vol. 38, Nos. 12

13

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Bernd Belina
troubles have fallen in a double sense.
First, my noble fathers perished, the man
who was once your king and my kind father.
And then theres an even greater problem,
which will quickly and completely shatter
this entire house, and my whole livelihood
will be destroyed (2, 5765).

All modern knowledge about the early Greek agora before the middle of
the seventh century B.C.E. is drawn from Homers epics, from the Iliad and the
Odyssey. Their suitability as historical sources is the subject of a long, drawn-out
dispute (van Wees, 1992: 523). The dating of the action, the political structure of
the polities described in these works, and the role of their agorai as public spaces
are also contentious (Hlkeskamp, 1997; Hlscher, 1998; Kenzler, 1999: 2230).
However, researchers generally agree on one issue: with the one exception described
here, it is true that in the Homerian agora the themes discussed are always of
general interest (Kenzler, 1999: 34). This is obviously not the case here. It is only
by means of his speech in the agora that the private plight of Telemachus has
become a public injustice (Thornton, 1970: 69). He thereby offends the established
government ideology, whereby a distinction between public and private affairs
is recognized (van Wees, 1992: 36). He makes his private problems public in order
to pursue his private interests.
However, it can also be argued with good reason that Telemachos private
interests already had a public dimension before they were discussed in the agora,
and that Homer depoliticizes the issue when the threat to Odysseus house by
the suitors is treated as a purely private problem (Heubeck et al., 1988: 5960).
For in the case of Telemachos death, or a crisis that reveals the young prince to
be weak, the issue at stake is the governance of Ithaca (Ibid.). In this case, the
successful suitor would succeed Odysseus as the owner of great riches and as ruler.
The suitors openly stated this interest. As Homer tells us, after evil death, his own
black fate (22, 17) has overtaken Antinous as the first of the suitors through the
arrow of the returned Odysseus, the suitors second spokesman, Eurymachos, tries
to save his skin by revealing the dead mans true motivation:
But the man responsible for all this
now lies deadI mean Antinous, the one
who started all this business, not because
he was all that eager to get married
thats not what he desired. No. For he had
another plan in mind, which Cronos son
did not bring to fulfillment. He wanted
to become the king of fertile Ithaca (22, 5966).

Ending Public Space as We Know It

15

Telemachos private problem is simultaneously one of political leadership in

Ithaca. A clear distinction between private and public spheres is not possible here.
Telemachos behavior is an attempt to benefit from this ambivalent situation by
redrawing the line between private and public. Thus he utilizes the dichotomy
between private and public in a strategic manner.
According to Clausewitz (2003: 27; 157), strategy is the employment of the
battle as the means towards the attainment of the object of the War and war an act
of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will. This is exactly what
Telemachos attempts to do: he tries to impose his will on Antinous and the other
suitors by transforming what many see as a private matter into a public problem,
although he does not do this directly or by violent means but indirectly, in and
through the public sphere. This strategic readjustment of the boundary between
public and private is designed to achieve his aims by changing the framework
in which the problem is treated, thereby also altering the prevailing rules and
relations to established values and normative ideals associated with private and
public spheres. Different rules and values obtain in the agora for issues that are
recognized as public ones. The public/private differentiation emerges as a social
product, in which are inscribed power relations and meanings that actors can
exploit by themselves by exerting strategic influence on this differentiation. In
this sense, the public/private differentiation represents a strategy that can be used
in socio-spatial conflicts.
This is the order of the day in urban conflicts concerning what is public and
what is private in urban spaces as well as in the consequences of this differentiation.
These struggles are about the placement of individuals and groups within sociospatial power relations that are produced by structuring categories of class, race,
gender, sexuality, and age (cf. Hausen, 1989; Wucherpfennig, 2010). In this essay,
I am particularly interested in what public or public space stands for in such
conflicts and to what purposes and for what politics the adjective is used. To do
this with regard to debates and practices in U.S. and German cities, I will discuss
the dual meaning of the bourgeois public, which makes possible the existence of
two variants of reference to public space in urban politics and debates.
2. The Dual Meaning of the Bourgeois Public
The bourgeoisie of the early nineteenth century became highly dissatisfied.
The absolutist state guaranteed private property, the most important political and
economic precondition for capitalist accumulation, by force while denying that class
any active influence in state affairs. In this situation, the term the publicfirst
recorded in the German language in 1765 (ffentlichkeit, meaning both public
and publicity)became a liberal catchword, directed primarily against the
arcane practice of absolutist cabinet policy and administration (Hlscher, 1984:
1138). The emerging bourgeoisie countered its exclusion from political decisions
with a demand for making affairs more public.

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Bernd Belina

Jrgen Habermas studied this process in The Structural Transformation of the

Public Sphere (1991).2 In the first half of the book, he analyses the bourgeois public
as a product of social conflict and the object of ideological struggles, emerging with
the establishment of capitalist social conditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth
century. He explains the advent of the sphere of the bourgeois public and its ideology
as resulting from the transformation of social relations to exchange relations in the
context of emerging capitalism that has left remaining no other nexus between
man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment (Marx and
Engels, 1969: 464). Since anyone who engages in commodity exchange must
mutually recognize in each other the rights of private proprietors (Marx, 1962:
99), a private sphere is constituted: With the expansion and liberation of this
sphere of the market, commodity owners gained private autonomy; the positive
meaning of private emerged precisely in reference to the concept of free power of
control over property that functioned in capitalist fashion (Habermas, 1991: 74).
For Habermas (Ibid.: 27), the bourgeois public is the sphere of private people
come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above
against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general
rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere
of commodity exchange and social labor. Thus, the public sphere is constituted
between the private sphere and state power. In the public sphere, private individuals
grapple with state power in order to further their own interests. This sphere, which
is initially necessary for the interests of the bourgeois, becomes a good and valuable
institution from their perspective. The public sphere as a functional element in the
political realm was given the normative status of an organ for the self-articulation of
civil society with a state authority corresponding to its needs (Ibid.: 74; emphasis
added). The contradiction between public and private life (Pashukanis, 2007:
136) that emanated from economic relations is ideologized as something good and
assumes, over time, an eternal and natural character.
Only this ideologized version of the emerging bourgeois public includes the
principle of universal access. A public sphere from which specific groups would
be eo ipso excluded [is] less than merely incomplete; it [is] not a public sphere at
all (Habermas, 1991: 85). As Habermas notes (Ibid.), this accessibility was never
realized, with education and property being the criteria for admission. Feminist
authors in particularand rightlycriticized Habermas superficial discussion
of the exclusion of women that was a constitutive, not a marginal or accidental
feature of the bourgeois public from the start (Landes, 1998: 143; cf. Lang, 2003).
This ideal does not engage with the fact that access to the bourgeois public is
always limited to the few and is permanently under siege (Gerstenberger, 1990:
527). But as the real participants in the newly emerging public, the bourgeoisie
acted as if the realization of their interests was the common good, and their class
interest was the basis of public opinion (Habermas, 1991: 87). The assumption
of an all-inclusive public sphere is and has always been an ideological tool for the

Ending Public Space as We Know It

17

few who are and were allowed to participate. Although today we are accustomed
to associating free access with the public, the roots of this perception lie in a
class strategy that subsequently became reified.
In the second half of his book, Habermas argumentation takes a turn that is
crucial to the meaning of his conception of the public sphere. On the basis of the
continuing domination of one class over another, the dominant class nevertheless
developed political institutions which credibly embodied as their objective meaning
the idea of their own abolition: veritas non auctoritas facit legem, the idea of the
dissolution of domination into that easygoing constraint that prevailed on no other
ground than the compelling insight of a public opinion (Habermas, 1991: 88).
This idea of the dialectical Aufhebung of the ideal of the rule of reason, despite its
originally ideological character (i.e., its potential for pursuing the common good of
mankind rather than a particular class interest), is the basis of the dual meaning that
the public sphere assumes in Habermas work. It is both a historical phenomenon
and a normative ideal. As Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge critically remarked as
early as 1972, these two meanings are not distinguished clearly enough (cf. Calhoun,
1992; Eley, 1992; Fraser, 1992). Although the double meaning of public sphere
is not Habermas inventionthe term ffentlichkeit has been used normatively and
descriptively since the nineteenth century (Hlscher, 1984: 11381139)it takes
on a specific meaning in the context of Habermas project of the reconstruction of
critical theory. The general idea is to measure bourgeois society against its own
legitimizing ideals as a means of emancipation (cf. McCarthy, 1978: 382). But
since Habermas cannot find a way to ground his hopes for the realization of the
ideal of the classical bourgeois public sphere within actually existing capitalism
around him (cf. Calhoun, 1992: 2932), he gradually deemphasizes its importance
as a historical reality and turns it into a merely normative concept in his later work
(Habermas, 1989, 1992). Here, the public sphere becomes the fundamental
concept of a theory of democracy whose intent is normative (Habermas, 1992:
446). In addition, the complete inclusion of all parties that might be affected
(Habermas, 1992: 449) is constitutive.
This move toward an ideal of ffentlichkeit, very much like that developed
by Kant (1968) in his famous Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklrung?
(An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?), was thoroughly
criticized by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right (1986: 389391) and later by Marx
as masking the real antagonistic interests within bourgeois society (cf. Habermas,
1991: 102129). It is a move away from an explanation and critique of capitalist
society and toward a constructive critique that takes its fundamental relations for
granted. By abstracting from the actual differences of interest and power to pursue
these interests, this position takes an affirmative standpoint toward existing power
relations. Habermas places great faith in bourgeois society (Holub, 1991: 6).
This affirmative position is also the reason for clinging to the ideal of an all-inclusive
public sphere in this emphatic sense (Peters, 1994): no matter how extensive

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Bernd Belina

the empirical and theoretical proof of the impossibility of realizing such an ideal in
contemporary social conditions, it still prevails in academic and political discourse
because of its normative attractiveness. The notion of the public understood as a
sphere in which everyone is included, no matter what their position within existing
power relations, makes possible a (purely idealistic) reasoning about paths toward
a better world without having to analyze the existing world.
I have dealt with Habermas conception of a public sphere at some length
because it is the most elaborate to be developed as a historical description, was
transformed into an idealized concept, and has lived a double life ever since. This
is important in debates about urban spaces because any idea of a public space
as open to everybody makes the same idealistic assumption. Before discussing
this point in concreto with reference to debates about the criminalization of
undesirables and the right to use and appropriate urban spaces, I will briefly outline
some conceptualizations of public space that share the more idealist aspects of
Habermas public sphere.
3. Public Space as Ideology
For many theorists, public space is the spatial, material form of the ideal
of the public sphere. For Marshall Berman, for example, public spaces are (or
should be) environments open to everybody where, first of all, a societys inner
contradictions could emerge freely and openly and, second, where people could
begin to deal with these contradictions (1986: 477). For Sharon Zukin (1995:
32), public space is defined by two basic principles: public stewardship and open
access. These conceptions have at least three similarities with Habermas public
sphere: First, open access for everyone in these accounts is a constitutive element
of public space. Second, this ideal was never and can never be realized in real
life: There are not and never have been truly open public spaces where all may
freely gather, free from exclusionary violence (Mitchell, 1996: 127; cf. Siebel
and Wehrheim, 2003). Third, the empirical and theoretical impossibility of open
access for everybody notwithstanding, this idealism remains a strong ideological
feature that masks underlying struggles. Thus, the same criticism leveled against
Habermas idealist conception of the public sphere applies here too: it is an
ultimately affirmative position.
Some theorists have chosen a different path. Instead of searching for true public
spaces, they point to the intertwining of the public and the private in urban
spaces while emphasizing the necessity of adhering to these concepts (Kilian, 1998;
Ruddick, 1996; Soja, 2000: 320). I would like to take this point one step further
by arguing that the public/private distinction does not help at all as a descriptive
tool when the analysis of concrete processes in urban spaces is at stake. On the
contrary, measuring these processes against some ideal of public space and their
categorization within the framework of the private and the public, no matter
how intertwined, obscures them because of the idealistic character of the terms

Ending Public Space as We Know It

19

public and private. By looking at the phenomenon through the spectacles of the
public/private distinction, all one gets is a normative categorization of what is
going on: phenomena are regarded as either good or bad, justified or not. What
one does not get is an explanation of why they occur. Quite the contrary, once the
phenomenon is framed as one in need of normative judgment, attention is diverted
from any explanation. Instead of choosing this necessarily affirmative approach, I
would argue that the analysis should concentrate on the concrete interests involved,
how they are pursued, and the ideologies used to legitimize themfor example,
the ideology of public space.
4. Debates over Public Space and Urban Undesirables
Probably the most notorious document of recent urban policing is the Police
Strategy No. 5, subtitled Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York. This paper,
bearing the names of then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William
Bratton (Giuliani and Bratton, 1994), enumerates not only the types of behavior to
be fought (quality of life offenses), but also lists the types of people to be driven
out of the Public Spaces of New York: panhandlers, prostitutes, squeegee men,
street artists, the mentally ill, and the homeless. Reacting to such developments,
since the mid-1990s a series of leftist activities adopted the slogan Reclaim the
Streets! Here the reclaiming of public space is in the opposite sense, that is, as
a way to fight the criminalization and expulsion of undesirables (cf. Brnzels,
2001). Both supporters and critics of social cleansing (Smith, 2001) la New
York use the concept of public space to support their claim. Critics claim that
everybody has a right to enter public spaces, while supporters state that to be
truly public, a space must be orderly enough to invite the entry of a large majority
of those who come to it (Ellickson, 1996: 1174).
In both versions, public space becomes a code word that stands for opposing
ideas concerning the treatment of a certain part of the populationthe costly
yet relatively harmless burden to society that Spitzer (1975: 645) referred to as
social junk. I prefer to use the term undesirables. Contesting views of their
presence in public space is an inherent part of the debates on managing the
social consequences of the recent restructuring of global capitalism (Belina, 2006;
Herbert and Brown, 2006; Wacquant, 2009). As one of the more visible effects of
this restructuring, the growing number of undesirables in the streets and parks of
cities in the global North is becoming a social problem as well as an eyesore. In
this context, the reclaiming of public space can mean law and order, holding
the poor, the homeless, and loitering jobless adolescents responsible for their own
misery (i.e., blaming the victim), accusing them of stealing the city from the
orderly people (cf. Smith, 1998), and calling on the repressive state apparatus to
deal with them. (See Beckett [1997] for a critical analysis of this law and order
rhetoric.) Or it can mean social justice, claiming that the state bears responsibility
for the welfare of all citizens and calling for more money for education, social

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Bernd Belina

welfare, and the like. In this second version, reference to the public can even
become a code word for socialism (Robbins, 1993: x).
A striking feature of these two antagonistic positions, though, is their
commonalities. Both versions of public space use the term as a strategy and
code word that stands for something else. Both parties also direct their claims at
the same address: the state. This comes as no surprise. When the treatment of the
reserve army of labor (Marx, 1962: Chapter 23) is at stake in capitalist societies,
it is and always has been the state that has to take care of themnot for altruistic
reasons, of course, but to guarantee the existence of a functioning and peaceful
working class (Decker and Hecker, 2002; Piven and Cloward, 1993; Spitzer, 1975).
This is precisely why it makes so much sense for both positions to rely on the same
theoretical underpinningthe idealization of the public. In capitalist society,
social antagonism and conflict are to be transformed into the legal form, which
the state will ultimately take care of (Pashukanis, 2007). Finally, both versions of
public space share an implicit or explicit reference to the idealistic vision of a
pubic sphere and space that is open to everyone, with the huge difference being the
form this ideal is supposed to assume. In one case, a socially just society should
include the undesirablesat least physically in urban spaces; in the other case,
ideal openness necessitates their exclusion and expulsion.
Currently in Germany and the United States, the law-and-order version of
public space has gained enormous support following what has been perceived
as the successful implementation of broken windows policing in New York in the
1990s and the transfer of this success story to Germany (cf. Belina and Helms,
2003). One achievement of the indirect way to promote law and order using public
space as a code word is the way in which it helps to turn a moralistic judgment into
a claim compatible with the rule of law. In this version, the law-and-order position
does not openly refer to its exclusive social ideal according to which marginal
groups are to be excluded as morally inferior. Instead, it emphasizes the egalitarian
value of free access for all, which is curtailed by the presence of undesirables.
This strategic reference to public space fits well with the general policy pursued
by conservatives in the United States since the 1980s, justifying their demands
for state intervention in everyday life, e.g., with regard to pornography, drugs, or
homosexuality, on the basis of abstract equality before the law rather on moral
grounds (Harcourt, 2001: 194205; Hirsch, 2002: 1011). Thus, they poach on
the ideological territory of their liberal opponents by constructing arguments in
which their own moral conception of the inferiority of certain groups is compatible
with the abstract principle of equality. A crucial aspect is the reference to the harm
principle, i.e., the idea that it is not an infringement of social morals, but rather social
harm that legitimates state intervention. John Stuart Mills axiomatic formulation
of this principle in On Liberty (1974: 68) states: That the only purpose for which
power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against
his will, is to prevent harm to others. Liberals concluded from this principle that

Ending Public Space as We Know It

21

forms of behavior that may generally be considered immoral, but do not cause any
discernable social harm, may not be prosecuted by the state. The U.S. Supreme
Court increasingly tended to adopt this perspective from the 1950s on and used it
to justify numerous decisions that prevented the police from intervening in forms
of behavior that diverge from commonly accepted morality. This had far-reaching
consequences for the treatment of undesirables in urban spaces, because the
discretionary scope of the police was limited by legal principles. In Papachristou
v. City of Jacksonville (1972: 171), the Supreme Court states:
A presumption that people who might walk or loaf or loiter or stroll or
frequent houses where liquor is sold, or who are supported by their wives
or who look suspicious to the police are to become future criminals is too
precarious for a rule of law.... The rule of law, evenly applied to minorities
as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich, is the great mucilage
that holds society together.
Forbidding minorities, the poor, and other undesirables to loiter and stroll in
urban spaces while remaining compatible with the rule of law necessitates an
ideological association of their mere physical presence with social harm. In this way,
the law-and-order version of public space makes undesirables responsible for the
decay of public spaces and the fact that orderly people feel uncomfortable due
to their presence. Their exclusion is legitimized by the social harm they represent
simply by being in a particular place. To be even more persuasive, this harm was
augmented by inextricably linking their presence to crime with what has become
famous as the broken windows hypothesis. Its central ideological achievement is
that it criminalizes undesirables not for what they have done or for their supposed
moral deficiencies, but for their mere physical presence in a place.
In Wilson and Kellings (1982: 30) original formulation, too many disreputable
or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy
teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed in a certain space create a
perception of a lack of social control that in turn leads to an invasion of criminals.
Thus, they conclude that arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed
no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything
about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community
(Ibid.: 35). Ellickson (1996: 1195) similarly emphasizes that the harm caused by
a single act of begging or lying on park benches is generally insignificant. Yet,
he sees genuine harm to incommoded and frightened passersby, retailing, race
relations, perceived social control, and a societys work ethic in the permanent
and widespread occurrence of such behavior, very much in the spirit of the harm
principle (Ibid.: 11811183). Because of this harm, he views state intervention
as necessary and justified. Thus, by claiming that the presence of undesirables in
certain places causes social harm, the idea of a conservative order in which morally
inferior individuals have no place is transformed into an argument based on abstract

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Bernd Belina

equality before the law and thereby legitimates the same practical demand: the
expulsion of these undesirables. In this way, the ideological foundation is created
for ejecting undesirables on the basis of the rule of law (Beckett and Herbert, 2008;
Belina, 2006, 2007; Mitchell, 1997).
In a context where almost any policy that is presented as fighting or preventing
crime is applauded, e.g., in the United States from the 1980s on (Beckett, 1997;
Chambliss, 1999) or Germany from the 1990s (Hirsch, 1998; Frehsee, 2000), this
connection between the mere physical presence of undesirables in urban spaces and
crime suffices to turn undesirables into objects to be dealt with by the police. On
the surface, it is a return to the kind of policing that was criticized and regulated
in the past on the basis of the rule of law (Harring and Ray, 1999; Walker, 1984).
Today, however, it is based on the rule of law itself because of the successful
ideological equation of the physical presence of undesirables and social harm.
A central explanation for the inability of the empirical and theoretical critique
of broken windows (Harcourt, 2001; Taylor, 2001; Fagan and Davies, 2000) to
seriously challenge the triumph of this social cleansing in the name of crimefighting was that it did not question the two ideological connections discussed here.
My argument is that one reason for this was (and is) the adherence to an idealistic
understanding of the public and public space as open to everyonea belief
that was successfully turned against undesirables and advocates of social justice
precisely because of its idealistic underpinnings.
5. Ending Public Space?
If positive references to public space therefore increasingly entail embracing
the ideology of law and order, if every argument in favor of social justice and
against exclusion that is based on public space can readily be turned into its
opposite, and if one suddenly finds oneself in debates over ones attitude to the
worries and fears of the silent majority, is this then the moment to end positive
references to public space? Instead of referring to public space, it would be
more appropriate to insistently point to the reasons why the reserve army of
labor as a socioeconomic reality and its feared visible presence in urban spaces
as a moral problem exist in the first place. The discussion should instead be about
capitalism, racism, and their neoliberal versions, which entail the punishment of
the poor (Wacquant, 2009). Many groups and initiatives already do that, notably
those using Henri Lefebvres slogan of the right to the city in recent years in the
United States and Germany (Lefebvre, 1968; Mayer, 2009; Mitchell and Heynen,
2009). In this respect, ending public space refers to the abandonment of the term
by radical politics due to its current contamination.
In some circumstances, of course, claiming open access to public spaces may
be a useful strategy for promoting social justice and radical change. Yet this must be
well thought out in relation to the (possibly multiple) publics (in the first meaning
of the term as expounded by Habermas) that one wishes to reach. It might be, for

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Ending Public Space as We Know It

example, particularly useful to argue that undesirables be allowed in public space

when the truism that in order to be one must have a place to be is used as a
point of departure for a geography of survival within the context of a geography
of direct action (Mitchell and Heynen, 2009: 614; 628). Such an approach rightly
points to the scandal that many recent urban policies and strategies of evicting
undesirables undermine their fundamental means of survival. But then again, the
sooner we move from the idealism of public space toward the materialism of
concrete demands and struggles for radical change, the better.
NOTES
1. This reference, 2, 171173, is to Book Two, verse 171173, of the English translation by
Ian Johnston of Homers Odyssey.
2. Habermas understanding of the public sphere is, of course, not the only one (cf. discussions
in Peters, 1994; Sheller and Urry, 2003; Weintraub, 1992), but as Fredric Jameson (1993: 48) puts it,
the topic can be said to belong to Jrgen Habermas.

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Illustration by Christoph Schfer

The city isinhabited worldappropriated space.
Acquisition (Anneigung).