Title: Urban public space and imagined communities in the 1980s and 1990s.

Subject(s): PUBLIC spaces -- Social aspects; CITY & town life

Source: Journal of Urban History, Aug94, Vol. 20 Issue 4, p443, 23p, 4bw
Author(s): Lees, Lynn Hollen
Abstract: Focuses on the significance of public spaces in the 1980s and 1990s. Importance of public
spaces; Issue of urban public space in major political upheavals; Civic and commercial
spaces; Influence of politics in the use of public spaces.
AN: 9503101423
ISSN: 0096-1442
Database: Academic Search Elite
URBAN PUBLIC SPACE AND IMAGINED COMMUNITIES IN THE 1980S AND 1990S

Public spaces have lain at the physical and metaphysical heart of cities for centuries. According
to Spiro Kostoff, the square is where we exercise our franchise, our sense of belonging.[1] In Greek and
Roman towns, men conducted public affairs in the central agora and the forum. Since medieval times,
European town squares have hosted elections, demonstrations, and ceremonies, as well as the day-to-day
encounters and conversations that make up normal social life. The great urban spaces gain their civic
qualities from their multifunctionality, from desires of citizens to transact both public and private business
within them. They remain alive through use. Public protest as well as celebration, commemoration, and
conversation, find proper homes there. Civic spaces show urban community and identity in action.
Recently, however, architects and urban theorists have argued that this tradition has come to an end or that
it is obsolete in the contemporary United States. Robert Venturi announced in the mid-1960s, The piazza,
in fact, is un-American. Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the
office or home with the family looking at television, or perhaps at the bowling alley.[2] Charles Moore
observed in 1965, It is not at all clear what the public realm consists of, or even, for the time being who
needs it.[3] Other analysts of contemporary cities are less happy with this conclusion, although they
recognize the problem. Michael Pollan, executive editor of Harpers Magazine, observed recently that
Americans no longer seem to be able to design attractive public spaces. Not only the will but also the
knack for it have virtually vanished.[4] Mike Davis, targeting fortress LA, rails against what he sees as
the steady destruction there of accessible public space and the general repression of free movement by
citizens.[5] Richard Sennett, in The Fall of Public Man, proclaims public space dead and public life
meaningless, killed by capitalism, secularism, and changes in urban geography.[6] Sennett and Davis, in
effect, deny the possibility of an engaged public life in the contemporary city. For them the link between
public space and active citizenship has been broken; city streets and squares no longer serve as forums for
democratic discussions.
I disagree. The newspapers are filled with examples of citizens using urban public spaces
politically. To look only at Europe in 1989, the squares and streets of Prague, Leipzig, and Berlin were the
sites of the popular demonstrations that ended the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe.
More recently, thousands of Germans marched in dozens of cities in January of 1993 to protest violence

against foreigners. In Brussels on 26 April 1993, tens of thousands of Belgians rallied in central squares to
oppose demands for independence made by Flemish and Walloon nationalists. After the May bomb blast
at the Uffizi, 100,000 Italians crowded into Florences Piazza Santa Croce to demand an end to terrorism.
Similar examples could be given of the political use of public space in cities all over the world during the
last several years. Civic spaces still serve as sites for protest, for celebration, and for public commentary
on current politics. Citizens routinely capture these spaces and use them for their own political purposes,
whether or not the current political regime is sympathetic.
The major political upheavals of the last several years in China, Russia, Germany, Eastern
Europe, Palestine, India, Thailand, and Burma--to mention only the most dramatic--have all included
contests over the use of urban public space; citizens have challenged governments for, and in several
cases have won, the right to demonstrate politically in city centers. Ringing the death knell of public
space and popular interest in it will not do at all. Neither is it sufficient to assert that U.S. cities are
different from those in the rest of the world. Many of them are not; the Mall in Washington D.C. has long
been a preferred spot for demonstrations and civic ceremonies. The area around the Capitol is virtually all
public space, which during daylight hours in decent weather is crowded with visitors. Even Los Angeles,
I will argue, has a lot of living public space.
If we look around the world, it is clear that urban public space continues to be of vital
importance. But it is clearly under siege in many places--by developers, by traffic, by police, by fearful
governments, and by violent people who prey on the vulnerable. As social life in cities has in many places
become less civil and less open, public space becomes a threatened, unstable realm. Both the redefinitions
of public space and its more unsavory uses are alarming. They force us to reexamine our notions about
the quality of civic life and about citizenship. In fact, the uses of public space signal transformations in
civic life that are unsettling and often contentious. In this essay I examine some of these changes as they
appear from the vantage point of 1993, focusing on Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Paris, Beijing, and Berlin.
I posit not the fall of public man, but the attempted reimagination of a civic community by citizens of
multiple races, ethnicities, religions, genders, and ages. Along with the virtually worldwide collapse of
communist and socialist governments has come a renewed interest in political, social, and environmental
change that has brought people into a public arena. In different places these movements take different
forms, but a common denominator is the use of public space to express local visions of civic
communities. These visions, however, are both multiple and contested.
We need to ask how well public spaces in the 1990s fulfill the needs and aspirations of
contemporary civic communities. Opinions in the United States on this issue differ widely. On the
positive side are assorted architects and architectural critics who point to the revitalization of central cities
through imaginative designs. For the past fifty years, Edmund Bacon has defended and extended his axial
plans for public areas in Philadelphia.[7] Denise Scott Brown has written eloquently about the successes
of a Venturi, Rausch, and Scott Brown style of humanistic urbanism and community architecture,
which can express the aspirations of their times.[8] Touting such schemes as Baltimores Harborplace
and the South Street Seaport, which for him satisfy a deep need for communality, James Saunders

concludes, The nation is moving toward new and complex conceptions of public space and public
life.[9]
Opposing opinions have received far more publicity, however. Two American architects, Michael
C. Cunningham and Donald F. Savoie, have written of the decreasing civicness of US cities and
towns, charging the public sector with an unwillingness to build usable public spaces and designers with
a lack of ideas about how to do it.[10] Mike Daviss diatribes against the militarization and class
segregation of space in Los Angeles are well known, and some of his readers certainly assume that L.A.
represents the wave of the future for us all.[11] Michael Sorkin, in Variations on a Theme Park, warns of
urbanity betrayed, of the destructive effects on civic communities of contemporary architecture. Sorkin
charges, The new city is little more than a swarm of urban bits jettisoning a physical view of the whole,
sacrificing the idea of the city as the site of community and human connection. For him and his cowriters, the urban future looms as a universal Disneyland, where a sanitized, ersatz architecture devoid of
geographic specificity draws citizens away from a democratic, public realm into plastic temples of
consumption. In their view, the malls and marketplaces of the rebuilt waterfronts that dot our cities are an
architecture of deception, substituting an essentially false image of both past and present for the more
authentic city that lies around them.[12]
There is little common ground between these two points of view and the politics from which they
spring. Yet most of the authors cited (I would exempt Scott Brown and Venturi) share a touching faith in
architectural determinism. Most architects of the modern movement assumed a direct cause-and-effect
relationship between buildings and the social life that they contained. For designers of public housing and
postwar New Towns, the redesigned environment would reform the mores of inhabitants. Community
interaction would supposedly spring directly from shapes on the ground, while clean walls and plumbing
would civilize them.[13] Similarly Michael Sorkin assumes that the malls and urban atria determine the
responses of the* users, depriving them of the traditions and of the ability to act together.
But can architecture make things happen? Or to put it more precisely, what--if any--influence
does the built environment exert on human behavior? Certainly city planners have long made claims for
particular designs that should have embarrassed even the most hardened salesmen of utopian dreams.
Remember the new worlds that were to follow the building of Robert Owens plans for a model
community: it was, he said, an invention which will at once multiply the physical and mental powers of
the whole society to an incalculable extent without injuring anyone by its introduction and rapid
infusion.[14] Ebenezer Howard touted the Garden City as the stepping stone to a higher and better form
of industrial life. When he described the impact of his ideal community, he quickly moved from the
physical advantages of a healthy environment to metaphysical benefits. In the Garden City, anger would
be silenced in favor of goodwill; the instruments of war would be dropped in favor of the tools of peace.
[15] Most planners today have more modest goals, although the pages of the Architectural Record still
ring with optimistic endorsements of hightech designs and their benign effects on urban communities.
Clearly, many architects and planners have wanted to believe in the power of design to shape social and
political life. The spirit of architectural determinism lives on.

But as we well know, the investing of a public space with civic significance requires far more
than artful design. History, public memory, and political legitimation come into play. The most successful
public spaces have multiple identities and powerful symbolic power acquired often at great cost. For a
Russian citizen, having casual, friendly conversations in Red Square or purchasing something there from
a vendor has an entirely different significance than the same acts set elsewhere. At issue is not so much
design but the meanings that people read into it. One cannot turn a shopping mall corridor into the
Champs-Elysees merely by adding trees and an arch at its end. Although shopping malls are public
spaces, they are not civic spaces, because they lack the range of political and ceremonial functions that lift
them from commercialism into a wider realm of action and significance.
Public space is alive and well in the United States today, even in such supposedly hostile
environments as Los Angeles and Orange County; admittedly, it looks different from an Italian piazza.
Denise Scott Brown defines public space as the public sector seen in physical terms; she includes within
it not only the parks, streets, squares, and government buildings of a strictly public realm but also a host
of semipublic places where individuals congregate to satisfy shared needs.[16] Given that definition,
churches, university campuses, shopping malls, schoolyards, marketplaces, sports stadiums, and beaches
qualify. The core of city life--exchanges of goods, information, and ideas--still has a strong grounding in
space. Even if computers, telephones, and television have technically eliminated the need for face-to-face
encounters, they have not done so in practice. As people play, shop, listen to live music, vote, pray, and
celebrate, they move into and help create a public realm. The design, the accessibility, and the quality of
such urban space can and ought to be criticized, but its existence must be recognized. Its civic qualities,
however, need to be examined most closely.
Let us look first at Los Angeles. Even in what is supposedly the most privatized environment in
the United States, there are lots of public spaces. Wide beaches line the coast for most of the area from
Malibu south through Newport and Corona Del Mar. Griffith and Elysian Parks in the north and
MacArthur and LaFayette Parks in the center are only a few of many recreation areas scattered over the
city. Central Los Angeles houses a gigantic city hall, a music center, and a civic center replete with
adjoining squares or open spaces and wide streets. University campuses dot the metropolitan region,
drawing people into them for games, lectures, and concerts. And if you are looking merely for open space
where people can--and sometimes do--congregate, what of the ubiquitous parking lot? Granted, the scale
of the metropolitan area dwarfs any particular bit of open land, but their collective size and importance
are not inconsiderable.
Yet the supply of public space is not really what is at issue in debates over the missing public
realm. Quality and the cultural derivation of the space, rather than its quantity, are the problems. Too
many of these primarily commercial public spaces lack wider civic functions; they represent only a
truncated urbanism that is not connected to broader forms of civic participation. When Charles Moore
discussed public architecture in Los Angeles, he dismissed the importance of the standard monumental
civic buildings and college campuses. He found city hall lifeless, and lacking in any activity which
elicits public participation. In contrast, he pointed to Disneyland and to various commercial arcades and

movie theaters as places filled with the public where a fanciful architecture had captured their
imagination. In his opinion, Disneyland has single-handedly replaced many of those elements of the
public realm which have vanished in the featureless private floating world of southern California. Of
course, what Moore celebrated others decry. For Michael Sorkin, Disneyland signifies cultural bankruptcy
because of its sanitized commercialism and theatricality unrelated to place and to tradition. Obviously,
opinions differ on whether or not malls and theme parks can count as public space without signifying
cultural doom.
We should remember, however, that commercial space has always been built into public space
and vice versa. In a Roman city, buying and selling took place in the forum, which was also the place
where civic authorities administered commerce and checked weights and measures. Street markets
constituted some of the few open, public spaces in Islamic cities and in the small towns of medieval
Europe. In London, the town hall is still known as the Guild Hall, denoting its tight linkage with the
merchants and artisans of the city. In medieval Europe, city halls often had a ratskeller providing food and
drink or an arcaded ground floor serving as a market; cathedrals were surrounded by shops and vendors.
In fact, central squares and arcaded public buildings formed the preindustrial equivalent in Europe of a
shopping mall.
Because we must grant that commercial space has served successfully as public space in many
places and times, why then should people find distasteful the public space on offer at malls and shopping
arcades in U.S. cities? Certainly there are legitimate questions of access and location. If a significant
section of the public cannot get to or use malls because cheap public transportation is lacking or because
they are denied entry, then malls reinforce communal divisions rather than overcome them. Moreover,
they offer a super-sanitized, ahistorical environment that denies all contact with a specific city and its
past. Joan Didion writes of the suspensions of light, personality, and judgment enforced by entry into their
climate-controlled corridors.[18] Although malls have public space to offer, it is generic, a commercially
bottled variety that generally closes by 9:00 p.m. and locks its doors against trespassers. Because malls
are privately owned, access remains tenuous, a function of the competitive marketplace rather than
citizens rights. Then too activities within them are monitored, as senior citizens have sometimes found to
their distress when turning mall corridors into exercise tracks. The meaning of free speech within them is
currently being contested in U.S. courts. Should people pass out leaflets or work for political causes
within them? Opinions are divided on these issues. Malls are at best semipublic spaces, open to criticism
on a variety of grounds.
The major lack in cities like Los Angeles is not public space, but civic space where communal
activities link citizens. In the latter, according to Mark Lilla, we participate jointly in a public realm of
government, ritual, and high culture; we act civilly and ceremoniously.[19] Shopping malls and other
varieties of commercial space obviously do not qualify under this definition, nor do beaches, parking lots,
or freeways. Successful, lively civic space in Los Angeles is hard to find, and failures are easy to
recognize. The latest L 4 Access Guide, although a booster of the city, brands the civic center area
pompous and lifeless. You look for the sign, Abandon hope all ye who enter here. [20] In the blocks

between the monumental city hall, the hall of records, the hall of justice, and the U.S. federal courthouse
lie a series of squares and walkways, filled with benches, fountains, and the standard equipment of urban
public spaces. Unfortunately they remain bottle strewn and virtually empty. Chain link fences blocked
one weed-choked area soon to be turned into a high rise office building and parking garage. In most of the
remaining public areas, only a few homeless men huddled in the corners. Their only other inhabitants on
the day I visited were squads of riot police complete with helmets and assault rifles on guard against a
possible citizen attack in the last stages of the Rodney King trial. Los Angeles is not Paris; its central
spaces lack political resonance. Despite its monumental architecture and acres of carefully designed open
space, the civic core of Los Angeles was practically dead on arrival with no hope of resuscitation. Even
Rayner Banham, who pronounced L.A. one of the worlds leading cities in architecture, dismissed the
entire downtown area as irrelevant.[21]
What Angelenos have never done is to endow either the civic or the commercial buildings of
central L.A. with much cultural significance. The action is elsewhere. And as Charles Moore pointed out,
elaborate design and mass do not create monuments; people do. Societies have to mark out their own
significant places, and the act of recognition defines membership in the community. Part of the essence of
urban civilization, he argued, is this selection and maintenance of civic places. But public memory has
endowed little in the metropolis with wide public significance except the beach, some movie theaters, and
perhaps the sites of the Watts and Rodney King riots.
To help Angelenos create a common sense of place and the past, a group of architects, planners,
designers, and preservationists led by Dolores Hayden began in 1983 to identify sites important in the
economic and social history of Los Angeles. In an effectively illustrated map of central areas, they
identify the first public school, an African Methodist Episcopal church, a Buddhist temple, and a NativeAmerican village. Their tour passes by the sites of early citrus groves, oil fields, flower nurseries, and
produce markets. Moreover, they point to locations rich in local labor history: The Embassy Auditorium,
where dozens of trade unions met, and the Speakers Rostrum at the Plaza, where Mexican American
laborers gathered to hear political exiles and organizers. The Power of Place group hopes to create a
network of new public places that recognizes the contributions to the city of the many ethnic and racial
groups that compose it.[22] Their greatest success has been the building of an evocative wall monument
to Biddy Mason, an African American midwife and community leader. Still, it is an uphill battle to create
a sense of place when buildings have vanished and land uses have changed. The lot on which Biddy
Masons house stood is now a parking lot; much of Little Tokyo has been turned into high-rises, and the
citrus groves have vanished. Planners and urban historians would seem to be losing their battle with the
forces of forgetfulness in Los Angeles.
Cities can also create civic spaces through civic ceremony and public ritual. And like most other
cities, Los Angeles does not lack the celebratory mode. The ability to gather and to celebrate seems most
advanced within ethnic communities. Mexican Americans go to the Plaza area for the Cinco de Mayo and
feast days. Japanese Americans have built a square in Little Tokyo for concerts, festivals, and other group
celebrations. Chinatown houses the communal festivals of Chinese Americans. A few of the many ethnic

groups that compose L.A. have created a sense of place and maintain it today. Ethnic Los Angeles has
civic spaces and ceremonies, which reaffirm identities despite the radically decentralized quality of the
environment.
But what of the collectivity? Joint celebrations have their grounding in sports and leisure rather
than civic or national traditions. Think of Oscar night or the Rose Bowl Parade and game when thousands
decorate the floats, line the Pasadena streets, and pack the stadium. Yet I have failed to find much civic
tradition that extends beyond the boundaries of a single ethnic group or neighborhood. There is, to be
sure, the Fourth of July celebration in Huntington Beach when people pour into the area for parades and
general hoopla. Yet the majority of citizens celebrate public holidays within their families or ethnic
groups. Even the public spaces briefly transformed by Rose Bowl crowds quickly revert to ordinary
stretches of asphalt and do not remain territories invested with civic significance. After studying
Independence Day in Huntington Beach, Debra Gold Hansen and Mary Ryan complain of the relative
paucity of public life and the vacuity of public symbols in Orange County. In their opinion, the
celebration of the Fourth typifies the decentered and uprooted qualities that identify the county
today.[23]
Civic space is hard to find in Orange County and Los Angeles. Although there are a few
conventionally ordered town centers-- chiefly the Santa Ana and Pasadena town halls and associated
buildings--much of the rest of the county is so radically decentralized that citizens have no obvious places
where they can gather to express either their political will or their solidarities. Where would Angelenos go
to make a revolution? In the mid- 1960s, one architect suggested that the freeways or central Manhattan
would be the best choices; if people went to the Los Angeles City Hall, no one would notice.[24] His
prediction was quite apt.
If we check the sites of the larger protest movements in Los Angeles over the past twenty-five
years, we see that they have no common geography. Their decentered quality is striking. Groups picked
the spaces that were reedy to hand, rather than identifiable civic spots. The major demonstrations against
the Vietnam War took place on the UCLA campus, in Laguna Park to the south, and outside a luxury hotel
in Westwood where Lyndon Johnson was staying briefly. The Watts riots of 1965 broke out on the
commercial streets and in residential neighborhoods of south central L.A. When Chicanos protested
against educational inequality in the 1970s, they marched around a high school; charges of police
brutality led to demonstrations outside a sheriffs station in east Los Angeles. They chose neighborhood
targets for their hostility.[25] Janitors for Justice, composed mainly of Central American service workers,
clashed with police in June of 1990 along streets west of MacArthur Park where they resided. Most
recently, the centers of the rioting after the first Rodney King trial lay in south central Los Angeles, in
Koreatown, and along Wilshire Boulevard in Central American areas; the targets of arson and looting
were quite ordinary commercial streets, not public buildings. The lack of civic space in Los Angeles
means that people have no central place to occupy to attract attention; no square to seize to assert
symbolic power. Instead, in the absence of effective political targets, anger has been contained within
their own neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, political hostilities are defused through their decentered, almost

random locations. Moreover, the concentration of protest within specific ethnic groups or areas intensifies
its marginalization: too many citizens can simply see the problem as happening elsewhere among people
unlike themselves. Effective civic space builds communities and helps to resolve political conflicts; it
does not divide them.
If we turn away from Los Angeles, we can easily find examples of civic spaces heavily used both
for ceremony and political demonstrations by ethnically and racially mixed groups of citizens. Although
Los Angeles has no center that serves as the symbolic center of power and authority, many other U.S.
cities do. Think of city hall and the Parkway in Philadelphia, the state house as well as the area around
city hall in Boston, the U.S. Capitol and Mall in Washington D.C., Jackson Square in New Orleans,
Empire State Plaza in Albany, and Grant Park and Daley Plaza in Chicago. In Philadelphia, during the
past few months, people rallied outside city hall to demand a police review board; supporters of MOVE
marched around city hall to protest the continued imprisonment of MOVE members. President Clinton,
Nelson Mandela, and President de Klerk joined city officials and thousands of citizens to celebrate the
Fourth of July in 1993 at Independence Square and Mall. On multiple occasions throughout the year,
thousands of people drawn from different classes, ethnic, and racial groups gather in the center of the city
to watch parades, to listen to speeches, and to cheer everything from the Phillies to Super Sunday. The
waterfront of the Delaware too has become a major site for civic ceremony and political rallies, as well as
general hanging out. Its Vietnam Memorial, its amphitheater, river walkway, and restaurants draw people
there for multiple purposes. Civic space is alive and well populated in my home town.
In Europe, similar places can be found in most major cities. Citizens and state governments
commonly express ideological positions in particular settings with clear awareness of the historical
baggage that goes along with them. Ordinary commercial streets lined with shops, cafes, and occasional
statues have embedded within them a vast store of political memories to be reinvoked in case of need.
The squares and boulevards of central Paris regularly bring memories of the past to add an aura of
legitimacy to the positions of the present. Military parades on July 14th proceed in triumph up the
Champs-Elysees, along the route of kings carriages from the Tuileries to Versailles. At its end, the Arc de
Triomphe has become a sacred space for the nation since the time in 1840 when Napoleons ashes were
carried through it prior to his reburial at the Invalides. Foreign politicians regularly pay homage at the
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier within it; de Gaulle proclaimed the liberation of Paris there in 1944, just as
Hitler had marked its capture. Calling on memories of earlier revolutions, Communist and trade union
demonstrators commonly march from the Place de la Republique to the Place de la Bastille. Students
move along the Boulevard St. Michel between the river and the Pantheon, where previous generations
have built barricades and shouted their defiance of the state. Mitterrand chose a similar route to mark the
electoral triumph of the Left over Gaullism in 1981. In France, political symbolism calls citizens into
Paris, into the civic spaces that have signified power for centuries.
Even where civic space is lacking, powerful states can create it in a relatively short time,
conditioning citizens to use it to express political loyalties. Beijing under the Ming and Qing dynasties
had almost no public areas and no tradition of democratic assembly or discussion. In its core lay the

walled Forbidden City reserved for the emperor and his household, which was surrounded by the walled,
imperial city for the government. Soldiers and tall gates blocked access, even to a small, open area in the
south where foreign ambassadors came and imperial edicts were presented. Under the early republic, the
Tiananmen Gate was reconstructed. The adjoining square was enlarged, and it remained under official
control, although demonstrators occasionally used it to call for changes in policy.[26] Mao announced the
founding of the Peoples Republic in this space, replacing the imperial presence with his own. The
modern shape of Tiananmen Square emerged during the later 1950s when the Communist government
decided to enlarge it, to have its own Red Square as a parade ground and ceremonial center. Buildings
were cleared in a vast space, which was then lined with gargantuan monuments to the Communist state.
Citizens were brought into the area for regular May Day parades and massive demonstrations. The state
tightly controlled its use until around 1974, when crowds began to turn from reinforcement of the regime
to challenges of it. Since the end of the cultural revolution, demands for a more democratic China have
periodically erupted in Tiananmen Square, climaxing of course in its occupation by students in June of
1989. The Chinese government had succeeded so well in identifying itself with that particular space that
its leaders were willing to use tanks and guns to recapture the square. During the few days when it was
occupied by protesters, the square functioned as an open forum for political democracy, a place where the
meaning of citizenship in China was being debated and redefined. It was functioning as a civic space in
the manner of its most boisterous Western counterparts.
The examples of Beijing and of Paris underline the point that civic space is generally controlled
by the state. As a result, attempts to use it in ways or at times proscribed by governments can lead to
immediate conflict. What would be innocuous actions elsewhere the singing of a song, decorating statues
on a politically incorrect day, gathering in a group--are challenges to state control when they take place in
civic space. As a result; public places can easily become contested places, particularly where authoritarian
governments rule. The recent revolution in Czechoslovakia was triggered by crowds massing in Pragues
Wenceslas Square and by unsuccessful attempts to keep them out. The control of civic space confers
legitimacy in states that have strongly identified themselves with a specific site. Civic space, political
control, and citizenship are tightly linked in the public mind throughout much of the world.
Today in Eastern Europe, after the demise of Communist regimes, civic spaces are being
redesigned and renamed to fit the new polity. In Budapest, statues, plaques, and obelisks from the
Communist period have been removed from public spaces and shifted into a statue park for public ghosts
outside the center of the city. Older symbols of the state, such as the 1894 Millennium Monument
marking the thousandth anniversary of Magyar Conquest of Carpathia, are being revitalized as
embodiments of Hungarian statehood and Hungarian history.[27]
Revolution has brought with it a need to recapture civic spaces for the new political order. If we
look at the recent use of civic space in Berlin, we can see the linkages in the public mind between
symbolic territory and political control. After the division of the city in 1945, the Allies and the West
German government gradually built up the borough of Schoeneberg as an administrative center around its
city hall because all the major public buildings lay in the eastern section of the city.[28] When the Berlin

Wall was built in 1961, it cut through the core of the old city, blocking traffic through the Brandenburg
Gate and ending access for much of the citys population to the cathedral, city hall, university, and major
public buildings of the Prussian state. Pariser Platz, Potsdamer Platz, and Leipziger Platz became dead
spaces, heavily fortified to keep citizens away from the wall. The core of the old ceremonial city was
effectively neutralized as East German authorities moved celebrations further to the east. Meanwhile the
barricaded Brandenburg Gate came to symbolize the divisions of cold war politics and the closed quality
of politics to the east. Ronald Reagan went to the western side of the gate when he publicly announced to
President Gorbachev, If you seek political liberalization, come here to this gate. Tear down this wall!
Civic space, or in this case the lack of it, stood for the political regime that controlled it.
To express opposition to the crumbling East German regime in 1989, citizens took over urban
public areas and politicized spaces. Thousands travelled into other East European cities and climbed
fences into West German embassies. People marched in the streets, lit candles, and sang as they asserted
their control over central Berlin and Leipzig. When they reconceptualized the meaning of their
citizenship, they began to behave differently in areas formerly dominated by the state. Then as the
demonstrations in Berlin grew, the East German government surrendered control of the Leipziger Platz
and the Potsdamer Platz to the crowds. West Germans climbed the wall, danced along it, and dashed up to
the gate. After receiving the right to travel freely on November 9, 1989, citizens of the Deutsche
Demokratische Republik poured into West Berlin; a new checkpoint in the Potsdamer Platz was opened
two days later. The final conquest of formerly closed space came on December 22, when the East German
regime reopened the Brandenburg Gate. The elation of people recovering after almost thirty years the
right to walk around freely in their city is unforgettable to anyone who was there or who even saw the
events on television. One middle-aged woman so harangued the soldiers that they escorted her through
the central portal, once reserved for the emperor. Once in my life I want to walk through and see the
other side. Is that so hard for you to understand? she said. To cross through the Brandenburg Gate was to
be free, to have basic rights as a citizen. In Berlin, civic space holds the keys to power and to the nature of
civic community.[29]
Over the past several years, an activist, public style of politics has intensified dramatically in both
Eastern and Western Europe. The events in Berlin in 1989 are only an extreme example of a larger set of
popular political actions in civic space. People have poured into the streets to demand higher agricultural
subsidies, to defend or to attack immigrants, to demand or to challenge liberal abortion laws. Claus Offe
has described a style of political action, which he contends has developed since the 1960s in Europe. In
his opinion, politics have become more participatory, because people are exercising their democratic
rights more extensively. Also, the repertoire of political actions has widened to include greater use of
nonconventional forms, such as strikes, demonstrations, and protest meetings. Often their interventions
are intentionally disruptive and confrontational; they signal not a community in harmony, but one in
conflict. Finally, he points to a widening of demands to include many issues formerly considered part of a
private sphere. A range of moral, environmental, and economic issues now triggers citizen action. Offe
sees these newer social movements operating outside conventional political parties and institutions;

instead they use public space, cultural and religious institutions, art, music, and theater to carve out more
informal modes of communication.[30] His explanation implies a rising interest in civic space and public
culture as realms to be used by citizens for political purposes.
Historians need to point out that such actions are not new; remember the great Journees of the
French Revolution, the riots, demonstrations, and strikes of the early industrial period, when citizens used
the streets to pressure regimes for particular policies. To turn to non-European examples, think of the
mass political demonstrations against British rule led by Gandhi in Indian cities and the American civil
rights marches in Birmingham and in Washington, D.C. during the 1960s. Much of the vocabulary and
methodology of contemporary European agitation had been borrowed freely from the various civil rights
and independence movements of the mid twentieth century. In the contemporary period, nonviolent civic
action had its defining moments in India and in the American south.[31]
In contrast, much of what Offe describes is more limited in its aims and more fragmented in its
appeal. People pushing different solutions to policy questions jostle one another in public spaces-religion
against religion, party against party. In a sense, Offes description of a participatory, but divided European
style of politics mirrors the fragmented practice of celebration and protest in California. One can find
multiple examples on both sides of the Atlantic of divided urban groups using public space for their own
purposes, just as one can find examples on boa, sides of the Atlantic of vital civic spaces being used by
multiclass, multicultural groups.
How then ought we view Los Angeles when placed alongside the examples of Western and
Central European cities? Clearly, spatial designs show the effects of different histories and formative
technologies. Older cities, especially chose chat underwent Baroque-style planning or rebuilding, are well
endowed with central squares and monuments chat trigger complex public memories and civic
associations. In such places, civic space abounds, if governments and citizens choose to use it.
Centralized states and authoritarian governments have been particularly effective in creating such spaces
for their own purposes; paradoxically, in their efforts to mold national communities loyal to the state, they
have sometimes succeeded in stimulating dissent sufficiently strong and unified to use civic space to
unseat them. In contrast, ethnically diverse cities such as Los Angeles that lack large amounts of effective
civic space have a harder time forging an urban community and bridging differences through ritual and
ceremony. There the forces of fragmentation and exclusion seem far stronger than those of unity.
Over the last several years, societies around the world have been attempting to come to terms
with their own pluralism. Long-distance migration combined with the complex legacies of empire and
conquest have made most societies mosaics of different ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups. Although
previous generations idealized homogeneity and strove for it, homogeneity seems culturally obsolete
today in many places as individuals assert alternative identities and construct a personal past not identical
to the myths of the nation-state in which they reside. The idea of citizenship is being stretched to
encompass cultural diversity, not always successfully. In such a world, public spaces have to appeal to a
diverse clientele and to be flexible enough for multiple and changing uses. Unfortunately, the monuments
and sacred places of the past do not always harmonize with the many identities of the present. Cities in

the 1990s must reconstruct their public life around reimagined, multiple communities, which interact and
together form a whole. Some cities have done this more successfully than others. In Los Angeles and in
Beijing, a significant share of the limited civic space has been given a particular ethnic, class, or political
identity; in Philadelphia and Berlin, in contrast, civic spaces have been claimed by the whole community.
Civic space continues to be an unstable, contested realm, but one that assumes increasing importance as
communities seek to redefine their political and cultural identities. Rather than proclaiming the death of
public space, we would be better employed by efforts to preserve its multifunctionality and its appeal to
the widest possible groups of citizens.

NOTES
[1.] Spiro Kostof, The City Assembled (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 124.
[2.] Robert Venturi, quoted in James Sanders, Toward a Return of the Public Place: An American Survey,
Architectural Record 173, no. 4 (1985), 87.
[3.] Charles W. Moore, You Have to Pay for Public Life, Perspecta no. 10 (1965), 58. I would like to thank Robert
Fishman for this reference.
[4.] Michael Pollan, Look Whos Saving the Elm, New York T imes Sunday Magazine, October 31, 1993, 93.
[5.] Mike Davis, City of Quartz (New York: Random House, 1992), 223, 226.
[6.] Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 3, 12, 54.
[7.] Edmund N. Bacon, Design of Cities, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1974).
[8.] Denise Scott Brown, Urban Concepts (New York: St. Martins, 1990), 51.
[9.] Saunders, Toward a Return, 95.
[10.] Michael C. Cunningham and Donald F. Savoie, Is the Piazza Un-American? Its Uses in Italian Urban
History, Ekistics 39, no. 232 (1975), 176.
[11.] Davis, City of Quartz.
[12.] Michael Sorkin, ea., Variations on a Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space (New
York: Noonday Press, 1992), xiii-xiv.
[13.] Ion Lang, Creating Architectural Theory (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987), 103.
[14.] Robert Owen, quoted in Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped (Boston: Little Brown, 1991), 198.
[15.] Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, ed. by P. J. Osborn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965, originally
published, 1898), 138, 150.
[16.] Scott Brown,Urban Concepts, 21.
[17.] Moore, You Have, 63-64.
[18.] Joan Didion, On the Mall, The White Notebook (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 183; quoted from
Margaret Crawford, The World in a Shopping Mall, in Sorkin, Variations, 14.
[19.] Mark Lilla, The Great Museum Muddle, The New Republic 8 (April, 1985), 25-30; quoted in Brown, Urban
Concepts, 21.
[20.] Richard Saul Wurman, LA Access (New York: Access Press, 1991), 9.
[21.] Reyner Banbam, Los Angeles The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Penguin, 1990), 208.

[22.] The map, The Power of Place, is available through Dolores Hayden, School of Architecture, Yale University.
[23.] Debra Gold Hansen and Mary P. Ryan, Public Ceremony in a Private Culture: Orange County Celebrates the
Fourth of July, in Rob Kling et al., eds., Postsuburban California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991),
166, 184.
[24.] Moore, You Have, 65.
[25.] Marlin J. Schiesl, Behind the Badge: The Police and Social Discontent in Los Angeles since 1950, in
Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl, eds., 20th Century Los Angles (Claremont CA: Claremont Books, 1990),
172.
[26.] See Shi Mingzbeng, The Development of Municipal Institutions and Public Works in Early-Twentieth
Century Beijing, Chinese Historians 5, no. 2 (Fall, 1992),7-24; David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1989), 167-197.
[27.] David Altshuler, Damnatio Memoriae: Dismantling Monuments and Revising History in Modern Hungary,
(paper delivered at the Conference of the Council of European Studies, Chicago, April 1, 1994); Miklos Voros, In
Search of Identity and Legitimacy: Multiple Allegories and Conflicting Uses of the Millennium Monument in
Budapest, (paper delivered at the Conference of the Council of European Studies, Chicago, April 1, 1994).
[28.] Kostoff,City Assembled, 71.
[29.] This account of the dismantling of the wall is taken from a television report on the events compiled in Ode to
Joy and Freedom (Berlin: SFB Sender Freies Berlin and NDR International, 1990).
[30.] Claus Offe, Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics: Social Movements Since the 1960s, in
Charles S. Maier, ea., Changing Boundaries of the Political (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 63105.
[31.] I owe this point to Robert Fishman.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 1: Empty Public Space in Los Angeles. The Squares Around the City Hall
Remain Empty Even at Midday
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 2: Gate and Main Square In Chinatown, Los Angeles. The Space Is Heavily
Used, Even Before Shops Open In the Morning
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Fiqure 3: Central Philadelphia, Looking from the Art Museum to City Hall Along the
Parkway, a Major Site of Celebrations and Parades
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 4: Gay Pride Parade Along Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. In May of 1993,
Marchers Crossed the City, Ending In the Public Areas Along the Waterfront

AUTHORS NOTE: I would like to thank Janet Golden, Dolores Hayden, Sue Naquin, and Eric
Schneider for conversations that helped clarify my thinking on this topic; I am indebted to Robert
Fishman, Paul Hohenberg, and Andrew Lees for their intelligent, helpful comments on earlier drafts
of this article.
~~~~~~~~
By LYNN HOLLEN LEES: University of Pennsylvania

Source:

Journal

of

Urban

Item Number: 9503101423

History,

Aug94,

Vol.

20

Issue

4,

p443,

23p,

4bw.