The Fall and Rise of Public Space

Michael Walzer’s “Notes on Public Space” is a valuable reopening of a debate that in the past has been very important to radical thought. I will here suggest that qualitative and aesthetic issues like this one may have an exemplary relevance for politics in late-capitalist societies, and may help us to revitalize the agenda of the left.

I want to situate our understanding of space and its uses in a longer historical perspective, and to examine the antagonism that has long existed between capitalism and the whole idea of public or, as I prefer to say, social space. I shall argue, first, that our most influential conceptions of social space, still preserved in buildings and city plans, are precapitalist in origin; ...