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COPYRIGHT 2006 The Institute Inc.
Postmodern metropolis. Heterotopia. Capital of the Third World. City of Quartz. Los Angeles is ascribed a singularity that is alternately applauded as utopic and vilified as dystopic. While the former perspective (Dear 2000; Jencks 1993; Soja 1996) celebrates the city for its social and architectural diversity, the latter (Davis 1992; Rieff 1991) emphasizes the decline of public life and an intensification of inclusive exclusivity, epitomized especially by the privatization of public space. Privatized public space, exemplified by the "elimination and/or intensified surveillance of urban public spaces" and the "creation of new privatized spaces of elite/corporate consumption" (Brenner and Theodore 2002a: 24), is by now a defining measure of neoliberalism and its expression in the neoliberal city. As such, it provides a means of recognizing the newness of neoliberalism, its effect on cities, and implications for citizenship formation. (1)
California Plaza in downtown Los Angeles has been taken as an exemplary case of the privatization of public space (Davis 1992; Loukaitou-Sideris and Banerjee 1998). It boasts two gleaming high rise office towers, an upscale hotel, the Museum of Contemporary Art, fast food options for lunch, a Starbuck's, a nice Italian restaurant, a series of fountains, a granite plaza, a series of fountains, and a free summer concert series. Built on the razed land of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles' first urban renewal project, California Plaza was constructed with the intention that it would serve as public space. Intended for the public of the city, it also helps shape that public through multiscalar legal frameworks, features of the built environment, and mechanisms of surveillance and control.
The specific publicness of public space is based in a framework of liberal democracy, integrating conceptual frameworks and practices in a complex web of associated meanings and ideals that are both predicated on and productive of particular meanings of public and private. Minimum definitional criteria of public and private emerge from shifting notions of public and private that have taken a relatively stable institutional form as an opposition between the state and the market. Yet, as Weintraub asserts, "The public/private distinction ... is not unitary, but protean. It comprises, not a single paired opposition, but a complex family of them, neither mutually reducible nor wholly unrelated" (1997: 2). The meanings of "public" (Warner 2002; Weintraub 1997) allow for a range of characteristic features of public space as well as the possibility for public space to include multiple and shifting ideals. In the context of shifting institutional dynamics, it is important to pay attention to the ways in which particular attributes of public and private vary in theory and practice. The array of meanings of both public and private reflects a tangling of multiple historic moments that are called forth for a variety of applications and contexts. For instance "freedom," which Habermas (1991) locates in the private realm and Arendt (1958) finds in public, emerges in the context of public space as at once private (free market and individualism) and public (as in freedom of speech and dissent as a measure of democracy) (see also Calhoun 1992: 6-7), reflecting the contingent and strategic nature of categorical meanings. In examining privatized public space, it is important not to reify labels of "public" and "private," but to explore the attenuated meanings of each in changing historical and institutional contexts.
The complexity of terms is increased as notions of public as social formation and as institutional framework come together in public space. The meanings of "public" invoked in definitions of public space tend to focus on democratic institutions and frameworks, indicating a level of incommensurability between the meaning of public when used as an adjective, in the case of public space or the public sphere, and a noun, when used to describe text-based publics (Warner 2002). At the same time, the publicness of public space is dependent on the spatialization of a social formation that is at once "the people" with an abstract, infinitely extensible membership and the citizens of a particular nation-state. As such, ownership, access, and social practices are all integral to defining public space as such. Its transformation, therefore, implicates not only institutional actors, but the nature of democracy and citizenship. As Sorkin (1992a: xv) proclaimed, the privatization of public space is "an ill wind blowing through our cities ... that has the potential to irretrievably alter the character of cities as the preeminent sites of democracy and pleasure." Nevertheless, marking a loss in privatized public space tends to stabilize categories that have been sites of debate throughout the development of liberal philosophy. Investigating the nature of this space in the current moment necessitates a consideration of the complexity of these categories and their associated meanings.
Current meanings of public and private emerge as part of a dynamic relationship between thought and practice informed by a past that provides a loose set of available meanings for something being made in the present. The idealized public aspired for at California Plaza suggests the emergence of a phantom public (Robbins 1993), in which a mythical past is drawn on as a model for contemporary conditions. Discussions of the need for a place to gather in urban downtowns are "not really about the past;" rather, "they tell us about the concerns and anxieties inhabiting our present social arrangements" (Deutsche 1996: 290). Thus, the analysis of an actually existing privatized public space requires a tacking between ideals drawn from particular moments of liberal philosophy and current meanings expressed through institutional configurations and practice.
Privatized public space is less a radical transformation than a transformed space that provides a lens into an ongoing negotiation of the relation between the state and the market. The centrality of this relationship for the meaning of citizenship in liberal society begs the question of what kind of citizenship is produced in and of privatized public space. (2) Free summer concerts in California Plaza produce a heightened public, explicitly intended to reflect the diversity of the city, in which programming is used to shape an audience that includes desired categories of diversity. Emphasizing ethnicity and race in public concert audiences occludes other measures of diversity such as gender or class, indicating the ways in which strategic inclusions and recognitions help shape the meaning of diversity itself (Peterson 2005). Here, however, the focus is on the everyday use of the space, in order to examine what kinds of conditions the institutional form of privatized public space provide for citizenship formation, and what kind of public or citizenship emerges in privatized public space.
As with Bourdieu's category of doxa (1984), the normative public of the Plaza is inherently invisible. The corporate plaza follows a Rousseauian model of agreement, with a public that is consenting, invisible, and harmonious (Rousseau 1987). Organizing public life around consent rather than dissent erodes what is considered a fundamental aspect of democratic public space; however, the fact that this is not a new formulation indicates how many of the defining features of neoliberalism are consistent with a longer history of liberal thought, such that the privatization of public space is one moment of a longer negotiation over the balance between the state and the market, and of meanings of public and private. The invisibility of this normative citizenship is made visible through actual and potential threats to the order of the public space. Use regulations, the built environment, and security surveillance tactics are some of the primary means of marking relative inclusions and exclusions that define and create a public and its other. The meanings of and relationship between public and private that provide foundations for these processes of citizenship formation are most evident through ruptures in the apparent seamlessness of the privatized public space.
Privatizing Publics
"A public space is commonly defined as a place (or space) created and maintained by public authority, accessible to all citizens for their use and enjoyment" (Jackson 1987: 276).
California Plaza reflects the interests and designs of the capitalist city from the mid-20th century era of urban renewal to late-20th century neoliberalism. Throughout Los Angeles' history, development driven by the interests of capitalists has helped shaped the city (Fogelson 1993). Today's neoliberalism is in many ways a heightened version of this dynamic, its "newness" characterized by public-private partnerships (Brenner and Theodore 2002a; Harvey 2001; Whitt 1987), regionalization (Scott 2000; Soja 1996), a flexible or post-industrial economy (Amin 1994; Sassen 2000; Scott 2000), and an emphasis on the arts and cultural events, "place-making," and multiculturalism (Harvey 2001; Kotler 2002; Ward 1998; Whitt 1987). These features have been the cornerstone of late 20th century downtown development in Los Angeles, marking a transition in capitalism and a turn toward the city as growth machine (Harvey 1990;...
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