THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PUBLIC SPACE （公共空间的政治经济）.pdf

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PUBLIC SPACE DAVID HARVEY The idea of the public sphere as an arena of political deliberation and participation , and therefore as fundamental to democratic governance, has a long and distinguished history . The imagery of the Athenian agora as the physical space wherein that democratic ideal might be attained has also had a powerful hold upon the political imagination . As a result some kind of association or even identity has been forged between the proper shaping of urban public space and the proper functioning of democratic governance in the public sphere. The statu s of this association is, perhaps for good reason, often left extremely vague. For some it seems to function merely as a convenient metaphor and with the arrival of the internet and the construction of virtual communities the physicality of spatial organization seems scarcely to matter any more. Others will ask more pointedly how it might be possible to encourage political participation in an urban world constructed out of segregated suburbs, gated communities, privatized spaces and tightly surveilled shopping malls and downtown streets monitored (thanks, these days, to some shadowy form of governance called a business partnership) with a video-camera at every corner. While it may well prove impossible to sort out the relationship between the physicality of urban public space and the politics of the public sphere with any exactitude, there are, I think, some potent points of linkage between them . We do not, after all, experience the city blankly and much of what we do absorb from that daily experience (be it the long drag of the commute, the j ostle of subway crowds, the blandness of the shopping mall, the elegance or gr