Public Spaces in Local Places

Doubts are accumulating with regard to the uses of rational discourse in the rule-governed sphere once thought of as the public space. There autonomous individuals presumably resolved disagreements, worked out consensus, and devised plans of action for the benefit of those they represented and in the light of logically derived norms. Communicating within the same universe of meaning, they functioned apart from the domains of private life: the domains of women, feeling, subjectivity. Today the boundaries are no longer clear. Words, images mean variously, as the recognition grows that language does not refer to phenomena in some external "reality." Multiplicity, relativism, contin gency: these are the watchwords. The very notion of representation is challenged; the idea of consensus has come to seem illusory; there are no essences to be sought within the newly acknowledged diversity. In their lived lives, people feel their own voices overwhelmed by technical talk or the formulas of the media. They turn inward, many of them, withdrawing from what lies beyond their immediate, everyday con cerns. Surrounded by simulacra, artifacts, artifices, they grope for a sense of actuality, of particularity. Powerlessness, passivity, and a kind of despair shroud many of them. As Percy's (1961) narrator says in The Moviegoer: "Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

Architectural engineering · Geography · Public space · Engineering · Urbanization and City Planning

• Post-Modern Ethnography

  Stephen A Tyler•Writing Culture•1986

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• The Public and Its Problems

  T V Smith, John Dewey•The Philosophical Review•1929

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