Tuesday, January 19, 2016

From The Guardian Cities
The privatisation of cities' public spaces
is escalating. It is time to take a stand

The geographer David Harvey once wrote that “the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is … one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights”. Generations of urban theorists, from Lewis Mumford to Jane Jacobs to Doreen Massey, have suggested that the place where cities get “remade” is in the public rather than private sphere. Part of the problem, then, with privately owned public spaces (“Pops”) – open-air squares, gardens and parks that look public but are not – is that the rights of the citizens using them are severely hemmed in. Although this issue might be academic while we’re eating our lunch on a private park bench, the consequences of multiplying and expanding Pops [privately owned public space] affects everything from our personal psyche to our ability to protest. Read more: The privatisation of cities' public spaces is escalating. It is time to take a stand | Cities | The Guardian

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