Koray Velibeyoglu,PHD Candidate at:
Izmir Institute of Technology, June 1999
Abstract
A.Public
Sphere
B.Transformation
of the Public Realm
C.Reconsidering the Public Realm
In urban studies the impacts of new information technologies upon built environment and city's social and economic life have gained their significance. The political impact of the Internet has focused on a number of issues: access, technological determinism, electronic surveillance, the public sphere, decentralization, gender and ethnicity. In this study transformation of physical and political public spaces/sphere will be the main concern. The aim is to highlight the key points in the production and transformation of public spaces in the information age.
In first part of the study the definition of public sphere is given under major public sphere theories. Then the Internet public sphere will be tested under the five main criteria making analogy with the physical public spaces. The role of new media and computer-mediated communication will also be highlighted in the production of public sphere. Secondly the transformation of today's public space will be examined under the new concepts and trends of both physical and virtual world.
Because the concept "public sphere" is part of a theory built on a lifetime's work it is hard to identify in the framework of single true definition. However we can be discuss on the two main public sphere theories that correspond to the works of Jurgen Habermas and Hanna Arendt.
In his milestone book, "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere", Habermas develops the normative notion of the public sphere as a part of social life where citizens can exchange views on matters of importance to the common good, so that public opinion can be formed. This public sphere comes into being when people gather to discuss issues of political concern.
Despite its many similarities Habermasian public sphere does no merely refer to ancient Greek agora. Habermas is talking about something that is conceptual rather than physical. His public sphere is not a marketplace, nor is it a coffeehouse, a salon, an organization or a newspaper. It goes beyond these physical forums, because the public sphere is a forum for dialogue and ideas that aims to form communicatively rational consensus of opinion. This forum can and does exist in which only rational communication is possible, in which all claims are either defended through rational discourse, or are rejected.
Habermas also suggests that a person's individual opinion does not constitute the public sphere, because it does not enclose a process of opinion formation.
"Publicity was, according to its very idea, a principle of democracy not because anyone could in principle announce, with equal opportunity, his personal inclinations, wishes and convictions - opinions; it could only be realised in the measure that these personal opinions could evolve through the rational-critical debate of a public into public opinion."
The other significant public sphere theory comes from the political thinker Hanna Arendt. In her major work, "The Human Condition" she offers a critique of the mass society and the loss of public realm. While Habermas mainly analyses the modern bourgeois public sphere to develop his normative model, Arendt focuses on the public realm in the Greek polis. To her in greek polis private sphere is non-political and contains households matters. In the modern age, however, the housekeeping and its related activities, problems and organizations have risen from these private spheres to the public sphere.
Arendt and Habermas both agree on the loss of distinction between the public and private spheres and the negative effects of this process on public sphere. They both criticize the mass society, with which they associate the decline of the public sphere.
On the other hand both have strongly criticized by the post-structuralist, feminist, and marxist theories in many ways. Post-structuralists like Lyotard attacked the Habermasian model of consensus through rational debates. He sees speaking as fighting. To him the goal of communication is not consensus, but victory: to see your opinion prevail over others'.
In the 1980s Lyotard's critique was expanded by feminists like Nancy Fraser who demonstrate the gender blindness in Habermas's position. Then feminist thoerists revise the Habermasian notion of the public sphere separating it from its patriarchal, bourgeois and logocentric attachments. Unlike bourgeois public sphere, the feminist public sphere does not claim a representative universality but rather offers a critique of cultural values from the standpoint of women as a "marginalized group within society." But in this sense it constitutes a partial public sphere.
To Marxist points of view the great ideological fiction of liberalism is to reduce the public sphere to existing democratic institutions. Habermas's critique of liberalism presents a radical alternative to it but one that still universalizes and monopolizes the political. Instead, Marxist thinkers Negt and Kluge offer decentralization and multiplication of the public sphere, opening a path of critique and possibly a new politics.
Publicity versus Privacy
The term public simply means "relating to all the people in a community", "open to or shared by all people", "actions and events are made or done in such a way that everyone can see them, known by everyone not secret". The term privacy, on the other hand, reflects the polar opposite of the public. There is a dialectic relationship between them. According to Alexander and Chermayeff there can be no community without privacy. Without a core of privacy, the community becomes chaos.
Greek distinction of public refers to the "polis", and the term privacy is used indicates the "family and household". Today the usage of the term private refers to an isolated speech or actions that are unobserved by anyone and not recorded or monitored by any machine. Private sphere is now more than the restricted physical space or home. It is also the subject of electronic surveillance.
2. Is Internet
a Public Sphere?
Today the loss of distinction between the public and private spheres is obvious. On the other hand the realm of the public sphere has been decreasing under the encroachment of mass media. Private lives of individuals are steadily take place in the media via mass communication devices. This is so far from the Habermasian notion of public sphere in which the publicly shared ideas are discussed through rational consensus. In this sense an interesting recent debate is the position of the Internet as a new public sphere. Here the publicity of Internet will be tested in light of given circumstances below.
To Altman there are three significant characteristics defining truly the public:
We may extend these characteristics by adding "friendliness" and "freedoms of action" which are also vital for testing Internet as a public sphere.
1. Accessibility:
City's public spaces must be accessible to all groups of people with various ages, gender, and ethnic background. This spaces are not separated with the physical barriers and not for the use of any particular groups. Normally exclusion from public space means removal from the community life.
However today we have opportunity for being in public sphere without being physically in there: Internet, teleconference systems etc. In cyberspace accessibility is provided by private firms (Intemet service providers known as ISP) via telecommunication lines. The placement of access points is critical here. We reach the Internet public sphere with our computers that can be either located in homes or in physical public spaces and buildings such as streets, squares, public libraries or schools. Interestingly it can also be placed in an Internet Cafe that is not publicly owned or used. A public sphere in a private sphere?
One important question is "the accessibility of Internet public sphere by all users". Internet is a growing electronic medium that there are over 30 million people connected mostly from developed countries. However problems of creating "information rich" elites or countries with Internet access, at the expense of "information poor" will be a major ethical question for an emerging Internet community to address.
Do we have to pay to get into cyberspace? Now, as an individual, to access Internet public sphere you have to pay for access to private firms and institutions. This is the economic dimension. On the other hand you have to get some basic skills about the usage of Internet and other related software products. Recent researches indicated that the large majority of computer users are men. A survey in the United States found that 67% of Internet users are male over half of them aged 18-34. Their median household income is between $50.000 and $75.000, and the most frequently mentioned occupations are education, sales, and engineering. Accessing the Internet we are still keeping in touch with economic constrains, gender issues, basic skills and age group barriers. This makes accessibility of Internet to all groups of people questionable.
Another important point is the "level of interaction". Recent findings indicated that among the Internet users, only a minority is really active in the medium. The level of interaction between net users is inadequate. There is no doubt that a simple (passive) connection to the network is not enough to constitute the Internet public sphere.
2. Ownership:
Public spaces in the city are not owned by any individuals or groups. Public efforts throughout the history preserved the integrity of the public spaces from the encroachments of private property. Public spaces always imply the struggle between public and private property upon the urban scene. On the other hand in the Net we see commercial, governmental, educational institutions and individuals' web pages that all have different purposes and different functions. Individuals can easily prepare his/her own web page for any purposes. However he must pay for this service to his service provider. Without doing this, his page will not be maintained and not seen any longer in this server. In the Internet, therefore, we cannot see unique and authoritarian ownership pattern. Instead the power is decentralized between different service providers and institutions. (Internet as network of networks)
In the capitalist city private ownership is sanctified. The invasion of one's private territory is strongly resisted by its owner. "Hacking" in the Internet refers to such a circumstance. Since late 1980s we have been introduced with the hacking events and undesirable access to the government and commercial sites. Main concern here is the invasion of one's privacy by Internet hackers.
"Basically, the whole discussion about privacy in the network is something of the past. Due to the massive use of credit and bank cards, all kind of personal information is already floating in the network. Marketing specialists are able to get any kind of intelligence about you they want: what's your car make, where did you eat out last week, what kind of stuff did you buy in the K-mart yesterday."
Privacy on the Internet as hacker Rop Gonggrijp suggests above is meaningless. Advertising agencies, direct mail marketers, and political consultants already know many personal details about the one's private property. Rheingold called them as "professional privacy brokers" who use and even sell personal information, in return for payment or subsidies.
Hacking governmental and institutional web pages is judged as crime. But so far there is not any proper regulations regarding the security of individuals' web sites and their credit cards used in the cyberspace for shopping entertainment etc. To Castells, in any case Internet will expand its commercial capacity with its inevitable small dose of psychological deviance.
3. Public Control:
Public control of use in physical public spaces handled through public agencies and institutions. Internet also has similar character. There is no centralized control, because there is no central computer running everything.
4. Friendliness:
Public spaces can be physically accessible in principle but can be hostile and unwelcoming to outsiders. According to Mitch Kapor cyberspace public spaces must be welcoming an issues of interface design. Only designing user-friendly computer interfaces will create Internet public sphere. The ability to type Unix commands is not accepted as public space. (Fig.1)
Fig.1. Electronic Console of Digital Amsterdam: a user-friendly interface
Normally physical public spaces provide high levels of freedom of assembly and action. In most developed countries you can hold public meetings, demonstrations etc. There are few restrictions on speech. Similarly in cyberspace you may freely discuss any topics with few restrictions. In this sense Internet is unquestionable as a public space. (Internet Bulletin Boards for example are wonderful for sharing ideas) Because there is no central control, people can talk unimpeded, and thus a true freedom of speech is possible.
Being involved in cyberspace means becoming a member. The member of a network has the options that are clustered and non-linear. Fore example alternating connection and disconnection; reading or not reading messages; giving free rein to a highly personal use of language or taking refuge in `forwarding` formal discourse; engaging with specific people or not, according to interest etc. However commercial online services on the Internet control and restrict user's actions via some rules and regulatory options.
We are still practicing Internet just for few years. Therefore it is hard to discuss any exact findings about the Internet as a public sphere. But the criteria given above may help to discover its some promises and constrains. In my opinion Internet is a public sphere, an electronic agora. Restrictions of ownership or access do not prevent it from being so.
3. New Media
and the Public Sphere
The realm of the public sphere has been decreasing under the encroachment of large corporations and the new media. We are steadily using the terms "information society", segmented and "privatized social life" and "interactive society". These are not freestanding concepts. Controversially they may be considered as interconnected concepts to explain the today's trends and community structure. In restructuring the community structure and as well as the new public sphere the role of new media and computer-mediated communication (CMC) has very significant role. During the 1980s new technologies constituted the world of new media:
The "New Media" are no longer "mass media". (mass in terms of number but no longer give uniform messages). Mass media, in the traditional sense of sending a limited number of messages to a homogenous mass audience, was replaced by the new media in which the multiplicity of messages and sources can be sent and the audience itself becomes more selective. According Japan media analyst Youichi Ito there is evolution from a "mass society" to a "segmented society" (Fig.2)
The shift from mass society to segmented society also atomized the family structure and substituted it to the hyper-individual households. The new media produced images for each members of the family and created a "private-life industry." Public sphere manipulated by New Media is the collage of symbols and images labeling the individuals' identity and consumption. In this sense media public sphere is not truly based on reality and rational consensus. It is the fiction that creating the world of public sphere.
Fig.2. Media and Society: Adopted from the concepts about the media and society
from the Manuel Castell's "Rise of the Network Society", Chpt.5
Two influential thinkers Poster and Rheingold indicate the authoritarian nature of Media in creation of public sphere. To Poster the public places of the past like the public square, the café, a factory lunchroom, religious centers, or street corners will remain but no longer serve as organizing centers for political discussion and action. The rise of new Media and electronic communication isolate citizens from one another and substitute themselves for older spaces of politics. Rheingold reflects similar thoughts in his popular essay "The Virtual Community". For him, the Media giants will fully control most important newspapers, magazines, broadcast stations, televisions etc. by the turn of the century. These new media lords will determine the character of the public domain and politics. However, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has the capacity to challenge the existing monopolized powerful media technology.
The contemporary trend of privatization of public spaces as shopping malls, theme parks, and office parks is considered as worrying by many commentators. Similarly the Internet is being understood as an extension of existing institutions. For example, Internet is partly used to deliver entertainment products like a huge virtual theme park or is functioning as an electronic shopping mall. There is a rising trend toward more safer and privatized places. Past public spaces, therefore, will continue to be transformed and will be diversified with the new ones. Here I will use spatial metaphors such as street, home, community, and city, when dealing with cyberspace. I also try to indicate the drawing factors behind their changing structure.
1. SMART HOMES
& GATED COMMUNITIES
Utopian vision of the information society predicts the emergence of a new "home-centered" society where work, leisure, information and communications are provided via telecommunication networks of the smart homes. For example, Peter Goldmark associates the reason of home-centeredness with the rising problems of cities such as crime, pollution, poverty, traffic, education etc. Alvin Toffler, on the other hand, develops his sustainable, rural environment on the basis of "electronic cottage" or the "smart home". Utopian vision suggests that there are signs of trends towards greater home-centeredness and the privatization of social life mainly in post-industrial societies.
WHAT IS SMART (ELECTRONIC) HOME?
New technologies allow the home to emerge as a center for communications receiving information and entertainment, obtaining goods and services, and linking in with workplaces. We can discuss the functions of new electronic homes into three main areas:
First, the flexible use of the home for tele-based work is growing. (home-offices) But the progress towards home-working has been slow because of the technical and physical problems. Now it is still practicing in the USA by 13 million people that can be classed as "teleworkers".
Second, the usage of "tele" services in smart homes. Many experiments in new forms of home entertainment and service use are currently emerging in developed countries. It is expected that in the longer run, there are many home telematics will be added. (Tele-shopping, tele-health, tele-education etc.) These services will use video and virtual reality interfaces to offer the real sense of purchasing products, accessing services, experiencing education, undertaking transactions, obtaining information from within the household.
Lastly, all domestic services at home become integrated via telematics into a multi-function household communication system that is linked with outside networks. Such an integrated system, as Graham and Marvin suggest, "would allow the remote control of consumer appliances, new energy management systems, new environmental control systems and new security systems." In this context the home can be thought as a network terminal:
"…in speaking about the modern home, we are talking about more than technologized comforts. The modern home is inconceivable except as a terminal, according to benefits of, but also providing legimate support to a vast infrastructure facilitating flows of energy, good, people and messages. The most obvious aspect has been a qualitative transformation of the technical specification of houses and their redefinition as terminals of networks."
This is a vision that computer have become completely absorbed into domestic space. But these processes can only be operated efficiently under the larger political, social and economic changes. Today, most of the development of technology in the home still based on stand-alone media and entertainment systems such as CD players, personal computers, and televisions. Also the most cable services are not interactive. Therefore evolution of home as a "terminal" may take longer time with two reasons: requirements of vast telecommunication infrastructure investments and its economic feasibility. In mass markets the audience does not yet provide the revenue which supports the services.
SMART HOMES: liberating or limiting?
We discussed the trend toward home-centeredness and removal from social activities in public spheres. But as a locus of urban social life what kind of living space are smart homes offered? According to the thinkers Roy Mason and Lane Jennings:
"…In the past, life at home was often confining and oppressive…the home-centered life of the future may be exhilarating and mind-expanding,thanks to worldwide networks of electronic communication. Computer-based access to electronic spaces will bring into the home environment many of the facilities and services we now often travel many miles to obtain at schools, libraries, offices, theaters etc. [...]. It will provide a new focus for human like - a twenty first century version of the hearth that was so long an essential feature of the 'home' in every age and civilization"
To the writers, digital homes have liberating effects in our daily lives and have the ability extending our choices without physically being there. Here there is a positive message of living in smart homes in terms of conformist way of life. But home-centeredness can also be seen as a political preference. For example Ela Kaçel associates the term "home-centeredness" with the process of depolitization and provocation of privatization that are the extension of state control over citizens. This made, therefore, home-centered life inevitable as the single platform of individual's liberation (!)
Marxist critique of home-centered lifestyle is also considered in terms of discipline and consumption. According to this view, every citizen who has a regular lifestyle in modern capitalist society is a householder. To live in a home is a basic circumstance of state confirmation. Home is a true place of any sort of official records. Orienting working-classes to their homes (domestication) has the common goals of all ruling classes. Instead of marching the street (depolitization), an individual should directly go his/her sweet home and either spend his time with his family or the beautification of his home and its garden. Home itself, therefore, is also a locus for mass consumption supporting with the marketing strategy of mass media. (the more telematic based domestic services the more consumption) In this sense commentator Mark Poster asks whether Internet is an extension of these marketing strategies or not:
"Shall the Internet be used to deliver entertainment products, like some gigantic, virtual theme park? Or shall it be used to sell commodities, functioning as an electronic retail store or mall?"
As we look at home-centeredness as the depolitization of individuals through increasing state control and the commercial trap of mass consumption a home-centered domestic life has also the limiting effect over inhabitants.
Individualism can be focused around private life industries promoted by New Media and postmodern themes of apoliticism, fragmentation, and commercialism. Time spent at home went up in the early 1990s in post-industrial societies. The new smart (electronic) home and "portable communication devices" give chances to the family members to organize their own time and space. Increasing electronic equipment in the home has increased their comfort and stepped up their self-sufficiency, enabling them to link up with the whole world from the "safety of the home". Ela Kaçel indicates the close relationship between the "home devices" and householders. Electronic home devices have become integral part of our bodies. Without them we feel ourselves trapped. Since early 20th century the standardization of "3 bedrooms" in homes has brought a transition from "home-scale" to the "room-scale". Individuals' personal spaces, therefore, separated from each other. To her, now we are practicing a new phase: from "room-scale" to the "electronic device scale". In this sense television and personal computers are the most significant electronic devices of this new scale. They are the communication devices that remove geographical constrains of space and time, arrange our ties with outside, and transform every "private" world to the "public" one.
SAFER HOMES, STERILE COMMUNITIES
Will home-centeredness encourage a retreat from public life and public space? This is one of the crucial questions in the evolution of the digital homes. But as many commentators suggested there is trend in developed countries,, particularly in middle classes, towards "cocooning".
Cocooning simply means "staying at home" because of crime and other urban dangers. "Urban cocooning", the warm return to the security of home, has been started in the late 1980s firstly in major North American cities:
"Staying at home was a choice, based on a mindful refocusing of priorities that led us to value, newly, things like quality time with the family and making our own cappuccino. But as the turn of the century looms, the cocoon is evolving into a bunker. And under this new "siege" sensibility, we are ever more hesitant to leave our beefed-up, protective walls without the proper defenses."
The availability of self-service technologies and network access points at homes (like Internet), fear of crime and social alienation with urban life are key supports to this trend. The protection of the home from the intruders inevitably brings a new market: security systems, entry codes, video-surveillance controlled gated communities that are the tools for privatization of the public urban life and spaces. (Fig.3)
Fig.3. Gated communities and office parks with maximum security, L.A.
Gated communities are becoming increasingly popular throughout especially in the United States. Today, the large numbers of Americans move into gated communities constructed with elaborate home security systems, bullet-proof administrative suites, fully armored luxury cars, custom-trained guard dogs and so on. It is clear that there are dangers that these gated communities will provoke individualization and polarization within post-industrial cities. It is the "tribalisation" of socioeconomic and ethnic groups in cities:
"Already white communities throughout the country [The U.S.] are segregating themselves in walled-in private neighborhoods (Gated or Fortress Communities) behind monitored security gates."
"Megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and pseudo-historic marketplaces... If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged."
Many traditional open spaces are now being replaced by private and regulated ones. Mostly we prefer going shopping malls, corporate plazas, and commercial theme parks for shopping, business, entertainment and like. There is a shift from traditional street and squares to theme parks. Here the former is considered truly public, but can we consider the latter as public space? Commentator John Friedman criticizes the process retreat from the street to the shopping mall in Los Angeles:
"Shopping malls are air-conditioned labyrinths for just spending the money. In there, security cameras monitor our every movement with their unblinking eyes while we are walking and watching shopwindows. In contrast with the street a shopping mall is uninviting due to its nature. Light and water games, promotions, and the shiny mirrors are just for whom that can pay for luxury goods inside the mall." (Reduction of individual's identity to the electronic credit card)
Rise of such theme parks can be associated with the themes of postmodern urbanism that explain the cities as centers of consumption and the spectacle of festivals and events. Boyer indicates the commercialization of city space and architectural forms becoming consumer items or packaged environments that support and promote the circulation of goods. Unlike from street, corridors of shopping malls are designated for mass consumption. There is no time for stop and have a rest. This new "streetscape" is based on privatized consumption and surveillance.
Disneylandlike commercial theme parks (Disneyism), according to Sorkin, not only commercializes the artificial urban space, but also whole landscapes:
"This is the sky above Disney World, which here substitutes for an image of the place itself. Disney World is the first copyrighted urban environment in history, a Forbidden City for postmodernity. Renowned for its litigiousness, the Walt Disney Company will permit no photograph of its property without prior approval of its use. Is there a better illustration of the contraction of space of freedom represented by places like Disney World than this innocent sky?"
For Sorkin Disney World represents a "non-place", a nowhere-land, that could at the same time be everywhere and nowhere. Everything in the Disney world is like in the real world, only better. All the unpleasant features of big cities - like dirt and criminality - have been cleaned away. "Otherness" has been turned into a safe cartoon-world for the middle class to consume. Disneyland is such a sterile world that in which crime, pollution, and deviance are replaced by community, cleanliness, and uniformity. In this context, Disneyland is the prototype of a "simulated environment" which is produced artificially. It can be thought as parallel with the postmodernist motto of "form follows fiction". (Fig.4)
Fig.4. Disneyland, The most famous commercial theme parks: A view from
Tomorrowland in Disneyworld
"Click, click through cyberspace; this is the new architectural promenade...The network is the urban site before us, an invitation to design and construct the City of Bits (capital of the twenty-first century)… Its places will be constructed virtually by software instead of physically from stones and timbers, and they will be connected by logical linkages rather than by doors, passageways, and streets."
Is
Internet a new kind of space or just the extension of old metaphors? Most of
the metaphors and symbols we use in the digital cities are derived from an
analogy with the real cities and places. (Table.1) (Fig.5)
|
The City |
The Digital City |
|
Home |
Homepage |
|
Street |
Information Highway |
|
Shopping Mall |
Cybermall |
|
Square, agora |
Electronic Agora |
|
Post Office, post box |
E-Mail, mailbox |
Table 1. Development of the digital city as an analogy of the real one
Fig.5. Cleveland Freenet system based on the analogy with the physical public
space,Source: Graham and Marvin, 1996
One important thing about the cyberspace is that this form of space seems to reproduce many of the social and spatial forms of inequality that exist in our traditional world. In this sense one may suggest that Internet as a public sphere is just the virtual extension of the older traditions that cannot uniquely offer a new scope:
"Wireless communities, still real people in real place, yet transformed into urban shadows doomed to haunt the ultimate urban dream of the new technology"
In this context I will discuss the Internet Cafés a real place in the real-city but also offering a virtual environment, a new public sphere, in the digital city.
INTERNET CAFES: a public sphere within a
public sphere?
Today we have seen more and more Internet Cafes opening all around the world as well as in other big cities. These places are normally used for sending e-mail to friends and relatives, to play computer games, to chat with other people in IRC and so on. In an Internet Cafe using a computer interface we can communicate with other people, exchange our ideas and join some activities in cyberspace. Then can we think of Internet Cafes public sphere within another public sphere? (Fig.6)
Fig.6. Web page of Electronic Café International: The Original Café for the
Global Village
To researchers Betzen and Askwarn what makes public sphere is the discussions and the issues shared within the sphere; not its physical shaping. They regard the café as public sphere where anyone can drop by and have a snack, something to drink, discuss the latest news, or just socialize. Therefore they optimistically describe the Internet Café as a public sphere within another public sphere. Their survey indicates the general acceptance Internet as the natural extension of our bodies.
"An interesting thought we found when studying the results of the survey, was that while people in general know very little about the Internet and often talk about the dangers of the Internet, the respondents had already introduced Internet to their daily lives. They like the idea of having access to the Internet in a café. For them, it is like a natural extension of using a book or a newspaper in a café."
They suggest that people will continue to crowd at public spheres, such as cafes. Because face-to face communication is still the important and people need to meet other people. On the other hand we will meet other people on the Internet also. Internet will continue to be integrated into the real public sphere. To them this is not dialectic or alienating process. Oppositely it is a fresh opening that being a member of both real and virtual worlds. In this context I agree with the authors. We will become the members of both realms in the near future. Technology contains both positive and negative sides. As Graham suggests,
"Cyberspace is seen as either totally liberating and all good or totally dangerous and all bad - a vision of heaven or a vision of hell."
During the first half of the 20th century automobile had accelerated privatization. To many commentators widespread access to communication technologies via television and computer mediated communication (CMC) adding a new dimension upon this panorama. CMC joined to television and the screen became more interactive and subjected to mass consumption.
David Harvey, in his wonderful book "The Condition of Postmodernity", explains this turn giving reference with the change of economic system and cultural codes. Accelerating turnover time in production through "flexible accumulation" and "just-in-time" delivery system entails parallel accelerations in exchange and consumption. Improved systems of communication and information flow, linked with rationalizations in techniques of distribution, made it possible to circulate commodities through the market system with greater speed. To him this process has introduced two major changes: First, the mobilization of fashion in mass markets provided a means to accelerate the pace of consumption in every step of the individuals' lives. A second trend was a shift away from the consumption of goods and into the consumption of services as entertainment, spectacles, happenings, and distractions.
According to postmodern thinker Jean Baudrilard society of consumption is also "society of spectacle". Their bodies, landscapes, time, and public spaces are altered by perception and pleasure. He calls this loss of private space, the extroversion of the individual's private realms. The loss of distinction between public and private realms made the individual's lives transparent and visible through New Media and CMC.
We cannot think of built environment far beyond this process. The commercialization of the built environment as discussed previously attracted the theme parks and digital homes as a locus for consumption. Rise of semi-public spaces is one of the main facts towards privatization of public realm.
Successful public open spaces are the medium for recreation, safety, and shelter. To Kevin Lynch public spaces should openly accessible and welcoming to members of the community that they serve.
However today we see more and more erosion in the role of public spaces to perform these functions. Especially in developed countries there is a trend to retreat from public spaces due to fear of crime. Parks and resting areas have become an endangered species in many post-industrial cities. The role of traditional public spaces as locus for communication, political action and recreation are still transformed by comfortable semi-public theme parks.
For example malls and their adjoining green spaces have replaced parks as hangouts for kids. Parents feel that malls are safe because they are enclosed from the street, guarded by security, close at a reasonable hour, do not promote illegal activities and close to transportation services: Sterile and adjusted to mass consumption but on the other hand safe and comfortable. (Fig.7)
Fig.7. Transformation of public realm as privatized, monitored indoor malls
We have two choices in the reshaping of new public spaces. First, to think of these places as the natural extension of current social and economic dynamics. Then, to accept the reality of theme parks as a successful combination of commercialism and traditional functions of public spaces. Second to extend the definition of public spaces capturing new dematerialized spheres like Internet. Therefore the rethinking of public space design will include both spatial and aspatial processes: borrowed by Graham and Marvin "an amalgam of urban places and electronic spaces".
The latter seems more flexible and democratic way in reshaping of urban public spaces. We have witnessing the blurring of boundaries between physical and electronic environments. Despite its black holes Internet has the potential to production of built environment in the participatory context. (decentralized, flexible, interactive, informative, transparent) This is the key point. We are retreated from the control of our cities giving to professional elites including city planners, architects, bureaucrats, politicians etc. compressed by the vicious circle of commercial and political actions. These elites have also the physical control in shaping of "public opinion" that is highly questionable. In order to create successful public spaces we need a shift from representative context to the participatory one. Virtual communities, local governments' and NGO's web pages, public forums, electronic bulletin boards, and even IRC have all the great potential in the creation of such a context. Because in today's world "information is power". Consequently, if Internet increase their accessibility and range of usage for community issues it will become an efficient tool that reshaping the true public realms.
Please send your comments to:
korayvelibeyoglu@iyte.edu.tr
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