Right to the City, Social

Right to the City, Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, By: Don Mitchell

Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City, Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. Guildford Press, 2003.

Even -- or especially, in a privacy-obsessed society such as our own, public space is hotly contested, particularly in urban areas. The one principle individuals of a variety of political affiliations seem to believe is that public space can never be taken for granted, rather urban public areas are battle grounds of ideology as to what being a citizen means in a free society. This struggle is chronicled in The Right to the City, Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space through a series of case studies, including the early 20th century labor movement's demand that unions have the freedom to assemble, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the battle over People's Park; and the rise of anti-homeless legislation in the 1980s.

One aspect of this book that is very surprising is that despite the Constitutions' language about the right of the people to assemble, the right of organized political protest in public spaces has often been very fragile within the court system. The U.S. Supreme Court's 1939 landmark decision in Hague v. CIO, stated that the right to use public spaces, such as parks, must be subordinated to the needs of the "general order" (Mitchell 70). The case was seen as a landmark because it did not regulate activities to protect private property or order, but that of the public order (Mitchell 71). Thus the ability to freely assemble has never been absolute -- even today, in the case of the anti-abortion movement; protests may take the form of illegal actions that inhibit the rights of others. "Law is always enacted" argues Mitchell, who views protest as a performance of rights, specifically the right to public space, not simply an exercise of rights (Mitchell 28). However, the courts have more often denied the use of public space for such articulation of rights, which reinforces social inequities. The liberal Justice of the Supreme Court William Brennan bemoaned the fact that a corporation has access to the ears of millions through the electronic airwaves to sell soap, but a person who wished to get on a soapbox in public could have his or her rights more easily taken away (Mitchell 72).

The ability of the state to hem in the free use of public space is clearly seen in the limitation of the Free Speech movement in Berkeley, California. Students at the state university were outraged by the limitations placed upon the campus by the administration, such as prohibiting non-students from disseminating materials and the prohibition on distributing political leaflets on the Bancroft-Telegraph sidewalk, traditionally an area of political protest (Mitchell 90). The university invoked its right, in loco parentis to supervise free expression. Students and administrators were at war as to whether the university was a totally free public space, or a space subject to regulation -- this division would later be waged over the People's Park, an area designated for university expansion. The war between the university and state authorities that ensued turned the park into a generational or ideological battle, articulated and mapped on the space. Who owned the public land, the state that controlled the university, or the people, the students who attended the university?