Public and Private Spaces of the City by Ali Madanipour

Author:Ali Madanipour
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Urban & Land Use Planning, Architecture
ISBN: 9780415256285
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-03-12T21:00:00+00:00

4.6 The play-acting model cannot account for the phenomenological perspective of individuals, who may believe they are engaged in truthful behaviour and not in play-acting, as exemplified in the religious experience (Milan, Italy)

and that a civilized balance between play-acting and intimate life was a goal to move towards rather than the actual conditions in which the vast majority of people lived.

Emphasis on conventions brings with it the problem of the origins of conventions: who develops the conventions and who benefits from particular forms of conventions? As the size of public life has expanded from small elites to large parts of the population, what are the conventions that apply to all and what are the ways in which these conventions are negotiated upon? Many conventions were formed on the basis of the beliefs of the elite in what constituted civilized behaviour. How far are these conventions acceptable today? In a less hierarchical, more egalitarian society, what are the modes of expression that are understood and appreciated by many rather than few? If masks are to be worn in public so as to enhance public life, what should the masks look like for effective communication? If public spaces are to provide settings for public behaviour and social relations, what shape should they take to accommodate many forms of interaction? Should we bemoan the decline of the elite sophistication of public appearances or should we welcome the rise of popular intimacy, which enables a wider range of relationships free of potentially rigid conventions? Should we be nostalgic about the pomp and ceremony with which the eighteenth-century public behaviour was conducted (which was so effectively ridiculed in the caricatures of the time) or should we welcome the more egalitarian codes of dress and behaviour? Could it be the case that crying for the fall of public man and the decline of public sphere would be a nostalgic cry for the decline of a particular aesthetic form, a particular set of appearances without appreciating the actual changes that have occurred in social life?

CONCLUSION

Public sphere is the realm of society as a whole and of the state. A public space is provided by the state and used by the society. In other words, it is controlied by the public authorities, concerns people as a whole, is open or available to them, and is used or shared by all members of a community. There are, however, ambiguities associated with the notion of public sphere. It refers both to the state and the society, both to their entirety and their subsections, both to universal and particular categories, both to impersonal and interpersonal relations, both to concrete and abstract concepts, both to normative and descriptive notions, and to many shades of publicness, where degrees of access, interest and agency can vary widely.

Interpersonal exchange relations among strangers came to be the dominant form of social relations in emerging cities of post-medieval Europe. The cultural framework that enabled this exchange, good manners and social performance, found a new significance. This meant

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