Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space. By Margaret Kohn. New York: Routledge, 2004. 256p. 22.95 paper.In her first book, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (2003), Margaret Kohn analyzed the spatiality of early working-class activism in Italy and developed a sophisticated argument about the conditions for democratic empowerment. In this book, she shifts her attention to the United States. Aside from one chapter on the Wobblies, the focus is on the present. In both books, her emphasis is on the way in which the space for political engagement—“public space”—is constructed, sustained, controlled, or foreclosed. Her overarching theme is that theorists of democracy have paid far too little attention to the spatial conditions for democratic interaction. As she attempts to show in the present book, the privatization of public space—that is, the transformation of once-open downtowns into privately governed business improvement districts, the creation of privately governed gated communities in the suburbs and elsewhere, and the colonization of once-public space by private businesses—tends to insulate people from direct, physical encounters with people who are “different” or who may be attempting to persuade them to think otherwise about political issues. The trend toward privatization is particularly pronounced in the United States, and Kohn's concern here is to show us why we should be concerned about it, as democrats.