ABSTRACT
A major premise of this book that is fully supported by the case studies is that access to civic spaces has the potential to improve a community’s capacity to demand more responsive forms of urban governance and to better its quality of life. Given this, the researchers seek to discover ways to create and support civic spaces to facilitate civil society activities in a peaceful, tolerant manner that can also encourage better urban governance. As such, the work in this book parallels related research on state-community synergies (Evans, 2002) by adding an explicit spatial dimension to the relationships between civil society and governance (Figure 11.1).
