ABSTRACT
Critics and historians began to see multiple versions of the theme park in the increasingly spectacular and centralized zones of leisure and consumption—gentrified shopping streets, massive shopping malls, festival marketplaces. The existence and popularity of these commercial public places is used to frame a pervasive narrative of loss that contrasts the current debasement of public space with golden ages and golden sites—the Greek agora, the coffeehouses of early modern Paris and London, the Italian piazza, the town square. In the bourgeois public sphere, citizenship is primarily defined in relation to the state, framed within clear categories of discourse, and addressed through political debate and electoral politics. This liberal notion of citizenship is based on abstract universal liberties, with democracy guaranteed by the state’s electoral and juridical institutions. In order to locate these multiple sites of public expression, people need to redefine their understanding of “space.”.
