ABSTRACT
The broad decay of twentieth-century American liberalism provides the crucial context for the restructuring of what counts as public space today, and this, in turn, was sparked by a range of social shifts and transformations: reactions against the liberatory maelstrom of 1960s politics; the implosion of official communism after 1989; and the consequent neoliberal onslaught after the 1980s. The clampdown on public space, however, is not simply due to a heightened fear of terrorism after 2001, and it has many local- as well as national-scale inspirations. Many public uses of space are increasingly outlawed and policed in ways unimaginable a few years previously, but these rights were already under concerted attack well before 2001. Public space is traditionally differentiated from private space in terms of the rules of access, the source and nature of control over entry to a space, individual and collective behavior sanctioned in specific spaces, and rules of use.
