Setha Low and Don Mitchell: The Politics of Public Space

The politics of public space is the dispute over who may use, control and be visible in a city's squares, parks and streets, and two authors have studied it from complementary angles: the anthropologist Setha Low, who in On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (2000) documented how the design and management of plazas decide who stays and who leaves, and the geographer Don Mitchell, who in The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (2003) showed how law and policing turn public space into a place where certain people, above all those without a home, lose the right to be. Together they explain that public space is not a given but the outcome of conflict.

Setha Low: the plaza as a stage of negotiation

Low reached the politics of space through ethnography. For years she compared two plazas in San José, Costa Rica, the colonial Parque Central and the modern Plaza de la Cultura, and observed how a remodelling meant to attract tourists and commerce expelled the street vendors, pensioners, preachers and young people who gave the park its life. Her conclusion is that every design decision, benches, shade, fences, surveillance, and every rule of use takes sides between groups, and that the plaza is a stage on which society negotiates, often without saying so, who belongs. That method, the systematic observation of who uses a place and who is missing, is her main contribution.

Don Mitchell: People's Park and the annihilation of space by law

Mitchell works with the law. His central case is People's Park in Berkeley, a vacant lot that students and residents turned into a park in 1969 and that the university and the city tried to reclaim for decades, with clashes, fences and ordinances. From there he analyses the laws against sleeping, sitting, begging or camping in public that spread across the United States from the 1990s, which he calls the annihilation of space by law: rules that do not ban being poor but ban every act a homeless person needs to perform in public, so that their very existence becomes illegal.

The right to the city is decided in public space

The right to the city, for Mitchell, is decided at that frontier. Public space is where groups without power can become visible and make claims, which is why those who govern have incentives to order it: demonstrations are confined to designated zones, the plaza is privatised through business improvement districts, the park is closed at night. Mitchell argues that public space was never fully open, that it has always been won by those left out, women, workers, minorities, and that keeping it open requires continuing to fight for it. His later book, Mean Streets (2020), extends the analysis to the criminalisation of homelessness in the neoliberal era.

Undeclared exclusion: design, management and privatisation

Low and Mitchell converge on three points. First, exclusion is rarely declared: it is produced through apparently neutral design, management and rules, from the bench with armrests that prevents lying down to the noise ordinance that expels vendors. Second, privatisation advances on two fronts, ownership, with corporate plazas and foundation-run parks, and control, with private security and cameras on public ground. Third, just public space is recognised by who is in it: if the poor, the young or the homeless are missing, it has stopped being public even if it remains accessible.

For planning, the lesson is uncomfortable but clear. It is not enough to design pretty squares or declare that they belong to everyone: one must review which rules, which furniture and which management decide who may be there, and defend the right to be present of those who bother commerce or tourism. Low offers the method for seeing it, counting who uses a place and who is missing, and Mitchell the political warning: public space that is not contested is lost, and those who lose it first are those with nowhere else to go.