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The Production and Politics of Public Space Radical Democratic Politics and Public Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2014

Kaveh Ehsani
Kaveh Ehsani*
Affiliation:
Department of International Studies, DePaul University, Chicago, Ill.; e-mail: kehsani@depaul.edu
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Extract

These are critical times for democratic politics from Morocco to Iran, as heterogeneous popular movements for greater representation and social justice increasingly challenge established authorities. It is not surprising that these struggles have laid claim to symbolic urban places in the process of claiming their collective political demands. Politics is not purely discursive or institutional; it always has material and spatial dimensions, which for democratic politics is manifested through public space. For all the recent enthusiasm about the emancipating possibilities of the digital media, the fact remains that Tahrir Square (Cairo), Gezi Park (Istanbul), Revolution Street (Tehran), and Pearl Roundabout (Manama) are not virtual locations on the Internet.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 159 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 See the special issue “Gender Frontlines,” Middle East Report, no. 268 (Fall 2013).

2 For a classic statement see Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996)Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Sorkin, Michael, ed., Variations on a Theme Park (New York: Noonday Press, 1992)Google Scholar; special issue “Espace Public et Complexité Sociale,” Espaces et Sociétés nos. 62–63 (1990); Kohn, Margaret, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar; Low, Setha and Smith, Neil, eds., The Politics of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; and Ruddick, Susan, “Construction Difference in Public Spaces: Race, Class, and Gender as Interlocking Systems,” Urban Geography 17 (1996): 132–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Bayat, Asef, Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

6 See Ehsani, Kaveh, “Municipal Matters: The Urbanization of Consciousness and Political Change in Tehran,” Middle East Report no. 212 (1999): 22–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Khatam, Azam, “Struggles over Defining the Moral City,” in Being Young and Muslim, ed. Herrera, Linda and Bayat, Asef (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 207–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.