Bartlett Think-Tank » sociology of public space http://bartlett-thinktank.org Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:00:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Theorizing the ‘sociology of public space’. http://bartlett-thinktank.org/2009/12/theorizing-the-%e2%80%98sociology-of-public-space%e2%80%99/ http://bartlett-thinktank.org/2009/12/theorizing-the-%e2%80%98sociology-of-public-space%e2%80%99/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:17:10 +0000 Patricia Simoes-Aelbrecht http://bartlett-thinktank.org/?p=385 The ‘sociology of public space’ is a research area still rather unknown and unexplored. Until recently, most social sciences conventional wisdom was that the public realm was inhabited and asocial (Simmel, 1903, Wirth, 1938). Their essential argument was always that public spaces of the city were densely filled with visual and sounds stimulus overload and as a result our public realm was populated by an asocial human behaviour. In addition, there was a tendency of some scholars to grant the social character of public realm but to think of it as irrelevant and uninteresting.  It was just in the late 1950s that a group of authors came to challenge this social science’s conventional wisdom. They were Gregory Stone, Jane Jacobs, Ervin Goffman and William Whyte. Although they were not all concerned with the public realm per se, they were crucial to recognize the public realm as a social theory and to demonstrate its significance as well. Among these authors, Goffman and Whyte were the first to immerse into its study although their focus differed substantially. Goffman was the first to study it in a social-centred perspective with the focus on the organization of observable, everyday behavior, more in particular with the study of “interaction order”, the everyday social interaction among the unacquainted in urban settings. He demonstrated that what occurs between strangers passing on the street is as social as what occurs in a conversation between two lovers. Later, it was Whyte to make a study but in a spatial-centred perspective with a focus on the use of public spaces of cities, confirming not only the existence of a significant public realm social life but also how indispensable are public spaces for the vitality of the city.

Since then, there have been very few significant contributions, among them Lofland and Gehl are worth mentioning, that came to reassert once again the importance of the field of public-space sociology and to broaden its theoretical and analytical scope. But still a lot more could have been done, specially from a spatial perspective!

For those interested in or already busy with exploring the ‘sociology of public space’, please contact me. I will be very interested in discussing further since I am working in a project for an edited book and i am looking for future collaborators.

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