Our Urban Context

Molly (Hanzi) Meng

Section from Indeterminate Edges: A Temporal, Liminal, Hopeful Reading of New York City's Everyday Public Space.

MS Design and Urban Ecologies, Parsons School of Design, 2026.

The Neoliberal Frame of Contemporary Public Space

The contemporary urban condition is increasingly defined by a fundamental shift in how public space is produced and valued, a transformation driven primarily by neoliberalism. As David Harvey (2005, 2) defines it, neoliberalism is "a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." This framework has entailed, among other things, an increasing reliance on public–private partnerships to pursue economic development in our cities today (Harvey 2005, 76). The design and management of public spaces under such conditions has then extended neoliberal urbanization directly into the everyday life of the street. Margaret Kohn (2004, 6) draws an alarming distinction between two opposing frameworks: the "traditional public forum doctrine" and the "property rights" approach. The former emphasizes the government's responsibility for stewarding public spaces as shared resources and ensuring citizens' access to them; the latter treats public spaces as essentially private holdings, such that "the responsible bureaucracy has discretion to regulate or forbid citizens' access." To live under the neoliberal regime, Harvey observes, is to accept "that bundle of rights necessary for capital accumulation" as the operative inalienable right, one that trumps nearly any other conception of rights one might name (Harvey 2005, 181).

When public spaces are designed primarily as commodities to generate profit, they inevitably reshape the democratic reality of the city. Because capital is risk-averse, it demands urban spaces that hold high investment potential and follow predictable market trends. To guarantee these returns, space must be highly predictable and easily manageable. This economic requirement for predictability closes off generative possibilities, producing homogeneous public spaces that prioritize global market trends over the local social making of place, shutting off the world-making that public space can otherwise enable in its spatial locality (De Waard et al. 2024). As access to the public realm is increasingly filtered through the lens of investment potential and economic favorability, the existence of plural publics is displaced. Nancy Fraser's path-breaking critique of the singular public sphere is instructive here. Where Habermas idealized the public sphere as a single body of "private persons" assembled to discuss matters of "public concern" or "common interest" (Fraser 1990, 58), Fraser shows that cities are in fact composed of multiple "counterpublics" whose distinct forms of presence stand in "always-conflictual" relations with the dominant bourgeois public (Fraser 1990, 61). Bourgeois publics, in turn, have historically excoriated these alternatives and deliberately sought to block broader participation (Fraser 1990, 61). The homogenization of urban space proceeds along this same line. The built environment curates a sanitized experience for the bourgeois public, pushing marginalized groups out of sight or into fragmented, representational roles. The urban experience is reduced to the consumption of a lifestyle, sometimes ironically extracted from the very marginal demographics it has displaced, where inhabitants interact with a curated aesthetic rather than with real people across social divides.

Because neoliberal urbanism is now integral to our urban process, from capital investment and city-making to the day-to-day regulation of space, we must recognize the conditions under which people, rather than capital, might make space. Contemporary urban developments have reduced public life to a network of destinations and treat the immediate, in-between spaces as zones engineered to move bodies as quickly as possible from one point of capital activity to the next. The spatial experience of locality is reduced to what Marc Augé calls "non-place," which "exists, and it does not contain organic society" (Augé 1995, 111). Cities functioning as a logistical network for labor and capital present this "spectacular acceleration of means of transport," as Augé notes:

Its concrete outcome involves considerable physical modifications: urban concentrations, movements of population and the multiplication of what we call "non-places," in opposition to the sociological notion of place, associated by Mauss and a whole ethnological tradition with the idea of a culture localized in time and space. (Augé 1995)

The disappearance of immediate public life produces more than physical exclusion; it fundamentally alters the perceptive function of public space and inflicts a deeper psychological wound: the destruction of moral and psychological ownership. Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks (2001) describe psychological ownership as the feeling that a space belongs to the community and that individuals have a right to inhabit, shape, and attach meaning to it, regardless of legal title. When a city strips its inhabitants of the opportunity to dwell in, adapt, or claim space as their own, it loses the trust of its people in its capacity to host local plural life. People go to destinations, public or private, not only because they choose to, but because there is nowhere else to go. This harms psychological ownership precisely because the framing of public space as a destination keeps it perpetually distant rather than immediate and adjacent. It is a constant reminder that public life is something to be reached for rather than something one practices every day. It harms moral ownership because it hides the process of commoning with one another in our public spaces today, imprinting the highly individualistic notions inculcated by neoliberalism, and thus teaching us to mind our own business rather than attuning to and finding solidarity among our immediate adjacency. As the very process of forming public life is designed out of the public spaces, citizens are no longer required to navigate difference or share space with the "other," leading to an atrophy of public capacity. As Richard Sennett has long argued, the skills of cooperation and civility with strangers are themselves cultivated through exposure to difference in shared public settings (Sennett 2012). Cultivating the conditions for coexistence in public space is therefore the indispensable work of building public capacity. When individuals and communities are allowed to be together, leave traces, and attach meaning to their physical surroundings, they develop a process to claim the space that transcends legal deeds.

If the formal, legal governance of the city has been co-opted by the property-owner model, then the restoration of a truly democratic public realm cannot rely solely on top-down state intervention; it must be reclaimed from the bottom up by residents asserting psychological and moral ownership of the spaces they inhabit. Legal title to urban space may be increasingly concentrated in private hands, but formal ownership is not the only basis for spatial agency. To reintroduce genuine civic governance into the city, inhabitants must first feel that they have a legitimate stake in their environment. This is the core of what Henri Lefebvre (1968) first called "the right to the city": not merely a legal right of access to existing resources, but a collective, moral right to change and reinvent the city through active participation and appropriation. Under such conditions, everyday experimentation can evolve into a process of self-making and world-making, ultimately driving individual and collective self-actualization (De Waard et al. 2024).

To fully grasp the generative capacity of these participatory spaces, we must understand them through Hannah Arendt's concept of the "space of appearance." In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt describes this not as a pre-existing physical stage but as a political realm generated the moment individuals gather to act and speak, and disappearing the moment the action ceases. For Arendt, "appearance" and its shared visibility together generate "power":

Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance, and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d'être. Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes. (Arendt 1958, 204)

Building on Arendt and her account of "work" and "action," both De Waard et al. (2024) and Bonnie Honig (2017) draw attention to the infrastructural potential of being-together: "the work that builds public infrastructures, and on which political practices, in turn, rely" (De Waard et al. 2024). Such infrastructures, made through participation, "press us into relations with others" and "are sites of attachment and meaning that occasion the inaugurations, conflicts, and contestations that underwrite everyday citizenships and democratic sovereignties" (Honig 2017, 6).

Read through this lens, the making of space and the protection of spaces of appearance demand far greater attention for their immanent social, cultural, and political potential. Attention matters because only when we recognize how public space is actively being claimed can we cultivate the conditions for more plural occupations to emerge. Protection matters because capitalism has a historical tendency either to extract from such spaces when it sees profit in them, or to police them once they get in the way of profit-making.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso.

De Waard, Jolijn, et al. 2024. [Full citation pending — author list, title, publication.]

Fraser, Nancy. 1990. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." Social Text 25/26: 56–80.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Honig, Bonnie. 2017. Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. New York: Fordham University Press.

Kohn, Margaret. 2004. Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space. New York: Routledge.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1968. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos.

Pierce, Jon L., Tatiana Kostova, and Kurt T. Dirks. 2001. "Toward a Theory of Psychological Ownership in Organizations." Academy of Management Review 26, no. 2: 298–310.

Sennett, Richard. 2012. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation. New Haven: Yale University Press.