it on their own.
In this political context, the idea of public space takes on a special urgency. A society of split men and women badly needs a terrain on which people can come together to heal their inner wounds—or at least to treat them—and advance from political to human emancipation. Of course, there is no spatial form that in itself could make this happen. But we can imagine environments that could help it happen: environments open to everybody where, first of all, a society’s inner contradictions could emerge freely and openly and, second, where people could begin to deal with these contradictions and try to work them out. Any society that takes the rights of man and citizen seriously has a responsibility to provide spaces where these rights can be expressed, tested, dramatized, played off against each other. Implicit in our basic democratic rights, then, is the right to public space.
Americans are faced with special difficulties in trying to secure this right. Our Republic inherited no splendid monuments and plazas, such as were built by the feudal and absolutist powers that dominated Europe’s past. (I will have more to say later about those spaces.) Our built environments have been created almost entirely by private capital for private purposes and profits. Nevertheless, Americans are at least intermittently aware of what they are missing. Again and again, since the earliest days of the Republic, there have been popular demands and mobilizations for public space. Sometimes the people are lucky enough to get Central Parks and Washington Squares. But Americans haven’t been so lucky for a long while.
Michael Walzer’s distinction between “single-minded” and “open-minded” space is especially fruitful for understanding the politics of public space in the USA. Walzer’s “single minded” metaphor can help explain what makes our post–World War Two public spaces so sterile and empty, why they have been gold mines for owners and developers but ghost towns for the public. And his “open-minded” metaphor can help us imagine what kind of spaces we really need, so that we can fight for them effectively in the generation to come.
If I have an argument with Walzer, it is that he has not adequately thought through the consequences of his own values. Specifically, his vision of open-minded space isn’t open enough. I want to open it up some more, to expand our vision of what public space should be. I want to bring in all sorts of people, impulses, ideas, and modes of behavior that Walzer leaves out, to unfold dimensions of openness that he doesn’t seem to see. My critique of Walzer and my own vision of open space will emerge in two parts: first, openness to modern individualism; second, openness to the urban poor. I will be promoting an ideal of open space that Montesquieu was the first to identify, and to celebrate, on the streets of Paris after the death of Louis XIV; an environment where
Dissimulation, that art so practiced and so necessary among us, is unknown … Everything is said, everything is seen, everything can be heard. The heart shows itself as openly as the face.1
A PLACE IN THE SUN: MODERN INDIVIDUALISM
There is a distinctive strain in Walzer’s argument that seems to grow out of a paradoxical but persistent tradition in modern thought. This tradition professes an Olympian disdain for modern life as a whole and dreams nostalgically of a golden age of Greek or Roman antiquity. When the nostalgia takes a political form, it often focuses on idealized, magnificent public spaces where ancient men are said to have lived on a lofty plane of civic virtue. (This tradition doesn’t say much about where, or how, ancient women lived.) Moderns, by contrast, are seen as petty souls mired hopelessly in trivial pursuits.
When Walzer works in this tradition, his argument shifts from an indictment of capitalism for depriving the people of public space, and turns into an indictment of people for not wanting public space or caring about it. Thus, he says, modern men and women have been deformed by “the triumph of liberal individualism—which is not merely a creed but a state of mind, a … characterological formation.” People with this character can imagine and pursue happiness only in narrowly private forms. They seek material comfort, intimacy, love, “personal and mutual exploration.”
Walzer seems to write off all these needs as exclusive private affairs. He sees his contemporaries as having fallen from the heights of “older republicanism,” which left us a noble heritage of “monuments and fellow-citizens.” The men of those monumental times could be at home in public space because they were supposedly free from the press of personal needs that obsess us. They understood that public life “requires impersonality and role playing; civility, not sincerity; reticence and wit, not confession.” But we moderns are unable to leave our selves behind, and so public space is no place for us.
Walzer’s tone is uncertain and possibly ironic here. He may not believe all this. But there are plenty of people who do believe it. The pity is that their nostalgic vision of the past blinds them to the life that is unfolding abundantly in public spaces all around them right now. If they could only learn to look, they would see private and public life coming together and interfusing in fascinating and creative new ways.
To show briefly what I have in mind, I want to describe a song and an accompanying video that appeared and became a surprise hit in the winter of 1983–84. It is called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” featuring the previously unknown Cyndi Lauper, singing her own version of the song:
Some boys take a beautiful girl
and hide her away from the rest of the world.
I want to be the one to walk in the sun.
And girls just want to have fun. Yes, girls just want to have fun.2
Lauper is a singer and comedian in the mold of Fanny Brice: a flamboyant “personality” whose extravagant mannerisms often disguise the range and expressiveness of her voice; a brilliant clown who has the dramatic power to suggest underlying depth and sadness without breaking the rhythm of the clowning. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is remarkable for the power with which it incarnates a collective dream of what life in public space might be.
This song begins as a story set in a distinctive social space. It is a space that is central in twentieth-century popular culture, but (apart from the music of Bruce Springsteen) almost wholly absent from the popular culture of the 1980s: the tenement flat of the urban ethnic working class. In this space, shot in close-up to emphasize its claustral density and suffocating warmth, Lauper appears as a working girl in conflict with her family, fighting to break out of her parents’ stifling embrace and simultaneously out of the lower class she and they are in: “Oh, mommy dear, we’re not the fortunate ones, / but girls, they want to have fun.” She does this by talking on the phone (her parents vainly try to stop this), and by assembling a racially and ethnically integrated group of girls, who proceed to go dancing and singing through the streets of downtown Brooklyn.
As we follow the song and dance, we discover the distinctively public character of the fun that is at issue here. It springs from banter, flirtation, dress, theatrical display, extravagant gestures, stunning moves that are made to be seen. The heroine and her friends are not only starring in their own show, but—for a little while, at least—become their own auteurs. But it is only in public that such a show can go on. The protagonists must interact with strangers; some will rise to play along with them, or opposite them, while others crystallize into their audience. They must learn to depend on these reactions to give their actions a shared meaning, to incorporate them into public time.
As the girls dance through Brooklyn’s streets, they find themselves suddenly thrust into a gauntlet of construction workers. This is probably one of the primal scenes that the girls’ parents feared. But to our surprise and delight, the workers only smile genially and, even more surprising, some of them actually throw down their tools and join the dance. The parade descends into the underground, then emerges from the IRT in the neighborhood of Wall Street. Here they attract fellow travelers of a higher class, both aged stuffed shirts and yuppies. It appears
