Public Sphere

Definition

The public sphere is the social realm in which private individuals assemble to discuss and contest matters of common concern — in Jürgen Habermas's founding account, the eighteenth-century bourgeois public of coffee houses, salons, and print that stood between the private household and the state. Its built premise is spatial: the public sphere presupposes sites — squares, streets, fora — whose publicness is legible in their form. The wiki carries the concept in two registers: the Habermasian normative one (habermas-jurgen), and the spatial-revisionist one supplied by Jonathan D. Solomon's Hong Kong chapter, which deliberately rewrites the term with an apostrophe: "The public and private spheres are defined by public and private 'spheres, or atmospheres" — 'sphere' marked as a sphere of air. On this reading the public sphere is not a category of space ("all space has equal potential to become part of a public or private sphere based on its occupation") but a state of air: the publicly experienced atmosphere whose occupation — workers' Sundays, protest encampments, hair-salon streets — constitutes the public. Solomon's variant has a real-world reference point for Hong Kong: "the city has so few traditional spaces of state power as understood in either the Eastern or the Western canon" that "politics are practiced in the public 'sphere" — the public sphere persisting "in small-scale, ad hoc actions, appropriations, and occupations of private, public, and semi-public infrastructure."

Key Thinkers

• Jürgen Habermas — the concept's founding theorist: the bourgeois public sphere as the realm of critical debate between household and state (see author page).
• Jonathan D. Solomon — the spatial-atmospheric revision: the public sphere rewritten as public 'spheres — "defined by public and private 'spheres, or atmospheres"; politics practiced in the air, not on the square.
• David Howes — the sensory register (via Solomon): the sounds and scents of Hong Kong's foreign domestic workers establishing "temporary cultural boundaries" between "Little Manila" and the financial center — "the politics of differing sensory strategies for making sense of the same place" (not yet paged — see log).
• Hannah Arendt — the political-theoretical backdrop: the public realm as the space of appearance where plurality shows itself — the square tradition whose Hong Kong absence Solomon's chapter registers (see plurality).
• Michel de Certeau — the practiced underside: the public sphere as what users make of the places provided — "their occupation tends to do so instead" (see practiced-place).

Related Concepts

• interior-urbanism — the condition that displaces the square: Hong Kong's continuous interior as the medium of its public 'spheres.
• commons — the normative alternative the public sphere presupposes: what ad hoc occupations claim when they occupy private infrastructure.
• privatised-public-space — the POPS complication: the HSBC plaza "owned by the bank but legally designated a public passageway" — the public sphere legally pre-existing and judicially revocable.
• atmosphere — the medium: the public 'sphere as the publicly experienced state of air.
• atmospheric-politics — power's administration of the same air: teargas and perfume as rival sphere-managers.
• practiced-place — the mechanism: "In a city in which formal urban spaces do not embody narratives, their occupation tends to do so instead."
• separate-spheres — the nineteenth-century gendered ancestor of the public/private sphere pair, rewritten here as a distinction of air rather than territory.
• plurality — the Arendtian test the occupation-meetings satisfy: plurality appearing in the atrium.
• power-and-space — the debate the concept's revision feeds.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the street-level public sphere avant la lettre: city sidewalks as "the main public places of a city, [its] most vital organs" (p. 29); the informal public life that "formal public organizations in cities require… underlying them, mediating between them and the privacy of the people of the city" (p. 58); the "web of public respect and trust" grown from "many, many little public sidewalk contacts" (p. 56) — "Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow" (p. 73); the "freedom of the city" that safe streets confer and Turf forecloses (pp. 47, 50); and the public character as the street's informal officer — the storekeeper who lends umbrellas, keeps keys, hears the news and "spread[s] word wholesale" (pp. 68–70). Where Solomon's public 'sphere is occupation of atmosphere, Jacobs's is use of the sidewalk: public life as the by-product of errands, not the content of a forum. See public-characters, eyes-on-the-street, turf, privacy.
• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the concept's atmospheric revision: "Politics are practiced in the public 'sphere in Hong Kong in part because the city has so few traditional spaces of state power"; "no street or square holds such a symbolic place at the center of the city's public life"; the public sphere as "small-scale, ad hoc actions, appropriations, and occupations of private, public, and semi-public infrastructure"; the HSBC atrium encampment and the Umbrella Movement as the concept's built cases.
• The Human Condition (Arendt 1958) — the public realm's classical definition (the space of appearance), against which the Hong Kong square-less public 'sphere is measured.
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — the memorial as a 'true public realm': the Vietnam Veterans Memorial 'provides common ground' and is 'the most important evidence the late twentieth century produced that design can still serve as a unifying social force' (pp. 25–27); and the city's function, after Mumford, as the stage of 'meetings, encounters, challenges' (p. 173).
• source-notes/soja-2000-postmetropolis

Open Questions

• Is Solomon's apostrophe a typographic artifact or a deliberate device? The chapter never glosses it; the wiki carries both readings — if deliberate, the public 'sphere is the concept's name for publicly owned air; if not, the reader's reconstruction.
• Does a public sphere of atmospheres admit of domination more absolutely than one of squares? Solomon: "interior urbanism can make public life easier to snuff out" — the public sphere whose meeting-place is air can be cleared by changing the air (atmospheric-politics).
• Can the Habermasian norms (critical debate, public opinion) be located in the Hong Kong occupations — smartphone-app coordination without central planning as the public sphere's degraded or upgraded form?
• Howes's "sensuous (re)construction of space" shows the public sphere's sensory pluralism — but whose sphere wins when scents conflict? Is "Little Manila" the public sphere or a partitioned counter-sphere (boundaries, smellscape)?
• Is there a public sphere without a public at all — the pedestrian network as the potential public sphere ("potential spaces for political action") whose publics assemble only contingently?