A game of appearances: Public spaces and public spheres

Between the 1990s and the financial services crisis of 2008, new public spaces were regularly included in urban redevelopment schemes in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). Following the report of the Urban Task Force, and the invention of the new category of social exclusion, new public spaces were seen as producing social cohesion. Like public art in the 1980s and 1990s, new public spaces represented a cosmetic approach to a range of deeper-rooted urban ills, but were a low-budget, highly visible alternative to dealing with problems of infrastructure and wealth distribution. This article asks what issues emerge from an investigation of new public spaces, what histories are co-opted by their advocacy, and whether public spaces have ever housed a public sphere of social self-determination. It asks whether a proto-public sphere is found in the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and whether or not the idea of a public sphere is reflected in Millennium Place, Coventry, a new public space that is the site of a participatory art project by Jochen Gerz: The Public Bench. All this is put into focus by reference to the worldwide appearance of Occupy in 2011, which might have been an ephemeral public sphere.