Ideas about matters of public concern are shaped by the spaces associated with them: Events occur in particular places, political regulations apply to specific territories, people in different locations are differentially affected by issues. Yet, political communication research has neglected the question of how the spaces of public issues are constructed in the public sphere. This is especially true for research on social media communication, which is often perceived as placeless. Yet, social media discourses are driven by unequal attention patterns based on users’ interests, resources, and abilities. To understand how these patterns manifest spatially, this interdisciplinary monograph builds on public spheres theory, communication infrastructure theory, and urban sociology to develop the framework of issue spatiality. It focuses on how social media users discuss different places in urban policy issue discourses. By applying the framework to four large-scale Twitter discourses on housing markets and cycling infrastructure in two German cities, Berlin and Frankfurt, the research reveals the spatial patterns and inequalities of social media discourses. It demonstrates that digital discourses are overwhelmingly focused on a small number of places in the urban center. These places emerge as the locus of activism and political controversy, while the urban periphery remains hidden or is discussed in purely administrative terms. Places with dense civic infrastructure and privileged residents receive disproportionate attention. The book provides an in-depth look at the ways in which socio-spatial inequalities are inscribed in public communication and shape ideas about societal issues.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book highlights the way in which contemporary forms of governance, policy and politics have been reframed by women 'working the spaces of power'. It shows how they took activist commitments into their working lives, in the process negotiating the terrain of neoliberal governance. Their work generated new political movements, community initiatives, public policies, organizational logics and forms of 'knowledge work'. Newman draws on over 50 interviews with women from four generations to interrogate, develop and challenge existing approaches to understanding social and political change. In a postscript she traces ways in which the analysis might 'speak to the present' and offer resources for contemporary politics and practice.

Trading Places rethinks, develops, and tests design-driven practices and methods to engage with participation in public space and public issues. With this book we aim to help art and design researchers, students, practitioners, and the multiple stakeholders they collaborate with, to explore what participatory ways of working in our contemporary urban environment entail. Six approaches are discussed: intervention, performative mapping, play, data mining, modelling in dialogue, and curating. Each approach offers a different kind of logic and produces a different type of knowledge. Trading Places invites the reader to discover common ground, explore new territories, and exchange points of view – in short, to trade perspectives on issues of participation.

This book explores concerns for spatial justice as streets, squares, and neighbourhoods are continuously made and remade through planning processes, political ambitions and everyday activities. By investigating three sites in London that have been the focus of masterplanning, Ed Wall exposes conflicts between planning offices and private developers who direct large urban change and community groups, market traders and residents whose public lives are inseparable from their neighbourhoods being reconfigured. The book uniquely brings sociological approaches to what are often considered architectural concerns, revealing challenges as London's public spaces are designed, regulated and lived. Through in-depth research, Ed Wall identifies how uncertainty caused by large-scale urban strategies, the realisation of visual priorities, and uneven relations between private interests, public organisations and daily lives determine the public realm of global cities. This work is intended for readers interested in how the urban spaces of their cities are continually produced in competing ways—from architecture and urban studies scholars to planners and politicians.

This book offers a conceptual map of Habermas’ philosophy and a systematic introduction to his work. It does so by systematically examining six defining themes—modernity, discourse ethics, truth and justice, public law and constitutional democracy, cosmopolitanism, and toleration—of Habermas' philosophy as well as their inner logic. The text distinguishes itself in content and perspective by offering a very clear conceptual map and by providing a new interpretation of Habermas’ views in light of his overarching system. In terms of scope, the book touches upon Habermas’ broad range of works. As for method, the text illustrates key concepts in his philosophy making it a useful reference aid. It appeals to students and scholars in the field looking for a current introductory text or supplementary reading on Habermas.

What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms, and libraries reify—or subvert—dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that this book explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation, and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on how "modernity" has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading rooms, and libraries have all been crucial to how political culture was shaped, and how dominant hegemonies—caste, class, or capital—have been challenged. It suggests that the secular public sphere that emerged in the last century in Kerala was a result of the constant negotiations between conflicting ideas which were put to test in these social spaces. At a time when digital spaces are fast replacing physical ones, this book is a timely reminder of the struggles that led to the emergence of secular public spaces in Kerala. It contributes to similar studies on public space that have emerged from other parts of the world over the last decades. A major contribution to understanding modern India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of social history, political science, political sociology, gender studies, linguistics, and South Asian studies.

Over the past few years there has been a proliferation of new kinds of retail space. Retail space has cropped up just about everywhere in the urban landscape: in libraries, workplaces, churches and museums. In short, retail is becoming a more and more manifest part of the public domain. The traditional spaces of retail, such as city centres and outlying shopping malls, are either increasing in size or disappearing, producing new urban types and whole environments totally dedicated to retail. The creation of these new retail spaces has brought about a re- and de-territorialisation of urban public space, and has also led to transformations in urban design and type of materials used, and even in the logic and ways through which these design amenities meet the needs of retailers and/or consumers. This book describes how the retailisation of public domains affects our everyday life and our use of the built environment. Taking an architectural and territorial perspective on this issue, it looks specifically at how retail and consumption spaces have changed and territorialised urban life in different ways. It then develops a methodology and a set of concepts to describe and understand the role of architecture in these territorial transformations.

This book links two fields of interest which are too seldom considered together: the production and critique of art in public space and social behaviour in the public realm. Whilst most writing about public art has focused on the aesthetic, cultural and political intentions and processes that shape its production, this edited collection examines a variety of public artworks from the perspective of their actual everyday use. Contributors are interested in the rich diversity of peoples’ engagements with public artworks across various spatial and temporal scales, encounters which do not limit themselves to the representational aspects of the art, and which are not necessarily as the artist, curator or sponsor intended. Case studies consider a broad range of public art, including commissioned and unofficial artworks, memorials, street art, street furniture, performance art, sound art and media installations.

Based on original and previously unseen written and sound archives and interviews with former and current radio producers and presenters, Public Issue Radio addresses the controversial question of the political leanings of current affairs programmes, and asks if Analysis became an early platform for both Thatcherite and Blairite ideas.