Here is a very short excellent essay by a landscape architect in Boston, Privatizing the Public Realm. I hope some middle class consumers still have the ability to read an entire page.
Our city hall plaza belongs to the center city district, the parkway is a venue for exclusive Budweiser festivals, and Clark Park will now be Tony West's beer garden. It's hard to know if more than a couple of people out there have started to connect the dots between school closures, the AVI corporate windfall, the gentrifications, the police state, and the privatization of all public spaces; with the shift to corporate totalitarianism. ( The introduction of university sponsored censorship, several years ago, has had the planned chilling effect on this list and political speech in the neighborhood. )
If the bewildered local gentry ever starts to wake up to the real world, they will need to understand how their abandonment of principles was studied by elite business universities, like the Wharton University, and signaled middle class readiness for corporate enslavement! Our upscale village paradise was a very important pilot study!
I've blown the whistle on this privatization process since the late 1990s, but most of the neighbors were busy laughing at my tin foil hat and the incessant ad hominem attacks from our "community leaders."
I hope some locals can wake up and understand the reality of the world they thought they wanted.
"Public spaces are the arenas where the collective, common life which defines us as a society is acted out, and where we come into contact with those who are like and those who are different from ourselves. They are the places where we are all equal and where we are all "home." They are the places where our freedoms of speech and assembly are protected, where we can exercise the precious right of criticizing the government. In public spaces we are reminded of the most important civics lesson: We are all in this together.
When private agendas of stratification and control are imposed on those places, the very heart of democratic principle is threatened. Democracy cannot survive when we have no place to gather where there is "no purchase necessary." Democracy cannot survive substituting property rights for civil rights. Democratic principle cannot survive subordinating citizenship to consumerism.
The transformation of public space into a corporate preserve is an attempt by powerful elites to erase from our minds a consciousness of ourselves as people with goals which transcend a market-defined framework of social interaction and values which cannot be measured by the "bottom line."
Above all, the privatization of public space is an attempt to diminish the democratic dreams of ordinary citizens and to make us forget that we have the power to achieve them."
