Micropolitics of Public Space: On the Contested Limits of Citizenship as a Locational Practice

Can social psychology say something relevant about citizenship? Recently, there have been successful attempts to address this question (e.g., Barnes, Auburn, & Lea, 2004; Haste, 2004; Shotter, 1993; see Condor, 2011, for a detailed discussion). The theoretical and empirical foundations of this emerging approach to citizenship include a well-established range of concepts (e.g., social identity and self-categorisation, membership and belonging, ideological dilemmas, prejudice, cultural values, etc.), sensitising topics (e.g., immigration, racism, nationhood, civic participation, multiculturalism, etc.) and recurring ideas (e.g., the contested nature of citizenship, its political connotation, its context-related and historically situated meaning, etc.). These incipient contributions have made citizenship a theme that is worthy of exploration by social psychologists because they provide shared analytical frameworks that are insightful and familiar within the usual disciplinary boundaries.

However, the topic of citizenship also has the capacity to relate to other notions that are outside psychology and might be useful when examined using the discipline’s usual explanations. One of these ‘importable’ topics is public space, which is a relevant site where citizenship is enacted on a daily basis. The relationship between social life in public spaces and citizenship poses a twofold challenge for social psychology. On the one hand, there is an interest in determining why the discipline should offer a specific sort of knowledge about public space that is capable of enriching ongoing debates about citizenship. On the other hand, there is the need to articulate the conceptual paths for examining the interface between citizenship and public space from a social-psychological viewpoint. This article grapples with these tasks and contributes a social-psychological account of how public space dynamics may be consequential for the daily construction of citizenship.

The article develops three main ideas based on an empirical case study. First, it is argued that the daily construction of citizenship can be conceptualised as a place-related process located in public space. This focus on the ‘locational’ construction of citizenship implies that some of the main social-psychological processes that are involved in the representation and enactment of citizenship, such as membership, belonging, status, rights, entitlements and recognition, can be viewed as emplaced practices rather than as dislocated entities. The second idea highlights the extent to which the boundaries of citizenship, understood as a place-related psychological category, are overtly contested whenever conflicts concerning controversial practices in public spaces surface. The stress on the troubled nature of citizenship implies that definitions of ‘the citizen’ are constantly re-shaped as everyday place-discourses and spatial practices in public spaces unfold in problematic ways. Finally, the article pinpoints the main ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988) that frame the construction of citizenship as a process located in public space, considering their value to support or challenge the normative socio-political order. The aim of the article is to show how a social psychology of citizenship can be articulated through the analysis of everyday understandings of socio-spatial behaviour in public places.

From the How to the Where: Locating Citizenship in Public Space

Citizenship can be broadly understood as a legal status, a set of rights, a political activity or a form of collective identity and solidarity (Bosniak, 2000). From these four conceptualisations, explicit attempts to address the psychology of citizenship have clearly focused on the last one, which highlights “feelings of citizenship, belonging and social integration” (Chávez, 2008, p. 14). Although early attempts to broach the psychological dimension of citizenship were mainly individualistic, cognitive-centred and based on behaviouristic assumptions (e.g., Tyler, Rasinski, & Griffin, 1986), later developments have tackled the relational processes that ‘construct the citizen’ (Haste, 2004) as a social and cultural being within the interactional dynamics of everyday life. In this social-psychological framework, citizenship has been conceived to be a contested field of belonging that is achieved through joint interaction (Barnes et al., 2004; Shotter, 1993), an identity-experience that involves positive recognition in the public sphere (Hopkins & Blackwood, 2011), a condition that is related to the intergroup processes of differentiation (McNamara, Muldoon, Stevenson, & Slattery, 2011) or a rhetorical construction of legitimate membership to a political unit (Gibson & Hamilton, 2011). When combined, these studies justify talking about ‘psychological citizenship’, which is added to the list of dimensions (e.g., political, civic, social, legal, ecological, cultural, economic, etc.; see Condor, 2011) that are usually used to describe this concept.

A common underlying concern in these seminal studies is how citizenship is articulated through, and is intertwined with, social identity processes. The stress on the how allows for the exploration of the complex dynamics of belonging, self-categorisation, identity-recognition and claims for legitimate membership, which shape citizenship as a psychological experience. In addition to this argument, one can adhere to the basic assumption of what has been recently labelled as the ‘spatial turn’ in social psychology (e.g., Dixon & Durrheim, 2000). If human experience and social relations are inevitably located, then citizens’ relations and the construction of citizenship may also have a common place. Related to the how, there must be a where-dimension of citizenship that is implicated in the sort of identity work and legitimacy construction that defines citizenship’s psychological nature: a setting in which one can examine how these processes take place, either by observing territorial actions or through discursive accounts of who does what, how and where, in regard to citizenship. Public space seems to fit this description because it is an important arena where citizenship is experienced, staged, performed, challenged and demanded on a daily basis (Di Masso, 2012).

Considering citizenship as a locational experience that usually unfolds in public space implies at least two things. First, it means that public socio-spatial behaviour and citizenship status/identity are somehow organically related. What we shall refer to as ‘locational citizenship’ considers that positive belonging, acceptance and recognition as legitimate presences in the public sphere (i.e., citizenship status and identity; see Barnes et al., 2004) are derived in a specific manner (although, not the only manner) from the differentiated possibilities and modalities of access and use of particular types of public spaces (e.g., squares, streets, parks, markets, etc.). As a few authors have suggested (Hopkins & Dixon, 2006; Painter & Philo, 1995), people who use the public space in ways that are frequently constrained or perceived negatively (e.g., youngsters, social movements, etc.), including those who lack positive recognition or are overtly discriminated against and excluded from public space (e.g., the homeless, undocumented immigrants, sex workers, etc.), are the people who experience a lack of the positive inclusion that defines legitimate citizenship. Being a citizen, in the full sense of the term, implies not being disturbed, challenged or persecuted for one’s mere presence in public space. Consequently, locational citizenship can be defined as the right to have a place in public space.

The latter idea is directly related to the ‘right to the city’ (Gilbert & Phillips, 2003; Lefebvre, 1968; Mitchell, 2003), which can be broadly defined as the entitlement of any urban dweller to freely access and use public space. Accordingly, locational citizenship presupposes the right to the city. In its most politically ‘charged’ connotation, it entails the right to be in public space, as well as the right to appropriate it and materially transform it, either as a means for political protests or as a result of unmediated interaction (that is, either against or on the margins of the State and the market).Therefore, the right to the city ensures having a place in public space, in its most moderate version, whereas in its most ‘radical’ expression, it also demands the ability to make a place within it.

‘Locational Citizenship’ and Social Psychology

The right to the city is a conceptual hinge between citizenship and public space. This offers a few analytical advantages. Most evidently, it allows researchers to extend the language of rights, which is central to any theorisation of citizenship, into the exploration of public space. As Mitchell (2003) notes, rights are important catalysts of conformity, conflict and social change because they automatically legitimise organised forms of authority, power and resistance. The discourse of rights offers a different angle in the discussion of the issues of identity, entitlements, status and agency, which typically construct ‘the citizen’. The argument is rather simple. If the right to the city is ideally defined by the universal access to, free use of and spontaneous appropriation of public space, and if this is a fundamental right that shapes citizenship status, then conflicts and debates regarding the access to, use of and appropriation of public space will affect the condition of citizenship. Such conflicts and debates usually revolve around the normative meaning and boundaries of universality (i.e., who has/must have more or less access to public space), freedom (i.e., how is public space being used, occupied and transformed/how should public space be used, occupied and transformed) and agency (i.e., to what extent the citizen, as a political subject, can appropriate and transform public space vis-à-vis the institutional powers and structures). Underlying the question of universality, there is a controversy over the psychological limits of citizenship as a field of identity (i.e., who belongs in the citizenry). The debate over freedom foregrounds the social representations of normative behaviour in public (i.e., how must a ‘proper’ citizen behave in public). Agency relates to the symbolic constructions of citizenship status and autonomy (i.e., how is a citizen politically recognised and positioned among other political actors within a given arrangement of the socio-political order). Under this formulation, social psychology can provide useful tools that can broach the ‘osmosis’ (Burte, 2003) between public space and citizenship.

One possible way to do this, as will be further illustrated, is to focus on how ordinary understandings of spatial behaviour in public entail shared views of what it means to be a citizen, and conversely, how definitions of the ‘good citizen’ construct normative understandings of behaviour in public. In both cases, the assumption is that citizenship can be re-specified as a place-related psychological construct and, similarly, that conflicting place-understandings may be connected to competing views of the citizen.

This re-conceptualisation of citizenship as a locational issue capitalises on previous work on discursive social psychology that is interested in place-talk and spatial practices. Specifically, Dixon and Durrheim’s (2000) initial study on desegregation in South Africa concluded that particular understandings of place and self-in-place (i.e., place-identity) can warrant an ideological tradition that, in their context, had naturalised the spatial patterns of racial belonging which were being threatened by desegregation. Using a conversation analytic approach, Stokoe and Wallwork (2003) illustrated how ‘good‘ and ‘bad‘ neighbours and ‘(in)appropriate’ neighbouring relations can be discursively depicted and regulated by using morally connoted spatial language, so transgressions to the moral order become expressed in spatial terms (e.g., climbing hedges, playing on the gate, etc.). Additionally, they showed how the discussion about physical boundaries allowed for the negotiation of the meaning between the public and private spheres. Using a discursive-rhetorical approach, Dixon, Levine, & McAuley (2006) explored everyday thinking about street drinking in Lancaster (UK), in light of a recently introduced ban. Their analysis illustrated how people’s responses constructed street-drinking as an incivility, both in terms of an infringement of civic entitlements and as a form of visual defilement. It showed how normative features of social situations may be transgressed through the breach of the established meanings of place (i.e., place-transgressions). Additionally, it underlined the ideological and dilemmatic nature of public space by suggesting that the rhetoric of incivility and place-transgressions that is implied by street-drinking supported an ideological tradition of public space ‘sanitisation’ (Sibley, 1995), based on the removal of certain types of people who are not conceived to be people who legitimately belong to the ‘public’ category (e.g., drunks or people who are drinking in the streets). More recently, Gray and Manning (2014) examined young people’s experience of regulation in public space, focusing on how they positioned themselves (as youth who are on the border between childhood and adulthood) in the face of restrictions to access and use and in how their argumentations echoed dilemmatic ideological assumptions of who is a legitimate user of public space, the extent of their rights of access and when these rights can be accessed.

These studies provide the theoretical bases and the methodological resources to reframe identity, belonging and the related social-psychological processes that regulate behaviour in public (e.g., attitudes, norms, etc.), as place-based processes. However, the conceptual implications of this locational reinterpretation of behaviour in public when specifically analysing citizenship practices are still under-researched. Dixon et al.’s (2006) study clearly begins to address citizenship matters when it discusses incivilities and the discourse of norms that warrant civic entitlements. Likewise, Gray and Manning (2014) stress that claims for the access to and use of public space by the young people in their study relates to competing constructions of citizenship and that “this relationship between discourses of place and discourses of citizenship is an important topic for future research, insofar as [it] allows one to consider the ways in which places are constituted relative to claims about rights and freedoms, as well as the ways in which citizenship is constituted relative to claims about the nature of places” (p. 13).

Building on these contributions and on the early and current developments in the social psychology of citizenship, the conceptualisation of locational citizenship that is proposed in this article begins by considering citizenship status and identity as being defined by the legitimacy of occupancy in the public sphere (Barnes et al., 2004; Shotter, 1993). This involves positive recognition and acceptance (Hopkins & Blackwood, 2011) as someone who is a part of ‘the public’, which is defined as a “community of people who constitute the subjects and/or collective agents of governance” (Condor, 2011, p. 194). Hence, citizenship entails belonging/membership to a political community (Gibson & Hamilton, 2011). The public ‘sphere’ is not just an ethereal political atmosphere, but it importantly includes a material public ‘space’ in which different ‘publics’ make themselves visible and enact, negotiate and contest their condition as legitimate ‘publics’ on a daily basis (Di Masso, 2012; Dixon et al., 2006; Gray & Manning, 2014). Accordingly, locational citizenship is a status and an identity that are defined by the legitimacy of occupancy in public space by individuals, groups or crowds as acceptable ‘publics’ (i.e., as admissible presences and proper occupants of public space).

Again, this clearly resonates with the right to the city being a fundamental citizen’s right involving universal access to, free use of and agency in public space. From the perspective of locational citizenship, universal access relates to identity, belonging and recognition of someone being a legitimate ‘public’; free use relates to the acceptance of spatial performance, i.e., normative place-behaviour; and agency relates to status and empowerment of citizens as pro-active, autonomous political subjects (e.g., the State versus grass-roots movements). Consequently, the psychological boundaries of belonging, recognition, acceptance, entitlement and status that shape the normative view of the citizen can be worked through accounts about how, when and why individuals and groups of people (do not) have access to public space, can (not) use a public space in certain ways, and are (not) entitled to appropriate public space according to their will. It is even likely that such psychological boundaries are formulated in locational terms (e.g., belonging to the citizenry or having more civic entitlements being defined by belonging to a territorially bound community). Moreover, as was stated earlier, such psychological boundaries are never un-problematic. Therefore, disputes over the access to, use of and change in public spaces will easily trigger contested views about the limits and conditions of legitimate belonging, status and rights, both as a citizen and as a ‘public’. The neo-Marxist theory of citizenship that underlies this conceptualisation implicates a politics of belonging that foregrounds contestation and conflict between different publics and counter-publics that struggle to re-draw the lines of the legitimacy of occupancy in the public sphere, and to redefine the meaning of citizenship itself (Crawford, 1995; Fraser, 1990; Staeheli & Thompson, 1997).

This definition of locational citizenship as an ongoing, contested set of emplaced enactments of the right to the city offers a framework in which the political consequences of what actually happens in a given public space can be discussed. For instance, it allows for the framing of the restriction of access to a given space for some social groups as an impediment of a citizen’s basic right (i.e., equality), but it also provides the argumentative grounds to legitimately warrant such restriction to preserve another right (i.e., freedom and safety of other citizens). This sort of common-sense contradiction between equally reasonable ideas foregrounds a set of ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988) of public space that mirror common ideological dilemmas of citizenship, such as rights/duties, equality/inequality, universalism/particularism, freedom/control or inclusion/exclusion. For instance, echoing Gray and Manning’s (2014) work, the forced dispersal of young people from a park because they ‘make noise’ (i.e., exclusion from public space) can be contested by arguing that ‘it is the only park that is available and that we are not bothering anyone’ (i.e., vindication of inclusion). In terms of citizenship, this instantiates a debate over the legitimacy of occupancy in the public sphere and the limits of one’s rights and freedom vis-à-vis the rights and freedom of others.

What Public Space? From the Normative Ideal to the Right to Exclude

The aim of finding a place for citizenship makes it reasonable to consider public space a relevant location, both in social-psychological and political terms. Definitions of public space tend to overlap with the fundamental components of the citizens’ right to the city. Both assume full access to all sorts of publics and freedoms of use, which, in theory, entails that public spaces must be available to everybody, at any time and for any purpose that is desired by any citizen – who is a natural beneficiary. Kohn (2004) also reminds us that the public character of public space resides in its ownership and management by the State. This brings to the foreground privatisation and its consequences upon the right to the city, the latter being a condition of citizenship that must be guaranteed by the public authorities. The democratic credentials of public space have been discussed in environmental psychological research by the argument that, in order to support the common good, public spaces must be responsive to citizens’ needs, values, rights and demands (cf. Carr, Francis, Rivlin, & Stone, 1992) and must protect freedom of action and appropriation (Lynch, 1981; Rivlin, 1994). Theoretically speaking, public space and the right to the city are inter-related and seem to be significant components of any standard version of democratic citizenship as a locational practice.

This last remark pinpoints another powerful reason for talking about public space. In light of the contemporary urban changes in postfordist cities, which are oriented to the accommodation of the local patterns of city-making in global financial flows (Harvey & Smith, 2005; Sassen, 1991), a common belief has spread to all levels of the public sphere, according to which urban public spaces must be fostered and preserved because they are a crucial component of democratic life. Ignoring public space equals missing the point of any socially sensitive approach to citizens’ rights, needs and quality of life. Academics, urban planners, politicians, mass media, social activists and common citizens seem to agree on the idea that public spaces meet the most important ingredients of democratic citizenship. In streets, squares, parks, markets and other open urban spaces, citizens fulfil their needs for social encounters, relaxation, entertainment, consumption and evasion; in a few strategic locations of public space, they express political demands via protests and other forms of collective action; and in the everyday settings of the open city, citizens perform the ordinary rituals of urban coexistence that are based on the fundamental democratic values of reciprocity, civility and respect. There now seems to be a cultural imperative, according to which it is necessary to promote good public spaces in order to have a healthy democratic society.

However, public space is a fundamentally contested concept. The ‘normative ideal’ (Crawford, 1995; Mitchell, 1995) of public space being a common ground for citizens’ placid coexistence is firmly based on what has been called a ‘bourgeois’ conception of the public sphere (Fraser, 1990). This view is inherited from Habermasian deliberative democracy models, which are based on the fiction of equality between de facto hierarchically differentiated sectors of the public. This critical view is premised on the evidence of deep social and political inequalities that structure uneven arrangements of the social order which are mapped onto public space. Hence, whenever the socially disadvantaged, who tend to be seen “more as problems for the public than as part of it” (Staeheli & Thompson, 1997), are controlled or removed from public space, we witness the failure of the democratic ideal of citizenship, which is built more on the naturalisation of certain forms of oppression and exclusion than on the naive desideratum of universal publicity and acceptance. This exemplifies the ideological dilemma of ‘public’ space being an ideal of inclusion and equality that faces flagrant daily efforts to achieve precisely the opposite (usually in the name of the right – of those included – to enjoy public space).

Context: The Barcelona “Model”

A good example of a city where public space and its troubled relationship with citizenship construction can be studied is Barcelona. The ‘Modelo Barcelona’ (the ‘Barcelona Model’) commonly refers to a genuinely local policy of urban regeneration and public space-making, which began in the 1980s and has become widely acknowledged and internationally recognised. According to Marshall (2004), “Barcelona has in the past 10 or 15 years become the outstanding example of a certain way of improving cities, within both this Mediterranean world and in Europe” (p. 1). Indeed, Barcelona received the Harvard design award in 1987 and the Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1990, which has influenced British urban remodelling plans since this time (Balibrea, 2004; Capel, 2005).

As Borja (2005) explains, the success of this model is unquestionable, including its construction of more than 300 public spaces and high-quality facilities, the creation of new centralities, the transformation of the waterfront and its obsolete industrial facilities, the integral regeneration of neighbourhoods, the political de-centralisation favouring districts, a rich cultural environment, a revaluation of the architectural patrimony, the acknowledgement of the important role of social actors in urban policy-making, and the inter-connection of different parts of the city through the creation of new infrastructures. This was possible mainly because the political conjuncture favoured the acceptance of urban renewal proposals that came from grassroots movements during the 1970s. During the first years of democracy after forty years of dictatorship, “the legitimisation of a participatory urbanism built an active consensus that the political forces could not keep aside” (Borja, 2005, p. 24), and fostered an ‘egalitarian’ view of public space. In the words of Mónica Degen (2008), “the ‘Reconstruction of Barcelona’, as it was officially labelled, in the democratic period, focused on small urban interventions [including] new public spaces that would invigorate the diverse neighbourhoods of the city, creating a network of spaces for democratic gathering and connecting the external districts with its historic centre” (p. 87).

However, after the Olympic Games in 1992, the (officially) well-intentioned city-model entered a structural crisis. The city had prospered economically, but the local administration was insolvent (Borja, 2005). The Olympics was an excellent instrument for promoting public investments and attracting international capital, which could finance the large-scale public works that were needed to prepare the city for this important sporting event (Degen, 2008). After the commercialisation of the city for the Olympics, new public-private partnerships were needed in order to carry on promoting the city. Since the second half of the 1990s, the ‘Barcelona Model’ fostered the “improvement of the attractiveness and of the strategic position of the city” (Brunet, 2002, p. 270, in Delgado, 2007). As Maldo (2004) describes it, “the conjunction of public institutions and private capital propitiated the integration of Barcelona into the circuits of multinational capital” (p. 13). Degen (2008) has described the recent processes of spatial change in Barcelona as a function of the triple circulation of images and signs, people and finances across the planet in a globalised transnational era, which produces negative consequences for citizenship. According to Degen, economic policies marginalised social welfare programs in pursuit of permanent economic wellbeing of the cities in the global market. In this frame, “a triumphant city is a city that is globally attractive: not only attractive as a place for investment but also a physically captivating place” (p. 85). The consequence of this is that global dimensions begin to shape local urban policies according to flexible economic calculi, which materialise in new ways of shaping the urban space and embedded cultural practices, regardless of the social needs of their inhabitants (Zukin, 1995). This ‘recipe’ was applied in Barcelona through the creation of huge infrastructural operations in its port, airports and railways, as well as by creating new Olympic-esque events (such as the Forum of Cultures, 2004) and re-developing the historic centre to attract millions of tourists per year.

This process of ‘brandification’ of Barcelona (Balibrea, 2004) has been strongly criticised by intellectuals, scholars and social movements. Borja (2005) has referred to the ‘perverse effects’ of the Barcelona Model, regarding the rise in the price of urban soil and housing, the sale of parts of the city to private promoters, the creation of ‘theme park’ zones (e.g., the area around Gaudí’s Sagrada Família), the destruction of architectural patrimony and the low-density urban sprawl in the peripheries. However, Delgado (2007) provided the most critical diatribe against the Barcelona Model by referring to Barcelona as a “business-city” that is only exemplary of a “model of technocratic interventionism and centralising despotism (…) a prototype of the city-factory, an urbs converted into a huge production chain of dreams and simulations” (p. 14). Rather than the pleasant and inclusive public spaces, attractive buildings and tasty paellas on the waterfront, the defining features of the model, according to Delgado, include the “massive evictions of neighbours, the destruction of whole neighbourhoods that have been qualified as ‘obsolete’, the increase of levels of misery and exclusion, the police raids against undocumented immigrants and the repression against the un-governables” (p. 14).

As shown by Delgado’s words, as well as Degen’s and Borja’s descriptions, urban transformations in Barcelona have been hugely controversial from a social viewpoint, which raises questions about the (small) importance that is given to the rights, needs and desires of the local citizens in this allegedly exemplary city. In fact, there were many protests against the negative effects of this ‘model’ regarding its citizens, including the physical occupation of public spaces that aimed to impede the transformation of these spaces into socially exclusive, economically profitable environments. One of the most paradigmatic occupations occurred between 2000 and 2007 in the Old Town of Barcelona. The rest of the article will focus on this case study, which is an empirical example of how locational practices and citizenship enactments shape and regulate each other.

Locational Citizenship: Contested Psychological Assumptions

The experience of spatial appropriation in the Hole of Shame informs us about the relationship between public space and citizenship based on the terms that were defined in the earlier sections. The material that is used in this section is derived from sixteen personal interviews with the spokesmen of the main parties that were involved in the conflict (i.e., 3 district councillors, 5 occupants, 5 representatives of neighbours who opposed the occupation, the urban developer, the urban planner and the community mediator). Interviewees were contacted personally by the author between November 2005 and March 2006, during the period in which the ‘Self-managed Park of the Hole of Shame’ hosted its maximum variety of users and activities. Most of the interviews were conducted on the premises of civic organisations that were located within the area comprised by the Hole of Shame (i.e., they were in-place interviews, which reinforced the natural/contextual validity and the geographic indexicality of the accounts). The interview script included open-ended questions, which addressed the meanings that were attributed to the Hole of Shame by its users and its nearby inhabitants, as well as their views and opinions about the causes of the socio-spatial conflict and the future of the space. In previous work, transcriptions were analysed according to a discursive-rhetorical framework (see Di Masso, Dixon, & Pol, 2011, for details on the analytic strategy). However, for the purposes of this article, literal extracts will only be used to illustrate the place-based psychological assumptions that connect public space to citizenship. The sample of extracts selected and presented in the next section cover a variety of accounts that relate citizenship issues and place processes when discussing the meanings, purposes and functions of the Hole of Shame as a public space.

Ideological Dilemmas That Frame Locational Understandings of Citizenship

Common representations of the citizen include place-related understandings that re-specify belonging, status and entitlements as locational components of citizenship that are rooted in public space. The Hole of Shame case has been useful in illustrating, for instance, how higher citizenship status and recognition can be derived from the psychological assumptions about the territorial privilege over a public space of those who belong to a space-bound community (i.e., place identity). Additionally, it has been discussed how positive acceptance and the identity of being a ‘good’ citizen depend on how public space is used and on the extent to which spontaneous actions of city-making challenge or respect State-defined protocols of city-making. These common assumptions are actively contested when, for instance, they are formulated as a part of political strategies that either warrant or reject a dominant paradigm of public space-making (e.g., the ‘Barcelona Model’).

These locational assumptions connect the competing understandings of the meaning, functions and norms of public space to the psychological boundaries of citizenship. More specifically, they connect the everyday politics of public space to the ideological construction of the citizen in two main ways. On the one hand, normative representations of spatial behaviour in public lead to different views of the citizen that confirm or challenge particular versions of the social order. On the other hand, spatial talk provides a new language that warrants or discounts controversial practices of social control, which are precisely in the name of citizenship.

Regarding the first connection between the politics of public space and the construction of citizenship, it can be stated that the three sets of place-related psychological assumptions that were discussed in the previous section echo three ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988) that are shared by debates about public space and about citizenship. First, place-identity understandings trace a line of inclusion and exclusion in the field of citizenship by conferring the privilege of voice and vote in the creation and use of public spaces to those who are considered as belonging in the place. This constructs a psychological boundary within the right to the city, which undermines both equality as a central value of citizenship and the universality of publics as a core aspect of public space. Hence, the paradox here is that not all the citizens are equally entitled to take part in a public space which is, at the same time, for every citizen to enjoy.

Second, contested assumptions about (im)proper behaviour in public refract a broader tension about freedom and control in public space (see Dixon et al., 2006). As the liberal tradition of negative liberty recalls, the very essence of the act of freedom involves awareness of its own limits. Citizens’ freedom must unfold until it reaches the limits of the freedom of others. When this is translated to public space language, free use implicates respecting the others’ possibility to use public space in their own terms. This, in practice, transforms the citizens’ freedom of use of public space into a complex interplay of civic limitations; therefore, what one can ‘freely’ do in public depends on what the other can legitimately claim. The ideological problem here arises when defining the criteria for those limitations, in addition to their discretional application, depending on the case.

Finally, assumptions about place-making agency resonate with an ideological dilemma opposing social order and disorder. As was stated earlier, citizens are entitled to appropriate public space in order to protest and render their claims visible, but this should always occur within the democratic norms that regulate the expression of public dissent. Active appropriations that go beyond these norms (e.g., the occupation of the Hole of Shame) are generally perceived (in the hegemonic political imaginary) to be problematic, anti-democratic, anti-civic and anomic, which was clearly reflected in the words of the urban developer in Extract 7. The order/disorder tension ultimately questions the public ownership of public space, which seems to be either the people’s or the State’s property.

The second connection between the politics of place and the ideological construction of the citizen considers that locational understandings may be mobilised in discourse as metonymic formulations that warrant opinions and actions that can be profoundly exclusionary from the point of view of citizenship (see Di Masso, Castrechini, & Valera, 2014). In regard to the Hole of Shame struggle, discussions about ‘squatters’ or ‘immigrants’ being unwanted users would have exposed many neighbours to be perceived as ordinary bigots, which would diminish the legitimacy of their protest against the occupants. Place-identity talk and the rhetoric of spatial manners were more effective in justifying the negative depiction and the removal of such categories of people. The discourse of spatial relations in public, which is filled with common sense assumptions about who belongs where and how a public space should be properly used, provided a legitimate framework for promoting the exclusion of unwanted publics. It was just a matter of saying that those people did not belong to the neighbourhood and that their spatial usages were not adequate (i.e., they were ‘bad’ citizens and out of place). This is even more evident when looking at Barcelona’s municipal bylaw against incivilities, which was enforced in January 2006 to ban behaviours in public places that were qualified as indecent. While theoretically designed to be an instrument for preserving the ‘exemplary’ character of the city’s public space against an alleged state of urban chaos, the bylaw had the practical effect of persecuting vulnerable groups that were more likely to breach the norms, such as the homeless (e.g., washing in the fountains or sleeping in the streets), the sex workers (e.g., offering sex in the open space) or the undocumented immigrants (e.g., selling in the streets). The bylaw redefined such practices as ‘incivilities’ that are unbecoming of a good citizen. In other words, the spatial language of civility has provided, in Barcelona, an ideological framework that normalises the exclusion of certain ‘problematic’ publics, precisely in the name of citizenship. No racial, class or gender prejudice and no urban marketing strategy allegedly motivated these measures: these people’s use of the public space was simply wrong. These sorts of ‘sanitising’ practices (Sibley, 1995) demonstrate what the conflictivist thesis about public space reveals: that public space is less related to maximum inclusion than to normalising socially acceptable ways of excluding.

Conclusion

Condor (2011) has recently underlined the need “to explore ways in which social psychologists might profitably engage with current debates concerning citizenship” (p. 196). This article has provided arguments that show how the study of public space may contribute to materialising this engagement. I have postulated the existence of a spatial dimension of citizenship (i.e., locational citizenship) that is defined by the citizens’ entitlement and capacity to have and to make for himself/herself a legitimate place in public space. In this frame, the identity of ‘the citizen’ is discursively worked through a set of place-related experiences of membership, recognition, status, entitlements, agency and normative behaviour, which are located and staged in the city’s public spaces. The contested nature of these place-related categories confirms the troubled character of citizenship as a psychological construction, whose boundaries of belonging, positive recognition and social positioning are constantly re-drawn via the language of place. Ultimately, I have argued that this locational construction of citizenship implicates a micropolitics of public space: a network of contested place-representations and territorial practices that have normative effects upon the ideological reproduction of the socio-spatial order in the city.

‘Micropolitics’ means here that power relations in public go far beyond social protest and the institutionalised practices of social control and resistance. These also include ordinary bodily gestures, spatial uses and common sense beliefs about ‘normal’ and ‘inappropriate’ behaviour in public. The micropolitics of public space are, on the one hand, a disciplinary mechanism of citizenship, whereby the ‘good’ citizen self-regulates his/her embodied performances in public. On the other hand, it is a regime of governmentality that is rooted in common sense and makes, unmakes and ‘subjectifies’ the citizen as the ‘locus’ of a set of normative ways of thinking, feeling, talking and acting, which ensure positive acceptance in the public sphere.

This locational framework for the study of citizenship can be further developed and problematised by considering three related topics. First, a focus on the sorts of embodied and affective practices that articulate everyday experiences of citizenship in public space would expand the limited focus on place discourse (e.g., Di Masso & Dixon, 2015; Durrheim, Rautenbach, Nicholson, & Dixon, 2013; Wetherell, 2012). This would allow us to examine locational citizenship as an unfolding ‘assemblage’ of place-talk, feelings of citizenship and spatial enactments that goes beyond the narrower approach to spatial discourse, which, it could be argued, is less sensitive to the where-dimension of citizenship than to the how-people-talk-about-where. Second, the notion of belonging as a central feature in the experience of being a citizen could be revisited from an intersectional approach (e.g., Carolissen, 2012; Yuval-Davis, 2011), which is less concerned with boundaries than with multiple standpoints and identifications that reconstruct ‘the citizen’ in each situation. Finally, the connection (in this article) between place-related citizenship talk and the Barcelona Model reveals the ‘glocal’ nature of certain ideological dilemmas. This means that although the dominant trends of city-making are widespread and refract the same sort of ideological tensions in many cities (e.g., freedom-control, private-public), the local translation of these dilemmas generates context-specific political meanings of public space as a common ground. Social-psychological analyses of citizenship as a spatial category would certainly benefit from these types of approaches.