Right to the City, Social Research Proposal

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The ability of the state to hem in the free use of public space is clearly seen in the limitation of the Free Speech movement in Berkeley, California. Students at the state university were outraged by the limitations placed upon the campus by the administration, such as prohibiting non-students from disseminating materials and the prohibition on distributing political leaflets on the Bancroft-Telegraph sidewalk, traditionally an area of political protest (Mitchell 90). The university invoked its right, in loco parentis to supervise free expression. Students and administrators were at war as to whether the university was a totally free public space, or a space subject to regulation -- this division would later be waged over the People's Park, an area designated for university expansion. The war between the university and state authorities that ensued turned the park into a generational or ideological battle, articulated and mapped on the space. Who owned the public land, the state that controlled the university, or the people, the students who attended the university?

Perhaps the most poignant discussion of Mitchell's book is his examination of homelessness. Anti-homeless legislation attempts to ban certain individuals from public spaces altogether, given the homeless are uncomfortable reminders of the costs of our way of living.

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Although certain spaces are deemed public, unwanted individuals are excluded from access to these areas, as if the areas were private, and as if residency was a requirement for citizenship. Anti-homeless legislation makes the right to assemble and gather in a public area contingent upon having a home. As passionate as Mitchell's defense may be however, there are issues of impeding the rights of others when someone publically urinates and defecates in a public area -- taken to an extreme, celebrating such rights could have profoundly negative consequences for public use of areas to the point where people ceased to use them at all. The main criticism of his book is that Mitchell fails to consider the consequences of some of his protest activities upon bystanders, because of his celebration of free speech and his ire at the courts for limiting that speech. Perhaps the moral of this book is that every freedom we exercise impedes upon the freedom of another to some degree, and striking a balance between those freedoms in a way that does not reinforce the social order in a….....

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